Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 103

In the 1960s, Pierre Boulez was in discussion for the position of directing or organising a Max Planck Institute for music. This institute was never founded, partly because of internal resistance. In the 1970s, Boulez founded IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) in Paris. The present text reconstructs the sequence of events.

Peter Ruzicka’s String Quartet no. 7, composed in 2016, with a duration of roughly 40 minutes, is analysed against a twofold background. The first element of this background is his previous quartet music, in which the overarching tendencies of his compositional approach developed or reflected on themselves; the second is the poetic thought of Paul Valéry, from whose writings the title … possible-à-chaque-instant is taken. As clearly as Ruzicka refers to core points in his previous output, it is equally clear how this piece initiates a new phase of his work.

There is still a striking lack of serious music-theoretical literature on Richard Strauss. In addition, it seems doubtful how far something like Schoenberg’s tonal thinking, shaped as it was by »bourgeois« theories, can serve as an explanatory model for the advanced harmonic language of a composer who came from an older, more pragmatic craftsmanship tradition. While the »idea of a dynamic sequence of harmonic surface processes« (L. Holtmeier) is by no means central to Schoenberg’s understanding of tonality, this is precisely what distinguishes Strauss’s music: the locally dominant key is usually clearly identifiable, but often completely unpredictable. I will therefore discuss an eclectic analytical approach drawing on, among other things, traditional thinking in (freely alterable) scale degrees and structural voices and take methods from the historical rudiments of composition as its point of departure. It then becomes clear that in Strauss, the underlying framework of voices is often merely slightly distorted or alternatively filled. On the other hand, one can observe how individual harmonies are lifted away from their ›home scale degree‹, as it were, while the typical chordal framework remains intact and thus retains the sound of its innate functionality. Here it would seem appropriate to speak of degree-independent functionality (as a kind of opposite pole to the phenomenon of defunctionalised degrees).

Starting from the question, »What is Early Music?«, the author seeks to describe the state of Early Music and historically informed performance practice in 2022. In addition to concerts and recordings that claim a certain authenticity through labels (such as »authentic edition«), one can observe a selective attitude towards the insights of performance practice and a virtually unlimited freedom in crossover and collage projects. In the ethical and art-aesthetic individualism of postmodernity, however, it is also necessary to deconstruct or even rethink authenticity. To escape the dilemma between supposed authenticity and aesthetic arbitrariness, the author suggests focusing on Early Music as a craft that can be learned and transmitted, and offers a brief set of instructions for shaping an auditory and sonic space in the tension between craft and utopia that enables existential experiences of after-sound and pre-emergence.

Future is more than simply the passing of time. Future, like time itself, is also a raw material that we exploit. In this respect, Beet­hoven and the optimism for the future that one associates with his name are a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the future is shaped, yet on the other hand, it is thus colonised and made available, meaning that all futures today already appear to have been thought; the future becomes nostalgia. In addition, the derivation of the future from the past leads to an accumulation of pasts that threaten to suffocate the present. In this essay, the resulting contradictions are worked out in three invocations tracing the aesthetic, historical and philosophical aspects as combined in the person, the historical effect and the reception of Beet­hoven. The question is whether such a cultivation of future actually leaves any real, shapeable future.

There is barely another composer who has become as broad a part of society’s collective knowledge as Beet­hoven: not only individual works (or parts thereof), but also fragments of his life story and even his physiognomy have been incorporated into fields of everyday practices that are only distantly related to the music world, if at all. He became an icon of cultural self-presentation. Not only has his work remained present in a performance history that has now lasted for centuries; he himself has also become a subject of cultural appropriation. The present article takes three books that were published for the 250^th anniversary of his birth and deal with the affinity of his output for adaptation in other arts – from film via visual art to the design arts of everyday culture – as examples with which to discuss the problems of such a reception history. In all of these fields, the issue is the symbolically charged nature of the figure and work of the historical composer, the integration of the work into newer strategies of music marketing, reinterpretations and parodies, as well as other forms of productive appropriation of the work and the figure: the survival of an œuvre (and its composer) not as the performance history of an output, then, but as work on a cultural legacy.