Musik & Ästhetik, 2010, Jg. 14, Ausgabe 54

When Music Gives Rise to Philosophical Thought
Foucault As a Listener of Boulez

Foucault wrote far less about music than about literature or visual art; nonetheless he repeatedly emphasised how much influence contemporary music had had on him especially that of Boulez by tearing him away from Hegelian dialectics. What Boulez shifts in Foucault´s thought is not a view of art but philosophical activity itself. How can music alter the logical structuring and theoretical preconditions of thought? This article seeks to measure that influence and thus to understand the level at which philosophy and music can meet.

The Semantics of Textual and Musical Symmetry in Bach´s Cantata »Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit« (BWV 106)

This article attempts to explain the semantic structure and genesis of the earliest Bach cantatas (primarily BWV 106 but also BWV 4 and 131). The collection of texts and the musical structure especially in Actus tragicus (BWV 106) show a precise axial symmetry; the similar schemata of »outer« shaping in the cantata do not coincide with the »inner« logic of the tonal fabric however. Because of this formal profile the article seeks to interpret the semantic structure of the cantata.

Multiple Movements Within Single Movements – Single Movements Within Multiple Movements
Symphonic Composition in the First Half of the 19th Century

This essay argues that the formal idea of multiple movements within single movements and vice versa functioned as one possible compositional tool as early as the first half of the 19th century. Using various examples from the symphonic repertoire of the time the author shows how individual the respective realisations of this infinitely modifiable multi-dimensional formal idea are such that they resist any fixed schema such as that of »double function form« in Newman´s sense. The following motives for the emergence of this formal idea are named: the growing awareness of the problems inherent in the conventional four-movement form the increasing dominance of content aesthetics the aesthetic demand for organic totality and the postulate of individuality.

Cultural Policy and the Cultivation of Music: Social Impulses in the Education-Political Thought of Leo Kestenberg (1882-1962)

Against the background of his biographical experiences Kestenberg´s achievements for educational policy are described from a present-day perspective. We are dealing with a committed social democratic artist who caused decisive reforms in the educational policy of the 1920s that still affect the training of musical teachers to this day. It would be reductive however to view Kestenberg merely as an educational reformer. His true significance lies in his close connection of the social democratic idea of people´s education and the claim of autonomous artistic values. His culture-political initiatives in Berlin set new standards and were later continued in Tel Aviv. As a European intellectual influenced by his Jewish background he embodied the union of an artist pedagogue and cultural politician.

Adorno reads Benjamin
Language and Mimesis in Adorno´s Theory of Musical Reproduction

In his notes for a theory of musical reproduction Theodor W. Adorno made several references to the writings of Walter Benjamin. At one point as a suggestion for further investigation Adorno wrote: »Benjamins Sprachtheorie behandeln« (»deal with Benjamin´s theory of language«). In spite of these references Adorno´s notes do not contain a fully developed discussion of Benjamin´s »Sprachtheorie« in its relation to his own theory of musical performance. This article explores this relationship by examining two central concepts of Adorno´s theory of musical reproduction »language« and »mimesis«. First of all the linguistic character of music manifests itself in the musical text as the point of departure of musical performance. In Adorno´s description of the musical text as »intentionslos« (non-intentional) music reminds language of its original paradisal state of »unmittelbare Mitteilbarkeit« as described in Benjamin´s early essay Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (1916). At a second level musical notation is »not simply a sign system but rather a model for imitation«. The imitative quality of musical reproduction (with its gestural connotations) finds its expression in Adorno´s concept of »mimesis« and bears close resemblance to Benjamin´s definition of mimesis as »unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit« (nonsensuous similarity) in: Über das mimetische Vermögen (1933). In its resistance to conceptuality the mimetic dimension of musical reproduction tries to escape the inexorable process of rationalization and to bring to life the immediate quality of the original experience. Music in this way is always »ein Abhören« an echo or remembrance of something that is no longer present.

Unspoken Knowledge Unconscious Desire: The Musical Work and Its Representation in the Light of Early Romantic Hermeneutics. With an appendix on Adorno´s »Theory of Musical Reproduction«

Practically unnoticed in the musical performance practice of one and a half centuries the theorists of early German Romanticism in particular Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis developed an understanding of work realisation around 1800 from which performers of musical works in the classical scene which is still largely dominated by suffocating traditionalism should draw inspiration. Essentially it is the Romantic realisation of infinite sense that should be made fruitful. It means that »every outstanding work of whatever kind knows more than it says and wants more than it knows« (Friedrich Schlegel) and consequently demands that one bring to the surface some of what the work knows without speaking and wants without knowing. As an example of this free form of work realisation the article presents the possibility of a piece that hints at a style from a different period and thus enables its historical provenance and destination to be experienced sensually. An appendix defends such an approach to works against Adorno´s conservative notions of musical »reproduction«. Instead of Adorno´s implicit starting question – how can the work be (re)presented meaningfully with the greatest possible fidelity to the text? – performers should ask: how can a (re)presentation of the work based on the text convey as much experience with the work as possible?

The »Confusion in the Basic Questions of Morality«
Legal Theory After 1945 and Adorno´s »Theory of Musical Reproduction«

Adorno´s understanding of the musical work oscillates between an apodictic rhetoric that seems to promise instructions for »true« and »correct« interpretation and a clearly relativistic hence precisely not prescriptive indeterminacy of content. These inconsistencies take on meaning in the context of the highly pronounced »confusion in the basic questions of morality« (Hannah Arendt) prevalent in post-war Germany. A comparison between the theorems of the relativist legal theorist Gustav Radbruch and Adorno´s reproduction theory shows that both circle the same basal dilemma: the discrepancy between two forms of (legal and musical-interpretative) correctness. Firstly there is correctness in the sense of the musical or legal text which must be followed faithfully; but secondly a correctness in the sense of justice to society or the work which can only be achieved through an interpretative act that goes beyond the text.