Physics and music in nineteenth-century Prussia: Wilhelm Eduard Weber and precision measurement

Abstract

This essay tells the story of two material objects, the organ reed pipe and the monochord, which were critical to two distinct cultural activities of the early nineteenth century, namely physics and music. Indeed, I use these two instruments as a heuristic tool to probe the contours of and intersections between these two disciplines, with a view to improve upon disciplinary histories of both fields. Far removed from cosmic orbitals and Pythagorean ratios, my account is firmly anchored in the material culture of the nineteenth-century Bildungsbürgertum, or the educated German upper-middle class. One might be tempted to wax poetic about how science and music were inextricably linked in nineteenth-century Germany; surely, that is true. More to the point, my account proffers a glimpse into a period when debates throughout the musical community emerged on how taste could be developed and perpetuated, and to what extent physicists, with their penchant for precision measurement and quantification, could assist musicians with their attempts to create and define a new Romantic aesthetic of music.