Musik & Ästhetik, 2009, Jg. 13, Ausgabe 49

Handel´s "Belshazzar" – Musical Form and Historical Background

Of all Handel´s oratorios it is in Belshazzar (1744) that the music-theatrical character as opera and indeed ›great opera‹ emerges most clearly in a new sense that went far beyond Italian opera seria. This is not only due to the form which is characterised by the choruses representing three different peoples (Jews Persians and Babylonians) but also the subject matter: the fall of Babylon and the liberation of the Jews from Babylonian imprisonment where worldhistorical and salvation-historical significance coincide. Through the combination of biblical and Greek sources Handel´s librettist Charles Jennens showed the unique importance of the events in the year 539 BC here compressed into the space of a single day giving them a highly dramatic form and a near-mythical intensity that inspired Handel as he himself wrote to new ideas and means of expression.

Zemlinsky´s "Der Traumgörge" – a Post-Wagnerian Pentecost Play or: On the Genesis of a Pogrom from the Middle of the Christian Community

Starting from the position of a representative of the (Second) Viennese School in New Music – at the limits of tonality – this article discusses the opera as a dialectical allegory of the dream of modernity: the opposition of the village sphere and Görge´s yearning motive in Act I with reminiscences of the Tristan harmonies and the rite of passage through ostracism violence and despair. The couple´s song of lament and consolation recalling Wagner´s "Bühnenweihfestspiel" Parsifal leads into a Pentecostal awakening scene with a pastorale of harvest festival and thanksgiving as an epilogue. The composition which is in fact much more complex is made clear in the contrast between the music (textural fields iridescent effects) and the dramatic plot which can be read psychoanalytically as a breach of the paternal law or historically as violent ostracism. The character of Gertraud has aspects of a martyr while that of Görge recalls Parsifal and the »eternal Jew« and the aggression directed towards both of them arises from the latent violence of a profaned Christian community. By contrasting the latter´s formularised conventionalised language with the laments of the outcasts degraded to mere creatures it gains a fascinating polyphony of its own.

In the Beginning Was the Word...
The genesis of music as language in the 20th century

In the course of their explorations of new sound material after the Second World War poets and composers discovered spoken language as a medium with its own structure expressivity and musicality that could be moulded artificially. The universal medium of human thought communication and action here also served as a starting point for critiques of language ideology and society. Several language compositions were based on one and the same key text of Western intellectual and cultural history: the opening verses of the Gospel of St John describing the creation of the world from the logos. In analogy to the creation of the world through language – ›In the beginning was the word‹ – musicians and sound poets transformed language into music as second-order creators. Ernst Jandl´s concrete performance poem fortschreitende räude Lucanio Berio´s vocal composition a ronne and the electro-acoustic radio piece erat verbum by Alvin Curran are representative for three fundamental aspects of composing ›language as music‹: 1. the musicalisation of language by dismantling and de-semanticising it 2. the latent theatricality of pre-linguistic phonetic material and 3. the individual sonic characteristics of foreign languages and the transformation of speech into music via electronics.

Quotation – "Music About Music" – Intertextuality: Ways to Bakhtin. Vers une musique intégrale

Starting from the idea of the Romantic work of art which according to Dahlhaus cannot be any other way than it is German musicology in particular has so far been substantially interested in questions of integrality and organicity in composed music. What it might mean for music to follow other criteria than those of "organic coherence" has been discussed primarily with reference to the use of quotation in music. The present essay attempts to show how the structures of quotation and a ›music about music‹ overlap in terms of an intertextual approach to composition. The author´s prime witness for a way of composing that uses its methods to point beyond itself is the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin especially with reference to the question of how intertextual relationships can help to understand the (social) meaning of music.

Hans Kellers Functional Analysis and the Preconditions for Differential Listening

For Hans Keller musical works are the "foreground" written by the composer "instead of" repressed possibilities. His practice of Functional Analysis – preludes interludes and postludes that are performed together with an original work – is intended to make the "background" what has been repressed audible. Each FA supplements listening with a field of variants within which it moves around comparing and establishing connections. This essay takes a closer look at the FA of Mozart´s A minor piano sonata the status of the musical detail the "organism" model of traditional analysis and the relationship between musical listening and the "crisis of modern life" as Keller views it.

"Alienation" and "Authenticity"
Notes on current problems of legitimation in school music tuition

Against the background of recurring limitations and threats to music education in schools this essay takes up a number of central justifications from past discussions in order to adapt them to the current situation. The notions of "alienation" and "authenticity" form the focus; after years of rejection and neglect an attempt is made here to interpret them in a new and productive fashion for the music-pedagogical discourse. Taking cues from recent social-philosophical readings they are removed from the context of a supposedly naturally given personal essence and related to processes of appropriation used by the external world and thus directed towards itself. Following this redefinition preconditions and possibilities for an authentic musical behaviour and an authentic formation of aesthetic judgement are laid out and translated into concrete terms with reference to musicpedagogically relevant fields of work.