CHAPTER 12

Attention in Musical Action: Theories of Attention in Early Music Psychology and Piano Pedagogy

Youn Kim

The nineteenth century famously saw the ascendence of various new forms of auditory attention. These new modes of listening responded to emerging musical aesthetics—such as the dramatic increase in the prestige of instrumental music—as well as to innovations in the domain of medicine, which saw the emergence of mediate auscultation and a bevy of associated techniques of attending to bodily sounds.1 This chapter examines conceptions of attention in the context of psychology and music pedagogy at a late-century moment when the boundaries between these fields were still largely undefined.

Investigations of auditory attention took place in a variety of research laboratories toward the end of the nineteenth century. But the topic was also studied within the context of an active speculative tradition that had long attempted to understand the human mind in context. These approaches collectively formed what later historians have termed “second psychology.”2 Attention was a prominent topic across these various psychology programs, with rich and intricate conceptual layers. Many contemporary music pedagogy writings, and especially piano treatises that related attention to concepts of muscular sensation, automaticity, bodily effort, proprioception of the performing body, and the unconscious, can thus be regarded as also representing this “second” psychological tradition. Situating attention as a form of agency rather than discussing it as a quality of experience, they advanced broad, multimodal concepts of musical attention with significance well outside pedagogy. Here, I examine these multiple dimensions of attention in musical action, focusing on the reciprocal relationship between psychological research and piano pedagogy.

Late Nineteenth-Century Psychologies of Attention

With the emergence of scientific psychology in the late nineteenth century, many attempts were made to systematically discuss the topic of attention.3 Edward Bradford Titchener, who studied with the founder of scientific psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, even wrote that “the discovery of attention” was one of the principal achievements of the new experimental psychology:

What I mean by the discovery of attention is the explicit formulation of the problem; the recognition of its separate status and fundamental importance; the realization that the doctrine of attention is the nerve of the whole psychological system and that as men judge of it, so shall they be judged from the tribunal of psychology.4

However, the study of attention within the context of psychology remained complicated due to a lack of clarity as to the nature of the phenomenon. The reality was far from William James’s famous assertion that “everyone knows what attention is.”5 On the contrary, as historian Kurt Danziger has aptly pointed out, the boundaries between intra-scientific and lay usage of some terms have long been blurry in the human sciences, partly because specialized language “continues to seep into the languages of everyday life” (and vice versa).6 This was particularly true for attention. Though today the term is generally associated with the selective process of perception, historically, it had much broader and more comprehensive implications.

The most widely discussed attentional models in early psychology were based on analogies to vision. Wundt deemed the focus of attention the Blickpunkt (“focal point”) and the wider field of awareness the Blickfeld (“field of view”).7 This approach influenced several structural psychologists who investigated the basic elements of consciousness in order to understand the structure of the human mind. Titchener, for instance, delineated different “levels or degrees of clearness [that] may coexist in the same consciousness.” In his influential Lectures on the Psychology of Feeling and Attention (1908), he writes: “Increased clearness of any one part-contents of consciousness implies the decreased clearness of all the rest.”8 This model of attention prevailed even in writings by those who disagreed with the foundational tenets of structural psychology. For example, psychologist Oswald Külpe, who emphasized higher mental processes rather than the structure of consciousness, provided a similar explanation of attention as a “state of consciousness,” writing, “We think of the attention as a state of mind which may be realized in greater or less degree, and may embrace at any given time a larger or smaller number of conscious processes.”9 A similar view is found in American psychologist and philosopher James Mark Baldwin’s graphic representation of consciousness as a series of concentric circles that illustrate gradations of awareness, ranging from the unconscious to active acts of apperception. This further emphasizes the analogy with vision (see Figure 12.1).10

British ethologist and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan also proposed that “in any moment of consciousness, there are in addition to and alongside the dominant elements constituting the summit of full clear, consciousness, dimly felt elements that may have little or no direct connection with those dominant elements.”11 And American psychologist and educator James Rowland Angell made a similar contention about “a central focal point” and “fading gradually away to vaguer and vaguer consciousness.”12

The aforementioned visual models typically consider attention as a psychological state that reflects the limits of our perceptual capacity. Here, attention is “sensory clearness.”13 Such conceptions have been frequently discussed in the history of psychology and, as historian Christopher Mole observes, became “the central explananda for a theory of attention.”14

In nineteenth-century discussions of audition, however, a subtly yet significantly different conceptualization of attention emerges. In his monumental work, Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (1863), Hermann von Helmholtz proposed two kinds of ears: the “bodily ear” (das körperliche Ohr), which analyzes the compound musical tone into its constituent simple sinusoidal components, and the “mental ear” (das geistige Ohr), which synthesizes them back into a single representation. As a result, many constituent aspects of a given sound are overlooked or ignored in our everyday listening. We are used to hearing a musical tone as a whole. In order to perceive the details of a sound, such as its constituent overtones, an “exercise of attention” (Uebung der Aufmerksamkeit) is necessary.15 As Benjamin Steege puts it, “Helmholtz sought to produce a listener who could choose and analyze its objects at will and thereby makes its perceptions its own.” As a result, Helmholtz’s listener is “endowed with considerable perceptual agency.”16

Titchener was profoundly influenced by Helmholtz’s theory of auditory attention. In Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practices (1901), he provided detailed guidelines for instructors on how to conduct experiments on auditory attention. Proposing that “under certain conditions, the process attended to becomes more intensive as well as more clear and distinct” as the “second law of attention,” Titchener suggested an experiment using a piano (Figure 12.2):

(a) Strike on the piano the chord here indicated, and hold the keys down while the tones ring off. When the sound is quite weak, single out by attention some one of the constituent tones. Is the selected tone intensified? . . . (c) Strike the chord c-e-g strongly upon the piano keyboard, directing the attention to the c. Is it intensified? Strike the chord again, directing the attention to the e or g. Is the tone attended-to intensified?17

Here, a listener directs their attention to one of the constituent tones of the C-major chord, allowing it to occupy the focal point of consciousness. As in the preceding model, this explanation of attention proposes distinct levels of consciousness with varying degrees of clarity; as such, it remains grounded in the vision-based models discussed above. However, it also suggests a different connotation of attention as an action and invokes the agency of an attentive listener.

Attention and the Sense of Agency

Attention, conceptualized as an action of the psychological subject rather than a psychological state of consciousness, thus involves a sense of agency. The etymology of the word itself also reinforces this point. “To attend” in Latin is ad tendere, derived from “ad” (toward) and “tendere” (stretch), meaning the act of stretching toward. Attention has long played a significant role in the traditional philosophical discourse on volition.18 Given its close link to the concept of an active subject, how could attention be investigated within the new framework of physiological and experimental psychology? In his 1889 lecture for the Neurological Society of London titled “The Psycho-Physical Process in Attention,” English psychologist James Sully addressed this challenge directly: “In its higher form of voluntary selection and fixation of particular presentations of sense and ideas,” he writes, attention is often thought of as “a mysterious emanation of spiritual activity that interferes with and controls the mechanism of mind.”19 As a result, attention calls the “possibility of a true science of psychology” into question. In contrast to this notion of an “occult Ego that asserts itself in the activity of attention,” Sully advocated for attention as a psycho-physical process “of which we may, by properly scientific methods, determine the co-operant factors and conditions.”20 In his lecture, he not only discussed attention as a psychological phenomenon but also explored sensory and muscular changes involved in acts of focus, thereby presenting a biological conception of attention.

A similar emphasis on action and agency, as well as on the link between attention and motor processes, is found in William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890). Here, James emphasizes the significance of attention in the production of behaviors, stating that our “experience is what [we] agreed to attend to.”21 Theorizing the nature of the attentive process, he observes that the sensory organs and the bodily muscles accommodate and adjust themselves in our attention to not only sensory stimuli but also to the “idea” of a sensible object. As he puts it, “The two processes of sensorial adjustment and ideational preparation probably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts.”22 In his chapter on attention, James does not discuss listening in detail but provides a long footnote in which he cites Ernst Mach’s discussion of auditory attention, highlighting the view of attention as a “bodily activity”:

We ‘search’ among the sounds. This hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentive looking in the case of the eye. . . . If . . . we understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is most natural to seek it in the variable tension of the muscles of the ear. . . . it seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seat in the mechanism of the body.23

Motor Theories of Attention

A more substantial and methodical examination of attention in relation to action and motor processes emerged throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to the “motor theory of attention.”24 The Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain was a leading member of this school of thought. The major contribution of his two treatises on physiological psychology—The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and Emotions and the Will (1859)—is an emphasis on action and movement in all psychological matters. Bain regarded the muscular sense as primary and emphasized awareness of the body’s movement and force as exerted by the muscles:

In treating of the Sense, besides recognizing the so-called muscular sense as distinct from the five senses, I have thought proper to assign to Movement and the feeling of Movement a position preceding the Sensations of the senses; and have endeavored to prove that the exercise of active energy originating in purely internal impulses, independently of the stimulus produced by outward impressions, is a primary fact of our constitution.25

Bain treats music extensively in both treatises. In his discussion of touch, he links action and muscular sense: “In playing on finger instruments, the piano, guitar, organ, etc., the touch must measure the stroke or pressure that will yield a given effect on the ear.”26 The expression of feeling is hence conditioned by the nature of the action itself. According to Bain, attentive listening involves the sensations of both sounds and muscular activities. The gradual increase and decrease of loudness, for example, can evoke intense emotion as it involves muscular effects as well as the stimulation of the auditory nerves:

I think it not unlikely, that a muscular effect enters into this sensation: the gradually increased or relaxed tension of the muscles of the ear being a probable accompaniment of the increase or diminution of loudness. On this supposition, the influence on the mind would be one of the very delicate effects of movement.27

Noting that attention involves many deliberate bodily actions, Bain deemed it a kind of motor phenomenon.

Contemporaneous developments in neurology provided support for Bain’s notion of attention as action. In his work The Functions of the Brain (1876), Scottish neurologist David Ferrier claimed that “when engaged in the attentive consideration of some idea or ideas, we are in reality throwing into action, but in an inhibited or suppressed manner.”28 Several other psychologists continued to adopt the notion of action as central to attention. American psychologist Walter B. Pillsbury, for example, authored a 346-page monograph on attention in which he proclaimed, “One of the [strongest] facts in connection with the attention is its close connection with bodily movement and posture. . . . There is no act of attention that is unaccompanied by some motor process.”29 For Pillsbury, the “motor concomitants of attention” included the movements of the sense organs involved, as well as the effects on other voluntary muscles, on posture, and on the involuntary mechanisms of pulse, respiration, and vaso-motor activities. Arguing along similar lines, German-American psychologist Hugo Münsterberg classified “attention” as an “activity” in his Psychology: General and Applied (1914), claiming that attention consists of both “mental and physical activities.”30 He emphasized the fact that “the body adjusts itself to the center of attention, and this adjustment sends kinesthetic sensations to consciousness.” In his view, the body and mind are an inextricable unit: Bodily processes occur in tandem with brain processes, and they are not the “result of attention, but are themselves the attention.”31

Physiologically grounded motor theories of attention thus described how the attentional process was connected not only to the activation but also to the inhibition of physical movements. French psychologist Théodule Ribot’s conceptualization of attention is particularly noteworthy in this regard. In his monograph La psychologie de l’attention (“The Psychology of Attention”), Ribot famously asserted, “Every intellectual state is accompanied by definite physical manifestation.”32 His claim emphasized the close connection between our mental experiences and the biological processes that underlie them. When it comes to attention, the significance of the bodily movements and modifications becomes more crucial. Accordingly, “The fundamental role of the movements in attention is to maintain the appropriate state of consciousness and to reinforce it.”33 They are not “simply effects, outward marks”; they are “the necessary conditions, the constituent elements, the indispensable factors of attention.” To Ribot, physical movements are not mere side effects but rather the essential component of attention.

Claims such as this placed attention within the framework of experimental psychology, linking attentiveness to muscle contraction/relaxation and thus rendering it observable and measurable. This idea was soon applied to music. In an experimental study of musical enjoyment, psychologist Harry P. Weld drew on plethysmography, the technique of measuring changes in the volume of body parts and observed that “the act of listening to music was almost invariably attended by a decrease in the volume of the fore-arm.” He concluded that “volumetric changes are essentially phenomena of attention; it proves to be possible, in every instance, to correlate these characteristic changes with changes in the nature or condition of attention.”34 Weld’s research highlighted the role of bodily movements and muscular senses in music listening. The New York Times showcased his research under the title “Develop Your Muscle So You Can Enjoy Music,” highlighting its potential challenge to the prevailing view that “a strictly auditory enjoyment of music is the only way in which melody pleases us.”35

Muscular Attention and Music-Making

These discussions of attention as a motor process proved highly pertinent to practical discussions of music-making; indeed, a noticeable shift in piano pedagogy at the turn of the twentieth century coincided with emerging motor theories of attention. New treatises on piano playing brought attention–action correlates to the realm of music psychology by considering attention—both in auditory perception and in music-making—as manifested through bodily action. While a directly causal relationship between motor theories of attention and piano pedagogy cannot be established here, it is nevertheless instructive to explore resonances between the two fields.

The end of the long nineteenth century saw the rise of a new pedagogical approach that often incorporated contemporary physiological findings. The “physiological turn” in the study of piano playing is particularly evident in the work of the French performer-pedagogue Marie Jaëll. Central to Jaëll’s teaching was the principle of touch (toucher).36 She was especially well known for her fingerprint experiments, undertaken in collaboration with the physician Charles Féré, which involved applying ink to pianists’ fingertips and then recording their prints on the piano keys.37 Her keyboard print-maps served as evidence of proper or improper pianistic technique. More significant here is the particular emphasis she placed on attention in her piano pedagogy, which, she maintained, was “not particularly aimed at those who are gifted or those who are not; it is aimed at those capable of an effort of will.”38 Conscious attention to physical processes, Jaëll argued, was necessary: The pianist must continuously attend to the relationship between haptic and aural sensations, and such attention is closely linked to muscular tension. Chapter 2 of her La musique et la psychophysiologie (“Music and psychophysiology,” 1896) is entirely devoted to the topic of “attention and muscular sense.” According to her, the “mechanism of attention resides in the muscles, which, like rubber bands, warm up as they contract.”39

Jaëll opposed the mechanistic “finger school” of piano pedagogy, which advocated for the independence of individual fingers and stillness in other parts of the upper body.40 However, she recognized the importance of muscular tension or “fixity” (la fixité) in piano playing. In her piano pedagogy, the concept was equated with attention itself: “Without perfection of the muscular tension, there is neither a perfection of attention nor a perfection of timbre.” Such fixity allows students to “think about the movements, the sounds they hear, and the tactile sensations they are feeling.”41

Whereas the concept of fixity was important for attention in Jaëll’s teaching, other piano pedagogues approached the issue in different ways. For example, attention featured frequently in writings by the “arm weight” school. The treatises in this tradition were mostly theoretical and explanatory, and often drew on contemporary physiology and psychology, as opposed to the finger school, which focused on providing a wealth of practical exercises.42 German piano pedagogue Rudolf Maria Breithaupt, for example, considered attention as a characteristic of finger school piano pedagogy, with its focus on ideals of “immobility” and “fixation.” “To play ‘fixed,’” he wrote, “is perhaps the same as to play ‘with concentrated attention.’” Here, attention was identified as the cause of the rigidity, not desirable in piano playing. By contrast to this artificial fixation, Breithaupt foregrounded muscular relaxation by emphasizing the importance of relaxed forearms, upper arms, and even shoulders.43 He advocated for the development of the body’s “natural playing-faculties,” arguing that “the arm must be weighted and yet loose in all its movements.”44 While sharing a similar emphasis on arm weight, British piano pedagogue Tobias Matthay provided a different, fuller account of attention. Instead of likening attention and inhibition to action alone, he identified different kinds of attention, thereby proposing a kind of attentional psychology. In The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity: An Analysis and Synthesis of Pianoforte Tone-Production (1903), which underwent multiple editions by the mid-twentieth century, Matthay conceptualized attention multimodally, deeming it necessary for natural pianism. As he wrote, “The act of Attention needed in playing, although it seems but a single flash of consciousness, is really a compound act, and that it must embrace two distinct purposes.”45 He diagrammed “the intelligence needed in piano-playing” as follows (Figure 12.3):

Matthay identified two different levels of attention: (1) the “inward” or “aural” attention to music as a sonic phenomenon, and (2) the “outward” or “muscular” attention to “key-resistance.” These claims require some unpacking. The notion of “inward” or “aural” attention extends beyond hearing to include a vivid visualization of sonic imagery.46 Hence, attention is directed toward the intended object of our musical action. The idea of “outward” and “muscular” attention, on the other hand, includes attention to our bodily parts in action as well as the interaction between our body and the instrument, which, in Matthay’s words, refers to “the resistance the key offers before it will move, and during its descent.” Muscular-sense is the “medium through which we thus become aware of key-resistance.”47 In this view, instead of merely acting upon the sounding mechanism of the instrument, the performer’s body is also perceived by the performer in connection with their own position. Consequently, muscular attention is not equated with mere inhibition of movement during an action but embraces a more nuanced physicality. Although Matthay’s treatise did not include the terms “kinesthesia” or “proprioception,” he was aware of their sense and importance.48 His treatises describe both awareness of the position and movement of body parts (proprioception) and a sense of the strength of effort required to move the body (kinesthesia). Figure 12.4 shows the procedure of Matthay’s “‘Aiming’ Exercises,” by which the student could bring their mind “properly on Key-attention,” with both their “muscular-sense and aural-sense now keenly applied to each other.”49

Matthey’s treatise can be evaluated from the viewpoint of psychological theory as well as in the context of practical piano pedagogy. As his approach demonstrates, early twentieth-century piano pedagogues identified different kinds of attention—including attention to the object and to the attending agent—and contributed to expanding attentional discourse across different modalities.

Unconscious Attention and Virtuosic Pianism

In addition to describing pianistic attention as a psychological and physiological phenomenon, late nineteenth-century treatises also proposed integrated attention models related to action. This concept emerged particularly clearly in discussions surrounding virtuosity.50 Historically, the term virtuosity denoted not just performers but also composers and music theorists. Eighteenth-century French music theorist Sébastien de Brossard, for example, argued that “virtuoso” should be applied to excellent musicians who “apply themselves to the theory or the composition of music.”51 It was only in the nineteenth century that the term became associated primarily with extremely skilled performers. One of its key features was physical velocity—the speed at which musicians move their fingers. Intrigued by pianists’ sheer motor abilities, several late nineteenth-century physiologists empirically investigated the speed of pianists’ muscle movements, often in collaboration with players themselves. These studies call into question the role of attention during rapid, complicated passages.

To take one example: In 1902, James Paget, a leading medical figure of the time, collaborated with pianist Natalia Janotha. He was particularly interested in the rapidity with which she performed Mendelssohn’s Perpetuum Mobile, Op. 119, clocking her at 4 minutes and 3 seconds.52 Janotha did not leave a recording of this particular piece, thus no verification of her speed is possible, yet it would seem to fall well within the range of plausibility (for context, some twentieth-century recordings have a duration of less than three minutes).53 Certainly, her rendition was fast enough to impress Paget. According to his calculation, Mendelssohn’s piece contained 5,595 notes, which meant that Janotha had executed at least 72 bimanual finger movements per second, even without considering the movements of the hand, forearm, arm, and foot.54 Later, physiologist Homer William Smith continued this line of investigation, working with American pianist David Saperton. On studying Saperton’s playing, Smith concluded that, even focusing on finger actions alone (i.e., leaving aside the movements of other body parts involved in performance), “a speed of 20 to 30 notes per second may involve 400 to 600 separate motor actions.”55 Overall, Smith concluded that effortful attention had little influence on virtuosic motor execution, maintaining that “in the most complicated patterns of voluntary [motor] activity, consciousness may play a very limited role.”56

This point can be made concrete by examining Saperton’s performance of one of Leopold Godowsky’s piano pieces. Figure 12.5 shows the beginning of Godowky’s Study No. 47, “Badinage,” from 53 Studies on Chopin’s Études, which combines Chopin’s études Op. 10, No. 5 (“Black Key”) and Op. 25, No. 9 (“Butterfly”), both in G flat major. Each étude requires complex finger actions on its own, and performing the combination of the two études requires even more complex motor coordination.

Godowsky was, of course, a significant pianist and pedagogue, as well as Saperton’s father-in-law. Like Breithaupt, whom we met earlier, Godowsky was a proponent of the relaxed “arm weight” school. He was also known to be a “wizard of technique,” and yet appeared to exert very little effort while playing.57 His student Heinrich Neuhaus observed that while executing his “super-acrobatic task,” Godowsky’s face muscles demonstrated “enormous concentration” while his body appeared “terribly natural” and “completely effortless,” with no concentrative traces at all.58 Perhaps, then, extreme virtuosity stood in opposition to directed muscular attention?

This conclusion seemed attractive, yet it was irreconcilable with theories of attention as effort, particularly those of American psychologist Thaddeus L. Bolton. In his extensive study on rhythm (1894), Bolton described “efforts of attention” and more specifically, mental “efforts to attend to sound.”59 Similarly, in “Attention: A Historical Summary of the Discussion Concerning the Subject,” Bolton’s compatriot Lemon Leander Uhl wrote, “Physiologically, attention is a motor effort or a sensory impulse combined with motor innervation.”60 These notions of attention in action—that is, attention as equated with muscular effort—seemed at odds with observations of virtuosic pianism and with the “arm weight” school of piano pedagogy. How could the two be reconciled?

Among those who recognized and attempted to solve this conundrum was German physiologist Friedrich Adolf Steinhausen. In his treatise Die physiologischen Fehler und die Umgestaltung der Klaviertechnik (1913), Steinhausen argued for unconscious attending in action, writing that “only the goal of the movement, the intention or purpose, is continually conscious to us.”61 He claimed that “the muscular position and motion senses” that play a great role in piano playing are “totally unconscious (alles unbewußt).”62 The natural or passive motions (promoted by the arm weight school) are generated by weight and elasticity, not active focus. In fact, in order to learn to play the piano, an unlearning (das Verlernen) of disturbing and unnecessarily controlling forms of attention was required, this being “in the real sense[,] a mental process.”63

Attention, in Steinhausen’s formulation, thus plays a significant role in virtuosic performance, but differs from the conscious attention accompanied by motor innervation, constituting instead a kind of automaticity. It is also distinguished from the more widely known Helmholtzian notion of inattention, which dictates, according to James’s characterization, that “we leave all impressions unnoticed which are valueless to us as signs,” as in the perception of upper partial tones.64 In Steinhausen’s framework, attention is an unconscious proprioceptive sense, a form of muscular intention manifested on and through the body.

Conclusions

This chapter has examined various aspects of attention in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century psychology and music pedagogy. It reveals that theories of auditory, rather than visual, attention contributed to the emergence of an account of attention as action. The physiological consequences of this approach toward attention were explored and expanded in piano pedagogy, particularly by “arm weight” pianists active in the early 1900s. Histories of music pedagogy often credit advocates of this pedagogical school with introducing a “naturalistic” style of playing that engaged the entire body rather than focusing solely on the fingers. I have highlighted a different contribution made by these treatises by reading them through the lens of psychological theory. As demonstrated, the piano pedagogues in the arm weight tradition distinguished between various kinds of attention and thus recognized musical activity as a fertile arena for observing the relationship between attention and muscular action. They also considered the role of effort in attention and the possibility of attention not only to but also in action, as a muscular (rather than purely mental) phenomenon.

Historians of psychology often point out that attention has long been studied as a facet of perception, focusing on internal mental processes.65 Especially post-1950, when definitions of attention as “selection-for-perception” were dominant, auditory focus was primarily studied in response to external sounding stimuli and “in the absence of actions.”66 Not until the late 1980s did certain scholars advance an action-related approach,67 arguing that “viewing attention and action in isolation would not offer a realistic representation of either of the two types of processes.”68 Their approach was not entirely novel, however. As demonstrated in this chapter, an attempt to integrate attention and action was already present in various forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the discussions of musical activities such as piano playing. Because keyboard performance involves a complex interplay between the intended object of attention (the music) and the performing/attending subject (the player), it necessitates a theory of attention that goes beyond “the auditory self” or the “attentive ear,” casting the pianist as the agent of embodied attending. The piano treatises examined in this chapter, when viewed in relation to physiological and psychological theories of their day, thus represent an important part of the history of attention.

Notes

1. 1.  See, e.g., Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
2. 2.  On various nineteenth-century “second psychology” programs, see Emily D. Cahan and Sheldon H. White, “Proposals for a Second Psychology,” The American Psychologist 47, no. 2 (1992): 224–235.
3. 3.  As philosopher Christopher Mole puts it, when psychology and philosophy parted, “it was psychology that got custody of attention.” Christopher Mole, “The Metaphysics of Attention,” in Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, ed. Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies, and Wayne Wu (New York: Oxford University Press), 60–77, xi.
4. 4.  Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908), 173.
5. 5.  William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, rev. ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1950; originally published 1890), 404.
6. 6.  Kurt Danziger, “Psychology and Its History,” Theory & Psychology 23, no. 6 (2013): 829–39, 836.
7. 7.  Wilhelm Max Wundt, Grundzüge de physiologischen Psychologie (Leipzig: W. Engelman, 1874), 85–97.
8. 8.  Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention, 220.
9. 9.  Oswald Külpe, “The Problem of Attention,” The Monist 13, no. 1 (1902), 38–68, 41.
10. 10.  James Mark Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology: Senses and Intellect (London: Macmillan, 1890), 68.
11. 11.  C. Lloyd Morgan, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1894), 14.
12. 12.  James Rowland Angell, Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness (New York: Holt, 1908), 65.
13. 13.  For such a discussion of attention in relation to sensation, see Edward Bradford Titchener, “Attention as Sensory Clearness,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method 7, no. 7 (1910): 180–82 and Ernest Glen Wever, “Attention and Clearness in the Perception of Figure and Ground,” The American Journal of Psychology 40, no. 1 (1928): 51–74.
14. 14.  Christopher Mole, “Attention,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), 61.
15. 15.  Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über Combinationstöne,” Annalen der Physik und Chemie 99 (1856): 497–540, 526.
16. 16.  Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 81.
17. 17.  Edward Bradford Titchener, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practices, vol. I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 111.
18. 18.  See, for example, Lorraine J. Daston, “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860–1900,” Isis 69, no. 2 (1978): 192–208.
19. 19.  James Sully, “The Psycho-Physical Process in Attention,” Brain 13, no. 2 (1890): 145–64, 146, emphasis added.
20. 20.  Sully, “The Psycho-Physical Process in Attention,” 146–147. Here, we observe the status of attention study during the formative years of psychology when the focus shifted from the soul to the mind. See Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
21. 21.  William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, rev. ed. (Dover Publications, 1950; originally published 1890), 402.
22. 22.  James, The Principles of Psychology, 434.
23. 23.  Ernst Mach, “Zur Theorie des Gehörorgans,” Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Mathematisch-naturwissenschaftliche Classe 48, no. 2 (1863): 283–300. Translation cited in James, The Principles of Psychology, 436; emphasis added.
24. 24.  Myra O. Smith, “History of the Motor Theories of Attention,” The Journal of General Psychology 80, no. 2 (1969): 243–57.
25. 25.  Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: J. W. Parker, 1855), v–vi.
26. 26.  Ibid., 194.
27. 27.  Ibid., 207, emphasis added.
28. 28.  David Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 285.
29. 29.  Walter Bowers Pillsbury, Attention (London & New York: Swan Sonnenschein; The Macmillan Co., 1908), 12.
30. 30.  Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology: General and Applied (New York: Appleton, 1914), 190, emphasis in the original.
31. 31.  Ibid., 190. Münsterberg was one of the pioneering psychologists who postulated a “second psychology,” previously discussed at the beginning of this chapter. He distinguished two psychologies, “causal” and “purposive.” Each has different approaches, one focusing on explaining “mental objects” and the other on understanding “acts.” Both are needed for “complete psychology.” Although he still maintained attention as a topic of causal psychology, his emphasis on acts, activities, and agency is apparent in his discussion of attention. His approach to attention illustrates his endeavors to “modernize the soul” by “reinterpreting it for a world in which a natural scientific worldview, one without a place for the soul, dominated psychology.” Robert Kugelmann, The Soul in Soulless Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 57.
32. 32.  Théodule Ribot, The Psychology of Attention (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1903), 12; originally published as La psychologie de l’attention (Paris: F. Alcan, 1889).
33. 33.  Ibid., 19, emphasis in the original. Ribot’s claim has predecessors. Psychiatrist Henry Maudsley wrote, “Attention is the arrest of the transformation of energy for a moment—the maintenance of a particular tension.” Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind, 3rd ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 308; emphasis added. Philosopher George Stout also stated that the attention process “often involves a noticeable tension of the muscles, similar to that which arises when we make an effort to move and at the same time by a counter effort arrest the intended movement in its first inception.” Stout, “Apperception and the Movement of Attention,” Mind 16, no. 61 (1891): 23–53, 25.
34. 34.  Harry Porter Weld, “An Experimental Study of Musical Enjoyment,” The American Journal of Psychology 23, no. 2 (1912): 245–308, 251.
35. 35.  Harry Porter Weld, “Develop Your Muscle So You Can Enjoy Music: Dr. H.P. Weld Makes Some Curious Experiments That Show the Connection Between the Strenuous Life and Aesthetic Gratification,” New York Times, May 5, 1912, sec. Magazine.
36. 36.  Marie Jaëll, Le Toucher, Nouveaux Principes Élémentaires Pour l’Enseignement Du Piano (Paris: Heugel & Cie Editeurs, 1894); La Musique et La Psychophysiologie (Paris: Alcan, 1896); Le Toucher: Enseignement Du Piano Basé Sur La Physiologie (Paris: Costallat, 1899).
37. 37.  See Julia Kursell, “Visualizing Piano Playing, 1890–1930,” Grey Room, no. 43, 2011: 66–87 and James Q. Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
38. 38.  “L’étude du Piano ne s’adress spécialment ni ceux qui son doués ni à ceux qui le son pas; elle s’adress à ceux capables d’un effort de volonté.” Jaëll, Le Toucher: Nouveaux Principes, i.
39. 39.  “Le mécanisme de l’attention réside dans les muscles, qui, de même que des fils de caoutchouc, s’échauffent en se contractant.” Jaëll, La Musique et La Psychophysiologie, 17.
40. 40.  The “finger school” of piano pedagogy, as the name implies, focused on finger actions only. It advocated for independence of individual fingers, and for stillness in other parts of the upper body. Piano pedagogues, including Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Carl Czerny promoted the importance of “training all the fingers of both hands to an equal degree of power and independence of action” (Johann Nepomuk Hummel, A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instructions on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte (London: T. Boosey, 1829), 34; originally published Vienna: Tobias Haslinger, 1827.
41. 41.  “sans perfectionnement de la tension musculaire n’y a ni perfectionnement de l’attention, ni perfectionement du timbre de la sonorité.” Jaëll, Le Toucher: Enseignement Du Piano, 10; translation adopted from Laure Struber, “The Education of Musical Thinking Through the Hand According to Marie Jaëll (1846–1925)” (DMA diss., University of Washington, 2017), 171; “cette fixité d’attitude correspond à l’intensité avec laquelle l’éleve arrive à penser: 1° aux mouvements réalisés; 2° aux sons-entendus; 3° aux sensations tactiles éprouvées.” Jaëll, Le Toucher: Enseignement Du Piano, 27; translation from Struber, “The Education of Musical Thinking,” 173.
42. 42.  Rudolf Maria Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, trans. John Bernhoff, vol. 2 (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1909), 99.
43. 43.  For a discussion of this paradigm shift as an expansion of the perception-action interface in piano playing, see Youn Kim, “Music Psychology of the Piano-Playing Hands in Historical Discourse,” Journal of Musicology 28, no. 2 (2021): 32–66.
44. 44.  Breithaupt, Natural Piano-Technic, 99.
45. 45.  Tobias Matthay, The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity: An Analysis and Synthesis of Pianoforte Tone-Production (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903), 32–33. Diagram in Figure 12.3 appears on p. 34.
46. 46.  In the field of motor learning, the external focus of attention is “where the performer’s attention is directed to the effect of the action” while an internal focus of attention means “where attention is directed to the action itself.” Gabriele Wulf, Barbara Lauterbach, and Tonya Toole, “The Learning Advantages of an External Focus of Attention in Golf,” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 70, no. 2 (1999): 120–26, 120.
47. 47.  Matthay, The Act of Touch in All Its Diversity, 120, note 1; emphasis in original. Matthay’s conceptualization of “inward and outward attention” is remarkably well in line with recent theories of attention and action in the cognitive sciences, for instance, Wayne Wu’s two ways of understanding the relationship between attention and action. On one level, we can attend to “target of action, the object we intend to manipulate with our bodies,” which corresponds to Matthay’s inward attention. On another level, we can attend to our body deployed in action, which may not be “salient to us when we act,” consistent with Matthay’s outward attention: This kind of attention “must both select the target to manipulate and the part of the body manipulate with . . . attention to action, so understood, is a form of attention in action.” See Wayne Wu, “Attention as Selection for Action,” in Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays, Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies, and Wayne Wu, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 104.
48. 48.  The two terms first appeared in 1887 and 1906, respectively. H. Charlton Bastian, “The ‘Muscular Sense’; Its Nature and Cortical Localisation,” Brain 10, no. 1 (1887): 1–89; Charles S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1906), 129–130.
49. 49.  Tobias Matthay, Relaxation Studies in the Muscular Discriminations Required for Touch, Agility and Expression in Pianoforte Playing (Leipzig: Bosworth & Co., 1908), 23; original italics. Illustration in Figure 12.4 is taken from p. 12.
50. 50.  Several intricate aspects related to virtuosity are addressed in Thomas Carson Mark, “On Works of Virtuosity,” The Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 1 (1980): 28–45; Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Antoine Hennion, “‘As Fast as One Possibly Can . . .’: Virtuosity, a Truth of Musical Performance,” in Critical Musicological Reflections. Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, ed. Stan Hawkins (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 125–38; Jane Ginsborg, “‘The Brilliance of Perfection’ or ‘Pointless Finish’? What Virtuosity Means to Musicians,” Musicae Scientiae 22, no. 4 (2018): 454–73.
51. 51.  “Plûtôt à ceux qui s’appliquent à la Théorie, ou à la Composition de la Musique.” Sébastien de Brossard, Dictionaire de musique (Paris: Christophe Ballard, 1703), 248–249.
52. 52.  James Paget, Memoirs and Letters of Sir James Paget (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 205.
53. 53.  Benjamin Frith’s 1995 Naxos recording performance, for example, lasts 2 minutes and 47 seconds.
54. 54.  Physiologists of our own time have contended that the motor actions involved in executing these complex piano passages are considerably more complicated than Paget’s calculation. See, for example, Shinichi Furuya et al., “Secrets of Virtuoso: Neuromuscular Attributes of Motor Virtuosity in Expert Musicians,” Scientific Reports 5, no. 1 (2015): 1–8.
55. 55.  Homer William Smith, From Fish to Philosopher (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1953), 209.
56. 56.  Ibid., 211.
57. 57.  Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing, ed. K. A. Leibovitch (London: Kahn & Averill, 1993), 12.
58. 58.  Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing, 105.
59. 59.  Thaddeus L. Bolton, “Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 6, no. 2 (1894): 145–238, 211.
60. 60.  Lemon Leander Uhl, Attention, a Historical Summary of the Discussion Concerning the Subject (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1890), 124.
61. 61.  Friedrich Adolf Steinhausen, Die physiologischen Fehler und die Umgestaltung der Klaviertechnik (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1913). Translations are from Donald Rupert, “The Physiological Errors and the Reshaping of Piano Technique” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1963), 49.
62. 62.  “Dem Muskel-, Lage- und Bewegungssinn (33) fällt eine weit wichtigere Rolle zu, was jedoch, weil alles unbewußt, genauer kaum abzuschatzen ist.” Steinhausen, Die physiologischen Fehler, 68–69, Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 52.
63. 63.  “Das Verlernen des störenden und dann ja unnötig kontrollierenden Aufpassens ist im eigentlichen Sinne ein seelischer Vorgang.” Steinhausen, Die physiologischen Fehler, 77, trans. Rupert, “The Physiological Errors,” 61.
64. 64.  James, The Principles of Psychology, 456.
65. 65.  As historian Gary Hatfield notes in a historical overview of attention in early scientific psychology, attention was presented as a kind of internal sense in most standard psychological textbooks, along with memory and imagination. Bodily motion was discussed separately. Gary Hatfield, “Attention in Early Scientific Psychology,” in Visual Attention, vol. 8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3–25.
66. 66.  Jay Pratt, Eric Taylor, and Davood Gozli, “Action and Attention,” in Handbook of Attention, edited by E. F. Risko, J. Fawcett, and A. Kingstone, 325–48 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 326; emphasis added.
67. 67.  Donald A. Norman and Tim Shallice, “Attention to Action,” in Consciousness and Self-Regulation: Advances in Research and Theory, vol. 4, edited by Richard J. Davidson, Gary E. Schwartz, and David Shapiro (Boston, MA: Springer, 1986), 1–18. Alan Allport, “Selection for Action: Some Behavioral and Neurophysiological Considerations of Attention and Action,” in Perspectives on Perception and Action, edited by H. Heuer and H. F. Sanders (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawerence Erlbaum, 1987), 395–419.
68. 68.  Pratt, Taylor, and Gozli, “Action and Attention,” 326.