OSU Music Course
Ohio State University
School of Music



Music Psychology in 19th Century Germany






As Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin, Hermann Helmholtz's most important student was Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt worked in Helmholtz's lab for more than a decade before setting up his own laboratory at the University of Leipzig. Wundt is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern psychology. His legacy is to be found throughout the modern field of experimental psychology.

As Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, Carl Stumpf produced an extraordinary group of students. His student, Edmund Husserl, founded the field of Phenomenology.

Three of Stumpf's students -- Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka went on to found the Gestalt Psychology school.

Stumpf's interest in non-European music was sparked by reading the work of the British scholar, Alexander Ellis. Ellis was also the English translator of Helmholtz's On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.

Three other students were seminal in developing Stumpf's ideal of comparative musicology -- later to meld into the field of ethnomusicology. The students were Erich Hornbostel, Otto Abraham and Curt Sachs. As a jew, Sachs left Hitler's Germany and emigrated to the United States where he became highly influential -- training innumerable musicologists.

This document is available at http://dactyl.som.ohio-state.edu/Music829F/Biographies/german.geneology.html