Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 110

In our view, the social character of listening has changed radically. Listeners of traditional old music can perceive themselves as belonging to a counterculture, as can listeners of battle rap sessions. We regard the fact that they do this as a rational decision. We are experimenting with a concept of text that is close to the musical concept of a work and/or directly neighbouring it. For us, there is no such thing as »the opera«; nor is there an opera crisis or a crisis of music theatre. There is a playful approach to opera as a performance, to its proximity to ritual and to the desire to sing along to well-known arias, as is also the case with pop songs; all of this by allowing theatrical processes to take place on several levels of the text while the music remains ambigue.

Gustav Mahler’s works suggest an intimate knowledge of historic schemata, presumably rooted in Mahler’s education at the Viennese Conservatory (1875-78) which was still distinctly oriented towards church music and thoroughbass practice. His Ninth Symphony in particular features the »baroque« Romanesca schema in a very prominent role, incorporating it into all four movements. This paper examines the compositional methods of distortion and transformation which allow it to be woven into the very fabric of Mahler’s last completed work.

In the recent discussion within analytical philosophy musical movement is understood as an irreal (imagined, fictional) categorical property. According to the approach proposed in the present study, musical movement can be considered as the ›manifestation‹ of the disposition or power of sonic configurations to produce non-imaginary ideas of movement to perceivers appropriately disposed. Being real in a bidirectional dispositional sense, musical movement has its ›base‹ or ›ground‹ in properties of sounds as well as of human perceivers. Both philosophers discussed, Hegel and Plessner, ground the power of music to move in formal, invariable properties of sounds. Hegel’s idealist conception of the unity of body and mind and Plessner’s phenomenological anthropology centered around the notion of ›excentric positionality‹ support the idea of a direct impact of music on human enminded body. This idea helps us eschew the need for resorting to metaphorical transference or imaginative perception.

The article explores directions of music innovation in terms of aesthetics and style, with a focus on the influence of Western European modernism on the new creations of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian music. The article also examines modifications of these influences in the work of several outstanding individuals and their importance in undermining the dogma of Socialist Realism. In the context of this article, the term »normative aesthetics,« as used in Soviet art literature, refers to a set of external norms and forms imposed on art by Soviet ideology. The main norms: nationalism as closeness to the masses, in other words, classness; ideologicalness; partyness. The basis for these norms was declared Marxism as a socio-political theory, but in practice, the content of these norms was determined by adapting them to the Communist Party’s current policies, which were declared at its so-called plenums or general meetings.