Musik & Ästhetik, 2018, Jg. 22, Ausgabe 85

Reflexes of Invisibility: Wagner, Hanslick and »Judaism in Music« – The bourgeois anti-Semitism of the later 19th century kept ›the Jews‹ at a distance as ›invisible‹ outsiders. The constant demand to assimilate forced them to be as inconspicuous as possible, and simultaneously fomented the suspicion that they were undermining the majority culture from within by ingratiating themselves with no identity of their own. The calculus of political power in anti-Jewish sentiment can be clearly seen in the supposedly antithetical figures of Richard Wagner and Eduard Hanslick, who was of Jewish descent on his mother’s side. Wagner combines his distrust towards ›invisible‹ Jews with a warning of cultural decline, as well as an aggressive self-stimulation as an artist. Hanslick uses his reservations about the ›Jewish‹ as an attribute for a socio-cultural self-examination as an assimilated Jew, and also as an ironic weapon against Wagner. This can be observed in exemplary fashion in the debate about the figure of Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, who is suspected of being an anti-Semitic caricature.

»Form can wait«. Consideration of form in Lachenmann’s »Salut für Caudwell« – This paper endeavors to explore and compare various formal outlines of Salut. There are aspects of the discourse on Lachenmann’s formal thinking which led me to the conclusion that discussing its musical progression by building upon research previously conducted would shed interesting light on issues concerning perspective, perception, and sensibility. The essay’s central question involves the notion of structural demarcation, or partitioning, and in connection therto, how the ear perceives beginnings and endings as concerns long-range progressions. The results of this comparative analysis – often striking in terms of the sheer diversity of opinion – will be aligned against a recently-discovered formal design by Lachenmann himself, which will in part support, but ultimately question the way the work is commonly understood, at least on a structural level.

Index and icon, metaphor and metonym in music – In this paper, it is argued that the widespread attempts to use notions taken from semiotics, linguistics or literary theory – such as symbol, index, iconic sign, metaphor and metonym – to analyze the meanings of music are most often misguided. Index in particular – contrary to popular belief – does not occur in music. Of all the notions considered here – metaphor and metonym, index and icon – only the last may be applied to music in any essential way. That does not mean, however, that all musical meanings are so uniform in character. On the contrary: they are highly diverse, but notions mechanically imported from other fields are not suited to describing that diversity. The paper concludes with the suggestion that in order to produce such a description, one must endeavour to construct specifically musical distinctions and categorizations of meanings.

Nicht von oben und nicht von unten. Ferdinand Zehentreiters Konstruktion einer Musikästhetik – Ferdinand Zehentreiter’s aesthetics of music grasps music as a pre-conceptual medium, as a »logical space of meaning sui generis beside language«, and credits it with its own »dimension of knowledge«. Following on from C.S. Peirce and philosophical pragmatism, seventeen chapters trace the development of this understanding of music with reference in key texts from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Michel Foucault. As Zehentreiter himself speaks of a »construction process«, one is hesitant to reproach him for one-sidedness or omissions in his account. What he offers is an aesthetics of music that is impressive in its argumentative richness and cohesion, not a history thereof – admittedly, an aesthetics of music that only rarely examines music as such.

A Discursive Minefield: Nietzsche and Wagner – The relationship between Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche is a decisive, yet extremely tangled constellation for aesthetic modernity. The paradox of this discursive movement is that it was, of all things, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of music that paved the way, via a number of enthusiastic misunderstandings, for a modernity that would liberate itself from the metaphysical foundations of art and philosophy, replacing the dualism of essence and appearance with expressive constellations of semblance. In Nietzsche, this was articulated in the form of a ›performative philosophy of music‹ – that is, a philosophy that elevated music to the form of a ›post-metaphysical‹ thought in which form and content are impossible to separate. Written as a double review – discussing Federico Celestini’s book on Nietzsche’s philosophy of music and an essay collection about Wagner and Nietzsche edited by the Basel research centre eikones – the present text retraces this discursive movement.

National Anthems – Using the national anthems of the USA, France, Italy, Russia and Germany, the author attempts to establish a connection between the music’s character and the »national mentality« represented by it, in whatever sense, that goes beyond mere analogy.