Thinking with Sound by Viktoria Tkaczyk

Author:Viktoria Tkaczyk [Tkaczyk, Viktoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MUS000000 MUSIC / General, MUS020000 MUSIC / History & Criticism, SCI001000 SCIENCE / Acoustics & Sound, HIS010000 HISTORY / Europe / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2023-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

The Politics of Testing Musicality

In his writings on absolute tone consciousness, Abraham suggested several new methods of applying his findings to the training of audition.105 Again, the education of the larynx and auditory-motor associations more generally was an important objective. Advising on teaching singing to youngsters, for instance, Abraham warned that they should not be confronted with too many voice models at once, because the mother, father, and siblings all work from “different larynxes” and therefore risk confusing the child’s tone judgment.106 Instead, Abraham proposed to train the associative capacities by confronting children daily with the sound of tuning forks or whistles and inviting them to develop their own acoustic, visual, and motor associations with the sounds—if need be, by rewarding their arduous and solitary “associative work” with pieces of chocolate.107

Abraham’s testing and training methods never gained a particularly high profile. They were, though, famously taken up by Georg Schünemann, a music educator at the Berlin Academy of Music. In 1921, Schünemann established his aptitude test—a “test for the talented,” Begabtenprüfung—at a time when young musicians from the age of thirteen were being sought for the Academy’s orchestra classes, which were expanding for military reasons.108 Schünemann’s test sheets covered intelligence, perceptiveness, grasp of tones and harmonies, grasp of rhythm, and melody, and were complemented, as was Abraham’s survey, by a set of medical examinations to evaluate the test subjects’ physical aptitude, including motor perception.109

In the subsequent years, Schünemann refined his entrance examinations, considering them essential to a new musical education founded, again influenced by Abraham, less on the belief in innate talents and the wunderkind ideal than on the identification of musical “total personalities.”110 I will return in chapter 6 to Schünemann, some of whose tests and training methods continued to be applied at the radio laboratory he directed at the Academy of Music from 1928 to 1935. For the moment, it is important to note that Abraham’s view of musicality as an ability based on unconscious associations between sensory centers in the brain, the larynx, and the whole body may, through the intercession of Schünemann, have influenced the testing and training of thousands of musicians who applied to and studied at German conservatories in the 1920s.

Another line of influence leads from Abraham’s broad-based notion of musical talent to Carl Emil Seashore’s “Measures of Musical Talent,” which were once applied at numerous educational institutions in the United States and Europe.111 After earning his doctorate at Yale in 1895, Seashore traveled through Europe and seems to have been in contact with Stumpf’s Institute of Psychology in Berlin, where Abraham was working.112 On this occasion, Seashore may have learned about Abraham’s strong conviction that musicality is a matter of education. Back in the United States, Seashore soon obtained a professorship at the University of Iowa and began to develop, quite in line with Abraham’s phonographic tests of absolute tone consciousness, a series of musicality tests with “pure tones” produced by tuning fork sounds augmented by a vacuum tube resonator.113

Unlike Abraham, who considered

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