Career Summary

Educated in music, philosophy, theology, and natural sciences, Carl Stumpf was professor of philosophy at several universities, culminating in the University of Berlin (1893‒1928), where he founded the Institute of Psychology in 1893 and the Phonogrammarchiv (sound recordings archive) in 1900. He formulated the concept of Tonpsychologie, and established the independent discipline of "systematic musicology."

Stumpf and Schenker

There is no known personal contact or correspondence between the two men; but Stumpf may have influenced Schenker in two ways. The format and design of the four volumes of the Sammelbände für vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, edited by Carl Stumpf and E. M. von Hornbostel and published in 1922‒23 by Drei Masken Verlag in Munich, was one of two DMV music journals on which Schenker's Das Meisterwerk in Musik (1925‒30) was based. Stumpf's Phonogrammarchiv, founded in 1900 in Berlin for ethnographical materials, was a likely model for the Photogrammarchiv for musical master manuscripts conceived by Schenker and assembled by Anthony van Hoboken in Vienna in 1927.

On December 17, 1909 (OJ 13/37, 10), Ernst Rudorff told Schenker that he had lent his copy of the latter's Harmonielehre to "the acoustician Carl Stumpf."