Musik & Ästhetik, 2020, Jg. 24, Ausgabe 93

Calligraphy is appreciated as an art form in many cultures, yet the stature of calligraphy in Chinese culture is unmatched. From the early period, it has been considered a supreme visual art form, a mean of self expression and cultivation. For centuries, calligraphy has profound meaning in Chinese society. Hardly surprising then that it is one of the most important sources of inspiration for contemporary Chinese composers. Yet, unlike folk tunes, pipa melodies, or Peking opera percussion patterns, as materials or elements for composition, Chinese calligraphy is elusive and almost too abstract to be rendered into aural experience. Still many composers tried. Wen Deqing has engaged extensively with calligraphy in his musical compositions and developed unique approaches based on the art form for nearly two decades. To explore the potential and expressivity in such an artistic endeavor, this essay provides a brief survey of the art form, and traces the usage of calligraphy in recent Chinese new music by composers such as Chou Wen-chung, Chen Yim, Qu Xiaosong and others. Then the essay examines closely Wen Deqing’s compositional approaches based on calligraphy in two large series of works.

The young Wagner’s encounter with Italian opera, especially the works of Vincenzo Bellini, played a decisive part in his compositional development. Starting from reflections on Wagner’s and Bellini’s musical training, the text discusses what influence Bellini’s Norma still may have had on Wagner’s mature works. Here the aria »Meco all’altar di Venere« proves to have been a model for numbers in Wagner’s operas that take a catastrophic turn. In Tannhäuser he deals with the bel canto aria, which in turn relates to the topic of the singing contest, as this would automatically have been associated with the bel canto tradition in the 1840s. Finally, the author compares the melodic shaping in the finales in Norma and Tristan and Isolde in order to discuss the question raised in secondary literature as to whether they are similar, and whether Bellini may even have acted as a model.

Adorno’s thesis of the language-likeness of music is problematised and developed further from a language-pragmatic perspective. Music is language-like because it mimetises the power of language – or, more precisely, it mimetises the communicative power of language. According to this assertion, aesthetic experience calls upon us to make regulative use of communicative reason.

The language-likeness of music constitutes a central topos in Adorno’s philosophy of music. Music’s language-likeness was meant to secure its expressive possibilities, its comprehensibility and the binding nature of its forms. With the end of tonal music, however, its language-likeness became precarious. This article seeks to lay out Adorno’s understanding of language-likeness in post-tonal music by relating it to another central idea in his aesthetics: the similarity of poetic language to music. In doing so, it shows that, on the one hand, music-like language transgresses the boundaries of ordinary language, but, on the other hand, can only act as a model for a post-tonal language of music to a limited extent. Relating the language-likeness of music to the music-likeness of language thus results in a more nuanced understanding of linguistic and musical attempts at transgression. While every form of language art has to work through the terminologies of language, the musical forms that post-tonal music must work through are more fluid.