The recently published Weber: Thought and Will, probably the most detailed biography of Max Weber in the Chinese world to date, is a more than 1,000-page account of the life of the sociological giant, Prussian citizen and Oedipal son. The author, Weber expert Dirk Ksler, also wrote a foreword specifically for Chinese readers, describing the special value and significance of this 19th-century German scholar to today's Chinese readers.
The following is authorized by the publisher to publish the preface to the Chinese translation (abridged, subtitle added by the editor), the original title is "Why should Chinese readers read this book today?" In the article, the author uses Weber's sociology of music as an example to explain how the 19th-century sociologist prophetically reconstructed the "superiority" of the "rational West."
"Weber's Biography: Thought and Will", by Dirk Xersler, translator: Gao Xinglu, Huang Ziqin, reviser: Yan Kewen, Xinmin Shuo|Guangxi Normal University Press, July 2023.
Written by Dirk Xler
In today's China, it is not a trivial question why people should read a book about the life and career of a German scholar born in 1864 and died in 1920. Moreover, the book as a whole seeks to place his life and career in the context of a large family system and the interconnectedness of his time.
This book was published in 2014, coinciding with the 150th anniversary of his birth, and I deliberately began it with the following sentence: "Max Weber was not our contemporary. I then outlined what separates us today from the world in which Max Weber, a citizen of Prussia, lived. What he experienced and pondered was the transition period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he also participated in shaping to some extent through certain concepts that he himself sought to use to understand and explain the complex process of this historical transition.
Max Weber could not have known anything about our current world at the beginning of the 21st century. So why are people reading this book today? Moreover, the world in which the Prussian, thinker, and Oedipal son (Muttersohn) wrote his scholarly works is far removed from life in time and space. His voluminous book was published in 47 volumes until 2020. Are these writings really part of the cultural heritage of humanity that even we must study and use for me today?
In the contemporary era when I write these words, there is every reason to ask, why should we still follow or should follow the ideas and theories of white, old, mostly deceased people from the "West" or "Europe and America"?
Is it true that "Westerners" have a higher degree of analytical thinking, individualism, credibility, diligence, honesty, self-control, patience, and impersonal "prosociality" than others? Isn't Eurocentrism, which for centuries invented a "special way" to "modernization" in Europe – a term that always means North America the same – gone?
Max Weber is undoubtedly an important author of one of these "grand narratives", according to which only the "individualistic" West could no longer organize its population in the structure of kinship, but led them to voluntarily form new alliances, from which monasteries, synods, guilds, classes, cities and states were born. It was the resulting alliance of the Enlightenment, industrialization, bureaucracy, and modern "rational" capitalism that shaped first European society and from there conquered North America and then the world.
According to this grand narrative, it is this model of separation of state and religion, state and society, economic and political decoupling, normative and economic and political subsystems, and the invention of the nation-state that gave birth to "modernity." It was the Christian "triumphant march" that developed a new sexual morality that promoted a very unique concept of marriage between men and women throughout the world through monogamy and incest taboos, and thus put an end to all traditional tribalist social models. It is for this reason that impersonal markets have emerged in Western cities. This, in turn, leads to the construction of a "rational" state that dominates the political competition of democracies. "Modernization" and "rationalization" have become two headings that imply all these diverse processes. Max Weber, with his grandmaster account of the influence of "Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism," is arguably one of the most important authors of this narrative in the world.
Today, many people are criticizing this so-called "history of achievements" that promotes "civilization" through Eurocentric thinking. Their reverse narrative speaks of colonialism, racism and genocide. They point out that through the slave trade and brutal wars, Europe's conquest of intact continents brought untold suffering to mankind; This Europeanization and Christianization destroyed intact culture and civilization. These counternarratives also speak of the increasing limits of global rampant capitalism and overwhelming bureaucratization and will eventually destroy human freedom.
Dirk Kaesler, born in 1944, received his doctorate in sociology from the University of Munich in 1972 and taught at the University of Munich, the University of Hamburg, the University of Cologne and the University of Marburg. Author of "Weber: Thought and Will", editor of several Max Weber research works.
Max Weber and the Sociology of Music
That is why people have every reason to read this book about Max Weber's life and career. Undoubtedly, it was this German scholar who tried to reconstruct the "superiority" of the "rational West" in various ways. But it was Max Weber who warned of the long-term effects of the "triumphant march" of bureaucracy and capitalism, which deeply disturbed him and sought a way out of this "cloak of obedience."
To avoid revealing the contents of the book in advance, here I would like to give an overview of Max Weber's "Sociology of Music" and show why it is worth reading.
The question explored in "Sociology of Music" can be simply expressed as: Which Chinese composers are comparable to Johann Sebastian Bach or Mozart? A further question is, why don't concert halls in Europe perform music by Chinese composers, but why are the works of Bach and Mozart so often performed in China today? Why is the frequency of European pianos in China today much higher than that of Chinese guzhengs in Europe and the United States?
When Max Weber died at the age of 56, he left behind many unfinished works. A large number of publications signed Max Weber were published after his death, largely due to the efforts of his widow and administrator, Mary Anne Webb. From the turn of the century, one of the focuses of Max Weber's work was to develop a "sociology", but his "sociology" was far from the ideas of many of his colleagues in this new scientific field.
His exposition of "general sociology", his use of plain language and clear concepts, and his demand that "value judgments are inrelevant" all mark Max Weber's commitment to building sociology as an understanding and at the same time explanatory independent social science, whose primary responsibility is to arouse people's interest in social and economic affairs.
Despite the complexity of his legacy to later generations, we can identify two core conceptual narratives: his analysis of modern, rational, bourgeois (operational) capitalism and the accompanying all-encompassing "rationalization" of society. "Reason" is an extremely vague concept, and it is Weber's merit to apply this concept to a sociological context. According to Weber, if a person has the foresight to take the means for an end, acting this way rather than that on the basis of the expected possibility, then his actions are "rational." In his analysis of the cultural significance of Protestantism, Weber has emphasized that the purpose and motivation of actions do not necessarily correspond to the everyday understanding of the word "reason" in the sense of "reason." According to him, religious fundamentalism has given birth to modern "rational" management capitalism with Western characteristics, which is rather irrational.
Max weber.
Max Weber had a keen interest and detailed understanding of art in all its forms from an early age. The propertied and educated citizen class inevitably led him to love the plastic arts throughout his life, especially painting, architecture, music, literature, and the performing arts with a focus on drama. All the scholarly works and numerous letters prove that for Max Weber, works of art, which are very different from their origins, are an important reference point for his thinking, speech and action. Max Weber's references to writers, musicians, and painters are numerous quotes to show that he was an encyclopedic scholar, a well-educated cultural citizen who enthusiastically participated in the cultural consumption of his time.
His artistic hobby also developed into an academic interest, as evidenced by the fact that one fact suffices. At the First Congress of German Sociologists in October 1910, in his discussion of Werner Sombart's special report "Technology and Culture", he raised the question he later studied in this field: "To what extent does the formal aesthetic value of the field of art arise from a very definite state of technology?" In this context, a distinction must also be made between purely technical and socio-technical aspects. According to Marianne Weber, her husband had planned to write "one day" "a sociology covering all of art." In this project, Max Weber has only completed a pilot work entitled «Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik»), which will be briefly discussed here. Probably written between 1910 and 1911 and not published until after Weber's death in 1921, the essay was published as an appendix in the first four editions of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), and is now published as a separate volume in the Complete Works of Max Weber. Max Weber's book is extensive, and one can read a great deal about works of art and the process by which they were made, but I would like to mention here the posthumous work "The Sociology of Music" («The Sociology of Music), published in 1921.
Max Weber has had an indissoluble relationship with music all his life. He followed the typical development of the children of a wealthy citizen family, taking vocal and piano lessons, and regularly enjoying musical performances. His performance in music training is not very good, but he is always full of interest, which shows that he is a "music connoisseur and lover".
The subject of music first came into academic contact with him in the run-up to the first congress of German sociologists in 1910, when he was delving into the rationalization of technology and orchestral orchestration. His love affair with the skilled Swiss pianist Mina Tobler greatly deepened his love of music. He wrote to his wife Mary Anne in 1912 and to his publisher Paul Seebeck in 1913 that he was planning a "sociology of cultural content (art, literature, worldview)" and that his musical studies were his first foray into this aspect. Despite his repeated research on and off, he was unable to complete the work.
After Weber's death, Marianne Weber and Theodor Croyer integrated, edited, and published the paper from his posthumous manuscripts. The title of the first edition, "The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music," already shows the problem: the title is not particularly close to the research, and the more serious problem is that Weber himself never proposed or used the title. He himself talked about his "sociology of music".
Sociology of Music, by Max Weber, translated by Li Yanpin, Southwest Normal University Press, May 2014.
Although Max Weber's Sociology of Music was not revised by him himself, and he probably would not have been satisfied with the incomplete work published after his death, the publication seemed well thought out and logically consistent. It represents Weber's attempt to distill the special status of Western rationalism through a general historical examination of musical history, especially orchestral instrumentation and sound systems. Compared to his other fields of study (law, domination, religion, economics) in the process of rationalization, he gave music a special status because it "seems to be an art derived purely from feelings".
On May 12, 1912, Marianne Weber reported to her mother-in-law in Charlottenburg: "Last Sunday we held a meeting here... Colloquium of old gentlemen. Max talked for two and a half hours, telling the most difficult things in music theory and their connection to economic and sociological problems. The people were almost drowned out by his words, and I finally had to give a death order to free them and the asparagus waiting to be served. Max Weber had largely identified his core thinking at the time, as can be seen from a letter he wrote to his sister Lily Schaefer on August 5, 1912: "I may write something about the history of music. That is, it is only about certain social conditions from which we can explain why we alone have 'harmony' music, even though other cultures have much more elaborate hearings and much stronger musical culture. This is really strange! This is a work of a practitioner, and it will soon be known. ”
There is no doubt that Max Weber's in-depth study of music was a direct result of his romantic relationship with the skilled pianist Mina Tobler, who enjoyed a large number of concerts and operas together between 1911 and 1914. Max Weber's essay on the sociology of music is a collection of materials that contains some interlocking individual questions. Due to the peculiarities of the subject, the paper is rarely received, at least in the field of sociology, and its acceptance is low. Alphonse Silberman, one of the few early connoisseurs of the paper, divided it into 25 sections dealing with opinions, themes, and discussions, wrote of point 21 ("The Development of Stringed Instruments"): "From about this point in the paper, Weber's thinking focuses more on the sociological basis of music than on the rational basis." ”
Such a split is untenable. The process of "rationalization" of universal historicity is one of the central themes of Weber's writings, and it also has outstanding sociological significance. Because of the so-called "irrationality" of culture, he was fascinated by the question of the extent to which this process could also be proven in the field of "culture". Rationalization also takes place there, which is the basic theme of this unfinished manuscript of the sociology of music. At the same time, the paper proves that Weber no longer fully believes in his own imagination of universal rationalization as he enters the new century. Towards the end of his life, even he recognized its limitations.
All of Weber's assertions about the harmonic principles of "ancient" and "modern" music, the formation of notation, and the development of instrumentation are intended to demonstrate the gradual dissolution of mysterious and "irrational" qualities in art or artistic practice, and the process by which they are gradually replaced by the "rational" paradigm. By observing the primitive and ancient stages of social development, as well as the development of modern times, he traces this line of thought from the perspective of comparative history. The main conclusion of the study is that the simple interval principle between notes has been replaced by the "rational" principle of chord harmony (Akkordharmonie). Max Weber explained this development as evidence of the "rational" mentality of Western society.
To substantiate this thesis, Weber refers to a variety of very different social developments: the emergence of monastic institutions in the West, feudal structures in the Middle Ages, women's participation in choral singing, and the influence of language on the development of melodik. Weber believes that there are two main elements that drive the development of "rationality" in Western music: modern notation and modern musical instruments.
Especially in the development of musical instruments, Weber took as a basis his "socio-economic" research method, for example, he said: "Just as the organization of social hierarchies made possible the musical influence of court poets, especially to further develop their instruments on the basis of typical forms, which were indispensable for the advancement of music; Advances in the making of stringed instruments in the late Middle Ages are also evident in the same way as those that have appeared since the 13th century [...] The organists music guild organization is related. ［...... Organists were gradually included with singers in the monastic ruling clique, princes and nobility, and bands of the various parishes, so it was the instrument-making that allowed those who brought the security of citizenship to permanent positions [...] ] with a more impressive economic base. ［...... The rise and tending to perfection of stringed instruments began in the 16th century, which was associated with the demand for court orchestras. ［...... New instruments soon [...] ] was used in the orchestra of the opera house, [... But the reason for this is probably also the traditional determination of the social hierarchy of various musical instruments. The lute master was on the table, because the lute was also a pastime of the court; In Queen Elizabeth's orchestra, a lute player earns three times as much as a violinist and five times as much as a bagpiper. Organists are seen as artists. A virtuoso violinist must first earn such status, only in this [...] It was only then that a larger form of string composition developed. ”
The extent to which Max Weber analytically balances the question of cultural, economic, social, technological, and even climatic factors in his overview of the sociology of music is clearest when he speaks of the development of the piano as a "modern special keyboard instrument": "[...] Specifically, when the fate of the instrument no longer depended on the needs of a thin class of musicians and tasteful amateurs, but on the market conditions for capitalist instrument production, it was the expressive, unique 'vibrato' that made [the clavichord] fall victim to the competition of the hammerklavier. ［...... It wasn't until Mozart became internationally famous, until there was growing demand for sheet music publishers and concert organizers, as well as large-scale music consumption in terms of market and mass effects, that hammering piano won the final victory [...] ］。 First in England (Brodwood) and then in the United States (Steinway), large-scale machine production of musical instruments prevailed, because the excellent local iron quality facilitated the construction of iron frames and helped to overcome many of the purely climatic difficulties that occurred during the introduction of pianos, which also hindered the use of pianos in tropical regions. ［...... The production of the piano [...] ] is conditional on mass sales. Because in terms of its overall musical nature, the piano is also a household instrument of the citizen class. ［...... Therefore, it is no accident that the Nordic peoples have become the inheritors of piano culture, and the climate alone has confined their lives to the house and centered on the 'home', which is in stark contrast to the south. There, due to climate and history, the maintenance of the comforts of the families of the burghers lagged far behind, [...] The piano invented there has not been as rapidly popularized as we have here, and has not yet reached the status of "furniture" of the citizen class, which has long been a matter of course for us. ”
"Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" by [de] Max Weber, translated by Kang Le / Jian Huimei, Publisher: Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore Publication time: April 2019
The tension between freedom and reason
On a cursory reading, it may seem that Max Weber, even in his overview of the sociology of music, seems to be merely exploring the subject of rationalization. However, with a more detailed understanding of his life after 1911, experienced readers can see that it is in this text that the interconnection of freedom and reason, or their tension with each other, has become the real theme of Max Weber's later period. Like his analysis of the equally tense relationship between religion and individual freedom, Weber first explores the limits of reason in his analysis of the rational foundations of music. The tension between reason and emotion is reflected both in his discourse on chord harmony and melody, and in music theory and performance practice.
In this obscure essay on the "laws of music," Weber recognizes that even the Western pentatonik cannot justify itself, and that even the moderate coarse tone of the temperierte quinte is at best a pseudo-solution to the imbalance of the interval. The music that people actually play will only be produced in the free application of rules, only it contains free material. Rules are not life, and actions are different from the execution of actors. Practical action is always improvisation, a deviation from the rules and free play. Even if the Western ear can be culturally tuned through mandatory "harmony" music education, we cannot ignore the fact that precisely in cultural practice, not everything is "rationalizable" as imagined by the "sons of the civilized world of modern Europe" – Max Weber's 1920 Preface to the first volume of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie This is clearly asserted.
"Rational harmonic music" may indeed be, as he puts it, "exists only in the West"—he is alone in the realization that this Western rationality is not "rational" as purely mathematical logic imposes. Whether this disturbed him or was gratifying to us is unknown. We can only conclude that he must have realized that even his own picture of the terrible spectacle of universal rationalization, in which humanity deprived of action by modern rational management capitalism and overwhelming bureaucratic machines would desperately evolve into a shell of fellachenartig hörigkeit, is not necessarily the definitive statement, because even in the economic realm there is no room for manoeuvre for freedom. The imagination of forming a submissive bureaucratic shell is basically derived from the experience of joint-stock companies taking over family businesses and the positions of power associated with them by employees. Now that these shells are becoming tighter and more stable, it will be much harder to escape them, and a bureaucracy based on balance sheet standards has replaced the bookkeeping system of family businesses. Max Weber did not see a decisive transition at the beginning of the 21st century, in which joint-stock companies would be taken over by hedge funds. Whether more or less freedom will arise from this, only the future can guide it.
Max Weber's study of the sociology of music is, after all, an unfinished work. According to his own statement, this music research should focus on the internal tension of the musical system. The relationship between "musical reason and musical life" "is one of the most important tensions of change in history" in music. For Weber, there was always a conflict between the theoretical push oriented towards more rationalization and the practical-practical development and requirements of musical practice. Although the impetus dissonance has found and defended its place in modern Western music, it has always been viewed with suspicion from a theoretical perspective and regarded as an inevitable scourge.
Weber demonstrated the relationship between harmony and melody. The former refers to a harmony consisting of several tones, such as a trichord (which can pronounce concordance or dissonance). Melodies are based on the sounds and intervals of each note. Weber placed the West on the side of harmonic music theory (and practice) and proved that modern Western chord harmonies are much more "rational" and "advanced" than music in other cultures, which tend to be filled with more powerful interval or melodic principles. Even so, the existence of chord harmony is inseparable from melody: "Here we should bear in mind through the simplest facts that the chord rationalization of music is not only in constant tension with the realities of the melody, but it can never fully embrace these realities [...] ］。 ”
Melody, like dissonance, is indispensable to the dynamic auditory experience. Nevertheless, Weber has no doubt that the dynamic auditory experience is based on a completely irrational foundation: "Without these tensions provoked by the irrationality of the melody, there would be no modern music, because they can be counted as one of the most important means of expression in modern music." What else does rational chord harmony mean or can it mean? He didn't say it explicitly, but the answer was obvious: a rigid, lifeless routine Cannon. Weber acknowledges that irrational melodic laws can be compared to Canon because it is one of the most important means of expression in music. But in Weber's exposition, it has to succumb to the chord harmony of reason, which reflects Weber's uniqueness. Without this, he could not prove that Western music was based on a more advanced and rational musical system. In this way, the melody plays only one of many functions in the harmonic structure, it is never a supporting element, but only an embellishment. Its irrational–non-harmonic nature necessarily makes it a thorn in the side of music theory. Weber believes that from the rational point of view, the melody can never go out of the stage of arbitrariness, and can never be deduced in a harmonic-rational way.
Weber argues that "reason" and "rationalism"—not just musically—mean not only efficiency, predictability, and order, but also stubborn objectivity, intransigence, and lifelessness. But Weber did not explain this, nor did he take the opportunity to emphasize the negative tendency towards musical rationalization, as he did elsewhere with Western rationalism that exists in religion, domination, and economics. On the contrary, his narrative can easily be interpreted as a defense or even a sublimation of the Western music of his time.
Things that Weber excluded from musical rationalism or called "irrational", such as dissonance and melody, did not fall victim to reason. Thus, musical rationalism seems to lack the radical-authoritarian tendencies that Weber reveals in his discourse on the process of bureaucratization and in his study of the cultural significance of Protestantism. In Western music, which is inherently rational-theoretical, the irrational elements are reduced to mere function. It seems that only external resistance to pragmatism can prevent them from being swept away. Tonalität means a tonal center that exists in a composition, i.e. a basic tone/interval, around which a musical work is conceived. Weber believed that Western chord harmonic music embodies the purest tonal ideas. The tonal and melody are in conflict, in a "tension between the melody factor and the harmonic factor". The melody always retains a certain arbitrariness, because it only "works" in terms of intervals. Tonality is the grouping and layering of tones and intervals around a center, thus getting rid of the "original melody" and its irregular tendencies. Weber's undiscipline has a negative connotation only when the melody appears as a sign of "backward-primitive" music, or when atonal music (Zwölftonmusik), which was just emerging in Weber's time, when its tendency to destroy tonality becomes a sign of vanity and conceit that characterizes a few specific lovers of literature and art: "And what we see and hear in some of the tonal destruction phenomena that occur in the course of our music, It has been shown to apply to cases of complete heterogeneity, for obvious reasons: it is not uncommon for the use of entirely irrational means of expression to be understood simply as the product of a deliberate pursuit of Baroque, Mannerist aestheticist devotion, or of the refined taste of intellectualism. Even in other relatively primitive circumstances, in guild circles composed of erudite musicians specializing in a certain court music, it was particularly prone to produce [...] ］”
Later, Weber's criticism became sharp, writing that atonality (Atonalität) often simply marked "a shift in our enjoyment towards the pursuit of 'fun' effects, a distinctive, intellectual, romantic shift." Here he underestimates the fact that Arnold Schoenberg's traditional atonal music has a well-designed set of rules. Although its principles of order are different, they cannot be said to be arbitrary. Equally striking, Weber argues that atonal music in his understanding of "more irrationality", i.e., music that pays more attention to melodies, implies an exclusivity criterion with a purely "virtuosenmusik" character.
Thus, in Weber's eyes, atonality—which seems to trump the "arbitrariness" of the melody—is extremely undemocratic, at best the ornament of a few masters. This is surprising because Weber's "Western rationalism" has always been associated with specialization, pioneering the modern "expert class" (Fachmenschentum). Here however, in his sociology of music, irrational-atonality seems elitist and exclusive. Weber fails to provide a strong argument for why he understood musical rationality as a more open variant of democracy in this context. On the contrary, it should be pointed out that Western rationalism involves theorization and scientificization. These characteristics certainly do not lead to increased "amateur" engagement, or to put it bluntly, the hope of increased citizen participation, but rather lend themselves well to describing highly complex and elusive elite activities.
Interestingly, Weber himself implicitly hints at this explanation, as he points out that musical cultures that primarily use melody to arrange their musical material have a "more refined sense of hearing." Thus, tonality also seems to (exactly) require less attention from the listener, or – to be more explicit – tends to be pure "background music". The purpose of tonal music is simply to create an overall impression, while the characteristics of the individual tones and their combined effects no longer play an important role. This is also evidenced by the fact that Konsonanzen is characterized by a particularly high degree of "integration". Even for the vast majority of "non-specialists", although octave involves several tones, it sounds like just one tone. From this point of view, what Weber calls rational music is monotonous and dull and sluggish. But he completely ignores this view and associates Western rational music with progress, virtuosity, and democratic openness. He even said that only the harmonization of musical materials, that is, a certain rigorous mathematicization and assimilation, brought "complete freedom".
If we focus only on Weber's discussion of the modern piano as "bürgerliche Möbel" (burgherical furniture), his preconceptions can be more clearly illustrate. Weber called the piano's "Wohltemperierung" (Wohltemperierung) a decisive step towards complete freedom in modern Western music. At the same time, the term "furniture of the civic class" also contains a guarantee of the democratization of music, at least partially.
In Weber's eyes, the history of the piano can be read as a history of achievement in many ways. The piano is both an instrument of a few masters and a folk instrument of the masses, and it has achieved success in a relatively unaffected way in the context of professional and cross-class family music. "Its unshakable status today is based both on its applicability to the almost entirely own treasury of musical works without leaving home, on its immeasurable richness of works, and finally on its own characteristics as a universal accompaniment and teaching instrument. ［...... Our unique education in modern harmonic music is basically carried by it. ”
First, Weber traces the evolution of the modern piano with the most important intermediate steps: the intermediate steps he discovered were the organ (Orgel), the harpsichord (Cembalo) and the hammered piano. Regarding the organ, Weber emphasizes that although it paved the way for the emergence of the contemporary piano, it is still "the instrument with the most mechanical character, because in terms of tone shaping it binds the player most firmly to the possibilities given by objective technique; And it gives the player the least freedom to express his personal language."
However, with the establishment of the piano's status, the situation has changed dramatically, and the piano has become the basis of modern chord music theory and practice, and may even become a symbol of the musical culture of the "citizen class". According to Weber's musical research, the piano seems to have won the democratization of music in the first place: "The organ was and is a vehicle for ecclesiastical art music, not for the art of singing by the general public." The primitive instruments that preceded it, such as the Trumscheit, were also difficult to learn, and it took a lot of practice just to get the tones. The main reason why the piano was so economically successful that its instrument-making process was professionalized was that it was "still a burgherical household instrument in terms of its overall musical nature."
From a critical point of view, we have the right to question Max Weber's assessment. Commercial success, the professionalization of musical instrument production, and the participation of new social classes constituted the forces of pure economic rationalism. If music used to be an aristocratic pastime and vassal elegance, then with the spread of the musical culture of the citizen class, as people have the opportunity to watch musical performances or repeat them at home on the piano, there are two main aspects of its influence that will strengthen it: one is the artist, because his achievements are enough to live for centuries and be admired by the world; The second is businessmen, publishers, producers, instrument makers, concert organizers. Weber did not include this idea in his conclusion when he spoke of the applicability of the piano to claim almost all of its musical treasure trove without leaving home. The words "applicability" and "appropriation" are probably not coincidental. They show how little individual art and how much "repetition" Weber came up with with "burgherical family music." No matter how hard the family musicians of the civic class try, they are and will remain "amateurs", a world away from master artists. The former will pay for it and become the listener of the latter, and in doing so, make the latter's status possible. Weber inspired that citizens can now get involved, adapting the master's pieces into piano pieces, playing them, sharing them, and exerting influence.
"Academia and Politics" by [de] Max Weber, translator: Qian Yongxiang et al., Publisher: Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore Publication time: April 2019
The concerto of the piano and the zither is the best
The last thing we need to focus on is the motivation for rationalizing music. How did the idea of "rational" music come about? What is the reason for the creation of Western "rational" music? Did Max Weber provide any clues to the answers to these two questions?
As for the reasons why music has been "rationalized" in the West, Max Weber does not say a word in the text. Instead, Weber retrospectively affirms the existence of rational musical systems, complex notation, averaging piano pieces, and highly harmonious chord harmonies, and describes their formation. However, some starting points to the answers to the questions can be found in the text. On this issue, we cannot impose on Max Weber the assertion that he only admits Western music as "rational". On the contrary, in the case of octaves, he is sure that there are other cultural circles and music of other eras who also know about it, but only the West has reached such a high degree of rationality. The elements of musical rationality are comparable to Weber's understanding in the foreword: the musical system, chord harmony, notation, and average piano music in this musical study correspond to mathematical proofs and rational experiments, specialized bookkeeping, and trained bureaucracy in the preface. What is particularly striking here is that although Weber considers music to be the "most emotional" art form, reason is still able to work in the field of music. This shows that, for Weber, the universal, all-encompassing direction of rationalization abounds in all areas of the external and internal order of life. This is all the more surprising given the objective context in which music – and perhaps art in general – shines precisely in the West because it breaks free from all the shackles of purely practical demands.
It is no longer the mere music of chants subject to church rituals, but what Weber calls "l'art pour l'art." Weber wrote that once music is far from the West, it is completely detached from "aesthetic enjoyment." On the contrary, music for Weber is, first and foremost, an autonomous art form embedded in an aesthetic context. But how can the rationalization of art be explained from a purely aesthetic point of view? Wouldn't the rationalization of music be better understood if we assumed that art was economically dependent and that it led to the instrumentalization of art? What if we realized that rational music in the modern West is not "art for art's sake"? If modern Western music has begun to exist for itself, and if people no longer care about issues such as changing melodies to different pitches to make it possible to sing in churches, where does the motivation for strict musical rationalization come from?
In his famous book on the cultural significance of Protestant ethics, he wrote: "Earning money and the more the merrier, strictly avoiding all indulgence, so radically dismisses all hedonistic or even hedonistic views, and regards them so purely as an end in itself, that it shows, at least in relation to the 'happiness' or 'gain' of the individual, complete transcendence and absolute irrationality." Since in this context, the rationalization of business is justified by people's fear of misfortune in the next life and the disturbed conscience of this life, and since the rational life of a devout merchant means complete abandonment, where does the impulse to rationalize music come from? How much less aesthetic enjoyment will such a rationalized music allow? The focus of the music institute is precisely on the commercialization of music and the formation of a market for consumers and producers.
Therefore, we have every reason to doubt Weber's assumption that Western music can be sustained by some kind of purely aesthetic enjoyment. Music itself has become a commodity, and Weber's Introduction to the Sociology of Music foresaw this and named the characteristics of this mechanism. Weber concludes his thesis by pointing out that it is inconceivable from an economic point of view alone to abandon a twelve-key piano in order to follow Hermann von Helmholtz's advice and to develop a twenty-four-key piano. He wrote: "Like Arab practical music, at least theoretically like Greek music, the exclusion of certain irrational tonal sequences from common use is a principled advance." This is achieved by developing a typical sequence (Tonfolge). ”
However, the "typical sequence" seems to mark the adaptation of the music to suit popular tastes. Catering to popular tastes always means discovering certain popular tones and smoothing out all the edges. Weber, however, called it "progress of principle," without further relativizing it or mentioning opposition. In addition, we must add that the commercialization of art hinders emancipation. Modern art is no longer an end in itself, but rather adapts to the categories of economic applicability, an inherent term for Max Weber.
Interestingly, this is precisely one result of Weber's implicit assertion of the "democratization" of art: it is precisely because of the decoupling of music from the court that a professional market of consumers and producers is formed. This is a downside, and it also shows the stereotypical nature of the emerging art market. Thus, what might appear to be mistaken for some kind of democratic openness and the liberation of music itself, upon closer examination, may reveal the truth that it is actually some new form of slavery. It is questionable, at least, that modern Western music is not bound by purely pragmatic external resistance. Even though it was no longer used exclusively to accompany religious ceremonies in church halls, its subordinate status remained virtually unchanged.
It is precisely in reading his introduction to the sociology of music that Max Weber must be understood as a son of the modern era and a thinker who inherited the traditions of the European Enlightenment. To put it simply, the Enlightenment focused on the individual as never before, and placed the intellectual endowment of each subject at the center of its thinking. The core thrust of Weber's work has always been the study of the great tension between individualism and rationalism. Those essays on the cultural significance of Protestantism have shown that Weber has given an absolutely contradictory – critical – description of these two categories. It is these famous papers that have chosen a highly original and extended path, as they seek to deduce economic rationality from a deeply irrational impulse—an unquenchable belief in God and the fear of eternal punishment into hell—and thus depart from the traditions of the Enlightenment. In the process, they identified some "irrational" things as the pillars of Western rationalism, at least in economic terms, neither attributing them to the revolutionary changes that took place in the early days of the Enlightenment nor to unreservedly viewing them as a process of liberation.
Weber's musical studies, however, are silent on any form of individualism. The observational reflections in the article mainly focus on Western rationalism. From Weber's uncritical discourse, we can infer his principled endorsement of the analyzed process of rationalization. Is it possible that Max Weber's critical attitude towards the developments he assumed was much harsher in the first years of the new century than it was in 1909-1911?
Whenever Max Weber spoke of the discordant seventh tone (Septime), the das pythagoreische Komma, or the role of melody, he always used expressions such as "troublemaker", "revolutionary", "deadly" or "bad". Weber uses quotation marks to relativize the first two concepts, but he uses the last two terms without qualification. Although Weber, who was the creator of the basic concepts of jurists and sociology, repeatedly asked scholars to do everything in their power to strictly observe value judgments, and tried to prove that judgment and analysis were never the same thing, he may still be putting himself in the shoes of rationalized musicians and music theorists, because these are the very people who forcefully implement the rationalization of music that he describes in his writing. Since Weber never makes it clear in the text that the essay is only about his personal views or that he is merely introducing positions, our categorization of his discourse necessarily points not only to a value-neutral analysis, but also to allusions to personal preferences and a non-critical acceptance of the Eurocentric zeitgeist. To exaggerate, Weber issued a justification for the Western European music of his time. This proof became increasingly tendentious as he tried to provoke the opposition between "rationalism" and "primitivism". How is this possible?
For Weber, it is enough to use the terms rational and irrational in a superficial and descriptive way. But they are full of evaluation. The concept of reason in Weberian music studies is consistent with the myth that the subject's reason alone can control the world. The individual was liberated from this, and the golden age, backed by the ideals and truths of the Enlightenment, seemed to have arrived. Because it has been made known to the world, humanity must rise up with its own reason to rise up from self-inflicted immaturity and put an end to irrational external domination. The sanity of each individual seems to be a reason to celebrate.
Max Weber's musical studies echo this cheerful aria. Is it a coincidence that he proves that rational reconciliation brings "complete freedom"? No, because Weber, who conducts musical studies, is fully sure that the sanity of music means liberation, just as reason can eliminate immaturity. The self-driven, insatiable, contributional principle, pressure of expectation, and pressure of self-justification carried on by Calvinists are perpetuated in the form of modern, "rational" industrial capitalism and operational capitalism.
Whether it is Max Weber's essay on the cultural significance of Protestantism, the unfinished manuscript of his previous anthology "Economy and Society", or the written speech entitled "Scholarship as Vocation", it is exemplary to show that believing in reason and superficially understanding this belief as a liberation is a deceptive and unrealistic tendency. The Calvinist that Weber had in mind in his treatise on the ethical and cultural significance of Protestantism was the initiator of the process of economic rationalization of the whole society—was he free, mature, and independent? At least for himself, the opposite is true. Back in the days of the Enlightenment, people did not know that they could escape the "self-inflicted immaturity" (Immanuel Kant). They just have to be bold and use their sanity to do it. These are the conclusions indicated by Weber's work itself. At the same time, they are the same ones that make concessions to an uncritically adopted and apparently abnormal rational understanding in their musical studies.
Although Max Weber never used these conceptual expressions, every word in the text shows that his rational concepts indirectly speak for them. This superficial description lacks a critical explanation of rationalizing tendencies—it indirectly sides with a process that categorically refuses to explore the question of "meaning" or at least its direction. In this way, Weber's musical studies themselves lead to a defeatist inaction. The rational music implicit in Weber's speech, or the tendencies it points to, is both worthy of pondering and provides a basis for principled criticism.
Max Weber's sociology of music documented the superiority of the West over all other cultural circles, which by the beginning of the 21st century was no longer sustainable. In international discussions and studies of world history (global history), there are well-reasoned starting points that help people overcome the stereotype that reason is unique to the West, and even Max Weber has fallen victim to this stereotype, even if he had doubts in his heart. These starting points can benefit future generations from successfully avoiding such Westernist and hegemonic views in the future. To use a musical metaphor: European pianos and older zithers should not be "provoked" against each other, they should stand side by side as equals. The concerto of the piano and the zither is the best.
Author/Dirk Xler
Excerpt / Li Yongbo
Introductory proofreader/Lucie