Thomas Christensen

 University of Chicago

Tonality in France c. 1860:  Scales, Skulls and Sanskrit

Among the many claims the Belgian music theorist Francois-Joseph Fétis made about his theory of musical tonalité, was his insistence that every culture and race of people had their own indigenous tonality. Fétis’s arguments generated considerable resistance during his lifetime, particularly among French music theorists. Yet little could he know that by the second half of the century, his claims would begin to receive surprising corroboration by the work of many French ethnologists and linguists.

In his final writings, Fétis moved away from many of his earlier metaphysical claims about tonality rooted in German idealist philosophy and began to formulate a strongly race-based theory of tonality built upon the emerging Indo-European stemmata of languages then being reconstructed by comparative philologists.  In my paper, we will see some surprising fallout caused by Fétis’s turn to ethnology as well as more extreme theories of biological determinism and phrenology advocated by contemporaries such as Gobineau.