‘What are we thinking about when we are thinking about music in non-naturalistic terms?’ (24). This is the central question of Benjamin Steege's An Unnatural Attitude, an erudite book that examines the music-discursive reaction to naturalistic thinking in early twentieth-century Weimar. It is a good question. To answer it, one could turn to sound's physical presence and questions of acoustics, as Steege did in his first monograph. In Helmholtz and the Modern Listener,Footnote ¹ Steege historicized Hermann von Helmholtz's psychoacoustic theories, theories that described the ear as a physical organ or machine capable of discerning multiple components of a single musical tone within the vibrant world of sound. Or one could turn to the empirical naturalistic research programmes of experimental psychology that took place from c. 1860 in Germany. But here Steege does something different. Over the course of four chapters, he makes a compelling case for closer scrutiny of a generation of 1920s phenomenologists whose thought could be described as non-naturalistic, eschewing the notion of an acoustic object and of psychological interiority.

The first chapter, ‘The Unnatural Attitude’, turns to a number of young intellectuals developing theories that provided an alternative to the primacy of acoustics in music theory and the subject–object division central to psychology. Steege examines at length the work of Dalcroze instructor Gustav Güldenstein, for whom acoustics and psychology did little to explain musical experience. As Steege shows, Güldenstein's 1928 Theorie der Tonart (‘Theory of Key’) turned away from the idea that consciousness of tonality is already there or given from birth, instead lending primacy to familiarity (42). Güldenstein argued that, once familiar with a musical object, one already knows how to move around it, and there is no need to ask why it is there. He posited that, rather than listening to isolated notes, one always connects a note to other notes around it; the point is simple, but it means that musical experience is relational and does not occur via an a priori acoustic fact (41). Güldenstein also argued that one should not retreat inward to psychologism – a point that comes sharply into view in light of his teaching of the Dalcroze method, where bodily movement puts into question what is essential to the music. Steege's chapter goes on to survey the work of a number of other like-minded theorists, including Herbert Eimert, the music theorist, composer, and journalist whose work is further explored in Chapter 4. Steege explains that these men (and they were all men) knew what they rejected: acoustics and psychologism. But their idea of what a phenomenological orientation consisted of remained loose: a shared understanding was yet to be achieved.

The second chapter, ‘Debussy, Outward and Open’, examines the writings of Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset alongside those of Günther Stern-Anders, a Jewish student of Husserl and Heidegger and the spouse of Hannah Arendt. The first half of Chapter 2 addresses Ortega's search for modes of listening that are non-naturalistic insofar as they resist what he saw as the bourgeois retreat into inner psychology or the privacy of emotions. Ortega's attitudes, Steege assures us, were elitist but not right-wing anti-psychological. This point challenges Richard Taruskin's proposition in Text and Act Footnote ² that Ortega betrayed ‘the primacy of the ontological over the psychological’ (Taruskin quoted on 97) and, as Steege writes, ‘a passive infatuation with authority, whether of God, State, or some other entity’ (97). Rather, if Chopin's etudes induced lyrical personae that humanized pianistic music, Ortega argued, Debussy's etudes provoked a dissolution of the self into the world. The subject implicit in Debussy's music alternated between single and plural personae and, at times, the music compelled the dissolution of lyrical personae altogether. Steege suggests that ‘Ortega asks us to listen for the possibility that Debussy's etude already assumes as its basic premise the condition of having suspended the lyrical persona, despite maintaining distinct poetic affiliations with the vestiges of such a presence’ (77). For Ortega, Chopin turned inwards, while Debussy encouraged a form of outward attentiveness.

In contrast to Ortega, Stern-Anders argued that attention was not about zeroing in on the music; he proposed instead that Debussy's music cultivated a state of ‘letting go’. As Steege explains, when one lets oneself go, one is ‘neither tensed for a particular future possibility nor merely drawn along by events without entertaining any relation to them at all’ (91). This proposed mode of listening provided an alternative form of attention to the cognitivist logics of expectation and realization that had been (and indeed still are) so central to harmony-driven music theory. In one evocative passage, Steege recounts the experience of listening to Debussy's Étude Op. 25, No. 8 as Stern-Anders might, as a moment of wonder(ing): ‘“I wonder what will happen next,” “I wonder how we got to this point,” “I wonder why we are pausing here to take in a particular thing,” and so forth’ (93). This is a striking moment: one rather rare in musicological and musical theoretical scholarship, in which the author putatively describes his own experience of listening repeatedly to a single musical passage. Rather than opening up a discussion about music's drastic nature – asking what it means to listen to music in the present or seeking to recover the music's carnality – the ‘moment of wonder’ may be said to display a phenomenological orientation: it presents an openness towards the future, seeking to ‘tease the possible from the actual object’ (49), as Judith Butler defines one of the tasks of phenomenology. In addition, Steege's listening experience exemplifies Stern-Anders's ideas about musical attentiveness, which foregrounded ‘being with’ or ‘alongside’ the music, and which anticipated Heidegger's notion of ‘being-in-the world’. As Steege observes, ‘I am already involved with the world before I come to act on the interest effectively subsisting between myself and the world in the first place’ (94). The word ‘interest’ (‘Inter-esse’), after all, may be transliterated as ‘being in-between’: it suggests neither full concentration directed towards an object nor the state of merely following something along, at a distance from it.

The third chapter, ‘Hearing-With’, critiques the musical writings of Heinrich Besseler, a young philosopher who had studied under Heidegger, then turned to musicology, and who joined the Nationalist Socialist Party in 1934. Following an exploration of Besseler's discussions of the dance suite and of medieval polyphony, Steege raises the issue of Besseler's disenchantment with concert culture. For Besseler, that culture was detached from life, the latter understood not in a scientific sense but as a factual condition of living bound to the everyday activities of labouring, playing, or ritual participation. Concert culture, he argued, promoted an isolated listener attending to sound as a quasi-object in the world. Most productive in Steege's chapter is the discussion of Besseler's connections between the isolated, motionless listening of the concert hall and the mode of listening cultivated in the psychological laboratories of the 1920s, which submitted test subjects to ‘artificially isolated processes’ (101). As Steege goes on to explain, both the concert hall and the psychological laboratory foster a singular ontological relationship to the musical object. The first entails listening ‘alone together’ to deepen one's relationship with the artwork; the second submits test subjects to laboratory conditions, also isolated from everyday life, in this case so that they respond in controlled ways to acoustic stimuli. As Steege writes, ‘it is the rough coincidence of these two cultural-historical sites, and their ideological cooperation at a distance, that energizes Besseler's critique of them’ (101). Some further quotations from Besseler's work might have been useful here, showing in more detail how he placed together the concert scene and the listening that took place in the psychological laboratory. However, I took the link between these two apparently disparate forms of listening in order to disclose the psychologization of concert culture as one of the book's most pressing points. As Steege suggests, this carries implications for the individualization or the ‘alone-togetherness’ generated by modern culture and, later, sound reproduction technologies. Steege gestures towards the point in a footnote citing James H. Johnson's Listening in Paris and Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past; but what could be developed as a disciplinary critique of concert culture from the as-yet underexplored angle of phenomenology remained otherwise unexplored.

Steege does not ignore the ghosts of Nazi Germany in his examination of Besseler's musical theoretical interventions. On the contrary, at the end of Chapter 3, we learn of Besseler's quasi-fascist tendency (140) and are reminded that he approved of Nazi leadership. Only a few years after writing his dissertation, Besseler became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the first Nazi paramilitary wing. But it could have been argued, more broadly, that Besseler's notion of a living community made possible by music-making did not live up to its ethical promise. Phenomenological precepts mean that Steege's argumentative weight is directed at the possibility that the notion of such a living community could have been mobilized in an ethical manner. The fact that it did not, and indeed that it has not been mobilized in this way, is an important part of the intellectual history being told, and perhaps deserved more weight.

Another example concerning the potentiality for ethical action involves the German philosopher Max Scheler, considered among the founding fathers of phenomenology, and discussed by Steege in his introduction. Scheler's take on the notions of ‘world’ and ‘worldview’ involved a new category of worldhood that would respond to the events of 1914, when the very notion of ‘Europe’ had undergone upheaval. In interrogating nineteenth-century naturalist arguments that viewed the ‘world’ as environment, as Umwelt, or as pre-given surrounding, Scheler argued that there were, instead, only particular manners of viewing, inhabiting, and engaging with the world and actively forming it. As Steege suggests, ‘world’ thus emerges as a category that affords humans the capacity or ability to realize the principles of community, sympathy, and democracy. Again, one might here have wished for more on the critical importance of ‘world’ and ‘worldview’ in a coterminous body of intellectual history, given the extent to which ‘the world’ in German philosophy is fraught with difficulty and deserves theoretical engagement. Heidegger, as is well known, insisted on the German coinage ‘Weltanschauung’. Shortly after joining the Nationalist Socialist Party, he famously claimed that the term displayed a uniquely German way of viewing and philosophizing. In other words, the notion of a ‘world’ was mobilized in ways quite different from what Scheler imagined only a few years later. Perhaps Steege here missed the opportunity, especially given the historical specificity of the moment, to account for how the possibility of ‘world-community’ was foreclosed?

Steege's concern for probable futures and the question of possibility (broadly speaking) is, however, addressed in other parts of the book. In Chapter 4, ‘Techniques of Feeling’, the scientific experiment's irreversibility, its collapsing of present and future, emerges in the juxtaposition of Stern-Anders's anti-nuclear discussions of the 1954 ‘Caste Bravo’ nuclear test at Bikini Atoll and Herbert Eimert's 20-minute electronic composition Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama. Eimert wrote his work in response to a catastrophic nuclear test in which the settling of radioactive ash caused injury to twenty Japanese fishermen and the death of Aikichi Kuboyama, the Japanese fishing boat radio operator. Following an insightful discussion of how the Epitaph recreates techniques and feelings evoked by the test, Steege argues that Stern-Anders and Eimert demonstrate how the future is immanent in the present: the nuclear test suggests that death is constantly hanging over humans and that apocalypse can take place at any time. The manner in which Eimert deploys ‘hope’ towards the end, in the phrase ‘als Namen unserer Hoffnung’ (‘as the name of our hope’) (23:14–23:22) is significant. As Steege explains in great detail, ‘hope’ literally gets the final word, but Eimert manipulates this word so that it is hardly recognizable as an acoustic sound. At this point, feeling does not emerge as a naturalized inner experience; rather, ‘the fact that feeling would arise only through an act of making allows for what Stern-Anders demanded: the possibility of intervening in the historical structure of feelings, which was the opening for an element of hope’ (158). The test and its responses to it intertwine hope and hopelessness, suggesting ‘a shared world of intentional meaning’ and the possibility for revising our actions and responses to the present.

Historically, the book ends with a footnote: to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's commentaries on how the perpetual state of endless war in 1956 has persisted into the present and constitutes a form of ‘biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death … When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological’ (251). Might this final observation have been placed more directly into the book's argument? In my reading of An Unnatural Attitude, the footnoted remarks at the book's close are relevant to Steege's historical and philosophical trajectory and could have been articulated in a concluding section. After all, Steege ends his historical narrative at a point of climax in the militarization of everyday life, with the near universal state of war at the close of the Second World War. In addition, the era of nuclear testing offered a shift in ways of understanding the world that could not be further away from the temporal suspension, or the possibility of wonder, evoked in Chapter 2. Instead, Steege ends with forty-five pages of appendices, providing us with texts written by many of his actors, including Eimert's 1926 ‘On the Phenomenology of Music’ and Stern-Anders's 1927 ‘On the Phenomenology of Listening’. The inclusion of these extensive materials suggests that new translations of widely unread essays are crucial to Steege's project.

An Unnatural Attitude is a serious intellectual history that brings to light the musical thought of actors unfamiliar to the vast majority of music scholars. Ambitiously, Steege writes of both local and global concerns. At times, he suggests that the intentional manner with which one engages with music can shape the history of feeling; at others, he explicates music's role in forging various types of community and in responding to human-led catastrophes. Densely written and always precise, An Unnatural Attitude is likely to establish itself as a central treatment of its topic: musicologists clearly need to think more deeply about the ideological, philosophical and political implications of that strange practice we call listening.