CHAPTER 9

Franz, Stumpf, Riemann, Kafka: Toward an Auditory Unconscious ca. 1883

David Trippett

Beethoven’s extraordinary will power and his imagination that accommodated sensation apparently even brought about a temporary improvement in his hearing.

—Carl Stumpf, 18831

Franz

Not paying attention proved unusually costly for the Lied composer and baroque arranger Robert Franz (1815–1892). In 1848, while standing on the platform of a newly built railway station at Dessau, his train—bound for Leipzig—was slowly entering the station when it let off a steam whistle not a meter from his head. The acoustic shock was life-changing, as figures from Liszt to Franz’s American friend, the writer and critic William Foster Apthorp, noted. Reflecting in 1903, Apthorp relates the consequences:

He immediately felt as if something had given way in his ear, and could hear nothing but a mighty internal buzzing. The trip to Leipzig was given up. In a few days the buzzing in his ears stopped, and he could hear again; but it was as if the higher tones of the scale were cut off—above a certain acuteness of pitch he was deaf. From this time forward, note after note dropped out of the range of his hearing, until at last his deafness became complete.2

This story of a descending scale of deafness, and variations on it, appeared in articles and commentaries following the composer’s death in 1892. It laid the blame squarely at the door of the noise caused by the fierce expulsion of steam and water from locomotive cylinders, something Richard Pohl categorized—without irony—as “physical music” in 1852, and about which practical handbooks had begun cautioning users of the railways even by the late 1830s.3 With little experience of locomotives, Franz simply hadn’t anticipated the fierce blast. Though a quintessentially modern scene, the principle was ancient. If movement set up by an object is too strong for the organ of sense, as Aristotle has it in De Anima, “the form which is its sensory power is disturbed; it is precisely as concord and tone are destroyed by too violently twanging the strings of a lyre.”4 The physiological conditions for facilitating accuracy of sight and hearing were a constant for Aristotle (color of the eyes, consistency of the water surrounding them, “purity” of the ear membrane, etc.), so depended on the material health of sense mechanism—that is, lyre strings’ density and elasticity—rather than conscious attention.5 By extension, unguarded attention broke the tonality of Franz’s lyre. As Liszt observed poetically in 1872: “He has set his lyre aside.”6

Against commentaries on a life shrouded in anecdote, his correspondence revealed a more textured story: that his hearing in fact began to deteriorate as early as 1841, that his real name was “Knauth” (rather than the musically auspicious telescoping of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert), and that as early as 1867, he had been forced to give up his organist, conductor, and teaching positions in Halle owing to an accumulation of physical incapacities. This did little to hinder the circulation of tales of impairment. With a novelist’s eye for ironic coincidence, the American critic Henry Finck reported that Franz’s audible tones vanished progressively, from highest to lowest, “until 1876—the year of the first Bayreuth Festival—found him totally deaf,” linking the beginning of the world in Wagner’s Ring (or: E-flat at 18 Hz) with the end of Franz’s acoustic world. For good measure, he added a faddish biological cause, ascribing Franz’s physical condition to his father’s age (60) at the time of his conception: “Physiologists tell us that the children of aged parents are peculiarly liable to all sorts of degenerate nervous conditions,” he explains, “Franz’s fate did not disprove this doctrine.”7

All this might appear an intriguing but arguably irrelevant datum of music history, but for the extravagant regard in which Franz’s ca. 279 Lieder were held by certain German contemporaries, and—as we shall see—his post-traumatic auditory hallucinations. Let us take these in order. First, Franz’s reception as a curate’s egg. Beyond the early encomium he received from Schumann (“he seeks more than pleasant- or unpleasant-sounding music, he seeks to recreate the poem in all its vital depth”), still cited in Hanslick’s sympathetic obituary,8 and Wagner’s sense of rivalry during the late 1850s,9 the critic Wilhelm Heinrich Ambros ascribed to Franz’s Lieder the “extreme ‘depth and inwardness’ of Schumann, bound to that “naiveté” of Schubert.” When, during the summer of 1871, Ambros and Franz strolled together in the garden of the early Lied composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), smelling the roses first planted by Goethe that now encircled the house, Ambros later ventriloquized for his readers the words he imagined Reichardt would have said to Franz: “You have completed what we once started!”10

Such genealogical stylizing, along with the organicist imagery and name-as-Frankenword, is almost too obvious a pedestal, too forced a platform for one whose career had fossilized from the perspective of genre and enjoyed only localized acclaim. As a composer of Lieder, almost exclusively so, Franz tacitly rejected Schumann’s public caution to “try his hand at new forms” for “success in small forms often leads to one-sidedness, to mannerisms.”11 Just a year after his garden walk with Ambros, Franz offered bitter self-justification for his narrow output and resulting professional isolation. “From the outset,” he told the biographer Ida Marie Lipsius in 1872,

my Lieder found a very small circle of admirers, and a very large, fierce circle of adversaries. . . . The critics of our specialist ­journals . . . preferred to keep the Lieder in dead silence rather than bump into a hornet’s nest that might eventually become uncomfortable for them. But when they opened their big mouths, you could be quite certain that much stupidity would emerge. For one, I had too little melody, for another my accompaniments were too difficult; a third labelled me a weak follower of Schumann, a fourth mocked [my] Bachian turns etc.12

In light of these shades of bitterness, Ambros’s words might appear excessively sympathetic—consolation toward a living colleague with acute hearing loss, partially paralyzed, experiencing professional decline, and in need of benevo­lence. In short, the case of Franz all but inverted the Beethoven paradigm, as a musical mind defeated by deafness, creating a problem for commentators seeking to articulate his genius. “Unlike Beethoven,” Finck confesses, “Franz did not write his best music after he had become deaf.”13 Moreover, his turn from original composition to arrangement (of J. S. Bach and Handel) offers a positively anti-Beethoven model for so-called “disablist music,” for it robs the creative subject of originality (i.e., “exemplary originality” constituting the primary criterion of the Kantian genius), hastily widening the aesthetic remit ascribable to a “musical practice that rejects the normal performance body.”14

Yet aspects of the Beethoven paradigm linger in Franz’s reception. One obituary notes how he “swiftly withdrew from the world, which largely alienated him with its constant search for novelty, and in which he hardly felt comfortable.”15 And among his staunchest defenders, it was Liszt who first presented a stratagem of attentive listening as poetic straining against deafness, a trope also applied to Beethoven. Here, then, we turn to the topic of auditory hallucinations as the flip side to inner hearing. Liszt’s public endorsement from 1855—seven years post–train whistle—carries the claim that Franz

feels the urge to hear, to immerse himself, as it were, in waves of tones, to rock himself on her infinite element, to navigate her ether, to let her fragrant breezes caress her unfolding wings / vibrations [Schwingen], to surround himself with her miraculously scenic cloud-images, to eavesdrop on their tragic or poignant dialogue, to transport himself in its world of more expressive atoms, glowing and sparkling like the magic formulas of a heavenly language. Franz wants to hear music making and make music himself.16

This “urge to hear” implied hallucination. Writing in 1855, he sidesteps the label of impairment by evoking a quasi-magical science (“more expressive atoms”) in language more typical of Wackenroder’s generation. Accordingly, he remains elliptical regarding the elephant in the room, the loss of hearing itself as an inward turn in Franz’s destiny: “He dreamt of happiness . . . his grand piano [Flügel] touched him softly . . . and then it fled! This catastrophe of his inner destiny decided his entire path.”17 Buried in metaphor and the agency of ambiguity, the wordplay on Flügel (wing, grand piano, pinna) lets the reader decide. It solicits an aesthetic idiolect that makes the ellipses within a system of meaning mutually functional. The reader must intervene in the text to fill in semantic gaps, in other words, making Liszt’s tiptoeing around the issue of deafness a prototype for reader response theory in which “each reading . . . is an actualization of something that by its very nature is a potential, which can never be totally actualized.”18 Significantly, these unrealized potential readings were not primarily the outcome of a poetic flight, but of diplomatic ambiguity.

Liszt’s article was benevolent propaganda, after all. He and Franz had discussed it on a two-hour train journey a few weeks prior to its publication in the Neue Zeitschrift; “naturally” Liszt tells his partner, Princess Carolyn zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Franz “will be glad to fill in the blank spaces on the little handwritten manuscript I left in his hands.”19 This helps to contextualize the positive spin placed on “catastrophe,” as a speech-act within the sphere of illocution, channeling a reading of openness and possibility rather than a destiny stymied:

He broke with all temptations of wavering desires, wavering hopes; the pain radiated and concentrated his spirit and gave it that consecration, that energy which allows the soul all its freedom, in order to affirm this freedom with all its might. With these renewed powers he felt called to take his place among men of action, to speak his own language in the name of his inner zeal.20

But times change. When this article was reprinted in book form in 1872 (accompanying a fundraising concert tour to secure a pension of 30,000 thaler for the composer),21 Liszt included a frank postscript that dropped the diplomatic ambiguity. He now confirms the “hearing impairment . . . [that] has spread,” making all music making impossible, with conversation only forcible via a raised voice at his ear.22 This moment of anagnorisis brought an optimistic shift toward the belief that medical science might ameliorate Franz’s condition and recast the composer’s encroaching auditory hallucinations as quasi-supernatural,23 borrowing a personification familiar to Germanic legend: “In front of the aging master’s door lies the gray woman [das graue Weib] . . . who whispers all kinds of frightening sayings into his ear and heart.”24 Franz’s acousmas—occurring “especially at night . . . [such] that his friends feared he might become insane”25—figure as the flip side of a creative imagination lodged between inner hearing and aural infirmity.

Not three years after the train whistle incident, Franz’s attraction to the lines of the young poet Max Waldau (Georg von Hausenschild) about inaudible music might encourage a frail life-works reading of this predicament:

Taken from the final stanza of the poem “Es klingt in der Luft,” which Franz set strophically as Op. 13, No. 2 (1851), it is tempting to suppose the memory of sounds once heard resonated, for him, with Liszt’s sense of inner hearing as a creative amulet. If this has a wishful valence as inner hearing on the side of the angels, negative readings are also possible. Auditory hallucinations were not just invitations to musical invention; they also served to actualize the negative claims of critics in Franz’s aural imagination, especially in his later years of near-total deafness. He complained privately in 1889, for example, that unflattering reports from those “who knew in earlier years how to judge my little tunes” led him to imagine in sound various musical failings at a concert by the soprano Amalie Joachim—a lost duet-like melody in the tenor (“only the clatter of the demi-semiquavers!”), amid a wholly misconceived character (“the lady showed not a trace of understanding for the tender reticence which is absolutely necessary”). Here the distinction between interior and exterior sound (and between actual and imagined composition) became moot: “I, a deaf man, could of course not attend to the concert.”26 This, it seems, was inner hearing on the side of the devil.

By contrast, Liszt only ever understood inner hearing as a spur to creativity (of the gray lady’s many associations, she supposedly knew where the Niebelung’s treasure was hidden and carried a set of magic keys that opened mountain vaults: “At her touch a mysterious door opened,” one popular account reports, “glimpses of gold and jewels flashed within; but no living man had ever been brave enough to follow and seize the treasure”).27 Beyond such allegories, it was an underexplored link between physiology, attention, and the creative imagination that would draw the interest of empirical researchers.

In this chapter, Franz’s experience of his declining aural sense and the personal uncertainties it instilled in him opens the door to a discussion of three modernists from radically different fields: Carl Stumpf (empirical psychology), Hugo Riemann (music theory), and Franz Kafka (fiction). All engage the discourse of aural uncertainty, hallucination, and conscious attention, preparing the ground for a concept of the auditory unconscious—what our reasoned mind tells us we hear when there is nothing to hear, and vice versa, a deafness to rationally present sonic stimuli that appear insensible. Their voices speak indirectly to one another, but collectively broach the uncertainties of aural deception as they dovetail with the solipsist’s torment of a possible self-deception in what is heard.

Stumpf

Our first empirical researcher, the prominent philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, declared in 1883 that “attention is paramount” for all sensory judgment. As an expression of interest (that is, a feeling), attention constitutes “a theoretical feeling,” he explained, “since it stands in an especially close causal relation to perception.”28 But attending to the intensity of any sound impression—heard or hallucinated—immediately presents a paradox:

The intensity to be observed would indeed become eo ipso greater through observation. Hence I could never observe a faint tone, but only a maximally forceful one or at least one that steadily grows during observation, where I can, as a matter of fact, even follow a diminuendo with growing attention.29

His swift qualification—“the tone does not become louder, but we become more intensely conscious of it”—foregrounded the role of conscious attention. It was picked up by reviewers who noted that if attention did strengthen a sonic impression it would only hinder an accurate judgment of its intensity.30 This meant that attention had a Heisenberg problem: Sensory phenomena could become intensified for listeners through attention while the stimulus itself remained constant: “We merely become more intensely conscious of it.”31 This splitting of measurable amplitude from consciousness of intensity defined the agency of attention within an empirical domain and influenced the research for volume one of Tone Psychology ca. 1875–83. What the split accomplished, for Stumpf, was nothing less than the claim that the experience of sensation itself is real as an autonomous phenomenon, that is, a thing in Heidegger’s catchall sense of “a something and not nothing,” independent of consciousness.32 What it did not do was distinguish between attention to inner and “outer” hearing, distantly forecast by the case of Franz.

Shortly after being appointed full professor at Würzburg University in 1873, Stumpf began working on what would become the first volume of his Tone Psychology (1883). The project’s empirical methods offered an invigorating break from what Stumpf saw as the fruitlessness of recent work in philosophy: “It has always been reassuring and a kind of solace to switch from theories to observation, from reflection to facts, from the writing desk to the laboratory.”33 He set out from the principle that, rather than an ontology of pure sensation (a philosophical rabbit hole), it is only “sensory judgment” that can be scrutinized. This required a comparative process, for “every sensation is necessarily related to others; there are simply no pure sensations.”34 Judgment, in this context, means the reaction of the mind to sensations, its apprehension of their intensity and quality, and the relations of these to those of other sensations. A comparative approach is paramount because it sets like against like, avoids a reflexive stage, and prevents judgments from being fixed in language: “Sensation is itself something relative,” he explains in an extreme formulation; “we feel not absolute contents but only relations, difference, changes.”35

What could not be scrutinized within this comparative schema was the phenomenon of aural hallucinations—in Stumpf’s words: “those presentations that are subjective in origin and arise with the full character of powerful sensations.”36 He gave these phenomena scant treatment. Yet they raised the possibility of two complementary problem cases: a phantasmal sound that originates in the body or mind to which only one listener can ever be sensitive (i.e., unverifiable by another mind); and a sound that exists in the world but is initially inaudible to the unpracticed listener, becoming sensate only via an effortful process of mental arousal. Stumpf spelled out the theoretical implications of these cases:

If weak sensations that were already noticed can be intensified by increased attention, we must indeed conclude that, whenever a tone is attentively presented, central or centrifugal arousals in the brain occur and accumulate with the ones on which they are based. . . . [Hence] not merely unnoticed sensations can be made noticeable, but also arousals of the acousticus [Akusticus] that are not at all given in sensation can be raised above the threshold of sensation.37

In short, attention can make the inaudible audible by bringing about a process of recalibration. The prospect of raising the threshold of one’s sensate perception thus implied that thresholds of perception are not fixed (a claim long advanced by researchers interested in mesmerism, spiritualism, and the like). Yet Stumpf’s claim was biological rather than miraculous, as evidenced by his postulate of an evolutionary function whereby, if a neural process in the brain accompanies attentiveness, “gradually a special disposition, perhaps one that increases from generation to generation, is produced . . . for a faster crossing over the threshold of sensation.”38 Rather than arising from degeneracy, then (as Finck ascribed to Franz), inner or extrapolated hearing might result from inherited attentive acuity.

Behind this thought experiment in breeding hypersensate humans stands the ever-malleable model of Beethoven, whose sheer willpower and imagination coupled to sensation, Stumpf avers, allegedly brought about “a temporary improvement in his hearing.”39 This logic linked attention (will) to acuity based on a process of “centrifugal arousals in the brain,” distantly modeled on a reinforcing overtone series. In the case of Franz, such acuity was absent, the ethical implication being that the composer lacked the will to address the challenges of his own condition (pace Liszt and the “urge to hear”). Such a claim contradicted Karl Marx’s historical materialism half a century earlier, which expressly denied the capacity of individuals to swap one kind of conscious perception for another: “This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognize it by means of another interpretation.”40 In short, emerging from Stumpf’s scheme was the extraordinary possibility that, by degree, a disciplined practice of sense judgment achieved the opposite of hearing loss.

The possibility of confusion over phantasms of the imagination (that is, hallucinations and sensations that are weak but real), presented an epistemic tangle, for both were to be defined by the variable perception of a listening subject. Adopting an autoethnographic mode, Stumpf briefly relates his experience of passing a wind harp each day where at a certain distance he became unable to tell if its chord still sounded “in the most extreme pianissimo” or if he imagined it out of habit. This precedes a related anecdote, borrowed from Karl von Schafhäutl, professor of geology at the University of Munich, concerning an acoustic version of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837): A conductor continually instructed the horn section that they were not playing a certain passage quietly enough; exasperated, they finally placed the mouthpieces to their lips without blowing at all. (In Stumpf’s telling, the conductor was satisfied: “That’s the right way, gentlemen! Keep doing it like that!” In Schafhäutl’s, not quite: “Now it is right; but if possible, still more piano.”)41

The abiding lesson for Schafhäutl, who had also trained in acoustics and organ building, was that inner hearing led to musical experiences. Beethoven’s ability to orchestrate scores while deaf, again, serves as the telling detail, predicated on his—assumed—lifelong habit of reading scores silently. Yet this ability represented a danger to acoustic experiments, Schafhäutl concluded soberly. On the border of musical audibility, listeners were prone to hear whatever they wished to hear: “We know only too well how easily one thinks one hears music tones that lie on the threshold of musical audibility, if one wants to hear them.”42

Like a sleeve pulled inside out, this situation was inverted in cases where auditory sensations could be objectively real in their physical effect on a listening body, yet independent of a listening consciousness. The physiologist and philosopher Gustav Fechner coined the term “negative sensation” (die negative Empfindungswerth) for the nonexistence of a sensation where there is a corresponding neural process.43 In his words: “If the magnitude of the stimulus ß or of the psychophysical activity elicited by the stimulus falls below the stimulus threshold b, then, according to the measurement formula, the sensation y assumes negative values.”44 This concept of negative sensation is not mathematically negative, merely an expression for a form of subconscious perception, and for this reason a few paragraphs later, Fechner also termed it “unconscious sensations” (unbewusste Empfindungen), acknowledging the role psychophysical activities below such a threshold play in one’s “so-called unconscious life.”45

For Stumpf, who praised Fechner as a “true scientific researcher,” this results in the alarming prospect of a ubiquitous auscultation that must be ongoing below the threshold of perception, that is, “the total mass of undistinguished sensations which at all times make up the background [noise] of mental life.”46 This notion of an auditory unconscious emerges as a specter looming over the scene of German psychophysics in the final third of the century and ties together the four protagonists of this chapter. To trace the mechanisms for attenuating vibration or neural stimuli and the points at which this no-longer-heard content of the body’s neural processes proves insufficient to arouse the ganglia or cerebral cortex is simply “impossible,” Stumpf protests, “without going into metaphysics.”47 For Fechner, such negative sensations are autonomous phenomena and only become metaphysical with the claim that sensations exist independently of the mind. Ostensibly, unconsciously perceived stimuli always have the capacity to be perceived consciously when attention is applied, but with one qualification:

In fact, if with fixed attention on an area of sensation I can perceive absolutely nothing of a sensation (or of a perceived difference), in spite of its physical cause being there, which is the actual case of the threshold in my sense, then I don’t understand—as one says—that there is after all a small sensation (simple or differential) which one simply cannot compare with others; these seem completely mystical concepts to me.48

A sensation that cannot be discerned by any means does not exist in his account partly, we may surmise, because it doesn’t fit within the logarithmic law of sensation he had based on Weber’s law (famously, Fechner, who studied with Ernst Heinrich Weber, published two laws, Weber’s and his own, in his Elements of Psychophysics [1860]; these claimed that the intensity of sensation varies as a logarithm of the sensation’s stimulus).49 In Tone Psychology Stumpf retorts that there are often means for “inferring the existence of sensations” in subsensible cases. This led his most prominent English reviewer (and test subject), James Sully, to break ranks and side with Fechner. Stumpf’s argument presented a new, unpersuasive kind of psychological dualism, he felt, where sensations were thought to exist as real entities with a defined content independent of the mind seeking to observe them: “An impression which I cannot detect with a full act of attention,” Sully concluded, “cannot surely have any individual existence in my consciousness, however wide we make the region of consciousness.”50

Stumpf’s argument that an auditory unconscious exists (that sonic sensations below perceptual thresholds could be rendered accessible only by the agency of attention) stems in part from the view, current during the 1870s, that unconsciousness implied both subperceptual phenomena (cf. Fechner’s “negative sensation”) and those not directed by the conscious mind (namely, automatic or reflex actions). Indeed, the British philosopher George Henry Lewes drew attention to this ambiguity in the second issue of the journal Mind, noting that “reflex actions may be unaccompanied by Consciousness—in one meaning of the term—without ceasing to be sentient.”51 A simple explanation of Lewes’s account might be the behavior of vibrating hairs within the cochlea duct during the process of sympathetic resonance. Stumpf’s insight was that the mind, too, was subject to reflex actions (cf. his accounts above of inaudible orchestral horns or his own daily hearing of an Aeolian harp), so the boundaries of auscultation below the threshold of perception, which I am calling an auditory unconscious, could be established with confidence neither by physiological experiment nor by conscious cognition. Here attentive agency becomes the dynamic element perpetuating this ambiguity, a mediating force between conscious and unconscious.

A musical example can serve to illustrate Stumpf’s position. Hermann von Helmholtz had argued in Sensations of Tone (1863) that the perception of the phenomenon of consonance was directly related to the existence of each tone’s upper partials, whose coincidences determined the nature of consonance for the ear in consecutive pitches (his theory of “melodic affinity”) as well as in simultaneous intervals. Untrained listeners could not easily hear the upper partials, he explained, but “success depends more upon a peculiar power of mental abstraction or a peculiar mastery over attention, than on musical training.”52 Half a century later, Stumpf disputed the subliminal value of overtones in this regard. In the detailed endnotes to his 1909 lecture on The Origins of Music, he argued against the notion that overblown notes on wind instruments might have been a principal source for the origins of consonance. The makers of panpipes, he hypothesizes, would tune a second pipe so that its third overtone formed the double octave with the fundamental of the first pipe, creating a (large) perfect fourth between pipes. By continuing this pattern to the third pipe, impure consonant intervals arise (e.g., the fifth overtone of the first pipe is equal to the fundamental of the seventh pipe, “which is possible because the overtones are all a little too low”), and in-between notes would be added by a process of measured gap-filling.

Stumpf’s hypothetical panpipes show that “overtones are certainly utilized” but the transfer of overtone tuning to the pitch of a new pipe “did not lead to the pure intervals.” Prominent uses of the raised fourth—corresponding to the eleventh overtone—for example, in the ranz des vaches and associated alpine horn music, only draws attention to the selective use of overtones within theories of consonance, raising the prospect that some of these overtones might constitute negative sensations in Fechner’s sense, at least for unpracticed listeners. In his Tone Psychology of 1883, we read that “a distinction must be made between the existence of a currently unnoticed sensation and the nonexistence of a sensation as such.”53 By 1909, Stumpf had developed the consequences of this into a theory:

The fact that we do not use the seventh, eleventh, and thirteenth overtones . . . is indeed already evidence that overtones as such are not the crucial factor for our sense of hearing. We occasionally hear those overtones while overblowing, but they do not impress us, save for enthusiasts who worship natural products as such: we cannot use them in connection with our well-grounded tonal system.54

In Figure 9.1, reproduced from The Origins of Music, the raised fourth in the horn theme at the opening of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony serves as an explicit reminder of this fact: “I, at least, regard it as very probable that the horn melody . . . arose as a consequence of such Swiss notes.”55 Disagreements over the relative prominence of different overtones belied the truism that “practice does not change sensitivity” among listeners—leading to the marginalization of certain notes from the aural habitus of Western tonality during the late nineteenth century. At an extreme, Stumpf’s logic implies that listeners can revise the relative prominence and separability of different overtones in their hearing through attention and training.

Finally, within a materialist discourse in which imbrications between the physical conditions of life and mind yielded philosophical tracts such as ­Lewes’s The Physical Basis of Mind (1877), research into auditory perception was directly implicated.56 For Stumpf, this material entanglement raised the startling possibility that neural processes connected with attentive comparisons of sensation might alter physical aspects of listeners’ bodies. As a violinist, his instinctive comparison was to the physical entrainment of its frequency to bodily response: “There would be molecular changes in [the ear], as we suspect, by analogy, changes in the structure of a violin when it keeps ‘responding’ better and better during the use of it without there being any visible changes.”57 Any changes to the body of the player would be minimal, he reassures skeptical readers, “for it is not credible that the [auditory] organ could essentially transform itself anatomically in a few hours and become more acute by half.” But a few months? A few years perhaps? If physiological sensitivity could reside in the ear and attention could modify the boundaries of an auditory unconscious (and thus the workings of the brain), this established a material undergirding to disagreements over hearing component parts of tones.

Riemann and Kafka: Mobilizing the Auditory Unconscious

In the final section of this chapter, we turn to fiction and return to the interiority of hearing, its unverifiability, and consequent freedoms within a solipsistic approach to acoustic testing. First, the acoustics. Among the fabled disagreements in the history of acoustics, the moment when the twenty-four-year-old theorist Hugo Riemann claimed—and continued to argue for years—that he could hear undertones emanating from his Ernst Imler piano, arguably counts among the boldest. His work could not be replicated by others, so his response to critics relied on an insistence on the unassailable acuity of his own perception: “However this may be, and if all the authorities in the world appear and say: ‘We hear nothing,’ I must still say to you: ‘I hear something, and indeed something very significant.’”58 Who could disagree? Undertones, we recall, are the mirror image of overtones, their harmonic reciprocals; for believers, they appeared to offer a natural basis for the minor triad, just as overtones had done so for the major triad since the early seventeenth century. In the context of a debatable psychophysics where attentive listening could drive physical change in the auditory system, where thresholds of perception were seemingly variable based on practice, and where cases of impairment appeared to confirm the value of (a Beethovenian) will in improving acuity, the grounds for disputing Riemann’s claim might seem dangerously flawed.

In fact, the phalanx of fellow theorists who disputed and finally defeated Riemann’s claim that undertones had an objective existence is a matter of historical record.59 Like Stumpf’s argument against an overtone-derived consonance, Riemann initially supported the theory in his doctoral dissertation by including a melodic illustration of undertones taken from a familiar folk song (“Ach wenn du wärst mein eigen”). It parallels Stumpf’s strategy to the extent a well-known melody is made unfamiliar by demonstrating the possibility of new ways of hearing, and by extension, new auditory realities, albeit the auditory realities of what cannot be heard.

A number of questions arise from Riemann’s claim in connection with the discourse we have been following thus far: Was the young theorist experiencing a procrustean moment, as Karl von Schafhäutl—a prominent critic—would suggest,60 finding the sound he so keenly sought as a kind of auditory hallucination? Could his experience be an instance of sustained attention toward sounds ordinarily classed by Fechner as an “unconscious sensation,” namely real stimuli coaxed into consciousness from under the threshold of conscious perception? Or might it have resulted from a previously subliminal auscultation, the unnoticed by-product of a listening body that—according to Stumpf’s rather radical hypothesis—had undergone “molecular changes” resulting from months of practice in discerning differences in the sensations of tone?

Sensing arrogance, critics such as Schafhäutl had little patience for sympathetic theorizing. “Dr Hugo Riemann tells us that he and nobody else, except for Aristotle two thousand years ago, has heard these undertones.”61 Even within the breadth of psychophysical theories, it seemed implausible that Riemann, like some antique violin, was the only body whose resonant response had been entrained to an undertone series, penetrating a threshold of consciousness with no other tool than his Imler piano.

Within the discourse of an auditory unconscious, what was being debated was not the honesty of researchers (for the most part), but rather the mechanism by which the mind’s response to auditory sensation was to be measured—something Stumpf defined in all cases as a comparative judgment, as we saw earlier. He might have had Riemann in mind when he declared that any errors in sense judgment fall into two classes: “Either we see or hear falsely, or we interpret falsely what is seen or heard.”62 That is, objectively false sensory judgments arise when the mind either imagines or misinterprets a stimulus. The crossing-point in this division, between cognition and physiology, was made unstable by the possibility that powers of attention could change the status of sounds previous thought to be imagined. As is well known, the outcome was significant for Riemann’s dualist theory of harmony because undertones promised finally to reveal the natural basis of the minor triad. In the third edition of Sensations of Tone (1877) Helmholtz had described harmonic undertones as a property of the glass resonators he cupped to his ears during experiments to isolate over/undertone frequencies, but in a later footnote he confessed to being unable to demonstrate them directly via sympathetic resonance on the piano.63

As scholars from Alexander Rehding to Alexandra Hui have shown, physicists continued to dispute the reality of undertones until 1891, when Riemann retreated into a stalemate, arguing that because a state of perfect inference existed between the sound waves of over- and undertones, the latter were rendered inaudible, in other words, they were a matter of interpreting falsely “what is seen or heard.” It is striking, historiographically, that such a claim can now be read as the analogue to Stumpf’s belief that sensations can exist autonomously in the mind even when not perceived consciously.

Just as the line between imagined undertones and sounds that were deemed real but below the threshold of normative conscious perception blurred, so too did the hard distinction between sounds heard in the world and “phantasmal” sounds (those created or reproduced in the mind). This loss of certainty is indicative of the collapsing boundaries that for several decades gave credence to Riemann’s claims. Indeed, amid the currents of phenomenology eddying within Germany, Edmund Husserl used musical sounds to illustrate the reality he ascribed to the contents of consciousness. He defined phantasy in 1905 as consciousness “characterised by re-presentation (reproduction),” that is, a consciousness incapable of setting forth some kind of objectivity: “Not to give the object itself is the very essence of phantasy.”64 His test case for distinguishing direct perception from phantasy was hearing several tones in succession, then imagining the last sound in one’s head. In terms of temporal succession, these were categorically distinct, the one occurring after the other. In terms of consciousness, he acknowledged that the consciousness of sound that remains after the directly sounding event ends “presents itself in an entirely different way from the way in which the sounding presents itself.” However, it is with acts of mental reproduction that the two begin to blend:

We never refer to a continuous transition of perception into phantasy, of impression into reproduction . . . but reproduction, phantasy-consciousness also requires precisely the same shadings, only reproductively modified. . . . Sensation which functions presentatively for the object, forms a seamless continuum; and the phantasm likewise forms a continuum for the re-presentation of a phantasy object.65

This claim is based on the argument that all perception arises from sensation, and in the “now-moment” of our attention perception need not distinguish between the contents of sensations originating outside the mind and those of phantasms originating inside it. A counterintuitive conclusion finally dissolves the distinction entirely: “Whoever assumes an essential difference between sensations and phantasms naturally may not claim that the apprehension-contents for the just-past phases of time are phantasms.”66 Here, then, to circle back to our earlier figures, the difference between Franz’s inner hearing and Riemann’s illusive undertones becomes moot, for as contents of a conscious mind attentive to inaudible sound, both would count as equally real for listeners by comparison to fully heard sounds. This, at least, is the phantom auditory door opened by Husserl’s phenomenology ca. 1905.

Given the strained credulity of Riemann we saw above and the gradual intertwining of “actual” and “fantastical” theories of perception in Husserl and others, it is perhaps unsurprising that the contestable discourse around sonic interiority would find expression in fiction itself. Franz Kafka’s last short story, Der Bau (The Burrow, 1923), remained unfinished at his death. What survives fictionalizes the controversial psychology of an auditory unconscious with uncanny precision. Its first-person narrative sees a solitary mole-like creature discover “an almost inaudible whistling noise” in his burrow.67 He tries to determine its origin—intruder or hallucination—and fails, despite being a practiced engineer (“I have a good deal of experience in investigations of this kind”). Flashes of double-meaning alert readers to the underlying mind-ear nexus through anatomical wordplay: “I must have silence in my passages” (the plaint of a tinnitus-sufferer?) or “I stray so far that I find myself at the labyrinth,”68 as though a giant ear were being explored. As a result, the distinction between inner thought and outer reality collapses in the creature’s underground isolation, itself a metaphor for the interiority of mind, for the noise “is, so to speak, audible only to the ear of the householder.”69 As well as erasing distinctions between outer world and metaphysical solipsism, this in turn leads to improbable conclusions: “The noise can be heard everywhere and always at the same strength, and moreover uniformly, both by day and night. At first, therefore, one cannot but incline to the hypothesis of a great number of little [intruder] animals.”70 The anthropomorphic creature displays some acoustic refinement (“my ear can distinguish [the noise] in all its finest shades”71), as well as rendering several of Stumpf’s concepts from Tone Psychology in narrative prose: from comparative sense judgments (“There still remains the possibility that there are two noises”72) to the affecting powers of continuous attention (“the noise seems to have become louder”73) and discernment resulting from training (“My sensitiveness to disturbances in the burrow has perhaps become greater with years, yet my hearing has by no means grown keener”74). By the end, Kafka’s creature arguably becomes truer as an encapsulation of discourse on the auditory unconscious than the individual historical listening subjects we have traced in Franz, Stumpf, and Riemann.

It is telling that, biographically, Kafka not only confessed to being “unmusical” (a view borne out by his friend Max Brod, who soon gave up taking Kafka to concerts “since the impression they made on him were of a purely visual nature”),75 but for him, listening to musical sound was mentally trapping, a means of demarking off the normal world with a sonic one: “The natural effect of music on me is to circumscribe me with a wall,” he scribbled privately after an all-Brahms concert given by the Vienna Singverein in 1911, “and its only constant influence on me is that, confined in this way, I am different from what I am when free.”76 Rather than initiate an autobiographical reading of being confined within Der Bau’s subterranean environment, this raises the prospect that all aural worlds can be both world-defining and yet “ultimately unfathomable,” as one reader of Kafka recently put it.77

Epilogue

In an aside, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once observed that “the relationship between fiction and history is assuredly more complex than we will ever be able to put into words.”78 This rings true for the above attempt to thread a discourse of auditory perception through the needle-eye of Kafka’s unfinished story. Even the stability of the ear as a material object ran into difficulty with Franz’s advancing deafness and Stumpf’s “molecular changes.” They point to conditions of uncertainty and hypothetical questing that were susceptible to exploitation and help to explain why false authority in audiometry could flourish. During this period a fad for “Patent Artificial Eardrums” gained prominence, including commercial fraud by figures such as J. H. Nicholson (Figure 9.3), whereby aural realities could be redefined as much by belief as by empiricism, “throughout the civilised world.”79

Here aural fraud counts as little more than applied fiction vis-à-vis Kafka’s tale. It also explains why, from the outset of his doctoral work, Riemann’s belief that acts of listening are always analytical—“so-called simple tones are not simple”80—was also a statement about the inscrutability of private cognition, projected as such through Kafka’s subterranean creature who discerns noise in “all its finest shades.” Not only do acts of listening comprise composite partial tones, but they reflect the identity of the mind attending to them. Accordingly, before articulating what is meant by the analysis of musical works, the first edition of Riemann’s Musik-lexikon sets out a prior sense of “analysis” as an act of cognitive discernment: “Analysis of sounds by the ear is an end point of the new acoustics, it means the description of partial tones contained within a single tone (sound) of our musical instruments.”81 With this skill, it is possible to discern the different partial tones within a single sound, even if how this happens continues to remain “insufficiently explained” (noch nicht hinlänglich erklärt).

This insufficiency explains why debates over impairment and musical composition, the thresholds of sensation, the role of consciousness in acts of perception, and the prospect of an acoustic unconscious nest together as interwoven contingencies during the 1870s. In this sense, their emergence as a single entanglement, in the sense of a Foucauldian unity of discourse, is not the story of a historical concept’s progressive refinement or rationalization but of its “various fields of constitution and validity . . . its successive rules of use [and] the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured.”82 Above all, this entanglement speaks to the centrality of sound in guiding theories of sensation, perception, consciousness, and imagination in the final third of the century. Within the strengthening field of empirical psychology, moreover, the role of attention to sound sits across these discourses, both structuring their relations and, at times, threatening to dissolve the very boundaries between them.

Notes

1. 1.  Carl Stumpf, Tonpsychologie I (1883), Eng. trans. Tone Psychology: Volume 1—The Sensation of Successive Single Tones, trans. Robin D. Rollinger (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 241.
2. 2.  William Foster Apthorp (ed.), Fifty Songs by Robert Franz (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1903), xiv (fn).
3. 3.  “ein Geräusch hervorgrbracht wird, welches . . . auf heerstraßen jedoch gewiß bedenklich seyn würde.” Carl Hartmann, Praktisches Handbuch über die Anlage von Eisenbahnen (Augsburg: Jenisch & Stage, 1837), 421–22. The first passenger line, the Bavarian Ludwig Railway, had opened a mere thirteen years earlier, on 7 December, 1835. See also Richard Pohl, Akustische Briefe [1851–52] (Leipzig: Bruno Hinze, 1853), 95–101.
4. 4.  Aristotle, De Anima, Book 2, 424a, ll. 28–32; Eng. trans. W. S. Hett, On the Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
5. 5.  Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium, Book 5, 1–2; Eng. trans. A. L. Peck, Generation of Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1942).
6. 6.  “er [hat] seine Leyer bei Seite gelegt.” Franz Liszt, Robert Franz (Leipzig: F. E. C. Leuckart, 1872), 56.
7. 7.  Henry Finck, “Robert Franz: Anecdotes and Opinion,” The Looker-On (1 October 1896): 288.
8. 8.  “er will mehr als wohl- oder übelklingende Musik, er will uns das Gedicht in seiner leibhaftigen Tiefe wiedergeben.” Robert Schumann, “Rezension der Lieder op. 1,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 19 (1843): 35. Hanslick’s guarded appraisal speaks of “the last of that rare band that . . . gathered about the standard bearers of musical romanticism, Schumann and Mendelssohn.” Hanslick, “Dr Hanslick’s Feuilleton,” Musical Herald (1 December 1892): 53.
9. 9.  Richard Wagner, My Life, trans. Andrew Gray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 552. See also John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 262; and Werner Wolf, “Die Beziehungen zwischen Robert Franz und Richard Wagner,” in Robert Franz (1815–1892): Bericht über die wissenschaftliche Konferenz anläßlich seines 100. Todestages am 23. und 24. Oktober 1992 in Halle, ed. Konstanze Musketa (Halle: Händel-Haus, 1993), 152–62.
10. 10.  “Da war wir, als trete uns Reichart entgegen und spreche zu dem lebenden Meister: ‘Du hast vollendet, was wir einst begonnen!’” W. H. Ambros, Bunte Blätter: Skizzen und Studien (Leipzig: Leuckart, 1872), 325.
11. 11.  Henry Pleasants (ed. and trans.), Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings (New York: Dover, 1965), 190.
12. 12.  “Meine Lieder haben vom Anbeginn einen sehr kleinen Kreis begeisterter Verehrer und sehr großen heftiger Widersacher gefunden. . . . Die Kritik unserer Fachblätter . . . suchte die Lieder lieber tot zu schweigen, als daß sie in ein Wespennest stieß, daß ihr vielleicht mit der Zeit unbequem warden konnte. Wenn sie aber den breiten Mund aufthat, ließ sich mit voller Bestimmtheit darauf rechnen, daß eine dicke Dummheit zum Vorschein kam. Dem einen hatte ich zu wenig Melodie, dem anderen waren meine Begleitungen zu schwierig; der dritte nannte mich einen schwachen Nachtreter Schumanns, der vierte mokierte sich über Bachsche Wendungen u. s. w.” La Mara [Ida Marie Lipsius], “Zur Erinnerung an Robert Franz: Briefliches und Mündliches von ihm.” Westermanns Illustrierte Deutsche Monatsheft 75 (1894): 707–18, at 710–11.
13. 13.  Finck, “Robert Franz,” 289. Emphasis added.
14. 14.  Blake Howe, “Disabling Musical Performance,” in Howe, Stephanie Jenson-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph Straus, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 191–209, at 200–201. Cf. Franz’s public statement on musical arrangement as method, Offener Brief an Eduard Hanslick Ueber Bearbeitungen älterer Tonwerke (Leipzig: F. E. C. Leuckart, 1871).
15. 15.  “Und doch mußte er scheinbar schnell Abschied nehmen von der Welt, die ihm mit ihrer rastlosen Sucht nach Neuem fast entfremdet war, und in der er sich kaum mehr behaglich fühlte.” Richard Winker, “Erinnerungen an Robert Franz,” Neue Musikzeitung 13 (1892): 257–58, at 257.
16. 16.  “den Trieb in sich fühlt, zu hören, sich gleichsam in Wellen von Tönen zu tauchen, sich auf ihrem unendlichen Element zu wiegen, ihren Aether zu durchschiffen, ihre duftenden Hauche um seine entfalteten Schwingen kosen zu lassen, sich mit ihren wunderlandschaftlichen Wolkenbildungen zu umgeben, ihren tragischen oder ergreifenden Dialogen zu lauschen, sich in ihre Welt ausdrucksvoller, gleich den Zauberformeln einer himmlischen Sprache glühender und funkelnder Atome zu versetzen. Franz wollte musiciren hören und selbst musiciren.” Liszt, “Robert Franz,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 23 (1855): 242.
17. 17.  “Er träumte von einem Glück . . . leise berührte ihn sein Flügel . . . und dann entfloh es! Diese Katastrophe seines innern Geschicks entschied seine völlige Reise.” Ibid., 246.
18. 18.  Wolfgang Iser’s concise account of his own theory from How to Do Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 77.
19. 19.  Liszt to Carolyn zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, 15 October 1855, in La Mara (ed.), Franz Liszt’s Briefe, 8 vols. (Leipzig: 1893–1905), 4:273.
20. 20.  “Er liebte mit aller Hingebung, wie sie nur in seiner reinen edlen Natur keimen konnte. Er träumte von einem Glück . . . leise berührte ihn sein Flügel . . . und dann entfloh es! Diese Katastrophe seines innern Geschicks entschied seine völlige Reise. Er brach mit allen Lockungen schwankender Wünsche, schwankender Hoffnungen; der Schmerz strählte und concentrirte seinen Geist und gab ihm jene Weihe, jene Energie, die der Seele ihre ganze Freiheit lassen, um mit allen Kräften diese Freiheit zu bestätigen. Mit diesen neuerweckten Kräften fühlte er sich berufen, seinen Platz unter den Männern der That einzunahmen, im Namen seiner innern Begeisterung seine eigene Sprache zu sprechen.” Liszt, “Robert Franz,” 246.
21. 21.  Details recorded in Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon, 5^th ed. (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1900), 340.
22. 22.  “[T]rotz seines Gehörleidens war der Verkehr mit ihm nicht schwer. Das mit etwas erhabener Stimme in sein Ohr gesprochene Wort blieb ihm ohne Schwierigkeit vernehmbar.” La Mara, “Zur Erinnerung an Robert Franz,” 707.
23. 23.  “Perhaps some fortunate turn of events in his story will bring him back his lost health, revive his creative drive, and bring us a new springtime of songs.” (“Vielleicht, daß durch irgend eine glückliche Wendung seines Geschictes [sic] zum Bessern ihm die verlorene Gesundheit wiederkehrt, sein Schaffenstrieb von neuem erweckt wird, und uns einen neuen Liederfrühling bringt.”) Ibid., 55–56.
24. 24.  “Das Gehörleiden . . . hat in den letzten Jahren in einer Weise um sich gegriffen. . . . vor des alternden Meisters Thüre lagert das graue Weib, die Sorge ‘stets gefunden nie gesucht,’ und raunt ihm allerlei ängstigende Sprüche ins Ohr und Herz.” Liszt, Robert Franz, 54.
25. 25.  Finck, “Robert Franz,” 288.
26. 26.  Franz to Carl Ambruster, 13 December 1889, Halle, in William Barclay Squire, “Letters of Robert Franz,” The Musical Quarterly 7 (1921): 278–83, at 282.
27. 27.  See Emma Huntington Nason, “The White Lady of German Legend,” Munsey’s Magazine 9 (1893): 178–86, here 179.
28. 28.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 39. Emphasis added.
29. 29.  Ibid., 41.
30. 30.  James Sully, “Tonpsychologie by Carl Stumpf,” Mind 9 (1884): 593–602, at 596.
31. 31.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 41.
32. 32.  Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 6.
33. 33.  Stumpf, The Origins of Music, ed. and trans. David Trippett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 199.
34. 34.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 8.
35. 35.  Ibid.
36. 36.  Ibid., 179.
37. 37.  Ibid., 240.
38. 38.  Ibid., 241.
39. 39.  Ibid.
40. 40.  Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” (1845), Collected Works, 50 vols. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004), 5:39.
41. 41.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 240. Schafhäutl relates the tale: “Der Director war zufrieden: ‘So ist es recht; aber wenn möglich, noch etwas mehr piano.’” In Karl von Schafhäutl, “Moll und Dur in der Natur, und in der Geschichte der neuern und neuesten Harmonielehre,” Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (6 February, 1878), 90, in a footnote.
42. 42.  “Allein man weiss wohl zu gut, wie leicht man in der Musik Töne, die an der Grenze der musikalischen Hörbarkeit liegen, zu hören glaubt, wenn man sie hören will.” In Schafhäutl, “Moll und Dur in der Natur,” 91.
43. 43.  Gustav Theodor Fechner, In Sachen der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1877), 95–6.
44. 44.  “Wenn die Grösse des Reizes ß oder der psychophysichen Thätigkeit, die durch den Reiz ausgelöst wird, unter den Schwellenwerth b fällt, so nimmt nach der Massformel die Empfindung y negative Werthe an.” Ibid., 88.
45. 45.  “im sogen. unbewussten Leben.” Ibid., 91.
46. 46.  Stumpf, Origins of Music, 196; Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 247.
47. 47.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 246.
48. 48.  “In der That, wenn ich bei fixirter Aufmerksamkeit auf ein Empfindungsgebiet von einer Empfindung (oder einem empfundenen Unterschiede) durchaus nichts erkennen kann, trotz dem, das seine physische Ursache dazu da ist, was der factische Fall der Schwelle in meinen Sinne ist, zo verstahe ich nicht, wie man sagen kann, dass doch eine kleine (einfache oder Unterschieds-) Empfindung da sei, die man nur mit andern nicht vergleichen kann; es scheinen mir das völlig mystische Begriffe.” Fechner, In Sachen der Psychophysik, 96. On Fechner’s concept of the unconscious, see David Romand, “Fechner as a Pioneering Theorist of Unconscious Cognition,” Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2012): 562–572.
49. 49.  Fechner’s classic formulation of his laws reads: “Simple differential sensitivity is inversely proportional to the size of the components of the difference; relative differential sensitivity remains the same regardless of size.” Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics [1860], trans. Helmut E. Adler (New York and London: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 1:112.
50. 50.  Sully, “Tonpsychologie by Carl Stumpf,” 599.
51. 51.  George Henry Lewes, “Consciousness and Unconsciousness,” Mind 2 (1877): 156–67, at 159.
52. 52.  Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone (1863), 3^rd ed., trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954), 49. Translation modified.
53. 53.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 246.
54. 54.  Stumpf, Origins of Music, 92.
55. 55.  Ibid., 95.
56. 56.  George Henry Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind (London: Trübner & Co., 1877).
57. 57.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 48.
58. 58.  “Wie dem auch sei und wenn alle Autoritäten der Welt auftreten und sagen ‘wir hören nichts,’ so muss ich ihnen doch sagen: ich höre etwas und zwar etwas sehr deutliches.” Riemann, Musikalische Syntaxis. Grundriß einer harmonischen Satzbildungslehre (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1877), 121.
59. 59.  See Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Alexandra Hui, The Psychophysical Ear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
60. 60.  “It is quite reckless to build his theory on the appearance of tones that no one has heard or can hear, even if our latest theorist believes he really has heard them. But we know all too well how easy it is for one to believe he hears musical tones which lie on the border of musical audibility, if one wants to hear them.” (“Es ist überhaupt gewagt, seine Theorie auf Erscheinung von Tönen zu bauen, die kein Mensch gehört hat oder hören kann, wenn auch unser neuester Theoretiker glaubt, sie wirklich gehört zu haben. Allein man weiss wohl zu gut, wie leicht man in der Musik Töne, die an der Grenze der musikalischen Hörbarkein liegen, zu hören glaubt, wenn man sie hören will.”) Schafhäutl, “Moll und Dur in der Natur,” 90.
61. 61.  “Dr. Hugo Riemann erzählt uns, dass er und sonst Niemand, als vielleicht Aristoteles allein vor 2000 Jahren, diese Untertöne . . . gehört habe.” Ibid.
62. 62.  Stumpf, Tone Psychology, 22.
63. 63.  Helmholtz, Sensations of Tone, 44–45, 365n.
64. 64.  Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dodrecht: Springer, 1991), 47.
65. 65.  Ibid., 48–49.
66. 66.  Ibid., 49.
67. 67.  Franz Kafka, “The Burrow,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Vintage, 2018), 368.
68. 68.  Ibid., 378.
69. 69.  Ibid., 369.
70. 70.  Ibid., 379.
71. 71.  Ibid., 369.
72. 72.  Ibid., 370.
73. 73.  Ibid., 377.
74. 74.  Ibid., 373.
75. 75.  Max Brod, Über Franz Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 103.
76. 76.  “Die gehörte Musik zieht natürlich eine Mauer um mich, und meine einzig dauernde musikalische Beeinflussung ist die, daß ich, so eingesperrt, anders bin als frei.” Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967), 135.
77. 77.  Thomas Martinec, “Music,” Kafka in Context, ed. Carolin Duttlinger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 128–36, at 135. Cf. Tyler Whitney, “Inside the Ear: Silence, Self-Observation, and Embodied Spaces in Kafka’s ‘Der Bau,’” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 92 (2017): 301–19.
78. 78.  Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 3:154.
79. 79.  On the shift of artificial eardrums from a surgical technology to a domestic medical good, see Jaipreet Virdi, “Between Cure and Prosthesis: ‘Good Fit’ in Artificial Ear Drums,” in Clair L. Jones, Rethinking Modern Prostheses in Anglo-American Commodity Cultures, 1820–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 48–69, at 65.
80. 80.  “diese sogenannten einfachen Töne sind nicht einfach.” Riemann, Musikalische Logik: Hauptzüge der physiologischen und psychologischen Begründung unseres Musiksystems (Leipzig: Kahnt, 1873), 8. On this point, see Trevor Pearce, “Tonal Function and Active Synthesis: Hugo Riemann, German Psychology and Kantian Epistemology,” Intégral 22 (2008): 81–116.
81. 81.  “Analyse der Klänge durchs Ohr ist ein Terminus der neuern Akustik und bedeutet die Unterscheidung der in dem einzelnen Ton (Klang) unsere Musikinstrumente enthaltenen Partialtöne.” Riemann, Musik-Lexikon (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1882), 27.
82. 82.  Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 2010), 4.