Così cantò Nuskilusta. Le radici filosofiche dell'etnomusicologia di Stumpf

This paper investigates the philosophical and epistemological foundations of Carl Stumpf's pioneering contributions to comparative musicology and ethnomusicology. Starting from Stumpf's 1885 encounter with Nuskilusta, a Nuxalk singer performing in Halle, the paper traces the systematic character of Stumpf's engagement with non-Western music — from his early transcriptions of Bella Coola songs to the founding of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv in 1900 — and argues that this engagement was not incidental but deeply rooted in his philosophical commitments. The paper first reconstructs Stumpf's epistemological framework, which assigns psychology a unifying role among the Geisteswissenschaften and motivates the adoption of comparative methods as a necessary complement to introspection and experimentation. It then examines Stumpf's twofold opposition to naturalism and nativism in the philosophy of music, arguing against both Helmholtz's physiological account of consonance and Darwinian nativist explanations of musical origins.