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In our view, the social character of listening has changed radically. Listeners of traditional old music can perceive themselves as belonging to a counterculture, as can listeners of battle rap sessions. We regard the fact that they do this as a rational decision. We are experimenting with a concept of text that is close to the musical concept of a work and/or directly neighbouring it. For us, there is no such thing as »the opera«; nor is there an opera crisis or a crisis of music theatre. There is a playful approach to opera as a performance, to its proximity to ritual and to the desire to sing along to well-known arias, as is also the case with pop songs; all of this by allowing theatrical processes to take place on several levels of the text while the music remains ambigue.

Pluriversum Oper

Gustav Mahler’s works suggest an intimate knowledge of historic schemata, presumably rooted in Mahler’s education at the Viennese Conservatory (1875-78) which was still distinctly oriented towards church music and thoroughbass practice. His Ninth Symphony in particular features the »baroque« Romanesca schema in a very prominent role, incorporating it into all four movements. This paper examines the compositional methods of distortion and transformation which allow it to be woven into the very fabric of Mahler’s last completed work.

Kompositorische Veränderungsprozesse des Romanesca-Modells in Gustav Mahlers Neunter Symphonie

»Verzerrung« und Einheit

In the recent discussion within analytical philosophy musical movement is understood as an irreal (imagined, fictional) categorical property. According to the approach proposed in the present study, musical movement can be considered as the ›manifestation‹ of the disposition or power of sonic configurations to produce non-imaginary ideas of movement to perceivers appropriately disposed. Being real in a bidirectional dispositional sense, musical movement has its ›base‹ or ›ground‹ in properties of sounds as well as of human perceivers. Both philosophers discussed, Hegel and Plessner, ground the power of music to move in formal, invariable properties of sounds. Hegel’s idealist conception of the unity of body and mind and Plessner’s phenomenological anthropology centered around the notion of ›excentric positionality‹ support the idea of a direct impact of music on human enminded body. This idea helps us eschew the need for resorting to metaphorical transference or imaginative perception.

Hegel, Plessner und die dispositionale Realität musikalischer Bewegung

Künstliche Kreativität?

Liedforschung

The article explores directions of music innovation in terms of aesthetics and style, with a focus on the influence of Western European modernism on the new creations of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian music. The article also examines modifications of these influences in the work of several outstanding individuals and their importance in undermining the dogma of Socialist Realism. In the context of this article, the term »normative aesthetics,« as used in Soviet art literature, refers to a set of external norms and forms imposed on art by Soviet ideology. The main norms: nationalism as closeness to the masses, in other words, classness; ideologicalness; partyness. The basis for these norms was declared Marxism as a socio-political theory, but in practice, the content of these norms was determined by adapting them to the Communist Party’s current policies, which were declared at its so-called plenums or general meetings.

Zur ästhetischen Überwindung der sowjetischen Normierung 1940-1970

Avantgarde im Baltikum

Frauen, Freies und Kollektives: die Donaueschinger Musiktage 2023

Drei Stränge, viele Perspektiven

Postautonome Kunst

Pascal Rudolphs Studie über präexistente Musik in den Filmen Lars von Triers

Annäherung aus wechselnden Perspektiven

Visuelle Perspektiven auf Musik

Improvisation als Hermeneutik, Hermeneutik als Improvisation

Innere Beteiligung und Auratisches Musizieren als Leitideen des Musiklernens

Erfülltes Miteinander in Musik

Felix Diergartens Bruckner-Biographie

Er war nicht unser

Proust Questionnaire

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 110

When it comes to listening, whether to music or to discourse, the answer to the question: how many ears are involved? depends, of course, on the number of listeners; but one thing seems quite sure: it will be a multiple of two. Ears, in the act of listening, work by pairs. There seem to be no exceptions …

Wie viele Ohren? Oder: Der Adressat des Hörens

Fojan Gharibnejad’s <italic>-O- For Trained Female Vocal Cords, Face and Body</italic> (2019) centers its topic on women’s emancipation, self-discovery with a particular focus on masturbation and orgams. This approx. 25 minute-multimedia theater work for solo voice, three video projections and audience participation re-imagines Jacques Lacan’s theory of »mirror stage« as one for a woman who discovers her subjectivity through exploration of her body and emotions. This article offers a feministic interpretation of the work by a musical analysis using the concept of l’écriture féminine.

Weiblicher Orgasmus und Feier der Klitoris

-O- von Fojan Gharibnejad

In Bruckner’s third-to-last motet, the <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> of 1885, sections of great stylistic variety stand side by side, from monophonic chant to the pure diatonicism of a artifical ›cecilian‹ style to the third-related chords of late Romanticism. With this polystylism, <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> takes to extremes a tendency that has characterized Bruckner’s sacred music since the 1860s, and for this reason <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> lends itself to a pointed analytical discussion of Bruckner’s sacred music in its liturgical, social, and stylistic context.

Anton Bruckner zum 200. Geburtstag

Ecce musicus magnus

The paper deals with the performance history of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic works in Japan before the Second World War and the cultural-political events connected with it. While Mahler’s symphonies had been a regular feature of concert programs in Japan in the 1920s, in the 1930s attempts to establish a »Japanese harmony« increasingly challenged the previously uncritically adopted music from Germany and Austria. Klaus Pringsheim, who was convinced of the universality of functional harmony, became an enemy of this movement and was dismissed from the Tokyo Music Academy in 1937. His commitment to Mahler in Japan was also criticized. A study of Japanese music journals, however, makes it clear that Mahler’s music did not disappear from the Japanese scene until the last year of the war, despite the intensification of German-Japanese alliance politics.

Die Mahler-Rezeption in der japanischen Musikpublizistik bis 1945

Der junge Mann folgt den Anweisungen

Gibt es eine geschlechtsspezifische Musikalität?

The essay discusses Nikolaus Matthes’ new composition of the lost <italic>St. Marc Passion</italic> by J.S. Bach. It argues that this kind of compositions in historical style should be understood as the compositional representation of a certain interpretation of Bach’s music: they transform contemporary performance practice into new works (I). The article sketches the history of the images of Bach’s music as an oscillation between theology and aesthetics: Bach as <italic>Thomaskantor</italic> or as <italic>Altklassiker</italic> (II). Matthes’ <italic>Markuspassion</italic> is argued to merge the two currents by opting, on the one side, for an opera-style composition full of thrilling effects, and, on the other hand, by representing Bach as sharing the baroque sensibility Walter Benjamin famously identified with the endless multiplication of allegories within the inescapable disaster of immanence (III).

Überlegungen zu Nikolaus Matthes’ Markuspassion nach Johann Sebastian Bach

Trauermusik der Immanenz

Zu Daniel Martin Feiges Musik für Designer

Nicht nur für Designer: hermeneutische Musikphilosophie zur Einführung

Arne Stollbergs Figuren der Resonanz

Ästhetik als angewandte Physiologie

Matteo Nanni über Luigi Nonos Programm des politischen Hörens

»Öffnung zum Unbekannten«

Ins Unbekannte von Simon Tönies

Boulez’ Polyphonie X in neuer Perspektivierung

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 109

This article pays tribute to Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in her home in Paris on June 2, 2023. More than a necrology, it serves as a topography of agendas that are or could be relevant to the reception of her work, from <italic>Bruden</italic> (1977) to <italic>Hush</italic> (2023) as well as her essays. Special emphasis is given to her Finnish environment – heritage, language, and professional surrounding.

Erste Gedanken post mortem

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) – Kunst zwischen Mensch und Maschine

With its history of breaking taboos and courting scandal, as well as its visually stunning stage excesses, Rammstein, one of the most controversial yet also most internationally successful German rock bands, stands for a multidimensional <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic> geared towards provocation. Lyrics, music, performance, artwork, stage design, lighting and pyrotechnics are brought together on a foundation of hard-hitting sounds to form a kind of hypertrophic opera that lends a wealth of connotations to the staged pro­vocations through irony, humour and parody. The musical and scenic realisation is characterised by ambivalence and intertextuality, and thus hews to the paradigms of postmodern aesthetics. The Rammstein sound too, an amalgam of music technology and sonic aesthetics, reveals itself on closer inspection as an ambivalent mixture of sonic concepts pointing in different directions. It lays the foundation for songs that undermine any unambiguous meaning via semantic equivalences and intertextual references. Rammstein’s aesthetic is governed by the law of subverting sense through an overproduction of sense, realised in the web of contradictory references that forms their deliberately provocative <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic>.

Zur Ästhetik der deutschen Rockband Rammstein

Provokation als Gesamtkunstwerk

This essay examines examples of graphic notation by Dieter Schnebel against the theoretical background of notational iconicity. Central to this is the idea, influenced by the work on the grammatology of images by Jacques Derrida and Sigrid Weigel, that traces of traditional notation contained only in the design, not as code, create tonal spaces, though these exist separately from their original contexts as something movable that changes with each new reading. Using examples from Schnebel’s <italic>Glossolalie 61</italic>, the graphic work <italic>MO-NO. Musik zum Lesen</italic> as well as later works from the 1980s onwards, the author shows that even in music since 1950, received and developed notions of tonality left traces in the graphic dimension of works, and can potentially act upon our current understanding of tonality.

Visuelle Traditionen in Dieter Schnebels graphischer Notation

Tonalität zwischen den Linien

Like any work of art, a CD comes into existence through the joint forces of different parties in the course of a (sometimes protracted) production process. And, like any work of art, the recording is shaped by this process. The »complete unreleased recording sessions« of Glenn Gould’s <italic>Goldberg Variations</italic>, released by Sony in September 2017, present a document that also offers outsiders insights into these circumstances and conditions. The main focus of this article is the »group achievement« of the recording. The author considers the concrete nature of the collaboration between Gould and his producer Scott, what constituted Gould’s »recording policy«, how a musician’s artistic – i.e. sonic and interpretive – decisions in the recording process come about, and to what extent the producer/engineer influences them.

Der Tonaufnahmeprozess im Studio

Gould und die anderen

On the occasion of the Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione’s 80th birthday, this essay illuminates certain aspects of his music: his interest in the smallest level of musical time, the microtemporal realm, which was opened up by computer-assisted electroacoustic music and enables composition based on individual samples; the relationship between this micro-world of sounds and the other layers of the musical fabric; the figures and granular textures that constitute his personal style in morphological terms; and the formal structures of his pieces, which the author links to the concepts of the network and the object. These observations are followed by an analysis of his piece <italic>Kitab</italic> (1992) for bass clarinet, piano, double bass and electronics, which is presented as an outstanding example of his compositional work. A few other pieces are also mentioned, with explanations of compositional procedures and the computer programmes employed, and the article concludes by suggesting how Vaggione’s music might act as a model for younger composers.

Horacio Vaggione zum 80. Geburtstag

Penser des temps musicaux

Wünsche zum Bruckner-Jahr 2024

Musik und Tod

Expression in music is taken for granted by most listeners as something that does not need to be discussed at all. However, this opinion has been questioned again and again, and especially in the 20th century there are downright currents of a deliberate denial of expression. Above all, it should be clear that we are not dealing here with something naturalistically imminent, but only with something highly artificial. The article takes a detailed review of Jürgen Stolzenberg (ed.), <italic>Ausdruck in der Musik</italic>, Munich 2021, as an occasion to reflect on the span of the phenomenon of »expressivity« in music. The subject matter is a topic of music psychology, aesthetics, and especially analytic philosophy. The book under review represents an immense achievement in discussing significant fields of research and aspects of musical expression, pointing the way to further research in the fields of performance studies and the history of music aesthetics. It shows that “expression” in music is very largely a phenomenon of European cultural history over the past 300 years, but its understanding can benefit from expansion into other cultures and into the depths of history.

Expressivität – ein lehrreicher Fall für die Musikphilosophie

Wie groß ist Beet­hovens große Missa?

Die drei !!! – oder: Aber etwas fehlt …

Leila Schayegh und Jan Schultsz mit Brahms’ Violinsonaten

Der Interpret als Historiker

Zu Adrian Kleinlosens Morphologie in der Musik

Von der inneren Identität der mannigfaltigen Gestalten

Iannis Xenakis’ elektroakustische Werke auf CD

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 108

This general theory of polyphony presents the concept of difference internal to discursivity as the key to understanding what distinguishes polyphony from other forms of multi-part texture. If the use of multiple voices is thought differentially, the result is a series comprising polyphony, polymorphy, polyprocessuality and poly-work. At the same time, this theory explains semantic issues in diagonal listening as part of a strategy for dealing with the apperceptive surplus, and considers matters of material construction without which polyphony, especially in its higher-level forms, is not possible.

Theorie der Polyphonie

This essay deals with selected aspects of Eco’s engagement with music, looking at both fictional and academic texts that have seldom, or in some cases never, been examined in the field of music research. The reception of Eco’s work has hitherto concentrated mostly on his statements about music in such publications as <italic>The Open Work</italic> (1962) or the semiotic writings. After presenting and discussing selected passages on music from the novels <italic>Foucault’s Pendulum</italic> (1988), <italic>The Island of the Day Before</italic> (1994) and <italic>Numero Zero</italic> (2015), the author considers individual facets of musical reception and interpretation found in scattered academic and occasional texts by Eco. The final summing-up attempts to identify continuities or constants in Eco’s long-standing engagement with music.

Umberto Eco und die »Musik des Denkens«

Since Luigi Nono’s death in 1990, there has been an astonishingly intensive reception of his music. It not only encompasses the late works following the string quartet <italic>Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima</italic> (1980), but has also revived the earlier works with explicit political content. A central factor in this is the Archivio Nono in Venice, made possible by Nuria Schönberg-Nono, with its extensive collection of documents. This makes it possible to explore in depth the history of the works’ genesis and effects, and to present them comprehensively with ›new questions‹ (in Nono’s own words).

Über Luigi Nono schreiben ...

In his works, the French composer Franck Christoph Yeznikian weaves a multitude of references together to form supporting layers of meaning, combining these with a complex, precisely defined rhythmic and microtonal structure. His music, concentrated in contrapuntal lines, develops in slow and calm arcs; its sonic character is clearly a melancholy one. His historical models are merged with his sonic language with different degrees of presence. One particular characteristic of his harmonic and sonic spaces is a ›shining‹ created through a constant re-colouring of fixed-register pitches.

Ein Porträt (mit Analyse)

Franck Christoph Yeznikian

Stimmauthentifizierung und Feinhörigkeit

Iranerinnen

Under the rule of Taliban in Afghanistan, music is no longer possible in the country, since musicians are criminalized. Herewith one of the most significant intangible heritage in Afghanistan has been almost completely silenced and banned from any kind of social or communitarian life. In a close cooperation with the German Foreign Office in 2021 the UNESCO Chair on Transcultural Music Studies at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar was able to name important musicians and representatives of Afghan music and music archives for the official evacuation list of the German government. Aprox. 170 musicians and experts have left Afghanistan and are now mainly based in Germany. The aim is to keep working closely with Afghan musicians and experts on heritage matters, with concerts, workshops, research projects and on archival materials. Besides that, the UNESCO Chair’s »Afghan Music Research Center« (amrc-music.org) is among the largest and most important ones outside Afghanistan, especially regarding the recent music related living heritage of the country.

Afghanistan und die Folgen

Musik als Verbrechen

Briefe von Carl Dahlhaus

Der Zunft ins Stammbuch zu schreiben

Über die Memoiren des Ai Weiwei

Jens Balzers Geschichte des deutschen Pop seit 1945

Deutschstunde mit Musik

Ein Sammelband über musikalische Interpretation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Institutionen – Medien

Verfestigung des Nichtfesten

Klara Haywards Konzeption musikalischer Mündigkeit

Selbstbestimmung als Qualität im Musizieren

Zu Karin Wetzels Das Werk im Werk. Konzepte des Poly-Werks

Potenzierte Polyphonie

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 107

Art and crime can be close together. Some crimes are so artfully planned and executed that they become art – a constellation that itself often becomes a subject in artistic depictions. This applies especially to the devious machinations of the Kim family in Bong Joon-ho’s <italic>Parasite</italic>, where they attempt to break out of the social underclass with the aid of a comprehensive fictional enactment and masterful acting performance. Drawing on the (neo-)Baroque triad of the <italic>Parasite</italic> film music, consisting of two Handel arias and the original composition <italic>The Belt of Faith</italic>, the film creates a narrative metastructure for this. Yet the combination of ›Western high culture‹ and Korean social drama achieves far more than a mere distancing effect, for the boundaries between play and reality, like those between art and crime, increasingly dissolve.

Zu Theatralität und (neo-)barocker Musik in Bong Joon-hos Parasite

Kunstvolles Verbrechen oder verbrecherische Kunst?

In the pre­ludes, specifically French constellations of sound and an accordingly autopoietic evasion of cadences lead to an increasing suspension of musical time. Various compositional strategies and models of immersion are examined theoretically and aesthetically from the perspective of the musical moment and placed in their historical context.

Zeitgestaltung in den Préludes Louis Couperins

»se perdre agréablement«

Early Music only gains aesthetic significance in conjunction with New Music, for both of these conceive a music whose basic formal principle is not harmonic tonality. Early Music, however, is rarely aware of this. It therefore becomes a problem in three ways: it obscures its non-tonal formal principle, it damages its aesthetic experience and it goes hand in hand with a colourful, authoritarian social character.

Alte Musik als Problem

In the debate on the so-called »crisis« in opera that raged during the early 20th century, numerous artists and members of the music scene argued about the orientation of music theatre, and even feared the death of the genre. Egon Wellesz participated in this discussion as a composer and an academic, exposed numerous problems with his music-historical research and offered concrete solutions with his idea for reforms. He demanded that the works of Wagner should be overcome through a stronger balance between orchestra and voices, as well as an abandonment of naturalism. Instead, Wellesz proposed following on from the principle of the great festival operas of the 18th century and the idea of the <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic>, which embodied timeless ideals for him. He also implemented these approaches using modern methods in his own operas, most importantly <italic>Alkestis</italic> and <italic>Die Bakchantinnen</italic>, hoping to win back the audience that had abandoned opera.

Egon Wellesz’ Beitrag zu Diskurs und Strategien

Die »Opernkrise« der Zwischenkriegszeit – eine selbsterzeugte Hysterie?

Werke von Gewicht

Afrika

In his essay, Alessandro Arbo starts from the legal debates on the status of the art work in digital media and proceeds to a far-reaching redefinition of the concept of the work. The category of works also includes the repertoires of orally transmitted and phonographically preserved music. The foundation is a generally understood concept of trace, as well as that of normativity, which turns musical traces in practices ontologically into »social objects« (in Roman Ingarden’s sense). Arbo’s social ontology of the musical work is attractive in its integrative approach. The price, however – in the tradition of analytic philosophy – seems to be a normative indifference towards its object.

Alessandro Arbo über die Normativität musikalischer Werke

Soziale Objekte

In her habilitation thesis <italic>Was ihr hört – Werke, was sie durch uns gewesen sein werden</italic> (<italic>What You Hear: Works and What They Will Have Been Through Us</italic>), Magdalena Zorn develops a model of music history from a radically subjectivist point of view, starting from the very basic consideration that musical works are meant to be heard. Her search for traces leads her to countless stations in European-American music history, which she examines in order to clarify which imprints the listening subjects have left on the works themselves.

Magdalena Zorn über Musikgeschichte als subjektive Aneignung

Vom Hören der Werke

Einblicke in das Musikleben der Renaissance

Klaviermethodik von Christian A. Pohl

Musik für Solo und Ensemble von Wolfram Schurig auf CD

Konzerte, Kreuzzüge und bedrohte Froscharten

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 106

It is no secret that women have been forced to reinvent the medium for their artistic expression more often than men. Self-doubt or other narcissistic symptoms of failing ego competence can only be overcome if they are driven out of the subject in a kind of exorcism. This starts with the simple conviction that no one needs to be exceptional, to be special or be discovered by anyone as the ultimate genius in order to live up to themselves and the world. In dialogue with a variety of female writers, artists, musicians and philosophers, the present article reflects on what self-empowerment and the associated victory over societal oppression mean, and why both are eminently significant. The decisive turn will not be brought about by female quotas, as important as they are for initiating a change in society. Rather, it will only take place through a rethinking of <italic>sexual difference</italic>, and thus of reality as a whole.

Weibliche Stimme(n)

Digital technologies and media determine work and everyday life. Alongside production, distribution and communication, they change people’s perception of themselves and the world. The term »post-digital« refers to the accompanying dissolution of physical ties to place, time, objects and people. Causes and effects are decoupled, and originals and images become increasingly indistinguishable. Being and appearance merge into virtual simulacra. From this, the composer Alexander Schubert, who was born in 1979 and studied computer science, derives the »virtual imperative« to make such intersections of the digital and the analogue tangible in either concert, installation, music-theatrical or participatory projects. By means of immersive audio-visual electronics including motion sensors, stroboscopic flashes and VR glasses, the performers and sometimes the audience itself appear like holograms or avatars.

Sein, Schein und virtuelle Perspektiven bei Alexander Schubert

Auflösung und Betonung des Körperlichen im Digitalzeitalter

The Czech-Brazilian Philo­sopher Vilém Flusser became known worldwide as the thinker of the new electronic media and even their ›prophet‹, since he seemed to foresee some decades in advance (he died in 1991) technological devices and processes that are now very popular, such as personal computers, satellite-based global communications networks (including social networks), digital cameras etc. The now ubiquitous electronic images are an outstanding example of what Flusser termed ›technical images‹ – a kind of plain code that reigns today after the previous age, he argues, dominated by writing as the linear code par excellence. Taking into account this congenial association between Flusser’s philosophy of communication and technical images, one might ask if there has been room in his thought to approach aesthetic matters related to the sounds and their meaningful organisation in time – to reflect also on the musical language. A close reading of Flusser’s work shows that from his early books on, there has been a concern with the role played by music in human culture as a whole, and it fits both into the more metaphysical (as well as epistemological) context of the first half of the sixties (in such books as <italic>Language and Reality </italic>and<italic> History of the Devil</italic>) and the media-philosophical environment of the mid-eighties, exemplified by such books as <italic>Into the Universe of Technical Images</italic>.

Klangkunst in Vilém Flussers Philosophie

Musik für die Kamera

This text deals with the (presumed) early piano works of Debussy written before 1890, analysing the compositional strategies employed in them. The results reinforce the thesis that, in these works, Debussy not so much anticipates the characteristic sonorities of later works as establishes their preconditions. The analysis reaches the conclusion that, despite the employment of traditional means of development such as cadences and sequences, the articulation of tonality is undermined, avoided and heightened in equal measure. In addition, one can find strong indications that, in these early piano works, Debussy explored the structural preconditions for his later use of parallel harmonies.

Satztechnische Strategien im frühen Klavierwerk von Claude Debussy

Bierzelt und Beisetzung

Krieg in der Ukraine

With his study, Zagorski has published an overview dealing with Adorno’s aesthetics and its influence on the young composers of the Darmstadt Summer Course during the post-war period. He does not offer a mere chronological outline, but also traces the roots of Adorno’s musical aesthetics in his philosophy and cultural criticism. Unfortunately, Zagorski’s assessments very often miss the point of Adorno’s considerations and thus omit some of the key elements in discussions described.

Oder: Über die Hartnäckigkeit eines Adorno-Bildes

Ein deutscher Idealist in Darmstadt?

Christian Kadens wichtigste Aufsätze zur Frage, was Musik ist oder sein sollte

Das wilde Denken, das Wilde denken

Marion Saxers kulturwissenschaftliche Studie zum Quintparallelenverbot

Von »süßen«, »sündigen« und »nicht mehr süßen« Quinten

Der singende Philosoph

Ein Sammelband über Musik und Subjektivität

Frage nach den Fragen, auf die »musikalische Subjektivität« eine Antwort ist

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 105

Nachruf auf Richard Taruskin (1945-2022)

Unterwegs zu einer anti-utopischen, post-autoritären Musikwissenschaft

The composer Gawriil N. Popov, the first prominent victim of Stalinist musical policy, refused to abandon a damaged, yet authentic, personal, innovative and intransigent music despite all the attempts at aesthetic adaptation that were necessary for survival, the regular censorship and the condemnations, official and unofficial alike. His quality as an avant-garde classic of Soviet symphonic music alongside Prokofiev and Shostakovich, stigmatised in his lifetime first as anti-Soviet and progressive, then later as Soviet and conservative, is barely registered today. The present essay on the fiftieth anniversary of his death is intended to offer perspectives for a necessary future engagement with his work.

Zum 50. Todesjahr von Gawriil Nikolajewitsch Popow

Avantgardist im Verborgenen

›Variations, With Solemnity‹, the third movement of Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 7 (1984), is presented as an extreme example of natural or ›just‹ intonation. In this music, Johnston goes far beyond Harry Partch, using the whole-number intervallic proportions 3, 5, 7, and 11 to 13. The all-encompassing proportional principle is also applied to the entire temporal structure of the work, with one cent (a hundredth of a semitone) corresponding to a metric value of an eighth-note. This is shown using the central viola line. Johnston constructs a web of complex whole-number relationships that ultimately forms an immense modulational arc leading into areas that go far beyond European methods of modulation. In so doing, he touches on tonal fields whose associations extend back to the Renaissance.

Beispiele aus seinem String Quartet No. 7 (1984), 3. Satz

Ben Johnston, sein Just-Intonation-Denken und seine Notation an einem Extrempunkt

This essay approaches the subject of aesthetic refusal, which was highly significant in the avant-garde and counterculture for much of the 20th century, from its historical margins: on the one hand, contemporary art, which attempts to rise above ineffectual artistic refusal, and on the other hand, the historical threshold of social modernity evidenced in J. S. Bach’s cantatas, where an imaginarium of evil appears and the congregation is exhorted to resist it. Drawing on Foucault and Hermann Broch, refusal is understood as a secularised element of religious normativity that has survived the structural changes of artistic modernity and persists to this day.

Bach, Broch und die Ästhetik der Verweigerung

»Widerstehe doch der Sünde«

The present text reflects on the paradoxical intersection of disparate artistic worlds in Enno Poppe’s choral piece <italic>Der Wechsel menschlicher Sachen</italic> [The Changes of Human Things], premiered in 2021, composed on a text by the Baroque poet Quirinus Kuhlmann (<italic>Bresslauer Himmlische Libesküsse</italic> [Heavenly Kisses of Love from Wroclaw], 1671). This analysis focuses on aspects of modular design, the idea of <italic>ars combinatoria</italic> realised here as well as the piece’s underlying concept of spectral (›multitonal‹) distinctions, which follows on from procedures already explored in <italic>Buch</italic> (2016) for string quartet. Finally, the author attempts to apply concepts of musical rhetoric rooted in the 17th century to Poppe’s score.

Wechselsatz. Enno Poppe vertont Quirinus Kuhlmann

Verlorene Selbstverständlichkeiten

WAS IST EIN DJ? 

»Über Cancel Culture«

Über die Frage, ob man Glaubenskriege anheizen oder unbedingt vermeiden sollte

Wenn das Schlecht-Abstrakte Realität annimmt

Der neue Musik-Konzepte-Band über Josquin des Prez

Postmonumentalische Geschichtsmächtigkeit

Neuausgabe der Klavierübung von August Halm

Robert Maschkas Buch über Manfred Trojahn

Contrevenir – Entgegenwirken

Zu Bernhard Langs Theater der Wiederholungen

»… dass man in der Mikroskopie eines winzigen Ausschnitts ganze Welten entdecken kann«

Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 104

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 (<italic>Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique</italic>) in Paris. The present text reconstructs the sequence of events.

Mit Boulez in Ulm und »... eine Art Bauhaus der Musik«*

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 … <italic>possible-à-chaque-instant</italic> 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.

Paul Valéry als Inspirator: Peter Ruzickas Siebtes Streichquartett

»Le jeu suprême de la transmutation des idées ...«

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).

Richard Strauss und sein harmonisches Handwerk

Vom Gehör zur Welt – Jean-Luc Nancy

RUNDFUNK 

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.

Alte Musik – eine Gebrauchsanleitung

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.

Das Ende der Zukunft – oder die Gespenster nach dem Beet­hovenjahr ...

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 250th 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.

Drei Bücher zum Geburtstagsjahr

Beet­hoven, Film und populäre Kultur

Pygmalion 4.0

Gabriele Geml entfaltet Ador­nos Kritische Theorie der Zeit

Intermezzo von Richard Strauss

Ehestreit als Oper

Historische Methoden fürs heutige Musiklernen

Die Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Konservatorien in drei Bänden

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

This article explores W. A. Mozart’s song <italic>Als Luise die Briefe ihres unge­treuen Liebhabers verbrannte</italic> (KV 520), focusing on how iconicity on surface and more abstract levels (cadences and key relations) helps contribute to the semantics of the song. It is argued that the main body of the song (mm. 4-18) constitutes an oversized structural parenthesis triggered by the emotional outbreak of the female protagonist. While the lyrics leave open the question whether Luise will ever be able to free herself from the painful memories of her unfaithful beloved, the music gives a more definite and indeed negative answer. In addition, the paper offers a reading of the song in terms of an aria-like adaption of a minor-mode sonata form, one that features a three-key exposition, a developmental retransition, and an utterly fragmented recapitulation. Without actually being <italic>in</italic> sonata form, Mozart’s song may be seen to engage in a dialogue with the concept and the conventions of that form.

Tobias Janz

Bücher, Übersetzungen oder Beiträge

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 110

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 109

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

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Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 101

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