Musik & Ästhetik, 2002, Jg. 6, Ausgabe 22

Perspectives on a psychoanalysis of music reception

The study of the fine arts and literature has always been an integral part of the development of psychoanalytic theory whereas the various aspects of music have been reflected upon relatively little. The author concerns herself with the question as to why this is so and attributes it to Freud's understanding of language as an objective carrier of meaning which is connected inseparably with thought. Against this background neither music nor its effect can be grasped psychoanalytically because they lie beyond the designations of thought and language. For the analysists Bion and Meltzer who work in the post-Kleinian tradition the emotional experience is inherent in the pre-lingual source of the experience and is interrelated through specific processes to abstract thought. Against this background Meltzer develops an extended concept of language which finds its symbolic expression in dreams. The article raises the question to what extent music can - in a way similar to dreams - be an expression of this inner mode of communication.

Woeful legacy. On the »metapolitics« of the »Meistersinger of Nürnberg«

Of all the factors that have made Richard Wagner »the most controversial artistic figure of all time« his appropriation by Adolf Hitler stands in the greatest need of explanation. Specifically we must come to grips with Hitler's extraordinary claim that Wagner provided the spiritual sword for National Socialism. This essay argues that Hitler's idolization of Wagner was grounded in the aesthetic experience of Wagnerian opera rather than in any specific set of ideas and that the political instrumentalization of Die Meistersinger was based paradoxically on the work's overtly non-political character. What made it possible to proclaim this opera as an anticipation of Nationalist Socialist Germany was its powerful »metapolitical« subtext which may be summarized in seven points: The conception of Nuremberg as a community rather than as a society; the opera's propensity to marginalize the outsider; the espousal of charismatic leadership; the plot's subordination of individual desire under the will of the larger community; its kindling of the expectation of a savior figure; its apparent advocacy of the establishment of an exlusionary canon in poetry and music; and its embodiment of an apotheosis of »German« music.

Planning procedures in György Ligeti's »Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures«

This article is mainly concerned with the question of the relationship between planning and freedom in the history of western polyphony. Györgi Ligeti's »Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures« for three voices and seven intstrumentalists serves as an example here. The goal of the composition is to free any emotional expressions and behaviors from their societal and personal motivations and to make them absolute. Ligeti's compositional thinking can be reconstructed along the main lines of the compositons. This is made possible by three sketches from 1962 two verbal (published in 1969 by Erkki Salmenhaara) and one graphic (as yet unpublished).
The planning procedure is executed in two strands. The first strand creates a form progression consisting of five layers in which the material processed in the other strand can be ordered. The graphic sketch offers a score of the form progression; the two verbal sketches are concerned with the preparation of the materials. The composition works on several distinct levels. It carries out the formal planning procedure and only then does it introduce the previous material. The strict construction of the formal plan makes the material realization possible.The procedures which derived from various experiences with serial music have a definable goal. The process documents the unity of form and meaning and the identity of structure and semantics.

Mixed comments on the thinking and music of Pascale Criton

The musical aesthetics and the compositional method of the French composer Pascale Criton who became known above all for her work with microtonality are presented using works from the second half of the 1990s. Above all the role of the continuum - of form sound color and technique - and that of the threshold are developed. In the center of Criton's musical work are the »espaces sensibles« whereby this »sensible« stands for a non-classifiable finely sensed awareness that is found on the edge of categorization. This awareness finds itself between perception and the musical »body« which is 'artificial' to the extent that it results from constructive and prudent composing.

The language of the meeting with the other and the phenomenology of Eros. Traces of aesthetic thinking in the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas

Although one cannot speak of an aesthetic theory in the thinking of Emmanuel Lévinas traces of a reflection upon the aesthetic can be reconstructed on the basis of the entire development of this philosopher. The constant element therein is the presentation of the countenance of the other in its phenomenological concreteness: The concepts of material and form are combined with the perception of the countenance of the other which is interpreted as the first aesthetic experience ever of the subject. While Lévinas always conceives of aesthetics negatively in its usual relation to art (one has only to think of the Hebrew critique of idolatry) it becomes a possible category for the constitution of my identity through the experience of the other. The constitution of my identity has the ever vulnerable nakedness of the other as the center istead of through erotic and carnal perception of the other. This allows Lévinas to tie aesthetics back to ethics.

The voice the silence

If there is a secret that actuated literature and allowed it to return to itself from its long mythical history then it is singing. Indeed between every tale and its reader reigns an 'in between' that pulls at the reader's heart through the voice of the text. The text Geisterstimmen. Echoraum Literatur by Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig gives us an impulse to ask to what extent this secret law of the tale is the encounter with something hidden with something that can be shown using as an example the the twelfth song from Homer's Odysseus. It is a tale that takes its story from an extraordinary occurrence one that is beyond everyday experience and thus comes into conflict with truth and places us outside and in front of the story. This is the beginning of listening to what literature can be: the movement in the direction of a point from which there is no return.

Once more: A lance for Alkan

The work of the Jewish-French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) still represented a special case in the music history of the 19th century. His eccentric piano music which is characterized by immense and partially paradoxical requirements for playing technique and mnemonics juxtaposes incommensurable elements of monumentality and triviality bizarreness and realism scholarship and experiment. Thus Alkan's style distances itself aesthetically from the romantic ideals of Chopin Liszt Berlioz and Schumann: His style can rather be interpreted as an »unbridled classicism« which ties together obsolete and forward-looking elements resulting in a highly individualized though nevertheless broken musical language. Busoni's judgement that Alkan belongs to the five most important composers for the piano since Beethoven should be reexamined anew seriously and without prejudice.

Heinrich Heine - The musician as a medium of music criticism

Toward the end of the 18th century the arts had become totally bourgeois. And with this change came the advent of the literary journalistic critique. After the turn of the century the character of concerts and galleries became noticeably more mobile with musicians and pictures wandering in search of audiences. Cultural events were being advertised with increased frequency in newspapers on posters and with leaflets. Within just a few decades the opening up of the relevant markets led to a commercial art and music industry which Heinrich Heine analysed and criticized more harshly than any of his contemporaries.