Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 108

This article pays tribute to Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in her home in Paris on June 2, 2023. More than a necrology, it serves as a topography of agendas that are or could be relevant to the reception of her work, from Bruden (1977) to Hush (2023) as well as her essays. Special emphasis is given to her Finnish environment – heritage, language, and professional surrounding.

With its history of breaking taboos and courting scandal, as well as its visually stunning stage excesses, Rammstein, one of the most controversial yet also most internationally successful German rock bands, stands for a multidimensional Gesamtkunstwerk geared towards provocation. Lyrics, music, performance, artwork, stage design, lighting and pyrotechnics are brought together on a foundation of hard-hitting sounds to form a kind of hypertrophic opera that lends a wealth of connotations to the staged pro­vocations through irony, humour and parody. The musical and scenic realisation is characterised by ambivalence and intertextuality, and thus hews to the paradigms of postmodern aesthetics. The Rammstein sound too, an amalgam of music technology and sonic aesthetics, reveals itself on closer inspection as an ambivalent mixture of sonic concepts pointing in different directions. It lays the foundation for songs that undermine any unambiguous meaning via semantic equivalences and intertextual references. Rammstein’s aesthetic is governed by the law of subverting sense through an overproduction of sense, realised in the web of contradictory references that forms their deliberately provocative Gesamtkunstwerk.

This essay examines examples of graphic notation by Dieter Schnebel against the theoretical background of notational iconicity. Central to this is the idea, influenced by the work on the grammatology of images by Jacques Derrida and Sigrid Weigel, that traces of traditional notation contained only in the design, not as code, create tonal spaces, though these exist separately from their original contexts as something movable that changes with each new reading. Using examples from Schnebel’s Glossolalie 61, the graphic work MO-NO. Musik zum Lesen as well as later works from the 1980s onwards, the author shows that even in music since 1950, received and developed notions of tonality left traces in the graphic dimension of works, and can potentially act upon our current understanding of tonality. 

Like any work of art, a CD comes into existence through the joint forces of different parties in the course of a (sometimes protracted) production process. And, like any work of art, the recording is shaped by this process. The »complete unreleased recording sessions« of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, released by Sony in September 2017, present a document that also offers outsiders insights into these circumstances and conditions. The main focus of this article is the »group achievement« of the recording. The author considers the concrete nature of the collaboration between Gould and his producer Scott, what constituted Gould’s »recording policy«, how a musician’s artistic – i.e. sonic and interpretive – decisions in the recording process come about, and to what extent the producer/engineer influences them.

On the occasion of the Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione’s 80th birthday, this essay illuminates certain aspects of his music: his interest in the smallest level of musical time, the microtemporal realm, which was opened up by computer-assisted electroacoustic music and enables composition based on individual samples; the relationship between this micro-world of sounds and the other layers of the musical fabric; the figures and granular textures that constitute his personal style in morphological terms; and the formal structures of his pieces, which the author links to the concepts of the network and the object. These observations are followed by an analysis of his piece Kitab (1992) for bass clarinet, piano, double bass and electronics, which is presented as an outstanding example of his compositional work. A few other pieces are also mentioned, with explanations of compositional procedures and the computer programmes employed, and the article concludes by suggesting how Vaggione’s music might act as a model for younger composers.

Expression in music is taken for granted by most listeners as something that does not need to be discussed at all. However, this opinion has been questioned again and again, and especially in the 20th century there are downright currents of a deliberate denial of expression. Above all, it should be clear that we are not dealing here with something naturalistically imminent, but only with something highly artificial. The article takes a detailed review of Jürgen Stolzenberg (ed.), Ausdruck in der Musik, Munich 2021, as an occasion to reflect on the span of the phenomenon of »expressivity« in music. The subject matter is a topic of music psychology, aesthetics, and especially analytic philosophy. The book under review represents an immense achievement in discussing significant fields of research and aspects of musical expression, pointing the way to further research in the fields of performance studies and the history of music aesthetics. It shows that “expression” in music is very largely a phenomenon of European cultural history over the past 300 years, but its understanding can benefit from expansion into other cultures and into the depths of history.