ABSTRACT
In the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber listed music as one of the fields which distinguished European civilization from all others. It was not that the ears of other peoples were musically less sensitive, Weber wrote; perhaps rather the contrary. It was rather that only the Europeans developed a rational harmony and counterpoint, the standardized musical instruments of the modern orchestra and, above all, musical notation, without which both the composition and playing of modern music would have been impossible. 3 Weber did not go beyond this brief paragraph, with its implication that it was the rational element of European music which primarily distinguished its development from that of music in other civilizations. Nor did Weber say very much about this particular problem of the uniqueness-! am deliberately avoiding the word 'superiority' -of European music in his later essay, The Rational and Sociological Foundations of Music;4 yet it is as striking a pheno.- menon as the uniqueness of modern European capitalism or science. The present essay is not intended to give a complete explanation of this phenomenon. It seeks only to analyse one condition (though, I believe, a very important one) of this peculiar development of music in modern European history. Music, as Weber knew well, 5 was in practically all cultures
intimately linked with religious worship and ceremonial. It was so in classical and early Christian Europe, no less than in Asian and African civilizations. But in Europe the power of religion and religious sensibility declined, slowly and almost imperceptibly) from the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, more and more rapidly, and very perceptibly, from the end of the seventeenth century.
