Musik & Ästhetik, 2016, Jg. 20, Ausgabe 79

Karl Kraus in Coney Island: Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s »Sideshow« – This essay offers an overview of Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s most recent work Sideshow, which deals with phenomena of cultural crisis using the example of a historical New York fun park. The work, a hybrid of traditional chamber music and music theatre, introduces a new genre and mediates between absolute music and politically programmatic art. At the same time, it marks an innovative continuation of expressionist theatre traditions (Schönberg, Kraus).

Aspects of Self-Referential Art in Josquin’s »Déploration de Iohan. Ockeghem« – This essay examines the phenomenon of self-referential art using Josquin’s nenia Nymphes des bois, written on the occasion of Ockeghem’s death. The point of departure is the peculiarity that Josquin himself is addressed in the passage of this motet-chanson with French text, and is urged to don his mourning dress and weep for his father Ockeghem. The analysis of the text and the music reveals a musical enactment by Josquin of his own singing. The key to understanding this is the use of the chorale from the funeral liturgy: it transpires that Josquin not only uses the Introit in the first part, but also the Communion in the last, here modifying Molinet’s text – especially the prayer for the dead – and making it the liturgical text of the mass. The author then systematizes the various self-referential elements whereby Josquin makes music the subject of his music, listing intertextuality, the enactment of music-making, the conscious creation of particularities of musical performance, and finally numerology. He ends with reflections on how to understand such self-referential aspects, emphasizing the necessity of the idea of the composer’s conception on the one hand, and of musical events in performance on the other hand.

»Orpheus in Need«: Wilhelm Kempff’s Friendship with Albert Speer – The topos that art and politics are two strictly separate spheres, which is still alive and well, was especially symptomatic of the relationship between Wilhelm Kempff and Albert Speer: despite his close connections to major NS figures like Speer and Arno Breker, the famous Beethoven performer was never subject to doubts about his political integrity. Speer’s self-styled persona as a naive artist in the service of Hitler, on the other hand, saved him from the Nuremberg gallows. The present text reconstructs an outline of the genesis and motives of this previously unquestioned friendship, and in so doing sketches a picture of Germany in the midst of the economic miracle, at a time when there was little interest in any presence of its fascist past.

Why Music Does Not Constitute a »Language of Emotions«: An Experience-Theoretical Critique – This essays seeks to highlight the immanent expression-aesthetic side of art music’s autonomy and its anthropological basis. For this, it draws primarily on emotion-theoretical, neurological and psychoanalytical insights. The intention is also to show that no examination of musical expression based on experiential science can dispense with considering the difference between art and non-art, and that the positivistic avoidance of any aesthetic evaluation itself constitutes an evaluative analytical halving of the phenomenon.

»I Want to Be Loud« – On the Limits of Music and Body: A Polemical Self-Defence – Starting from performance experiences in contemporary dance and theatre that overstep the limits of music through extreme electronic amplification, and thus provoke a primarily physical experience in place of listening, this text pursues a polemical intertwining of questions about the limits of music and about the political in art with paradigms of contemporary performance discourses like »sound«, »corporeality« or »atmospheres«. The fragile boundary between ecstatic bodily transgression and the exercise/experience of acoustic violence is marked by an overwriting of listening through bodily feeling.