The Listener in Modernity. Medialization and Anthropologization in Conceptions of Music around 1900

In 1877, the invention of the phonograph sparks the era of musical reproduction technologies, followed by the invention of the gramophone just ten years later. With the phonograph and the gramophone come the first experiences with technical-medial recording, storing, and playback of music. At the same time, the beginning of the medialization of music in the 19th century initiates the development of a scientific perspective from which music is seen as a product of human perception and thus experiences an anthropologization. Here, the reproduction technologies become a point in which anthropologization and medialization intersect: the new media change the modern order of knowledge.

This PhD thesis explores this development’s effects on the perceptions of music in the fields of ‘science,’ ‘media,’ and ‘the arts’ between 1880 and 1930. It focusses on these two tendencies—the medialization and the anthropologization of music—and investigates their relation.