Helga de la Motte-Haber (born 2 October 1938) is a German musicologist focusing on the study of systematic musicology.
Life
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.
In 1957, Haber began studying psychology at the University of Mainz with Albert Wellek, a representative of the Gestalt psychology of the Leipzig School. Her fields of work were music psychology and synaesthesia. In 1959 Haber moved to Vienna, where taught in the tradition of Viennese psychology. After a short excursion to Peter R. Hofstätter at the University of Hamburg, she then took her diploma in psychology with Wellek at the Psychological Institute of the University of Mainz in December 1961.
Four weeks later Haber married to Diether de la Motte, composer and music theorist. After her husband had accepted a call to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, la Motte-Haber continued her studies at the University of Hamburg. There she learned about Peter R. Hofstätter the Privatdozent Hans-Peter Reinecke. (1927-2003). She decided to study musicology and spent a year studying the .
Reinecke gathered a group of young musicologists around him - besides Helga de la Motte-Haber also Klaus-Ernst Behne, Ekkehard Jost, Günter Kleinen and Eberhard Kötter. When Reinecke was commissioned in 1965 to set up the department for acustic at the State Institute for Music Research, the group went to Berlin together.
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 the Technical University of 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 . 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.
In 1983 la Motte, who is committed to the promotion of sound art, founded the "" together with Klaus-Ernst Behne and Günter Kleinen.
Positions
Through her more than 300 publications (as of 2014), 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 (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.