Helga de la Motte-Haber (born 2 October 1938) is a German musicologist focusing on the study of systematic musicology.
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.
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.
La Motte received her doctorate in Hamburg in 1967 with the thesis 'Ein Beitrag zur Klassifikation musikalischer Rhythmen – Eine experimentalpsychologische Untersuchung.
In 1983 la Motte, who is committed to the promotion of sound art, founded the "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Musikpsychologie [de]" together with Klaus-Ernst Behne and Günter Kleinen.
Through her more than 300 publications (as of 2014),[1] 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.
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.
Her dissertation Ein Beitrag zur Klassifikation musikalischer Rhythmen[2] (1968) showed new methodical ways in the objective recording of music-related judgements.
At the same time, however, the specifically German research tradition of music psychology with representatives such as Ernst Kurth and Hermann von Helmholtz was also highlighted.
Besides her fundamental work on the development of art in the 20th and 21st century la Motte-Haber was for many years also engaged in the mediation of the musical avant-garde, so she belonged to the editorial board of the magazine Positionen - Beiträge zur Neuen Musik [de].
In the opinion of la Motte-Haber, the subject musicology has "regained its full breadth through the volumes of the Handbuch der Systematischen Musikwissenschaft.