Iris ter Schiphorst
Musik als Funktionssystem (Music as a functional system)?
Lecture by Iris ter Schiphorst, delivered in January 2011 at the Philharmonie Berlin
Music as a Functional System?
Presented in January 2011 at the Philharmonie Berlin
Music / Modernity
In philosophy, it is assumed that a process of modernization began in Europe in the 16th century which remains incomplete to this day. The period around 1800 is generally defined as the transition from pre-modern to modern societies.
Pre-modern societies were structured by social estates (Stände). This meant that the estate into which one was born determined the extent to which one could participate in society and the power one possessed in social life. It dictated whether one was granted legal rights, whether one had political co-determination, and whom or when one was allowed to love or marry.
Around 1800, the logics of these various spheres—law, politics, religion, love, as well as art and music—began to change. They were no longer bound to the hierarchy of estates; they were, so to speak, released from their previous functions and transformed into autonomous functional systems, each with its own specific code, in which every individual could participate regardless of their social standing.
Music, too, became an "autonomous functional system" (in the sense of Niklas Luhmann’s Systems Theory) and was no longer embedded in the Christian-medieval tasks of a clerical estate society. In this respect, the period around 1800 represents a profound turning point—for music as well!
The following brief list illustrates how deep this upheaval truly was and how strongly its impact is still felt today: From this moment on, music officially ceased to belong to the Quadrivium of the seven liberal arts. For the first time, we encounter "free" musicians and composers and a entirely new musical public sphere determined by the free market—but also a "free" music, released from all its former functions!
As a result, its intrinsic meaning and inherent value came into play; it is no coincidence that there was an increase in the composition of pure instrumental pieces, which would later enter music history under the term "absolute music."
And it was exactly at this time that it became the primary task of the authors of a new humanities discipline called Musicology to prove that music is an independent language (and no longer merely similar to language, as the Affektenlehre of the Baroque had claimed).
Under these changed, "free" conditions, the question of what the task of music could be was fiercely debated around 1800. It is important to know that what we are accustomed to calling music today was not represented as an independent subject at German universities in the 18th century at all. Empiricism and rationalism had almost completely displaced it. In Paris (Academie Royale) and London (Royal Society), music was only researched within the framework of the new discipline of 'Acoustics', which subsequently led to the standardization of pitch and duration through the sonomètre and the chronomètre.
In the German-speaking world, only the Collegia musica had previously existed—student associations for communal music-making, from which the institution of the public concert later emerged. Although university music directors presided over them from the mid-18th century onwards, no academic degree could be obtained. This was to change around 1800: Music was to have its own science that could reflect, regulate, and justify its transformation and new practice. In 1779, it was therefore elevated to the status of an academic discipline at the universities of Halle and Göttingen: in Halle by the organist and theorist Daniel Gottlieb Türk, and in Göttingen by the organist and music researcher Johann Nikolaus Forkel.
This seemed sensible and overdue, as by approximately 1800, music—with its new musical public sphere, all its forms of bourgeois self-organisation, its school and amateur concerts, its domestic music-making and private piano lessons, its musical societies and associations, its economy of the "free market" in printing, publishing, and instrument manufacturing—had advanced to become the absolute favourite art form of the bourgeoisie.
The introduction of the new discipline of musicology at the Universities of Halle and Göttingen was therefore also linked to the hope for a (state) regulatory framework for music – a framework that could give this dynamic direction and form. The differing emphases that the two faculties in Göttingen and Halle placed on the role of music around 1800 can be discerned from the lectures and publications of Forkel and Türk.
At Halle, with Daniel Gottlob Türk, the focus was on pedagogy. This means Türk made piano instruction his particular concern – the instrument that had become the absolute favourite of the new educated bourgeoisie. He had silent wooden keyboards built to promote "motor movement memory" in group lessons, wrote piano tutors, encouraged group piano instruction (partly on painted wooden strips), and published a flood of easy-to-play piano sheet music: etudes, short pieces, piano reductions, etc.
Until the end of the 18th century, singing lessons had been the decisive medium for musical education; from 1800 onwards, it became the piano. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that the piano became the decisive medium of this era, fundamentally modifying practice and thought about music, as well as the act of composing itself, at all levels. I believe today we can no longer imagine its widespread diffusion at the time and the associated practice of music-making. The medium of the piano made a crucial contribution to finding new terminology within and for the functional system of music.
Just a side note here: Baroque music theorists and organists had strongly opposed composing at the keyboard, campaigning against a practice that valued finger feel and auditory impression more highly than the rational-abstract observance of artistic rules.
Yet, in the late 18th century, keyboard instruments also gained a central place in composition. Through, with, and on these key instruments, "chordal thinking" gradually developed, focusing more on harmonies, modulations, and chord progressions than on "voices" and "intervals" according to the rules of contrapuntal setting. Crucially decisive for this development was certainly also the adoption of the new well-tempered tuning, which essentially “equalises” all keys and thereby makes certain modulations and compositions possible in the first place. Only through this process did the piano truly become a kind of "composition machine," making music—i.e., the arrangement of tones, scales, chords, etc.—both manually graspable and visually conceivable. Mattheson writes in his The Complete Capellmeister as early as 1739 that the piano "can provide a far clearer concept of harmonic structure than the other (instruments), even if the box or the machine is not present at all, but merely represented in thought; for the position, order, and sequence of sounds is nowhere as clear and visible as on the keys of a piano." (1729/1754 p. 106)
Unlike his colleague Daniel Gottlob Türk in Halle, Johann Nikolaus Forkel in Göttingen was less concerned with "practical human education" or piano pedagogy. Humanities were pursued in Göttingen: the focus there was on proving that music was a language. (The fact that Türk's approach and piano playing would ultimately flow "unconsciously" into Forkel's "logical language of music" can only be mentioned in passing here.) Forkel was pursuing a "universal historical design" for musicology. That is, in Göttingen, the conceptual tools were to be invented for a science that would articulate the "essence" of music, bring its "meaning" into concepts, and "translate" it. Music was no longer just to be performed and played, but also, and above all, to be "understood" and reflected upon. One could also say that in Göttingen, the goal was to find terms for what had long been inscribed in the practicing bodies of the citizenry via the keyboard: the feeling that music has an "inherent" meaning, that music "speaks."
In the search for a linguistic comprehension, in the search for linguistic terms for musical-practical facts, in the search for a theory for practice, Forkel became incredibly productive. He succeeded in uniting the different positions of the music scholars and opponents Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau within a "language of music," but also in transferring the emerging "ur-sound idea" of Johann Gottfried Herder in literature and linguistics to music.
We recall: For the skilled keyboard player Jean-Philippe Rameau, harmony was the origin of music; for the poor note decipherer and sight-reader Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, it was melody, so to speak, as the voice of the soul.
And Johann Gottfried Herder, in turn, had attempted to prove that any language, any speech, could be derived from an "ur-sound," a "primordial sound of sensation."
Against this background, Johann Nikolaus Forkel – following the ideas of Herder, but also Rousseau – would present in his attempt at a metaphysics of music that music is a language of sensation, nothing more than the passion-filled expression of a feeling, and every tone consequently a "sound of sensation"; yet simultaneously, referring to Rameau, he would argue that harmony, functional harmony, as "the grammar" of the language of music, constituted "correct thinking" and thus the "logic of music."
And only this musical logic (i.e., functional harmony) makes sense out of the ur-sounds and makes music a complete language.
This means: music became for Forkel a "language of sensation," a subjective expression of a self, whose lowest common denominator and origin simultaneously was the ur-sound. To elevate this ur-sound to the status of a tonic is one of the coups of this construction. Another is to declare functional harmony as musical logic, as the "grammar" of the language of music. For only a musical logic (i.e., harmony) makes sense out of the ur-sounds and makes music a complete language.
But Forkel had something else in mind: he wanted to reconstruct the historical development of music, he wanted to record its history, specifically as a progressive, ever-developing narrative, building from one work to the next. A total of 10 volumes were planned for this universal history of music, with their sequence 1-10 not only corresponding to a chronological-linear order but also to a rating scale. Forkel wanted to dedicate the 10th and final volume to German music – as the crowning achievement and endpoint of the history of music par excellence.
Allow me to break off my presentation at this point. Perhaps it has become reasonably clear how profound the upheaval around 1800 was, how great the significance for the field of music, and also how intensely it was reflected by leading intellectuals, finding its way into various writings and theories, some of which are still valid today.
The central role of music during this upheaval around 1800 is also impressive: its deep anchoring in bourgeois life as well as in science and pedagogy. Musicians, music scholars, and leading figures strived to reflect the transformation of music into the preferred bourgeois art form and to attribute a new function and an "intrinsic value" to it.
This process was certainly also driven forward by the desire of the "enlightened" citizen, increasingly distancing himself from the nobility, for an "own art," for an "own voice," for an own cultural identity. For an "intrinsic value." And this desire for an intrinsic value was certainly also connected to the desire for a "national value"; more precisely: for a "German identity" and for an "own" German language and music.
(Forkel's project of writing a universal history would culminate precisely in this intrinsic value: German music as the crowning achievement of music history.)
NB: In this context, one must not forget that at that time there was no "own" German nation-state – unlike France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc. Germany was divided into various protectorates and princely provinces, a circumstance that many intellectuals, e.g., Schiller, repeatedly lamented. In addition, German culture had little value in 18th-century Europe. (Scholarly texts were written in Latin script; French was considered the usual conversational language of the educated nobility. The German language was stigmatised as a "miner's language.")
In this respect, German music also became an identity-builder for the new bourgeois class. What was missed during this phase was defining musical literacy in a standardised way. Musical notation therefore remained expert knowledge right up to the present day.
However, something else is interesting: similarly significant media shifts in later times, e.g., the rise of the mass media in the 1960s or the digitalisation and globalisation from the 1980s onwards, were astonishingly no longer genuinely reflected within the ever-further differentiating functional system of music.
As if its nature and historicity had been not only founded but also "enshrined" around 1800 and in the subsequent period. As if the autonomous functional system of music, once established and differentiated, could no longer genuinely engage with "new things" from outside. As if the historicity of the system, its inner-systemic evolution, its permanent inner-systemic generation of the new from the formerly new – as if this, yes, "logic" of this functional system left no room for reflections that do not fit directly into its system.
(At this point, I would like to refer to the book "Klavier Spiele" by Wolfgang Scherer, to whom I owe many suggestions.)