Haber was born in Ludwigshafen am Rhein as the first child of Paula Haber, née Kilian, and the physicist and mathematician Gustav Haber. Two brothers followed in 1939 and 1941. She survived the Second World War and the post-war period, according to her own statement, "in the back of the Palatinate" (Winseln, Leutershausen and Frankelbach) - a few kilometres from the French border and the Siegfried Line. She attended school in Kaiserslautern and in Kusel, where she passed her Abitur in 1957. Her father also taught at the grammar school.
La Motte received her doctorate in Hamburg in 1967 with the thesis 'Ein Beitrag zur Klassifikation musikalischer Rhythmen – Eine experimentalpsychologische Untersuchung. At a congress in 1968 she met the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989), who brought her to the Musicological Institute of Technische Universität Berlin in the same year. La Motte taught there for many years. Her extensive publications enabled her to gain cumulative habilitation in 1971, and in 1972 she was appointed to the Pädagogische Hochschule Rheinland [de]. Dahlhaus' efforts to bring her permanently to the Berlin Institute were successful in 1978: la Motte was appointed professor of systematic musicology at the TU Berlin, a position she held until her retirement in 2005.
Through her more than 300 publications (as of 2014),[1] La Motte-Haber has contributed to the recognition of the subjects systematic musicology and music psychology and since the 1970s has developed their forward-looking new concepts.
New orientation
In contrast to the relatively artless and elementary conception of the systematic musicology of the 1950s, which was based on aural and music psychology and whose representatives Heinrich Husmann (1908-1983) and Albert Wellek (1904-1972), la Motte-Haber saw the future of the profession as being secured only by a new orientation: The psychoacoustics approaches - such as the determination of absolute threshold of hearing and the consonance degree of intervals - were viewed critically by de la Motte-Haber, since there was no clear correspondence between acoustic reality and musical perception. Thus, from the 1970s onwards, she replaced these older themes with topics such as musical understanding, musical judgment and the way music is dealt with. Her dissertation Ein Beitrag zur Klassifikation musikalischer Rhythmen[2] (1968) showed new methodical ways in the objective recording of music-related judgements. Here the polarity profile, also known as semantic differential, played a central role as a psychological measuring instrument.
Understanding music
Already in her 1982 article Scope, Method and Goal of Systematic Musicology la Motte-Haber formulated as a new goal of the subject the Understanding of Music Understanding.[3] In place of the search for the "laws that are supreme to the art of music", as still envisaged by Guido Adler in his conception of the subject published in 1885, the relationship between music and listener, which can be changed over time, is now being replaced by a new one. Especially the emotional effects of music becomes a challenge for research. The extended concept of music takes into account the traditional European art music and includes new music and popular music..
La Motte-Haber programmatically formulated the special claim of music psychology as a sub-area of systematic musicology in the spine text of the first Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie (1984), which she co-edited: "Music psychological research deals with problems of access to music. The development of music in our century has thus become a prerequisite for scientific work".
A comprehensive formulation of this new concept can be found in the 1985 "Handbuch der Musikpsychologie" (Handbook of Music Psychology), a book that, by aligning German music psychology with cognitive psychology, brought it into line with the Anglo-American development of psychomusicology. At the same time, however, the specifically German research tradition of music psychology with representatives such as Ernst Kurth and Hermann von Helmholtz was also highlighted. The concept of music psychology presented in this book explains the life and understanding of musicians from different perspectives: This includes the language analogy of music as well as the development of musical preferences, questions of musical talent or interpretation research.
La Motte-Haber made a high-profile contribution to the importance of music psychology as a science relevant to everyday life in the late 1980s with her experiments on the influence of listening to music on driving behaviour. The driving simulator studies on the question of the influence of driving behaviour under the influence of different music styles resulted in a press response that was previously unknown for this subject.
Philosophical approach to art
Starting in the 1990s, la Motte-Haber developed a further research approach in which the relationship of music to other arts is integratively addressed and a comprehensive philosophy of art (aesthetics) for the 20th and 21st centuries is developed. Externally, this approach is reflected in publication titles such as Music and Visual arts (1990), Music and Religion (1995), Sound Art (1999) and Music and Nature (2000). The central thinking behind these publications is the emphasis on the historical limitations of the concept of a temporal art (for example, music) separated from spatial art (for example, painting), which "crosses borders as a source of meaning in the music of the 20th century Jahrhunderts" (according to the author in the chapter of the same name in the book Music and Religion), the special position of music within the arts since antiquity due to the possibility of delimiting everyday consciousness, or the "de-hierarchization of the arts" in the 20th century as the basis for the emergence of new or superimposed art movements (such as sound art).
Music in the 20th century
A main focus in the work of la Motte-Haber is contemporary music with special attention to musical currents in which music and visual arts enter into new relationships. These works are based on sensual perception and aesthetic experience as the basis for the description and interpretation of these new artistic developments. La Motte-Haber not only adopts her own approaches from music psychology, but also traces the development in the relationship between the arts, which in the 20th century has revived the old ideal of an integral art appealing to all senses instead of the genre aesthetics. It also helped sound art, whose origins lie in Fluxus and in the installation art of the 1960s, to gain recognition as an independent new musical phenomenon. Important publications in this context were (besides the volume "Klangkunst") the catalogues she also edited for the two Sonambiente exhibitions in Berlin in 1996 and 2006. A proof of her commitment to the musicological study of contemporary music is the volume Geschichte der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 4: 1975–2000.
Besides her fundamental work on the development of art in the 20th and 21st century la Motte-Haber was for many years also engaged in the mediation of the musical avant-garde, so she belonged to the editorial board of the magazine Positionen - Beiträge zur Neuen Musik [de]. Her seminar and lecture activities at the conferences of the Darmstadt Institute for New Music and Music Education are devoted to teaching the musical avant-garde in school music lessons.
Technical consolidation
The last phase of la Motte-Haber's life's work is dedicated to the permanent academic establishment of systematic musicology. The six-volume "Handbuch der Systematischen Musikwissenschaft" (Handbook of Systematic Musicology), conceived and published by her, is the foundation of her professional autonomy from traditional historical musicology. The supporting pillars of the concept are reflected in the titles of the individual volumes: aesthetics of music (as art theory without normative claim), music theory (as a time-spanning foundation of music), music psychology (as a theory of understanding and experiencing music), sociomusicology (as a theory of the social functions of music), and a volume on Acoustic Foundations of Music edited by Stefan Weinzierl. The conception is completed by a Lexikon der Systematischen Musikwissenschaft. The ethnomusicology is not considered as a subfield, since it has meanwhile established itself as an independent field. In the opinion of la Motte-Haber, the subject musicology has "regained its full breadth through the volumes of the Handbuch der Systematischen Musikwissenschaft.[4]
Musikpsychologie. In C. Dahlhaus (ed.): Einführung in die systematische Musikwissenschaft. Gerig, Cologne 1971, pp. 53–92, ISBN3-87252-050-4.
B. Barthelmes: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie. Jahrestagung in Hannover vom 22. bis 24. Februar 1985. In Die Musikforschung. Volume 38, 1985, p. 304.
Reinhard Kopiez et al.: Musikwissenschaft zwischen Kunst, Ästhetik und Experiment. Festschrift Helga de la Motte-Haber zum 60. Geburtstag. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN3-8260-1524-X.
Andreas C. Lehmann und Reinhard Kopiez (Hrsg.): 25 Jahre Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie (1983–2008). Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hannover 2008, ISBN3-931852-79-2
Helga de la Motte-Haber: My life in music psychology in Germany. In Psychomusicology (Special issue: The history of the psychology of music in autobiography), 2009, volume 20, No. 1 & 2, pp. 79–88, ISSN0275-3987.
^list of publications until 1997 in: Reinhard Kopiez et al.: Musicology between art, aesthetics and experiment. Festschrift Helga de la Motte-Haber for her 60th birthday. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998.
