Sound Knowledge Zenodo

SOUND KNOWLEDGE Music and Science in London, 1789-1851 Edited by James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart Acknowledgements This volume was the outcome of a series of study days for Music in London, 1800-1851, a research initiative based at King’s College London, and funded by the European Research Council. We are grateful to our interlocutors at this early stage, including James Chandler, Eleanor Cloutier, James Grande, Katherine Hambridge, Jonathan Hicks, Oskar Cox Jensen, Arman Schwartz, Benjamin Walton, Heather Wiebe, and Alison Winter. Profuse thanks are also owing to the two anonymous readers of the manuscript, who are amongst the most insightful and generous unnamed humanists we have encountered. The volume became a book under the guidance of Marta Tonegutti and Evan White at the University of Chicago Press. Above all, the editors would like to thank Roger Parker, who oversaw this project from its beginnings. As ever, Roger discovered our various writings "minutely and multitudinous scratched in all directions"; and lo! the scratches seemed to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles. 1 Introduction Fantasies of Total Description James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart “The forming of the five senses,” Karl Marx famously quipped in 1844, “is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.” A frequent visitor to London in these years, Marx imagined that sensuous experience itself was subject to rapidly changing modes of capitalist production. One of the principal motivations of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts was to show how even common sense shifted according to vast historical movements in industrial property relations. This meant claiming that an emerging “slave class” had been overtaken by the mere “sense of possessing, of having.” “The sense for music,” “a musical ear,” or “an eye for beauty of form,” he argued, could be forged or withheld in relation to dark bourgeois forces. Such was the depravity of mid-century experience, apparently, that “to the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear.”1 For Marx, this emergent autonomy of the senses was by no means to be celebrated. Their estrangement one from the other, instead, betrayed the alienation of these “slaves” from their “authentic” physical and relational natures. While many might not agree with Marxist avowals of prelapsarian sensory life, music scholars will be familiar with the general emergence of concert-hall listening in the period in which he was writing; they will know of the much-hypothesized emergence of the sonorous artwork as an autonomous object of disciplinary knowledge. Marx’s cogitations might be taken to suggest that the emergence of all such matters of purely sonic concern be narrated in relation to shifting configurations of the human senses. He believed – as many have since – that everything felt and known could be explained in relation to basic transformations in economic, technological, and media conditions. It was only in full view of sensory history, one might say, that the enormous expansion of the sense for sound in the period around 1844 could be explained, as much as the prevailing British imperative (discussed in what follows), not merely to “have” music, but to have it all. The present volume, which addresses music and science in London during the first half of the “long” nineteenth century, is framed by two attempts to “have it all” – two attempts at the total description of aural experience. We begin with Charles Burney’s monumentally ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe “from the earliest ages to the present period,” published between 1776 and 1789. And we conclude with “the world” coming to London for the Great Exhibition of 1851, to witness – alongside other instruments of science and industry – music’s matters pinioned in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. Marx’s narrative of progressive sensory alienation sheds gloomy light on these monuments – as it might, if invited to do so, on the English invention of “the aural” (a category pertaining exclusively to “the organ of hearing”) in the late 1840s, and on many other trophies from this period’s extraordinary acceleration of musical activity and scientific innovation. The weight of what was achieved here left its traces in our language, in ways too easily overlooked or taken for granted. In addition to “the aural,” the period we are considering here bequeathed us “the scientist” (1834), as well as “musicology” (1845, from the German Musikwissenschaft) as a 1 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 140. 2 term and as a discipline.2 It also saw the emergence of energy in what is now its most familiar sense, as a term to denote quantities of work power. It gave us the “stock exchange”; and the discipline of acoustics, led by “the acoustician”; and an early glimpse of the microphone. It saw the emergence of the electric telegraph as the first means of rapid long-distance communication. If the native musical talent of this nineteenth-century metropolis bequeathed no works to the current canon – a fact that did much to earn England the title of das Land ohne Musik – its robust institutions of music can be credited with decisively fostering the very canon itself, as well as commissioning significant works by composers from afar. The baton conductor appeared here, as did the proms concert. The list could go on. We are not concerned here, however, with providing a comprehensive account of the landmarks of this extraordinary period; rather we ask what such traces might reveal about the sort of object music was understood to be, and how sonic and musical practices, performers and performances, instruments and technologies figured in the history of disciplinary knowledge. This volume explores how scientific truth was accrued by means of visual and aural experience; how musical knowledge was located in relation to sensuous scientific practice. A central motivation for the project was the need to rebalance the voluminous academic literature on visual culture in studies of popular science and spectacle in London.3 By focusing scholarly attention on aural history, our hope was that musicologists, with their training in aesthetic practice and the histories of listening and performance, might offer insights to historians of science and technology, particularly given recent mutual interest in the senses. How can science be listened for and known aurally? How might sound culture, auditory culture, or the study of musical practice be usefully brought to bear on research into historical ways of knowing and being? The facts and figures gathered in these pages thus tend toward accounts of embodied knowledge, toward thinking about the tangible nature of seeing and hearing. They grapple with physical experience first, and address the instrumental conditions that make epistemological inquiry emotionally compelling and technically possible. A central aim of this volume is to locate “London,” in its fullest phenomenological sense, as a city formed in relation to sites at once musical and scientific. Of course, the metropolis could be mapped in numerous ways. One could chart the rise of training institutions and pedagogical infrastructures; or the rapid expansion of a global market for technologies, alongside burgeoning markets for commercial retail, scientific, and music publishing in advertising, periodical literature, newsprint, and educational literature. One could document the flood of new instruments and communications media, considering media systems such as the kaleidoscope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, stereograph, photograph, difference engine, telegraph, typewriter, or stereograph, alongside other such enchanting communication technologies -- the lyrichord, coelestinette, celestina, eidophusikon, harmonium, concertina, and a myriad of more or less exotic musical instruments. Or, alternately, our “London” might be understood as multiple networks of amateur and professional musicians and scientists, interweaving in that city’s 2 The great mineralogist, moral philosopher, and polymath William Whewell famously coined the word “scientist” in 1834. The earliest printing of the English word “musicology” appeared in relation to an esoteric dispute over the “dissonant fourth” in the theory of an obscure Blackheath organist called Edward Clare. The German equivalent was used as early as 1822 – by the Dublin-based educationalist and alleged quack, J. B. Logier. What we mean by the “discipline” is clearly very different from a nineteenth-century usage; see Johann Bernhard Logier, System der Musikwissenschaft und des musikalischen Unterrichts (Berlin: Wilhelm Logier, 1822). 3 The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the phrase “the aural” (as opposed to the earlier term “the auricular” meaning “pertained to the ear”) to famed philosopher George Henry Lewes’s discussion of “sensuous knowledge” in 1847. 3 uniquely versatile spaces; this approach would involve tracing the interactions between music- makers, natural historians, astronomers, music historians, engineers, explorers, missionaries, composers, publishers, acousticians, instrument manufacturers, and entrepreneurs. What London was, in other words, cannot be thought as separate from its mode of becoming, the “modern” disciplinary, technical, and epistemological accumulations

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