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Chapter 30 - Science and Technology

from Part IV - Society and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2019

By
Myles W. Jackson  and
Katy Hamilton
Edited by
Natasha Loges  and
Katy Hamilton
Natasha Loges
Affiliation:
Royal College of Music, London
Katy Hamilton
Affiliation:
Royal College of Music, London
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Summary

Brahms witnessed a period of staggering scientific and technological advances throughout Europe and the burgeoning USA. The nineteenth century offered new modes of transportation: musicians could now travel to distant cities to perform. With this mobility came the need for standardisation, both of technological devices as well as musical parameters, such as concert pitch, which varied considerably among cities. Brahms was both interested in, and delighted by, advances which related to music and its performance, from train travel to new research in the natural sciences. Indeed, he became an interlocutor with a number of leading natural scientists of the period.

By the 1830s, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Britain, and German cities were slowly experiencing the effects of mechanisation. A crucial development in both production and communications was the steam engine, which powered factory machinery, facilitating mass production.

Keywords

Brahmscontextsciencetechnologyindustrialrecordingtransportmetronomeacousticspitch
Type
Chapter
Information
Brahms in Context , pp. 296 - 304
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

Botstein, L., ‘Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna’, in Frisch, W. and Karnes, K. C. (eds.), Brahms and His World, 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3–25Google Scholar
Hiebert, E., The Helmholtz Legacy in Physiological Acoustics (New York: Springer, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horvith, J. and Horvith, S. E., Edison, Musicians and the Phonograph: A Century in Retrospect (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1987)Google Scholar
Hui, A., The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840–1910 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar
Jackson, M. W., Harmonious Triads: Physicists, Musicians, and Instrument Makers in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, C. and Wise, M. N., Energy and Empire: A Biographical Sketch of Kelvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar
Steege, B., Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterne, J., The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Rayleigh/Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)Google Scholar

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