The "science of reality" of music history

on the historical background to Max Weber's study of music

Christoph Braun

pp. 176-195

in: Sam Whimster (ed), Max Weber and the culture of anarchy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

"He has never, we said afterwards, done anything more incredible. We were all completely dazed and dumbfounded." Bewilderment clouds the admiration with which the Heidelberg theologian Hans von Schubert comments, presumably in late 1912, on a lecture by Max Weber on the 'sociology of music" given in his Heidelberg home on Ziegelhäuser Landstrasse.¹ It shows the difficulty Weber's contemporaries faced in fitting his widely diverse interests within the canon of academic disciplines. How did the trained jurist, economist, historian and cultural analyst come to be directing his enquiries towards fields so foreign to his subject as music? A few motifs taken from the history of Weber's works as a whole and from his biography, described below, should provide an insight into this and demonstrate the nature of the theoretical musical analyses as well as their connection with the general interests of the social and cultural scientist.

Cited authors

Weber Max