Musik & Ästhetik, 2018, Jg. 22, Ausgabe 88

Sound as Form: The Development of Sound Spaces in »Mani.Mono« for Solo Spring Drum (2007) by Pierluigi Billone
Mani.Mono (2007) by Pierluigi Billone opens up a wide and fascinating sonic space that far exceeds the supposed limitations of the spring drum, an unusual instrument normally only used for individual effects. Using spectromorphological methods of analysis, this essay identifies three basic sound types that form the key elements in the system of sonic coordinates: percussive impulses, metallic noises and rumbling overtone clusters. The author examines how Billone develops, varies and combines these sound types in the course of the piece, and how, in this way, the piece’s sonic disposition significantly (co)­determines the structural and formal construction of the work.

Nominalism and Realism in the Aesthetics of Design
The starting point is a traditional debate which Bazon Brock summarized as follows: is there »an inherent property of being ›beautiful‹ in objects?« Or are »beauty and its attractive representation« nothing but »a social construct that is based on human nature, but largely reshapes these conditions culturally«? Against this background, the article addresses issues in recent design aesthetics with nominalist and realist arguments from analytical aesthetics. Looking back at Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Adorno, the author reconstructs a dialectic of the liberation of the individual aesthetic form. The article also hints at why one could follow on from aspects of Critical Theory, not least Benjamin’s anti-nominalist understanding of language and his concept of liberating objects from »the necessity to be useful«. The aesthetics of design, it argues, should go beyond the boundaries of analytical aesthetics.

»Homage Only to the Ear« – The Fantastic and Key Relations in Domenico Scarlatti’s Works
Proceeding from the rule of the octave and the associated system of standardized changes to the scales directly related to the starting scale, the 18th century saw the gradual and definitive expansion of the concept of key through new key relations that went beyond relationships of diatonic proximity. Against this background, one can view Domenico Scarlatti as an avant-gardist who especially advanced the exploration of the lower fifth, the presentation of maximum distances and the testing of new expressive means in an experimental fashion. Modulation here no longer serves the purely structural manifestation of multiplicity within the unity of the starting key, but rather, as an »autonomous artistic device« (Ludwig Holtmeier), itself becomes an object of compositional creativity and innovation. Characteristic Scarlattian means for shaping the fantastic can also be described in this context: the entrance of (pseudo-)improvisatory elements like the licence for dissonance from Italian recitative accompaniment into composed music, surrounded by drifting, ›wandering‹ harmony and a strategy of sudden expressive intensification unique to Scarlatti.

Listening for Oneself. Literature and Music in the Work of Wilhelm Heinse
Wilhelm Heinse (1746-1803) was an outsider, and this is precisely what makes him a key figure for understanding the ›saddle period‹ between the Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism. He is one of the few authors from the late 18th century whose literary and theoretical writings deal with music and visual art in equal measure, while showing a keen awareness of the differences between the different arts. Taking up contemporary debates on the media-based, semiotic and aesthesiological commonalities and differences between the arts conducted by such writers as Dubos, Batteux, Diderot, Lessing, and Herder, Heinse develops a concept for a non-normative aesthetics of the particularity of the subject and the arts. Against this background, his music novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (begun in 1795/96), which caused some controversy among his contemporaries, can be read as a sophisticated play with intermedia references and a literary formulation of an emancipatory aesthetic of listening for oneself.

A »Last Symphony«? – Brahms’s Third
We have no way of establishing beyond doubt whether the introduction to Mozart’s KV 543 only applies to it or to the three last ones, whether the transition to the finale in Schumann’s D minor symphony ended up too long in relation to the finale itself, and whether Brahms, at the end of his Third Symphony, composed not only his farewell to that piece but also – for himself – to the symphonic genre as a whole. If so, it would make the Third his »last« per intentionem, and the Fourth the »after-last«. This is supported not only by the circumstances and statements of his last years, but also by a specific »extremism« – culminating in the abruptly cancelled apotheosis of the finale – which is perhaps better ignored in order to gain familiarity with his music.

In Search of Boulez: A Review of Martin Zenck’s book
This review considers Martin Zenck’s extended examination of the work of Pierre Boulez. Zenck’s approach seeks to correct earlier clichéd views of the composer as an extreme rationalist by relating his music to gesture, dance and theatre, and also by supplementing traditional score analysis with a phenomenological description of listening experience. These are productive directions for research, but the book suffers from many structural problems, including repetitiveness and frequently diffuse writing, and has not been carefully proofread, which impedes its effectiveness.