Musik & Ästhetik, 2005, Jg. 9, Ausgabe 35

Joyce musician of the letter

James Joyce is the master of musical writing. In the course of his works he increasingly shapes the text according to its musical value. Leikert follows how the change in Joyce's writing takes effect. Drawing on Jaques Lacan's studies on Joyce he examines what destruktive phantasms the author seeks to neutralize with the help of musicalization of language making sequences of words glow as chains of phonetic events. He thus restores that value to language of which mankind's >conspiracy of indignity< had previously deprived it. This early formulation already implies feelings of persecution that refer to psychotic themes. In his final work Finnegans Wake Joyce oversteps the boundaries of the readable and crafts a musically highly tense dé/lire - an unreadable polyphoy of semanticlevels connected only through the bond of musical presence.

A Kaleidoscope of Shattered Songs. Composing with Paul Celan in »Fahlstimmig« by Paul-Heinz Dittrich

Paul-Heinz Dittrich's composition Fahlstimmig is a complex 17-part attempt to engange with the poetry of Paul Celan based on one of the poet's best known texts. In his reaction to Celan Dittrich avoids all superficial confidence and plasticity. The piece which can be viewed as the sum of Dittrich's decades of occupation with Celan creates an atmosphere of continuous tension; it seems to be searching insistently for words meanings and uncommon intensities t´hus emphasising the question.character of Celan's poetry.

Observations on the Musical Poetics of Gilles Binchois

The paper examines the relationship between text and music in the Chansons of Gilles Binchois. The first part focusses on the inner relations of textual and musical form and fine structure. The second part is dedicated to mode and »modal areas«. The author suggests that these represent »areas of the inner self« to which the text refers landmarks on a map of the soul so to say. The third part discusses the immediate musical response to a single word or group of words called »local aesthetics«. The three aspects are of course inseperable in the process of composition; their separation in the paper has purely methodical reasons. Together they are capable of giving insights into the high degree of differenciation and complexity in Binchois' chansons.

On Complexity in Alban Berg's String Quartet Op. 3

This article aims to interpret Berg's compositional methods with regard to their complexity. At the same time I do not postulate a fixed Definition of what musical complexity »really« means. Rather I consider complexity to be a problem which lies in the social construction of »meaning«. The modern intersubjektive crisis of meaning is a result of the functional differentiation of society in which traditional values and knowledge lose their taken-for-granted status and give way to a pluralistic situation in which no common order of values can be imposed. The same is true for art and music which cannot have recourse to sediments of historical meaning. Musical complexity in Berg is therefore understood to be an exemplification of the logic of subjective compositional decisions against a background of an increasing contingency of musically availablemeans at the beginning of the 20th century. Berg's first String Quartet op. 3 is an example of what Adorno called the »organised chaos«. Berg developed a number of methods with which he tried to solve the problem of meaningful technical composition which occurred with the loss of tonality. The crucial element of his technique is its extreme detail which does not result in the impression of a closed form but keeps it open to many different ways of reception. The actuality of Berg lies in the question as how the freedom of compositional decisions can lead to meaningful and binding results if the meaning cannot be assumed any longer due to the destruction of the normative language-character of music. This question is currently valid insofar as it shows the crisis of modern art in general: how does the subject cope with the structural crisis of meaning which is caused by the ongoing loss of legitimation of traditional social objectivations? In other words: how does the subject handle the problem of complexity?

Anti-classicist Aesthetics and Productive Music Criticism: E.T.A. Hoffmann's Ritter Gluck and Don Juan

Ritter Gluck and Don Juan follow very concrete music-related goals. While the Gluck text from 1809 deals with the reception of an important opera composer in the context of a critical and sharp-tongued description of the cultural and musical Berlin during those years Don Juan focuses concretely on Mozart's Don Giovanni as the centre of a creative and unconventional sketch. This remains connected to a definition of the nature of music which shows itself as an anti-classicist Romantic aesthetic developed from the spirit of Callot. It constitutes the background the basis and the criterion of assessment for all the convictions and intentions that reveal themselves in these two works and which encompass a definition of the philistine as well as the aesthetic of the arts and the unbridgeable gulf between the metaphysical and the physical.

Dylan's »Lyrics« - and Thomas Steinfeld's »Popular Music«

The article citiques firstly the purely information-oriented translation of Bob Dylan's Lyrics by Gisbert Haefs and secondly the politics of »Dylan Management« which has forced such an inartistic approach. In a third layer Thomas Steinfeld's reflections on pop music in general and Dylan in particular are examined - and the conclusion reached that they are conceptually ill-considered.