Musik & Ästhetik, 2018, Jg. 22, Ausgabe 86

Bruckner’s God: The Adagio of the Ninth Symphony
Few figures in the Classical-Romantic tradition of music are viewed as religious composers to the same extent as Anton Bruckner, and few other œuvres are considered largely religious music to the same degree as his. The Adagio of the Ninth Symphony in D Minor is the last movement that Bruckner completed in the symphony he famously wanted to dedicate to his ›dear God‹. At the same time, it is the most radical and advanced music that Bruckner ever wrote. This article argues against both biographically-based religious interpretations and purely formal ones; instead, through an analysis of the structure and thematic development that deals with the musical facts and their resonances, it aims to find out what it might actually mean to speak of the religious content of the Adagio of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.

»Oh, the Sublime«. The Aesthetic Discourse of the Radical Right
Artists with sympathies for the political right, in the widest sense, have often based a critique of modernity on aesthetic categories. Here it is notable that the central criterion was not beauty, which was the typical standard both for the academic aesthetics of the 19th century and the political left that was active in this field. Rather, the point of reference was the sublime, which was defined – rather one-sidedly – in terms of an aesthetic of overwhelming. This is shown with reference to three of the main directions in the aesthetic discourse of the right: völkisch nationalism (Lienhard, Langbehn, Kotzde), aesthetic fundamentalism (Wagner, Hofmanns­thal, ­Borchardt, Benn) and the new nationalism (Moeller van der Bruck, Ernst Jünger).

This Side and the Other Side of the Garden: The Music Theatre of Ming Tsao
Ming Tsao’s music theatre work Prosperos Garten is based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest and deals with colonial power relations as created and consolidated through language, and through associated elements of abstraction. Tsao realizes this language-critical interpretation of The Tempest with an aesthetic that, through reverse transcriptions of pre-existing historical material and complex structural sounds, integrates dissociated musical fragments, and thus also fragments of music-cultural perceptions, into the composition, interweaving them and bringing them into contact through layers of different sonic contexts. In this manner, he strives to open up possibilities for polyphonic musical subjectivity and expressivity beyond dichotomous representations.

The Sound Library of Michael Wollny
This essay seeks to show the musical development of the unanimously critically acclaimed jazz pianist Michael Wollny. To this end, the author examines Wollny’s (jazz) piano trio output since 2005 and considers how Wollny’s idea of a ›sound library‹ manifests itself in concrete musical terms. The article reveals the manifold references to other musicians or composers, writers and film directors that run through Wollny’s music and are becoming increasingly prominent. With reference to the extraordinary wealth of outside material used on his 2014 album Weltentraum, it also asks to what extent one can speak of kitsch.

The Aging of Adorno’s Music Philosophy?
This article is a review of the essay collection ­Gesellschaft im Werk. Musikphilosophie nach Adorno, edited by Richard Klein, whose texts sound out the current relevance of Adorno’s music philosophy, working both with and against Adorno. That the volume’s angle of enquiry is extremely current is clear in the fact that even today, it is impossible to practise music philosophy in Germany without positioning oneself in relation to Adorno. The review considers the individual contributions especially against the background of the relationship between aesthetics and dialectics in Adorno’s work.