An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought

An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic--a phenomenological style, which sought a renewed contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, figures in this milieu argued for an understanding and description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning when the act of listening is understood to be constitutively shared with others.

Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a post-World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war--actual or imminent--a younger cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of speculative thought and imagination. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which are offered in English translation for the first time in the book's appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude seeks to answer the question: what are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?