Creating an Academic Discipline

The current project explores the synchronous establishing of musicology and art history as academic disciplines at the University of Vienna as part of an education reform conducted by Leopold, Count von Thun und Hohenstein (18111888). This education reform, following the 1848/1849 revolution which had shaken the foundation of numerous European governments, led to the diversification of theoretical philosophical aesthetics into more specific academic disciplines. As a result, Rudolf von Eitelberger (18171885) was awarded an extraordinary professorship for art history in 1852, fol- lowed by Eduard Hanslick (18251904), who only four years later received the first post for musi- cology in German-language academia as lecturer for the History and Aesthetics of Musical Art. Both disciplines therefore emerged from a setting shaped deeply by political and cultural concerns. While in light of the changing political situation Thun was tasked with systematically modernizing Habsburg education, he moreover intended to suppress liberal forces considered responsible for the revolution. Furthermore, he had to address language conflicts and increasing nationalist tensions between Austrias ethnic groups, which had fueled the uprising. Because they treated non-verbal arts, musicology and art history took center stage in fostering the culture neutral method of positivism, an objectivist scientific approach seen as free from cultural and political partiality. Both academic disciplines were thus created at the border of science and politics, allowing for a rare window into the complex relations between these factors. Beyond studying the network between politics, culture, and science, the project will also analyze the development of musicological methodology and examine the exchange of concepts between early exponents of musicology and art history. Here, it will primarily consider the works of Guido Adler (18551941), pupil of Hanslick and founder of the department of musicology at the University of Vienna, whose central notion of style was profoundly influenced by art-historical precepts such as Alois Riegls (18581905) Kunstwollen. Adler also founded the Monuments of Musical Art in Austria, an ongoing music edition project dedicated to preserving and presenting masterworks of Austrian origin in a broad sense. This endeavor, ripe with covert identity politics, was established in engagement with art-historical monuments preservation movements. The current project will thus show how methods employed by both disciplines were not the result of purely scientific discourse but rather address concrete political agendas.

The project examined the establishment of musicology as a university discipline in nineteenth- century Vienna. It mainly focused on three related questions: First, it scrutinized the term musicology itself and worked towards determining the indispensable characteristics of this field and its differentiation from terms like music history, music philosophy, or music philology. Key here was the early (and in international context uncommon) integration of not only ethnological, but also psychological, physiological, and physical approaches, i.e. so-called systematic musicology. While English-language musicology, for example, likewise includes ethnomusicology, systematic musicology is a trademark of the discipline in German-language universities. This setting has important ramifications for defining the discipline and answering questions about the time of its emergence. Second, the project explored the scientific, political, and cultural background of Eduard Hanslicks and Guido Adlers understanding of musicology, which in view of the definition above should be regarded as founding figures of their field. Here I was able to show that their projects and methods not only depended on internal scientific circumstances and developments, but also responded to political factors like the increasing problems of multi-ethnic Austria. Habsburg officials pursued the (ultimately doomed) strategy of coping with religious, cultural, and ethnic tensions by simply sweeping them under the rug. Consequently, they promoted positivist research methods, that is collecting and analyzing the factual and objective while ignoring politically sensitive issues. This approach is evident in Hanslicks Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, a core text of music philosophy until today, as well as in Adlers works, especially the edition series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ). Third, I was interested in the extent to which Hanslicks and Adlers ideas had been influenced by the contemporary (but ultimately slightly earlier) emergence of academic art history and its most important exponents in Vienna at that time (Rudolf Eitelberger, Moritz Thausing, Alois Riegl, etc.). Apart from parallels explained by their shared cultural and political contexts, I focused on two of Adlers essential concepts, which clearly refer to art history: the concepts of style and the monument. While the latter helped determine the flagship project of the DTÖ, the former was central to Adlers method of musicology, which he conceived as the history and analysis of style. I found that Adler did not rely on any particular concept of style, but combined several concepts (in particular those of Alois Riegl and Gottfried Semper) for his purposes, adapting them for musical research. All three questions and their answers elaborated in lectures and articles contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of musicology in general and its particular manifestation in German-language academia. Especially the overlaps with early art history have proven a fruitful inquiry to be followed up in further research projects.