Musik & Ästhetik, 2019, Jg. 23, Ausgabe 92

Art Song as a Sonic Symbol: Belcanto in Vocal Music After 1960
The experimental exploration of new vocal possibilities in the 1960s expanded the repertoire of vocal utterances with noise-like practices. In the light of these new developments, the question of what role the conventional sonorities of the voice from traditional art song could play in the experimental vocal works of the avant-garde in the second half of the 20th century disappeared from view. This article offers exemplary descriptions of five different compositional strategies for using traditional art song in text-based, experimental vocal compositions (affirmation, negation, ambivalence, paradox and integration). These are laid out using examples by Luigi Nono, Chaya Czernowin, Dieter Schnebel, Michael Reudenbach, Luciano Berio, Helmut Lachenmann, Morton Feldman, Salvatore Sciarrino, José Louis Torá, John Cage and Carola Bauckholt. In the process, it emerges that the sonic world of art song has different meanings ascribed to it that focus to a notable extent on questions or theorems from the European philosophy of the subject, and are at times contrary or even mutually exclusive. The specific sonic character of art song becomes a sonic symbol whose content is essentially interchangeable.

Musical Activism and Commitment
Different Contemporary Compositional Approaches Share an Activist Character. The essay argues that this activism is accompanied by a sentimental music whose forms are satire, elegy and idyll. It then confronts sentimental music with the older concept of committed music, whose idea recalls Sartre, and whose necessary move towards silence it elaborates with reference to two works by Jacques Wildberger. At the end, it argues the case for a political music that does not rest on any statement, but rather speaks through its work on the material.

»… an diesem Orte hätte ich Dich wol nicht gesucht!« Johannes Brahms and the heritage of Ricercar
The central movements from Brahms’s First Symphony op. 68, unlike the outer ones, were already interpreted by contemporaneous critics as a problematic retreat to a chamber music idiom that did not do full justice to the paradigm of the symphonic style following on directly from Beethoven. This article offers a reading of the second movement from the perspective of a creative retracing and reception of Bach’s Fugue in E major BWV 878. The comparison is based on an understanding of fugal counterpoint that was realised more in the seventeenth-century ricercar than the more sonata-like fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which dominated the modern didactics of fugal counterpoint until recently. Preconceptions about Bachian counterpoint paving the way for Classicism that came about in twentieth-century aesthetics are likewise obstacles to a more nuanced understanding of Brahms’s reception of Bach, since one cannot assume that the ricercar tradition in the nineteenth century had been suppressed to the extent suggested by the fugal theory of the twentieth century. The present analysis provides explanatory models for an installation of symphonic form on the basis of combinatorial procedures applied to contrapuntal cells; these inhibit and counteract the developmental premises of sonata-like formal construction but, in so doing, actually intensify their effect.

Right Through Durch: Insights from a Saxophone Quartet by Fabien Lévy
With Les deux ampoules d’un sablier peu à peu se comprennent (1996) for solo harp, Fabien Lévy (* 1968) set the degré zero for the compositional concepts he would subsequently pursue. These approaches were further developed in Durch, in memoriam Gérard Grisey (1998) for saxophone quartet. As the main focus of the article, this piece serves not only to enrich a perception-based engagement with Lévy’s work, but also to trace certain compositional tendencies he inherited and adapted, which also appear in his later works. Via the tension between »analytical« structure and sensually perceptible form, Durch is permeable to a variety of musical traditions; among other things, these are used to produce virtual voices.

Romantic Unfitness for Life: On Donizetti’s Reception of Schubert’s »Die schöne Müllerin« in »Lucia di Lammermoor«
Die schöne Müllerin by Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert is, alongside Die Winterreise and Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, one of the most famous Romantic song cycles and left its mark in several areas, not least in literary history. But a very early reception of one of the songs from Die schöne Müllerin, perhaps the first notable one, took place within music history and remained undiscovered – until now. None other than Gaetano Donizetti, the most prominent exponent of belcanto alongside Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini and, like Schubert, born in 1797, adopted no less than five bars of one of the songs, slightly modified, in his opera Lucia di Lammermoor, premiered on 26 September 1835. Parallels in subject matter between the model and the corresponding aria by Donizetti also suggest the possibility that the famous bel canto composer was not spontaneously following a singular inspiration, but rather engaged closely with the song and developed it further.

The Obituary as a Form of Reflection: Sociological Observations on Hans-Peter Jahn’s Book on Otto Tomek
These deliberations on the book on Otto Tomek by Hans-Peter Jahn are intended not only as a review, but also as a sociological commentary. The book itself is praised not only as a biography of a commendable colleague that draws on material he himself gathered throughout his long professional life, but also as a self-reflective, and thus exemplary portrait of a professional practice. It deals with a key position in the cultural field: the »patron« of innovative artists. Insights into these artists are combined with insights into the institutional growth of New Music in Germany, as well as the field-specific role of the public radio introduced in Germany by the Allies. Jahn intersperses this with equally relevant critical observations about the differences between the radio practices of today and of those early times. They could provide a starting point for a further study.