MEINONG AND MUSIC ON MUSICAL OBJECTS OF HIGHER ORDER Riccardo Martinelli Summary Music represents a crucial issue in nineteenth-century philosophy and science. Scholars generally possessed a good musical competence and contributed to the explanation of sound perception and aesthetic enjoyment in music. Reflexions on musical psychology, in turn, influenced general theories of mind in a sometimes impressive way. Meinong plays a remarkable role within this context. Together with Mach, Ehrenfels and Stumpf, Meinong contributed to overtake Helmholtz’ physical-physiological theory, supporting a more comprehensive approach. He was repeatedly concerned with problems such as tonal fusion, tone quality (Klangfarbe) and melodic perception. Although Meinong did not develop musical problems systematically, he assumed a quite original and interesting position. His ideas have been developed by some of his followers in the School of Graz. 1. Music and Psychology: Meinong and His Time In the second half of the nineteenth century, new energies applied to the problem of the foundation of sound perception and musical pleasure gave a decisive acceleration to the acquisition of knowledge in this field. Many factors concurred to favour this evolution. First of all, progress in physiology and experimental psychology made it possible to approach the many questions of the psychology of sound on radically innovative bases. Moreover, the generally good and sometimes excellent musical preparation of most psychologists favoured a high-level and in-depth debate on the theme of human sound perception. All these factors must be read against the backdrop of the musical civilisation evolving at that time, which saw the peak of tonal system development as well as its progressive crisis, perceivable both in artistic practice and theory. The progressive diffusion of this trend, partly in keeping with positivist thought, freed the potentials of many disciplines: musical aesthetics, “Musikwissenschaft” (musicology) and ethnomusicology all made substantial advancements at that time. Mostly impressive, however, is the contribution to this topic of a science then only recently established, namely psychology. Important results were obtained in a field where, for many reasons, it had not been possible to attain the type of analytic clarification that Newton’s experience with the prism inaugurated in the field of optics. Overcoming this delay, in turn, enabled unexpected developments in the field of the psychology of perception which could count on valuable comparisons between visual and auditive phenomena. For all these reasons, musical psychology and Tonpsychologie, that mainly developed in German- speaking countries and especially within the Austrian area, constantly accompanied the