Musik & Ästhetik, 2019, Jg. 23, Ausgabe 90

Essay on John Dowland and Popularity
The article investigates the possibilities and limits of regarding John Dowland and his music as »popular«, recently promoted in the aftermath of Sting’s Dowland-recordings. This well-established image of Dowland’s historical and contemporary reception is somewhat precarious. While on the one hand certainly not engaged in emphatic popular music of his time and decidedly considering himself a learned musician, Dowland’s marketing strategies, resulting in the creation of a public aesthetic self, on the other hand produce points of contact for today’s perspectives of popularity. Analysis of the song Flow my teares (Lachrimae) exemplarily tries to transfer questions of authenticity and masquerade to Dowland’s music. It reveals a playing with ›popular‹ as well as with ›learned‹ elements and their successful blending is offered as a possible cause for Dowland’s continuous, broad and immediate appeal.

The Performance »Nature Morte« as a Play with the Medium of »Performance«: A Random Composition in Dialog with the City by Artur Zagajewski
The following text describes the playfulness of performances using the example Nature Morte (2013), a musical composition by polish composer Artur Zagajewski. The main aim of the paper is to name two levels of this »game« or playfulness. First of all, the basic category »alea« and randomness methods in general. They influence sound material. During the performance the composition allows involvement of the soundscape of the city. The »game« will also appear as a game with(in) the medium of performance itself. The text introduces such interpretative tools as »game« (alea) by Roger Caillois and uses them to analyze the traditional term of music performance (based on the search criteria by Erika Fischer-Lichte). The analysis shows that the random city sounds, beginning with futurism through Pierre Boulez and John Cage to modern polish music, affect the form of music-piece, but first of all of the performance itself and the way it is perceived by the audience.

Materials for a History of Modern Vocal Music
The turbulent development of vocal music after 1960 drew its dynamism not only from the revolutionary situation of the time, but also from recent literature. This specific development began with poets such as Christian Morgenstern, who is considered the inventor of sound poetry. The Zurich Dadaists (Hugo Ball, Walter Serner and Tristan Tzara) took up this idea and spread it throughout Europe from 1916 onwards. Marcel Duchamp brought it to New York, where it was adopted by John Cage and his associates after 1945 before being re-imported to Europe shortly afterwards. In Europe the foremost exponent was Kurt Schwitters, who already gained a wider audience for sound poetry before 1933 with his Ursonate, especially with the record he recorded himself. In the wake of Cage, Schwitters was also rediscovered (Ligeti). A new kind of aesthetic developed from this, one that differed from the traditional approach in no longer viewing composition as the renewed collection of familiar sounds, but rather as the production of new ones. The theoretical foundation for this came once again from literature, namely the works of the »Stuttgarter Konkreten« around Max Bense.

Parodies of the Tristan Chord
In analogy to the theoretical examination of the decomposition of tonality, which believed to make a first crisis in the Tristan chord, a compositional-semantic detachment process from Tristan’s pathos can be observed. The traditional figures used by Wagner and their romanticization, which provide the sublimity of Tristan chord motifs, represent the material that the various parody methods are aimed at. Prominent examples of Wagner himself, Debussy, Strauss, Hindemith, Eisler up to pop singer Max Raabe trace a development in which, far from political implications, the metaphysical Tristan eroticism sinks deeper and below the belt.

The Curator as Artist
Although the position of the art curator consistently gained power and influence in the second half of the 20th century, this development was further accelerated with the dawn of the 21st. Not only in visual art, but also in music, aspects of curatorial work have developed into an independent artistic practice. Possible artistic consequences of this development are examined with reference to the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016), curated by the US artist collective DIS, and a concert by the Berlin group Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop from the same year, curated by Tilman Kanitz.

The Endangered Freedom of Art: A Commentary on Hanno Rauterberg
In three books, the art historian and critic Hanno Rauterberg examines the process of change in the art world towards post-autonomy. This change raises certain questions anew: the quality of art and its social place. As the freedom of art has recently been questioned by art and its institutions, but also in social media, Rauterberg combines this diagnosis with a look at the crisis of the liberal-democratic model of society in Western countries. He asks: how free is art?