Musik & Ästhetik, 1998, Jg. 2, Ausgabe 7

Organizational forms of many-voiced polyphony Thomas Tallis´ forty-voiced motet »Spem in alium«

Thomas Tallis´ motet which was conceived as a counterpart to Alessandro Striggio´s Ecce beatam lucem is the unsurpassed pinnacle of a series of many-voiced sound experiments of the Renaissance. The formal architecture of the motet whose proportions are above all based on the omnipresent golden mean gives the spatial dimension particular weight: the circular arrangement of the eight inner choirs makes possible subtle spatial shifts of a many-layered »Klangkontinuum« (sound continuum) which foreshadows formal strategies of the 20th century. The work reflects the special compositional requirements which many-voiced textures are almost inevitably subject to. The many-voiced setting multiplies the characteristic dissonance conflicts of the English cadenza within the conflict of harmonic and modal thinking; in the forty-voiced passages of the motet there arises the phenomenon of a type of oversaturated polyphony in which the compositional detail is lost within the context of the whole. The last chapter of this investigation is dedicated to the interpretation of hidden numerical-allegorical relationships which – with the help of gematric codes – may refer to the circumstances surrounding the genesis of the piece.

The pasionaria of singing. Thoughts on myths: On the occasion of the new Callas Edition

Roland Barthes defines the myth as a depoliticized statement as a language that speaks about the things instead of speaking the things themselves and through this removes the things from reality. Around Maria Callas a myth has developed which weakens the real revolutionary significance of her interpretive art: Callas the Divine. In contrast to this Maria Callas´ musical portrayal of dramatic characters was not directed at an aestheticizing beautiful sound but rather at the stylization of the real emotional conflicts of women in a maledominated society. Following the methods of Michel Foucault which analyzes the production of discourses as power mechanisms of our society this article attempts to call the false myth of the »Divine« into question and comes to the conclusion that EMI´s release of the Callas Edition also takes part in this myth.

»Quasi parlando« Hegel´s and Roland Barthes´s concepts of voice

Hegel concedes to music and therewith also to song a prominent place in his aesthetics because from its own phenomenal state music is able to create the structure of the spirit the structure of the subjective inner self without having to rely on terminology. Furthermore Hegel considers the material property of the singing voice as the distinctive criterion which sets it apart from instrumental voices. And yet he goes beyond the medium of music in the name of a kind of poetics whose idealness supposedly does not rely on sound any more. Similarly he favors the autoreferential relationship between speaking and listening to the unfamiliar experiences of communication and of acoustic space. Roland Barthes´s observations on the Lied take as their point of departure a space between body and language. Unlike Hegel Barthes believes that both the speaker and singer must withstand – even resolve – the irreducible tension between tone and word music and language; that is they must distance themselves from the goal of conquering the sounding voice through the meaning of the sound. Through its signification the one system as well as the other inscribes itself in the body of the speaker or the singer. When Barthes includes the listener in the comings and goings of the significance which are oscillating between language and music he demands not only a critical reflection of the specialist terminology in the field of musicology; he is primarily concerned with breaking away from old listening habits and devising a new semiological mode of description. This must above all other things do justice to the fact that music is something like the provocation of language: it arouses the desire of the listener and irritates his »logical« sense by commencing to speak without saying anything.

Frank Cox´s »Spuren«

Frank Cox´s Spuren for String Trio is perhaps his most extreme work both in intricacy of organization and in its uncompromisingly bleak character. Whereas in earlier works by Cox structural conflicts projected themselves as heroic struggles for transcendence here Cox relinquishes overt drama exploring rich and slowlymoving textures. Analysis demonstrates how the instruments develop from ›normal‹ playing techniques and differentiated harmonic and rhythmic worlds to a collective morass characterized by ›fantastically elaborated‹ but elusive timbral complexity and a prevailing uniformity. This ›progressive paralysis‹ however is not complete: interludes propose albeit ineffectually an alternative to the general stasis; and other isolated moments – as well as the very extremity and hence newness of the compositional process and material – perhaps salvage the work from the nihilism it risks.

»Applaud so that it will continue!« An essay about Stockhausen on the occasion of his 70th birthday

Whoever recognizes Stockhausen as the head of the new music scene must be baffled by his late work »Himmelskindermusik« (Heaven´s children´s music) which bade farewell to the aesthetic modernity and truly floats in other spheres. The deficits of this design can be identified: a remythologized musical theater which ignores the present problems of art and society; a »world music« which blends together the different musical languages into a typical Stockhausenesque electronic sound; a repression of the 19th century and particularly of Wagner which bore the concept of a unified (musical) protolanguage; a fascistic potential which makes headway in the semantics of word and tone; a musical sub-system that only refers to itself: the Stockhausen music factory. One can only bear all this if Stockhausen´s late works especially his »Licht-Zyklus« (Light Cycle) is understood as a mega-humoresque. Then one can certainly laugh – until one is breathless. One is then for sure – as the master would have it – unmittelbar zum Sirius (right before Sirius).

The left and the right Wagner. Revolution – Myth – Modernity

It is difficult yet necessary to interpret Richard Wagner´s opus politically. A purely artistic interpretation of his opus is naive; a solely political or mythological one is inartistic. This problem is approached in very different ways by Udo Bermbach (Der Wahn des Gesamtkunstwerks. Richard Wagners politisch- ästhetische Utopie Frankfurt a. M. 1994) and Petra-Hildegard Wilberg (Richard Wagners mythische Welt. Versuche wider den Historismus Freiburg 1996). Bermbach sees in Wagner´s proximity to the left-wing political discourse of his time a constant in Wagner´s thinking in general. In fact he even sees in it the real meaning of his entire opus. Wilberg on the other hand considers Wagner´s real achievement his discovery of the myth as an independent ontological experiential system. She understands myth and history to be complementary to one another yet also to be pure that is untranslatable and incomparable dimensions of world experience. In contrast to Bermbach she does bring out the difference between the synchronic anti-linear chronology of the myth and the progressive thinking of the left-wing Hegelian philosophy of history. However she is neither able to connect myth and history with one another nor has she possess a theoretically relevant concept of the modern age. Both Bermbach´s and Wilberg´s positions require a critical correction. Wagner´s opus is too complex and too disquieting to be claimed by the ideology of the left-wing or the right-wing or even the bourgeois middle.