Musik & Ästhetik, 2004, Jg. 8, Ausgabe 31

Hanns Eisler's »Kammersymphonie« as a film music for »White Flood« (1940)

Hanns Eisler composed his Kammersymphonie op. 69 in the context of the film music project he carried out at the New School for Social Research New York as the original film score for White Flood a documentary on ice ages and glacier formation. According to the composer his self-imposed task in this work was to combine musical autonomy with the greatest possible fidelity to the images. A musico-dramaturgical analysis shows that this aim is formulated in an exaggerated and thus misleading form: firstly the autonomy of the work transpires as a relative value (which considering its rich crafting by no means diminishes its value as concert music); and secondly it becomes clear that Eisler sought to achieve dramaturgical functionality in a far more differentiated manner than as he suggests through »Mickey Mousing«.

Art - what for? On the role of the work of art in John Dewey's system of experience

According to Dewey art is supposed to contribute to the aestheticization of »ordinary life«. Yet the full implications of this claim only become clear against the background of Dewey's late theory of reality of which Art as Experience forms - according to Dewey's own testimony - the final building-block.

Between the Lines of Steven Kazuo Takasugi's recent work »Jargon of Nothingness«

Steven Kazuo Takasugi's recent work Jargon of Nothingness for sampled sounds critiques the notion of »line« or »distance« as a means to explore contradictory perspectives while searching for a »void«. A critique of »distance« occurs in his piece through the use of magnified/focused sounds and shattered/infected reverberations. This critique provides ways to thwart one's assumptions regarding normative musical spaces. By turning sounds and the spaces they inhabit »inside-out« (i.e. through a depth perspective interchange) one is removed from the usual modes of assimilating sound object and placed into perpetual state of uncertainty. This uncertainty - manifested through contradictory perspectives - supports the »belief that the physicality of experience could (and must) be affirmed through the destabilization of logical faculties«. Takasugi's search for a »void« emerges from the interestices caused by this destabilization: a search that counters narrative trance and awakens one to reclaim a subjective footing so that music can possess a more critical humanist nature.

Analyzing the Music of Olivier Messiaen

Analyzing the music of Olivier Messiaen has so far seemed possible only from one of two mutually exclusive perspectives. Either from a formal-compositional perspective or from a theological-semantic one. In his study of Messiaen's opera on St Francis of Assisi Stefan Keym attempts to achieve a synthesis between the two positions with reference to the aspects of »color« and »time«. In doing so the author admittedly does not always escape the semantizations which - even though they were often initiated by the composer himself - he criticizes.