Musik & Ästhetik, 2016, Jg. 20, Ausgabe 80

Improvisation as a Lifeline? – There has scarcely been a phase in recent music history when New Music and popular music came closer to each other than in the years between 1962 and 1969. The medium of communication was improvisation. Jazz was defined from its inception as an art of improvisation. Improvisation made its way into art music through the initiative of Karlheinz Stockhausen: his project of an Intuitive Music drew on Hesse’s Glass Bead Game and Heidegger’s Off the Beaten Track, whereas Vinko Globokar’s improvisation group active at the same time in Paris was more influenced by existentialism. The attempt to ›europeanize‹ improvisation, however, was thwarted by the contradiction between Stockhausen’s collective approach and Globokar’s subjectivism. After their last joint concert in Darmstadt in 1969, this conjunction was abandoned and they both returned to traditional composition.

Johann Jacob Froberger’s »Meditation, faist svr ma Mort fvtvre«. On the Composer’s 400th Birthday – Froberger’s Meditation FbWV 620, 1 is one of most programmatic of his keyboard works, which are among the very first examples of programme music. A completely new aspect of this work for its time is the composer’s reflection on his own death, culminating in the motto »Do you think of dying, Froberger?« The work’s key and its repertoire of figures and harmonic connections are subordinated to this theme.

Treatment of Cadence and Time in Froberger’s »Meditation sur ma mort future« – Froberger’s allemandes appeal to the listener both through their elaborate compositional fabric and their spiritual richness. In Meditation sur ma mort future, both these aspects reach their zenith. By means of an extremely bold formal and harmonic conception, Froberger composes the timeless moment of meditative immersion of a subject that becomes aware of its own temporality.

»Finis Terrae« by Brian Ferneyhough: Towards an Analysis and Interpretation – The article deals with Brian Ferneyhough’s 2012 piece Finis Terrae for chamber orchestra and six-part chorus, attempting to move towards a philosophical-aesthetic interpretation via a formal analysis and a consideration of the underlying idea of glacial landscapes. Thus the form and the unusual roles or the orchestra and chorus invite us to reflect on the relationship between nature and humans.

The Question of God: A Comparison Between Bach and Handel – This article is an attempt to approach the question, often addressed by researchers but by no means considered resolved, of Bach’s relationship with God. This is attempted by the method of an anthropologically-oriented context analysis of surviving first-hand documents, and the case of Handel is used for comparison. For Bach, God is hierarchically superordinate and ontologically prior to all that exists and all that is possible. He is the basis of all human existence and the purpose of all thought and action. With Handel, the relationship between divine omnipotence and human autonomy is shifted by a gain in inner autonomy for humans, though God, as the basis underlying the order of the existent, remains the final authority. The study concludes with a brief look at Telemann’s understanding of God.

Music Theory and Value Judgements: Observations on the History of a Systematic Field – A glance at music history shows that there have always been struggles to describe musical material and its treatment. Theories can be founded on value judgements, imply them or indeed lead to them. As an applied, practical system of musical texture, music theory virtually trains its purveyors to internalize value judgements in order to make aesthetic compositional decisions. Today, a misguided understanding of plurality that does not permit genuine contradiction can lead to music theory no longer daring to make value judgements. This article argues the case for acknowledging the competition between different theories and productively continuing it.

The Dissolution of the Concept of Music: Aspects of Disintegration and Consolidation of the Concept of »Music« Today – Music is currently confronted with the expansion of its media possibilities, in the same way that has long been evident in the visual arts and is characterized by Peter Osborne as »transmedial«. On the other hand, institutional structures secure the traditional, medium-based definition of the artistic disciplines. More recently, however, it has become apparent how this fixity can be overcome, enabling music and all the arts to enter the transmedial state. But there will still be criteria for distinguishing between different practices.

Pop Music as a »Gesamtkunstwerk«: On Diederich Diederichsen – This article is a review of Diedrich Diederichsen’s extensive study on pop music. The starting point is the observation that pop music has always been viewed in aesthetics as a difficult object of study. This review pays tribute to Diederichsen’s productive suggestion to defend pop music both from the charge of being a symptom of musical decline and from a reduction of its aesthetic particularities to the aesthetic particularities of music in the tradition of European art music. At the same time, it also argues critically that doing justice to pop music, which consists most of all in no longer treating it as a special kind of music, can only be achieved by presupposing a formalistically reduced concept of musical material.