Musik & Ästhetik, 2019, Jg. 23, Ausgabe 89

Music for the ’Iron Era’: Rubens, Seneca and Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals
In the preface to his Libro ottavo, Monteverdi presents an aesthetic and genre-theoretical concept that involves, on one hand, a new composing style – concitato genere – and, on the other hand, aims for a contrasting and symmetrically organised formal structure in which madrigali guerrieri and madrigali amorosi are placed in opposition. The essay attempts to relate this concept to the work of the contemporaneous painter Peter Paul Rubens and the reception of the Stoic philosopher Seneca. Whereas Rubens thematises war and love in his pictures and adopts a clear pacifist position, Seneca presents a theory of the war-triggering affect of anger, which Monteverdi’s concitato genere attempts to portray.

The Problem of Sound and its Fetishisation in Music 
This essay seeks to describe a number of fundamental problems in approaches to the sonic manifestation of a musical work of art that arise from a composition-historical treatment of the timbral dimension. Following on from Theodor W. Adorno’s reflections in his text ’On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, the author examines the current situation of music and calls for a renewed critical reflection.

Music Historiography with Luhmann: Problems and Possibilities of a (Meta-)Systems-Theoretical Perspective 
Addressing musical historiography from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory would not initially seem an especially promising approach. One can, however, credit systems theory with a certain competency when it comes to some current challenges faced by historical musicology, such as the problem of defining its object and the epistemological uncertainties in the course of historical analysis. Following on from this observation, the present text presents an approach that describes music as a metasystem based on the structural coupling of biological, psychic and social systems. The article connects this to musical historiography in several respects: in addition to Luhmann’s reflections on theories of evolution and history, it asks how far the connection to biological, psychic and social system references is of historical relevance for the practice of musical historiography.

Expression of a Voice. The Way Bob Dylan Sings 
This text sets itself several tasks. Firstly, it describes the inner diversity of Bob Dylan’s voice from the early folk years, via the album Nashville Skyline, to the late ›Never Ending Tour‹ and the albums of that period. The concern here is singing and language, the inner temporality of the voice and finally the interplay between performance and musical organisation. The analysis of Janis Joplin’s 1967 performance in Monterey shows how and why there is no contradiction between the show and the structure. The text ends with analyses of three Dylan songs that concentrate on extremely different types of vocal (re)presentation: ›Blowin’ in the Wind‹ (1962), ›Workingman’s Blues #2‹ (2009) and ›That Lucky Old Sun‹ (2015).

New and Well-Known Findings in Performance Research
The expanding research area of musicological performance research is still very vague in its methodological outlines and controversial in the scope of its content. Methodologically speaking, this relates to a difference between computer-assisted and hermeneutical procedures, which also leads to differences between the respectively examined performance parameters and models in performance history (especially in the case of the 19th century). The present essay comments on these fundamental problems with a review of the following publications: Laure Spaltenstein, Berlin 1830, Vienna 1870, Munich 1910. Eine Begriffsgeschichte musikalischer Aufführung im 19. Jahrhundert, Mainz 2017; Tobias Pfleger, Entschlackte Romantik? Die Sinfonien von Ro­bert Schumann in den Interpretationen historisch informierter Aufführungspraxis, Sinzig 2016; Elvira Seiwert, Enthüllungen. Zur musikalischen Interpretation im Zeitalter ihrer technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Springer 2017.