Musik & Ästhetik, 2021, Jg. 25, Ausgabe 99

The first prelude to the Concerts Royaux by François Couperin is examined in detail in this text to see how it could be performed today in the light of historical knowledge. The two authors assume that knowledge of the history of music theory, the craft of composition, performance practice and the cultural and historical context should go hand in hand in order to achieve a convincing result. This result can take many forms. In the text three specific possibilities of execution are presented: a version as a solo sonata with continuo, a version for harpsichord solo and a version with an added middle voice (contre partie).

In this paper I counter the formalistic rejection of musical meaning and the consequent dismissal of the analogy between music and language. Although musical formalists may concede that music can express emotions and offer sonic analogues of dynamic relations, they claim that music has no semantics, and, consequently, is not like language. However, the formalist account of linguistic meaning overlooks the pragmatic view of linguistic meaning. According to such an approach, language is a kind of action and linguistic meaning is determined by the use of language in specific contexts. Drawing on pragmatics, I will suggest that musical meaning is structurally and interestingly analogous to linguistic meaning, understood in such a way. A pragmatic understanding of music as communication, which is also supported by philosophical and empirical research on musical power to embody personal traits, is all what we need for answering positively the question of musical meaning. Musical works and musical performances are, like speech acts, communicational actions that activate and determine the vague and undetermined meaning of music, originated by music power of representing dynamic and emotional relations. Music’s determined meaning is actualized in virtue of its contexts of use (accordingly to the cultural-social conventions of practices), while, conversely, musical actions contribute meaning to its context(s).

Noise [Rauschen] is as much an everyday phenomenon as a complex acoustic, perceptual-psychological, cultural, media and cosmic one. It is a research object in physics, news technology, information theory, media studies, astronomy and philosophy. Musicology has hitherto treated noise only as a secondary phenomenon, even though numerous 19^th-century songs and waltzes deal with it and various composers since the 1910s have engaged closely with it, and it forms an important part of popular genres such as rock, techno, noise, metal, punk and industrial. Since the 2000s, few musical artists have worked as persistently with noise as Luís Antunes Pena. The composer, whose teachers included Emmanuel Nunes and, in Essen, Nicolaus A. Huber, Günther Steinke and Dirk Reith, uses instrumental and electronic noise as fully-fledged musical material that can be structured as well as expressively and atmospherically charged. In his works, Pena shows noise in different contexts and functions as foreground or background, filtering or masking effect, frame or content, disturbance or information, which directs the attention not least towards the selecting, focusing and evaluating activity of the supposedly passive auditory sense itself.

Beet­hoven’s music is imageless, is not an image of anything, and yet is an image of the whole: an imageless image. This judgement by Theodor W. Adorno on Beet­hoven barely seems connected to empirical reality. This is precisely why it raises the question of the connection between Beet­hoven’s music and the film A Clockwork Orange. Stanley Kubrick impressively shows the intermedial connections between film and music as well as film and image. In addition, he develops the aesthetic and political conflicts between these two basic media.

Structural composition is indebted to an emphatic orientation towards art music. It follows the tradition of Bach, Beet­hoven and Schoenberg, and elevates the inherent characteristic of serialism, the music of Xenakis, computer music and complexism its key principle: composing structures. The article presents five concepts that characterise such a compositional approach: musical systems, functives and functions, fields, structures and their relationships, and notation. It emerges that structural composition does not aim to formulate laws or declare one particular style as binding. Rather, it expresses a particular compositional thinking whose aim is to shape every element in every area of a musical composition, whether audible or not.

A two-volume social history of music has been published under the title Music and Society: Marketplaces, Battle Zones, Elysium. In the form of a chronology, short essays by numerous authors form a kaleidoscope of music in its social contexts. Structures of power and dependence, economic and cultural circumstances as well as the text material and subject matter of many operas situate popular and forgotten music in a history that is made experienceable as a network. An unassuming detail will often act as a point of departure for an associative intensification of the respective theme in relation to the present. The historically early events are followed in their reception throughout history, or used for a specific encapsulation of a systematic question. Although the emphasis is on European music history, this category is treated very broadly in a large variety of styles, practices and media. The book rarely gets stuck in the anecdotal or tendentious; more often, it provides surprising insights into the social embeddedness of music.

In his monograph, Rüdiger Görner focuses on aspects of acoustic and auditive narrative strategies in Kafka’s work. In order to establish a systematic connection between different types of text, he tries to show that notwithstanding the disparities, one can reconstruct a poetics of the acoustic from Kafka’s work. Görner illustrates the extent to which his theses support such a poetics with an interpretive approach that operates more in a kaleidoscopic than a linear fashion. The excurses on Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragmente raises questions that have a bearing on an aesthetics of the acoustic, but are simultaneously rooted deeply in the work’s widely-ramified reception history.