Neuroscience is increasingly being called upon to address issues within the humanities. We discuss challenges that arise, relating to art and beauty, and provide ideas for a way forward.

Generally acknowledged as the most important German musicologist of his age, Hugo Riemann (1849–1919) shaped the ideas of generations of music scholars, not least because his work coincided with the institutionalisation of academic musicology around the turn of the last century. This influence, however, belies the contentious idea at the heart of his musical thought, an idea he defended for most of his career - harmonic dualism. By situating Riemann's musical thought within turn-of-the-century discourses about the natural sciences, German nationhood and modern technology, this book reconstructs the cultural context in which Riemann's ideas not only 'made sense' but advanced an understanding of the tonal tradition as both natural and German. Riemann's musical thought - from his considerations of acoustical properties to his aesthetic and music-historical views - thus regains the coherence and cultural urgency that it once possessed.

Speculation as to the origins of music flourished around 1900, in the climate of the recently institutionalized academic discipline of Musikwissenschaft at German-speaking universities. Even across the methodological divides of the young discipline, virtually all branches of Musikwissenschaft participated in this search, which was fueled by the nineteenth-century "philosophy of origins," a powerful ideology that invested special metaphysical significance in the point of departure. Resonating with such concepts as authenticity, autochthony, stability, and purity, the philosophy of origins encouraged a search particularly for the Germanic origins of music. The article traces how various branches of Musikwissenschaft-psychological, ethnological, theoretical, and historical-contribute to this search by reconstructing these elusive origins of music, and at the same time (to varying degrees) establish a sense of identity. This search for origins was not merely of archaeological interest but became instrumental in defining the meaning of Musik as the object of the wissenschaftlich enterprise in the young discipline-not coincidentally at a time when this object, the tradition of tonal music, was increasingly perceived to be under threat from contemporary composition.

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