Musik & Ästhetik, 2000, Jg. 4, Ausgabe 16

On Mozart´s complexity. An analytical essay about a sequence

Mozart understands how to put into motion extremely complex processes within supposedly simple sequential models. It is thanks to this complexity and not just to the »pure« beauty of his melodic and harmonic creativity that Mozart´s technique of juxtaposition escapes the danger of becoming monotonous and banal. His music is not as effortless and casually constructed as it appears. There are multilayered technical procedures behind the succession of ideas and creations and the simplicity of the figures. The Mozartian juxtaposition is also successful because it places complex blocks next to one another which refer to one another through the degree of their inner complexity. The author attempts to investigate the complexity of the Mozartian figures based on a sequence from the piano sonata KV 280. In a musical language that works to a great extent with pre-existing models and pre-existing material the musical work can be understood as a result of a process of decisions and combinations in which the most diverse compositional possibilities and figures are subject to selection. The author explores these processes using a method that derives from an »oral« practice: A passage is surrounded by changes collages and transformations until one is sure of its specific formation or substance when these are removed.

The anthropological discourse on music. Rousseau Herder and the repercussions.

This essay sketches the outlines of an anthropological aesthetic of music whose center has been the semiotic constellation of sound and gesture or voice and movement ever since it was founded by Herder in the late eighteenth century. The historical-semantic modifications of this constellation are presented as well as the forms of its social realization for example in the Gesamtkunstwerk in popular music or in the epic orality. While written notation marks the European rationalization of music (Max Weber) the anthropological music theory additionally distinguishes itself through a voice-gesture-sound-dominated variation. The term of expression systematically unites all the types of symbols that develop an independent semiotics and semantics as opposed to conceptual and written language. Not only the nineteenth-century concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and of synaesthesia but also the twentieth-century voice-and-movement expressionistic music theater superelevate the material »separation of the elements« (Brecht/Wittgenstein) through the »unity of the senses« (Plessner) of the anthropological idea of unity. This leap into the anthropological transcendence is made primarily through literary-fictional text processing of music in musical prose which accomplishes at the very outset and in an elementary way the verbalization of the gesture-sound non-verbality (for example in Hoffmann). Instead of the written notational visualization the gesture represents a popular and theatrical visualization of the music which in turn is surpassed by theorizations of the anthropological thought figure in Nietzsche and Adorno as well. These also always reflect the exceptional requirements of reception and perception of anthropological music theory which replaces the academic »reading« of music with its un-academically popular »hearing and seeing«; the intellectualization lacking in this type of perception is replaced by the musically analogous and glib essay which offers an alternative to the written notation in the form of another type of »textualized« music.

Bach biographies

Two exemplarily different books about the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach are presented here. The biography by Christoph Wolff is the work of an historical musicologist in the strictest sense. Wolff examines and analyses evidence and documents belonging to Bach and to his contemporaries. And he does this with a meticulousness and precision that is unique in the present body of research on Bach. The historical distance Bach´s »remoteness« in relation to us or varying types of reception of his work do not figure here. Wolff can afford to take this virtually »pre-critical« approach because the level of reflection of his knowledge in this area assures a constant presence of the feedback of our present time that is derived from it. In contrast Martin Geck represents as it were a hermeneutic position: On the one hand to the extent that it is possible we must attempt to understand a work from the perspective of its era; on the other hand we must reflect on the limits of such a »sensitivity« for the past and also appreciate Bach´s work as an accumulation of all the ways in which it has been interpreted and commented on at different times. Geck´s position challenges us expressly as men and women of our time of our historical present. Thus his biography risks much more through its wide-reaching associations its aesthetic and philosophical considerations than close physical contact with the supposed objectivity of the facts ever could or would want to.

Igor Kamenz´s Rachmaninov Recording

Kamenz is a pianist who feels the pieces to be interpreted at the piano as a conductor would experience the musical structures. First he imagines the processes of a piece orchestrally in order to then realize them pianistically. Using his CD recording of Sergei Rachmaninov´s Piano Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor as an example this suspenseful interaction is developed in detail. In the process it becomes apparent that »Singers from Moscow« an older tradition of Russian vocal artistry serves Kamenz unconsciously as a model. The highly differentiated art of the crescendo heard in Kamenz´s interpretation of the Rachmaninov Sonata receives particular attention in the text.

(De)construction and (de)fragmentation in »AB II« by Mark André

AB II (1996/97) for ensemble and live electronics is the second version of the previously composed work AB I for whose construction such computer-controlled methods of analysis and re-composition had already been employed and which were later used for deconstructive and fragmenting strategies of the live electronics. The essay attempts an introduction to Mark André´s compositional thinking which is profoundly influenced by epistemological questions and great doubts concerning the traditional compositional models. Among these traditional models André includes the acoustic-spectral the experimental and the parametrical ones. The architecture of the André´s approach – construction and deconstruction fragmentation and defragmentation analysis and recombination endo-causality and exo-causality make up the pairs of conceptual opposites – is exemplified by a work that starts from the two notes A and B-flat the lowest keys on the piano and the first two in musical notation. This is a work that does not deny its roots in the music of Stockhausen Xenakis the French spectralism and Lachenmann yet one that reveals characteristic highly independent sound language that is oriented toward individual solutions.

The most recent developments in contemporary music in France

This article attempts to summarize the most recent developments in contemporary music in France (since the 1980s). First a short list of the main trends of modernity that characterize the time from 1950 to 1970 are presented whose last trend the so-called »spectral« music shows early symptoms of loosening and dissolution. This is followed by an analysis of the ideological use (in the spirit of critical theory) of the concept of artistic modernity in France between 1950 and 1980 that is an analysis of the political-economical conditions of contemporary music during this phase. Then the most recent changes in these conditions are identified under which the gradual abandonment of referring to modernity results in a type of »localization« of the musical creation. This is followed by the attempt at a (preliminary and non-homogeneous) typology of the most recent musical tendencies (since the end of the 1980s): those of the development of electro-acoustic music which drifts toward its own dissolution and of the development of »mixed« music; of the »second generation« of spectral composers; of a beginning of neoclassicism that is becoming increasingly influential on account of efforts to embed contemporary music within the great classical tradition; and of an as yet minority tendency to mix styles. The article concludes with a few remarks about an intellectual attitude which is perhaps common to all these tendencies: a return to the idea of expression.

»Lean and effective«

Richard Wagner´s Meistersinger was first performed in Italy in 1889. The present article attempts to show the part that the young Giacomo Puccini played regarding the considerable abridgements carried out especially for the Italian premiere of the opera. It is based on a shortened libretto and an abridged piano transcription (with additional cuts and comments) that the author found in 1997. This was most likely used during the rehearsals of the Italian premiere at Milan´s La Scala. The extent of the cuts that can be gathered from these together with their weighting as regards the content give us interesting information about Puccini´s relationship to this work one which was important to him. It also gives us insights into the Italian Wagner reception in the late nineteenth century.