https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3370-6301
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Thomas J Mulherin, An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 81, Issue 4, Fall 2023, Pages 564–568, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpad058
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Husserl famously characterized phenomenology as a science of “infinite tasks.” Among other things, this claim refers to the maximally general scope of phenomenology: no domain of human experience is excluded from phenomenological description. In light of this, as well as profound importance of music in the Weimar period that coincided with the height of the phenomenological movement in Germany, it is surprising both that there was relatively little work done in the phenomenology of music at this time and that the small amount of work that was done has received little scholarly attention. Nothing can be done about the former issue, of course, but Benjamin Steege’s monograph An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought aims to rectify the latter, offering the first extended engagement with Weimar-era phenomenology of music in English. Beyond the expected phenomenological touchstones of Husserl, Heidegger, and Scheler, Steege considers a broad range of familiar and unfamiliar thinkers, including the musicologists Gustav Güldenstein, Heinrich Besseler, and Herbert Eimert, critics such as Hans Mersmann, and philosophers José Ortega y Gasset, Günther Stern-Anders, and Walter Benjamin. Although Steege discusses relatively few musical examples, those he has selected range across the history of Western European art music, including thirteenth-century motets, seventeenth-century dance suites, canonical works by Chopin and Debussy, and even a 1961 work on tape by Herbert Eimert. He supplements all of this with five new translations of Weimar-era essays in the phenomenology of music. The result is a rich, suggestive text that will be of interest to Germanists, musicologists, philosophers of music, and historians of philosophy.
