Zur Zeit nicht lieferbar

Laudatio auf Klaus Huber

Adorno Listens to Records e.g. Klemperer&#180;s »Don Giovanni« Adorno&#180;s work as a music critic was always supported by a well-founded recording aesthetic latent in many of his writings but not formulated beyond a fragmentary state. Taking Adorno&#180;s review of Otto Klemperer&#180;s 1967 recording of Mozart&#180;s Don Giovanni as an example the author reconstructs Adorno&#180;s ideas. For him the central issue is the text or »matter« itself consisting of the triad as balanced as possible of mensural neumic/mimetic and idiomatic elements &#8211; i.e. notation interpretation and tradition. Although he traces the genesis of the text to the invention of musical notation he does not recognise that this new medium of sound recording must likewise alter the musical text. Rather Adorno views the record as the saviour of the autonomous work of art in the age of its enrichment with external and superficial elements. The article reflects upon Adorno&#180;s approach from the perspective of the present which is experiencing a further medial upheaval through CDs and mp3s.

Adorno hört Schallplatten - z. B. Klemperers Don Giovanni

Finis musicae. Angst of the future in the works of Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner At first glance it appears surprising that Thomas Mann should write in his extremely extended essay Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen in 1917 a long digression on Hans Pfitzner&#180;s opera Palestrina which had its premiere in the same year. Feeling alone in his conflict with the »progressive« trends of his time he was glad to find an ally in Pfitzner and his opera. He was able to identify his own conservatism in this opera and became more conscious of it. But the »ironic conservatism« which to his satisfaction predominated in the opera seemed to contradict the political views of the composer. In addition the formula »sympathy with death« which he used to identify the opera did not agree with the uniquely human character of this work which he appreciated. So it appears that the fortunate convergence between Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner became a hidden source of new reflections on the part of Thomas Mann and at the same time dissociation with the composer.

Zukunftsangst bei Thomas Mann und Hans Pfitzner

Finis musicae

Between Feeling and Illusion. Towards the Problem of the Immanence of Musical Meaning in Susanne K. Langer&#180;s Theory According to Susanne Langer music is a presentative symbol par excellence which in virtue of a structural resemblance between musical works and human subjectivity can directly present and provide access to »the morphology of feeling«. Exhibiting dynamic patterns analogous to the dynamic patterns of emotive life music however does not refer to them. Langer argues that the meaning or import of music does not point beyond the symbol but is intrinsic by its nature. The focus of the article is on Langers claim about the immanence of musical meaning. The author begins with a reconstruction of Langer&#180;s theory and then critically examines the arguments which Langer advanced in support of her immanence thesis. It is argued that Langer&#180;s theory suffers from the conflict between two notions of musical meaning &#8211; qua logical picture of feeling and qua tertiary quality.

Die Immanenz der musikalischen Bedeutung bei Susanne K. Langer

Zwischen Gefühl und Illusion

Marsyas Defeats Apollo: The Reinterpretation of a Central Cultural Myth in the Aesthetics of the No Longer Fine Arts The story of Marsyas and Apollo tells of the first instrumental competition in Western music history; it ended fatally for Apollo&#180;s challenger. Since the Renaissance this has been a central myth of European aesthetics. Its reinterpretation in the 20th century &#8211; the affront against Apollo and the sympathy for the victim the skinned satyr &#8211; became the paradigm for an epochal change in aesthetics. The essay sketches the prehistory of this reinterpretation from Ovid to the painters Titian and José de Ribera to Winckelmann Lessing Friedrich Schlegel and Heine and finally to Friedrich Nietzsche whose elevation of Dionysus assisted the subsequent support for and identifications with Marsyas in modernity. Kafka&#180;s story »In the Penal Colony« can be considered the esoteric key text of this aesthetic turn and its exoteric counterpart is Günter Eich&#180;s essay »An Epilogue by King Midas«.

Zur Umdeutung einer kulturellen Leitmythe in der Ästhetik der nicht-mehr-schönen Künste

Marsyas siegt über Apoll

Theses on the »Threepenny Opera« The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill originally conceived as a reworking of The Beggar&#180;s Opera by John Gay and Christoph Pepusch was written for actors and premiered at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm. To a certain extent the work can be classified as a play with music. At the same time however it incorporates what its final title names: opera as a genre and a theatrical presentation. One finds elements of Baroque opera opera buffa the catalogues of leitmotifs to which Wagner&#180;s dramas were reduced as well as a few bars from Mozart&#180;s Magic Flute and Humperdinck&#180;s Hansel and Gretel. In addition there are central formal principles of opera (scene and duet ensemble overture finale) and finally also insignias of sacred music. For »three pennies« transformed into beggar&#180;s fare &#8211; because it deals with beggars and those who exploit them with the poor and the rich? It is sooner about the culture industry that profits from the misery than the »what if« element that is inherent in opera in more than simply its everyday plays on words.

Thesen zur Dreigroschenoper

PopMusicology

Der Ursprung der Popmusik in den Sixties

Dylanfotos

Eine ›historische Satzlehre‹ für den frei atonalen Stil Arnold Schönbergs

Gestaltete Freiheit

Ligetis Schriften

Petr Eben: Das Orgelwerk

Musik & Ästhetik, 2009, Jg. 13, Ausgabe 50

Beethoven and the Crisis of the Subject Part V-VI Following examination of the threat to the subject and the signatures of negation and violence in Beethoven's late works the author now addresses two categories that are constitutive for Beethoven: the Promethean and Dionysian. Prometheus stands for the heroic self-assertion of the subject in the middle period and Dionysos for its dissolution or destruction in the late works. Dionysos stands in an antithetically analogous relation to Beethoven's Christianity which is characterised by a longing for restitution and pleas for mercy. At the same time however the Dionysian principle draws Beethoven's late music into a radical temporality and turns it in a precise sense into an art that refers to the future as atemporal mode. In this respect Beethoven's music seems to anticipate Nietzsche's philosophy. Finally a biographical sketch based on the psychoanalytical concepts of the »replacement child« and the »alien self« is devoted to the motif of the threat to and uncertainty of Beethoven's identity as a biographical subject. Such an investigation does not provide any causal explanations of the music's concerns but certainly an additional resonance space that can enrich and stimulate interpretation.

Beethoven und die Krise des Subjekts Teil V-VI

»Shir shavur«: Observations on a choral work by Heinz Holliger In his 2004 choralwork shir shavur [Broken Song] Heinz Holliger used texts by the Israeli poet David Rokeah. The poems were written in Hebrew but Rokeah also made a rough German translation for Holliger which the latter used together with the original Hebrew. The point of departure for this analysis is the double meaning of the concept of the idea: firstly the constructive idea that occurs to the artist and secondly what Hegel meant when he spoke of the >sensual appearance of the idea<. This difference returns in Holliger's composition. At the moment it becomes sound the work's construction one of the most complex in Holliger's oeuvre takes on a simple clarity and it is precisely this that makes the piece such an undeniable success. For the analysis this led to the decision not simply to show how it was made but rather to approach analytically what it is.

Anmerkungen zu einem Chorwerk von Heinz Holliger

Shir shavur

Balancing Acts. On culture shock and musical experience The experience of a culture shock can but by no means must be accompanied by states of shock as known from medical diagnostics. As a rule culture shocks have phases of differing intensity. Taken as a whole they constitute crises of adaption whose progressions are typical for confrontations with things that are initially remote unfamiliar or alien; hence all people go through these at some point. One case study shows that discourses on unfamiliar musical experiences have a great deal in common with ways of dealing with some of the processes typical for culture shocks. The focus is always on communicative actions where supposedly illogical or unreasonable have played an important part if not caused disturbances. Those who do not give up engaging with such experiences broaden their horizons in the process.

Über Kulturschock und Musik-Erleben

Balanceakte

The Concept of Musical Ascription Following on from Ruth Sonderegger's characterisation of aesthetic experience as a game between interpretative movements that continually dissolve and revive one other listening is defined here as an undecided balancing process between formal and speech-like or structural and material elements. Music is thus understood as multicoloured and listening as discontinuous. The essay then examines a way of ending this confusing game of interpretation prematurely by ascribing in a form of hermeneutic coup the work directly to the ego and retaining only its pragmatic significance and utility. Four characteristics of such an ascription are examined: forcing a connection; pushing things together in images or on stage; the relation to a current context; the awareness of the ephemerality of this very interpretation.

Der Begriff der musikalischen Zuschreibung

Art as a Way of Coping with Facticity This essay suggests a functional definition of art as a social system that analogously to politics law economics science and religion solves a specific problem in society. The function of art here is conceived not as an external supplementary aspect but is rather intended as a definition in the sense of a demarcation from other systems. This system-theoretical approach which assigns both a less problematic foundation and an appropriately central position to the Kantian idea of »purposiveness without purpose« is augmented by the phenomenological concepts of facticity and the imaginary in order to be able to represent art as the solution to the problem of facticity. In this way the essay attempts to outline not only a connection between art and society but also a concept of art as a genuinely social system.

Kunst als Faktizitätsbewältigung

A propos of Schönberg and Stefan George The fact that Stefan George was far from sympathetic to the expressionist modernity represented by Arnold Schönberg does not make their encounter in the musical-literary genre of the piano Lied any less of an event. Certainly it is true that the music needs such poems far more than vice versa. But when the encounter between the two arts is so strongly characterised by an equal footing one could perhaps be tempted to believe that even perfection can still be enhanced. This is illustrated using the two George poems in Schönbergs Second String Quartet in F sharp minor op. 10 - Entrückung and Litanei from the cycle der siebente Ring - and the fifteen poems from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten set in the op. 15 songs. These works composed almost simultaneously from 1908 to 1909 mark the start of Schönberg's period of »free atonality«.

Apropos Schönberg und Stefan George

Sound Dramaturgy in Wagner This text deals with Tobias Janz's book Klangdramaturgie. Studien zur theatralen Orchesterkomposition in Wagners »Ring des Nibelungen« (Würzburg 2006: Königshausen &amp; Neumann). Its innovative capacity notwithstanding isolated problems of representation is enormous. Jazz corrects one-sided aspects of the few existing studies on this subject at the same time presenting his own far-reaching analytical approach to sound in Wagner's music.

Klangdramaturgie bei Wagner

Alienating Empathy. An essay on the Kubrick Soundtracks The idea of »contrasting« film music is as old as the sound film itself; applying this idea to Kubrick's films however as has been done time and time again overlooks the fact that in supposedly »contrasting« scenes one could just as easily speak of an »analogy« rather than a »contrast« between image and sound and of »empathy« rather than »alienation«. The Kubrick Soundtracks achieve something apparently contradictory: they both act as a means of empathy and as means of preventing empathy i.e. a means of alienation: they suceed in this because the soundtracks converge emotionally with film events on the one hand but also as pre-existing and usually very popular compositions render a direct empathic involvement with the events in the film problematic. This discrepancy touches on a central theme of Kubrick's work: the potential for music and art in general to be »charged« both morally and immorally.

Versuch über die Kubrick-Soundtracks

Befremdliche Einfühlung

Innerlichkeit und Affekt im Gesang des Mittelalters

Peter Gülke über musikalische Interpretation

Elio Matassi über Musik und Philosophie

Musik & Ästhetik, 2008, Jg. 12, Ausgabe 45

The Future in Ruins. Essay on Charles Ives Although Ives was first interpreted as an ancestor of 20th century modernism recent American musicology has stressed his more traditional aspects to integrate him into the canon of »great composers«. Here Ives as outsider and anarchist is rediscovered and Ives' music is seen as linked to a specifically American variant of individualism and an aesthetics of genius and nature. American political and gender culture is found in Ives's specific technique and his evasion of artistic realization. Like Adorno's Wagner Ives at once embodies the inner contradictions of American ideology and also implicitly criticizes them.

Versuch über Charles Ives Teil I-III

Die Zukunft in Ruinen

Case studies on Aesthetics in Music Education: Bix Beiderbecke's Solo Aesthetics are generally being considered as a complicated field of inquiry particularly for students. Aesthetic experiences however often raise questions about the nature of music which philosophical aesthetics is intended to answer. It depends largely on the aptly chosen methods to connect students with aesthetics. Many music educators in the United States approach this goal through »case studies on aesthetics«. This method features short stories on aesthetic problems as a means of exemplifying aesthetic theory. These stories allow students to engage in aesthetic inquiry in close relation to the musical world of students. Furthermore case studies offer more applications to music education through performance improvisation or pre-concert lectures.

Ästhetik im Musikunterricht oder: Bix Beiderbeckes Solo

Sound-speech and Musical Syntax Mattheson's »sound-speech« as a musical language of the heart is based on an auditory concept of language. Music here takes on a meaning that is independant from verbal language and not (yet) autonomy-aesthetically founded. Its new communicative function in the discourse of emotions demands close attention. With his easily comprehensible writings (in German) Mattheson develops a new form of theory for this on the basis of contemporary rhetoric. Rhetoric is an effective communication theory and simultaneously provides the language-theoretical model. Music creates an acoustic space by sounding. Using the basic scheme of rhetoric the positions of non-conceptual musical representation are named within it. The attraction of the model lies in the functional analogy of effect. It is based on an early Enlightenment understanding of language that differs substantially also grammatically from today's notions of sentence and syntax.

Klang-Rede und musikalische Syntax

Salvatore Sciarrino's »Variazione su uno spazio ricurvo« The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino is one of the most productive today and his Oeuvre contains many works for piano. His Variazione su uno spazio ricurvo date from 1990; the piece is extremely short and succint and especially suited for an analytical explication of Sciarrino's compositional strategies and patterns of musical formation.

Salvatore Sciarrinos Variazione su uno spazio ricurvo

Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Rückert - a Mésalliance? In the discovery of Gustav Mahler after 1960 it has been precisely those who have been most vocal in effecting the restitution of his music after the Nazi era that have expressed displeasure at his choice of poetry in his vocal works. Among these were Theodor W. Adorno and especially Hans Mayer. After showing disinterest in this context in his book on Mahler Adorno later emphatically amended his position in a polemic against Mayer. The present contribution shows how misguided it is to offer an interpretation of Friedrich Rückert's poetry and its appropriation by Mahler that evaluates this output from the perspective of a linear modernisation process. Mahler recognised something of himself in Rückert's poems in such a way that taking his cycle of five orchestral songs the Rückert-Lieder we can identify a self-portrait assembled by means of a poetic collage.

Gustav Mahler und Friedrich Rückert - eine Mesalliance?

Current of Music. An examination of stage productions with new media using the example of »Fidelio« In the performing arts the progress in technical resources has also increased the demand for new expressive possibilities - yet formal and aesthetic discrepancies between the traditional operatic repertoire and technological innovations are still prevalent. As part of an entirely virtually-staged production of Fidelio (premiered on 2 December 2004 at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn) whose abstract figures were initially derived from purely musical information in the sense of a musical visualisation then subjected to further scenic interpretation an analytical procedure was invented enabling the translation of a historical musical score into a numerical digital representation. While motivic analysis no longer seemed powerful enough to preserve the fluid texture of the music in its data-generated image the parametric transposition of Beethoven's score into the numbercode had to be carried out without damaging any of its historical foundations. The new digital medium of »Virtual Environment« and the analysis of classical music put each other to the test.

Peter Horst Neumann

Bücher, Übersetzungen oder Beiträge

Musik & Ästhetik, 2009, Jg. 13, Ausgabe 50

Musik & Ästhetik, 2008, Jg. 12, Ausgabe 45

Musik & Ästhetik, 2007, Jg. 11, Ausgabe 41