Contesting the Musical Ear Hermann von Helmholtz, Gottfried Weber and Carl Stumpf Analyzing Mozart

Music analysis emerged in the late nineteenth century as an occupation
in its own right, independent from the education of composers. This chapter uses
three case studies to describe how and with what aims three authors, in analyzing
music by Mozart, produced samples to which to compare his music. It thereby
traces how a pairing of the notions of analysis and composition increasingly created
room for a concept of synthesis that eventually replaced the notion of the “fine ear”
for music with procedures devised by the analyst that take into account a genuine
malleability of hearing and listening. The cases are Hermann von Helmholtz’s
charts for indicating the harmoniousness of its component chords in Mozart’s Ave
verum corpus, K. 618; Gottfried Weber’s fabricated alternatives to the famous dis-
sonances opening the string quartet C major, K. 465; and, finally, Carl Stumpf’s
comments on his listening of the Serenade B-flat major, K. 361, after having exten-
sively used the first technical analysis and synthesis of the sound of musical
instruments.