David Trippett | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Books by David Trippett

This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works ... more This volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book's four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives. Antoine Hennion is Professor at Mines ParisTech, and the former Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation. He has written extensively on the sociology of music, media, and cultural industries. Christophe Levaux is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium. His research focuses on approaches to 20th-century American music and Actor-Network Theory.

Liszt Ferenc: Sardanapalo, Act 1 (Fragment), 2019

The critical edition of Franz Liszt's unfinished opera, published by the Neue Liszt Ausgabe (Edit... more The critical edition of Franz Liszt's unfinished opera, published by the Neue Liszt Ausgabe (Editio Musica Budapest). With reconstructed libretto, ossias, realizations of patterns, and various deleted and metrically variant passages.

This critical edition includes a detailed study on the genesis of Liszt’s _Sardanapalo_ in English, German, and Hungarian, the libretto in the original Italian as well as in English, German, and Hungarian translation, several facsimile pages of Liszt’s manuscript, and a detailed Critical Report.

https://www.kotta.info/en/product/20017A/LISZT-FERENC-Sardanapalo-Act-1-Fragment

The Cambridge Companion to MUSIC IN DIGITAL CULTURE, 2019

The impact of digital technologies on music has been overwhelming: since the commercialisation of... more The impact of digital technologies on music has been overwhelming: since the commercialisation of these technologies in the early 1980s, both the practice of music and thinking about it have changed almost beyond all recognition. From the rise of digital music making to digital dissemination, these changes have attracted considerable academic attention across disciplines,within, but also beyond, established areas of academic musical research. Through chapters by scholars at the forefront of research and shorter 'personal takes' from knowledgeable practitioners in the field, this Companion brings the relationship between digital technology and musical culture alive by considering both theory and practice. It provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to the place of music within digital culture as a whole, with recurring themes and topics that include music and the Internet, social networking and participatory culture, music recommendation systems, virtuality, posthumanism, surveillance, copyright, and new business models for music production.

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, 2019

Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound ... more Scientific thinking has long been linked to music theory and instrument making, yet the profound and often surprising intersections between the sciences and opera during the long nineteenth century are here explored for the first time. These touch on a wide variety of topics, including vocal physiology, theories of listening and sensory communication, technologies of theatrical machinery and discourses of biological degeneration. Taken together, the chapters reveal an intertwined cultural history that extends from backstage hydraulics to drawing-room hypnotism, and from laryngoscopy to theatrical aeronautics. Situated at the intersection of opera studies and the history of science, the book therefore offers a novel and illuminating set of case studies, of a kind that will appeal to historians of both science and opera, and of European culture more generally from the French Revolution to the end of the Victorian period.

Since the 1840s, critics have lambasted Wagner for lacking the ability to compose melody. But for... more Since the 1840s, critics have lambasted Wagner for lacking the ability to compose melody. But for him, melody was fundamental—“music’s only form.” This incongruity testifies to the surprising difficulties during the nineteenth century of conceptualizing melody. Despite its indispensable place in opera, contemporary theorists were unable even to agree on a definition for it, let alone formulate a stable basis for teaching it. In Wagner's Melodies, Trippett re-examines Wagner's central aesthetic claims, placing the composer's ideas about melody in the context of the scientific discourse of his age: from the emergence of the Natural Sciences and historical linguistics to sources about music's stimulation of the body, and inventions for “automatic” composition. Interweaving a rich variety of material from the history of science, music theory, music criticism, private correspondence and court reports, Trippett uncovers a new and controversial discourse that placed melody at the apex of artistic self-consciousness, and generated problems of urgent dimensions for German music aesthetics.

""The Origins of Music was first published in German in 1911. In this text, Carl Stumpf sets out ... more ""The Origins of Music was first published in German in 1911. In this text, Carl Stumpf sets out a path-breaking hypothesis about the earliest musical sounds in human culture: the perception of perfect consonances, fixed intervals, and the ability to transpose. Alongside his research in such diverse fields as classical philosophy, acoustics, and mathematics, Stumpf became one of the most influential psychologists of the late 19th century. He was the founding father of Gestalt psychology, and a collaborator with William James, Edmund Husserl, and Wolfgang Köhler.

The book was the culmination of more than 25 years of empirical and theoretical research in the field of music. In the first part of the book, Stumpf discusses the origin and forms of musical activities as well as various existing theories on the origin of music, including those of Darwin, Rousseau, Herder, and Spencer. In the second part of the book, he summarizes his works on the historical development of instruments and music, and compares a putatively global range of musics from non-European cultures with a view to demonstrating the psychological principles of tonal organization, as well as providing a range of cross-cultural musical transcriptions and analyses. This became a foundation document for comparative musicology, the elder sibling to modern Ethnomusicology, and the original recordings Stumpf used in this process are given in an appended CD.

Available for the first time in the English language, The Origins of Music will be a fascinating volume for all those with an interest in the history of psychology and music. It appears here in tandem with Self-Disclosure, Stumpf's autobiography of 1924, in which he outlines the rich life experiences behind his research career alongside his own explanation of his scientific and cultural legacy.""

radio broadcasts by David Trippett

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pc7w4 Philosopher Angie Hobbs is interested in Plato's idea... more http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pc7w4

Philosopher Angie Hobbs is interested in Plato's idea that there is a relationship between beauty and morality. The idea that goodness is beautiful and evil things are ugly is written deep into our culture. But Plato's ideas also suggest that beautiful things could not be appreciated by evil people. Can that idea really survive the image of a Nazi Camp Commandment listening to classical music?

Papers by David Trippett

The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 14, 2024

The Origins of Music, 2012

The Musical Quarterly, 2017

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, 2019

At first sight, opera and science would seem to occupy quite separate spaces. The one typically u... more At first sight, opera and science would seem to occupy quite separate spaces. The one typically unfolds on the stage of a theatre, the other most often takes place in a laboratory or lecture hall. The one draws on creative inspiration in entwining music, poetry and spectacle, the other on inductive reasoning through observation and experiment; patient activities that, for John Herschel in 1831, constituted the ‘fountains of all natural science’. And while the one offers an opportunity for emotional and intellectual engagement through the public gaze, the other cautiously validates the empiricism of verifiable experience through critical acts of witnessing. To yoke the two together, then, may appear arbitrary. Yet such a view not only risks caricature through its stark oppositions, but also overlooks a scene of rich interconnection within nineteenthcentury European social and intellectual life. To start at the biographical level, we find a famous scientist such as Michael Faraday not...

Lexikon Schriften über Musik, 2023

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective po... more Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis.

19th-Century Music, 2019

In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring t... more In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring that—in contrast to empirical science—it is the “artist [who] has beheld the real.” His lecture sought to show how sensory perception can be law-like, and how the effects of art are ultimately grounded in such law-likeness. Such a claim for an objective measure of perception was not unprecedented, yet it failed to distinguish cleanly between what is objective and what is real, opening up a discursive space regarding what sound “is,” and what its objective perception may be. Its arguments followed calls for “a science of beauty” based on number, and was motivated, in part, by Helmholtz's attempt to distance himself from the “weaknesses of Romanticism.” This articles argues that Helmholtz's bold claims were only possible on the basis of the writings of German materialists during the 1840s and 50s, and because sound had been figured for decades as an ambiguous object. On this basis, ...

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2014

Wagner’s vaunted model of artistic synthesis persists in scholarly assessments of his work. But a... more Wagner’s vaunted model of artistic synthesis persists in scholarly assessments of his work. But at its centre, the composer argued that the media of voice and orchestra do not mix: they retain their identities as separate channels of sound that can neither duplicate nor substitute for one another. Taking as a starting point Wagner’s claims for the non-adaptability of media, this article addresses the adaptation of Wagner’s music to the modern digital technologies of HD cinema and video game. Drawing on a wide circle of writers, from Schiller and Žižek to Bakhtin, Augé, Baudrillard and second-generation media theorists, it interrogates the concept of ‘reality’ within live acoustic performance, both historically, as a discursive concept, and technologically, via the sensory realism of digital simulcasting and telepresence. The philosophical opposition of appearance and reality fails when reality is defined by the intimate simulation of a sensory event as it is registered on the body. ...

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardana... more In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, Sardanapalo, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt’s composition and abandonment of Sardanapalo. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt’s mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel’s future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libret...

Liszt Ferenc: Sardanapalo, Act 1 (Fragment), 2019

https://www.kotta.info/en/product/20017A/LISZT-FERENC-Sardanapalo-Act-1-Fragment

The Cambridge Companion to MUSIC IN DIGITAL CULTURE, 2019

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, 2019

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pc7w4 Philosopher Angie Hobbs is interested in Plato's idea... more http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04pc7w4

The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 14, 2024

The Origins of Music, 2012

The Musical Quarterly, 2017

Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, 2019

Lexikon Schriften über Musik, 2023

19th-Century Music, 2019

Cambridge Opera Journal, 2014

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018

19th-Century Music

The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contempora... more The icon of the machine in early-nineteenth-century Britain was subject to a number of contemporary critiques in which pedagogy and the life of the mind were implicated, but to what extent was education in music composition influenced by this? A number of journal articles appeared on the topic of music and phrenology, bolstered by the establishment of the London Phrenological Society (1823), and its sister organization, the British Phrenological Association (1838). They placed the creative imagination, music, and the “natural” life of the mind into a fraught discourse around music and materialism. The cost of a material mind was a perceived loss of contact with the “gifts of naturer … the dynamical nature of man … the mystic depths of man's soul” (Carlyle), but the concept of machine was also invested with magical potential to transform matter, to generate energy, and can be understood as a new ideal type of mechanism. These confliciting ideals and anxieties over mechanism, as p...

19th-Century Music, 2019

In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring t... more In 1878, at the height of his fame, Helmholtz asked what was objective in perception, declaring that—in contrast to empirical science—it is the “artist [who] has beheld the real”. His lecture sought to show how sensory perception can be law-like, and how the effects of art are ultimately grounded in such law-likeness. Such a claim for an objective measure of perception was not unprecedented, yet it failed to distinguish cleanly between what is objective and what is real, opening up a discursive space regarding what sound “is”, and what its objective perception may be. Its arguments followed calls for “a science of beauty” based on number, and was motivated, in part, by Helmholtz’s attempt to distance himself from the “weaknesses of Romanticism”. This articles argues that Helmholtz’s bold claims were only possible on the basis of the writings of German materialists during the 1840s and 50s (Büchner 1855; Lange 1865), and because sound had been figured for decades as an ambiguous object.

On this basis, the article considers the role of sound within epistemological debates over sense perception and concepts of the real during the later nineteenth century. It examines the ways in which sound’s abstract character became co-opted within Anglo-German discourse concerning objective perception and the scientifically real, initially through the lens of Helmholtz’s 1878 lecture, but later broadening this focus to include the mid-century architects of a philosophical materialism, as well as their detractors. A closing case study, a closely documented wager between a geologist and a philosopher about the “real” of sound ca. 1850, demonstrates the imaginative uses of sound as a metonym for philosophical debate. This raises questions about the relation of sensation and number, the contested affinity between sound and concepts of the absolute, and the underlying desire to possess objects of sensory experience.

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018

In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, _Sardan... more In 1850, after five years of planning, Liszt began composing music for his Italian opera, _Sardanapalo_, after Byron. It was central to his ambition to attain status as a European composer, but he abandoned the project halfway through. La Mara (1911), Humphrey Searle (1954) and others declared the manuscript fragmentary and partially illegible, but in 2016 this verdict was categorically overturned when work began on an edition of what Liszt notated: almost the entirety of Act 1. This article draws on an array of sources – published and unpublished – significantly to update our knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Liszt’s composition and abandonment of _Sardanapalo_. In light of his inconsistently Italianate music and idiosyncratic treatment of the libretto, it also reinterprets Liszt’s mid-century aesthetic orientation, as a confidant of Wagner and would-be pillar of Franz Brendel’s future neudeutsche Schule. By contextualizing key aspects of the uncovered musical score and libretto within Liszt’s mid-century writings on aesthetics, it posits character, declamatory melody and the visuality of the stage as (initially) critical criteria in the communication of a literary narrative, and suggests that Liszt’s impulse towards symphonic poetry may first have been kindled within the aesthetic potential of opera.

Article here: https://academic.oup.com/mq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/musqtl/gdy001/4951391 ... more Article here: https://academic.oup.com/mq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/musqtl/gdy001/4951391

Between 1876 and 1894, prominent acousticians argued that humans could hear as high as 40,960Hz. While this was ultimately discredited, recent post-tonal works have notated pitches that explicitly play with, or exceed, the ordinary range of human hearing (cf. Schoenberg, Per Nørgård, and Salvatore Sciarrino). This article asks what kind of listener such works imply.

Amid recent moves toward sound as vibrational force, it argues that hearing has a special role in determining our natural sensory limits and human identity, and that attempts to push against these limits foreground the underlying matter of what status the biological body has for performance and the perception of music if the body constitutes an assemblage subject to variation. In a historical critique of auditory sense augmentation, it principally contrasts Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt with a transhumanist worldview which anticipates—and for some, already realizes—the enhancement of biological sense capacities through technology.

The discourse of transhumanism poses questions for musical listening as soon as the body becomes an assemblage subject to variation. It raises the question of how identity—ours as well as that of musical works—might be affected by “morphological freedom,” the extent to which self-identity becomes the lost referential when agency is distributed between biological and non-biological parts, and it asks what value are the new intellectual vistas that emerge when musical experience is conceived in material terms as communication between bodies.

This essay examines the history of auditory sensation, and the methodological challenges posed by... more This essay examines the history of auditory sensation, and the methodological challenges posed by the recovery of sensory communication. With a focus on physical encounters and the limits of the body, the somatic force of sound is central to the essay’s review of the artist’s physical and sensory capacity as it relates both to the art he or she produces and to his or her way of perceiving it. The essay divides into two sections: first, an examination of issues around historically lost sensations of sound; and second, the recovery of lost soundscapes. The author suggests that sense perception is not an unchanging facet of medical history, but is subject to cultural influences and local norms. The essay seeks to uncover in its various delimited contexts a historically flexible shaping of perception.
https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/towards-materialist-history-music-histories-sensation/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybtDI7LATbI&t=00s

Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2015), online first