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Benjamin Steege

Columbia University, Music, Faculty Member
An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the... more
An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning in particular when the act of listening is understood to be shared with others.

Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a young, post–World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent—a cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of imaginative thought. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book’s appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude considers the question: What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?
The musical writings of scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) have long been considered epoch-making in the histories of both science and aesthetics. Widely regarded as having promised an authoritative scientific foundation for... more
The musical writings of scientist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) have long been considered epoch-making in the histories of both science and aesthetics. Widely regarded as having promised an authoritative scientific foundation for harmonic practice, Helmholtz can also be read as posing a series of persistent challenges to our understanding of the musical listener. Helmholtz was at the forefront of sweeping changes in discourse about human perception. His interrogation of the physiology of hearing threw notions of the self-possessed listener into doubt and conjured a sense of vulnerability to mechanistic forces and fragmentary experience. Yet this new image of the listener was simultaneously caught up in wider projects of discipline, education and liberal reform. Reading Helmholtz in conjunction with a range of his intellectual sources and heirs, from Goethe to Max Weber to George Bernard Shaw, Steege explores the significance of Helmholtz's listener as an emblem of a broader cultural modernity.
In response to the devastating human and environmental impact of U.S. nuclear testing in the mid-1950s, the philosopher Günther Anders concluded that it was meaningless in such situations to distinguish between “test” and “reality.” In a... more
In response to the devastating human and environmental impact of U.S. nuclear testing in the mid-1950s, the philosopher Günther Anders concluded that it was meaningless in such situations to distinguish between “test” and “reality.” In a surprising twist of thought, the radical putting into question of life, brought about by the global nuclear experiment, led Anders to turn to what initially appears an unrelated interest in the phenomenology of musical hearing. Where the fact of worldhood was being put to the test, he responded with a provocative call to “test” in kind the limits to which one might extend the capacity for imagination through desperate acts of aesthetic listening and sober exercise in “techniques of feeling.” Meanwhile, an opportunity for exploring Anders’s ideas appears in a reworking of one of his thematically germane texts in the context of a 1962 electronic composition by his contemporary Herbert Eimert.
For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the "ammoniaphone." Invented and... more
For several months beginning in 1884, readers of Life, Science, Health, the Atlantic Monthly and similar magazines would have encountered half-page advertisements for a newly patented medical device called the "ammoniaphone." Invented and promoted by a Scottish doctor named Carter Moffat and endorsed by the soprano Adelina Patti, British Prime Minister William Gladstone and the Princess of Wales, the ammoniaphone promised a miraculous transformation in the voices of its users. It was recommended for "vocalists, clergymen, public speakers, parliamentary men, readers, reciters, lecturers, leaders of psalmody, schoolmasters, amateurs, church choirs, barristers, and all persons who have to use their voices professionally, or who desire to greatly improve their speaking or singing tones." Some estimates indicated that Moffat sold upwards of 30,000 units, yet the ammoniaphone was a flash in the pan as far as such things go, fading from public view after 1886...
When the philosopher and critic José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) diagnosed the literature and music of the post-First-World-War generation as an art of ‘dehumanization’, he singled out Claude Debussy as a formative exemplar. But what... more
When the philosopher and critic José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) diagnosed the literature and music of the post-First-World-War generation as an art of ‘dehumanization’, he singled out Claude Debussy as a formative exemplar. But what exactly would a ‘dehumanized’ music sound like? More difficult, what attitude are we to adopt towards a poetics that ostensibly defined itself in opposition to lived human experience? Lesser known than Ortega, but equally caught up in the heyday of interwar phenomenology and its antipsychologistic spirit, the philosopher Günther Stern (1902-92) likewise singled out Debussy as the exemplary music for a mode of attention that had been overlooked and misrecognized by traditional aesthetic and psychological discourse. In particular, Ortega’s idea of ‘outward concentration’ merits comparison with Stern’s description of a disposition of ‘letting oneself go’ -- two unfamiliar yet richly imagined attitudes that reflect a concern to think an aesthetics adequate to their contemporary moment.
Leoš Janáček's fascination with the trappings of experimental psychology has boosted his image as a kind of realist, for whom empirical engagement with psychological experience was a prerequisite for aesthetic value. Yet careful... more
Leoš Janáček's fascination with the trappings of experimental psychology has boosted his image as a kind of realist, for whom empirical engagement with psychological experience was a prerequisite for aesthetic value. Yet careful contextualization of the sources he drew upon in later years suggests that such discourses—above all, the work of Wilhelm Wundt—work ironically against the constitution of the expressive subjectivity we are used to inferring in his work. An emblematic case in point is Janáček's use of an experimental research instrument known as the "chronoscope," which psychologists had traditionally used for studying reaction times, a formative concern for the discipline since its emergence in the 1870s. While remarkable for its utility in accurately measuring extremely short durations, the chronoscope also highlighted the temporal limits of perception. It appealed to the composer' obsession with minute details of sensation, but it can also be seen to raise questions about the integrity or continuity of the very image of subjectivity it was meant to ascertain. The conjunction of the chronoscope's dramatization of short timespans and Janáček’s related concern for the calibrated gesture together suggest a mode of interpretation through which the expressive impulse in his music may be sensed as incipient, in a state of deferral, rather than as the immediate manifestation of an integral lyrical self.
Hermann von Helmholtz’s theory of melodic “affinity,” which he considered his primary contribution to music-theoretical thought, is inherently historicist in its conception. It seeks not only to explain local tonal relationships but also... more
Hermann von Helmholtz’s theory of melodic “affinity,” which he considered his primary contribution to music-theoretical thought, is inherently historicist in its conception. It seeks not only to explain local tonal relationships but also to provide a rationale for transhistorical change in musical structures. Yet this historical dimension, in many ways typical of its era, is complicated by a tenuous balance between the determinism demanded by rigorous scientific explanation and Helmholtz’s evident desire to preserve a complex role for the “choice” of fundamental aesthetic principles. Such principles would include the very parameters of modern tonality, so the status of tonal “affinity,” a seemingly given and predictable attribute of musical tones, coexists uneasily in Helmholtz’s writing with a humanist appreciation for the unpredictability of cultural choice and change. It also throws the physiological basis of his music theory into conflict with his ostensibly progressive treatment of non-European musics. Such tensions, along with unevenly successful efforts to resolve them, were by no means atypical of the liberal discourse of his intellectual milieu. Indeed, the unresolved challenge of reconciling a flexible aesthetics and historiography with the logical requirements of positivist knowledge aligns Helmholtz with major liberal thinkers from John Stuart Mill on.
Research Interests:
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