Musik & Ästhetik, 2012, Jg. 16, Ausgabe 62

Dieter Schnebel and Psychoanalysis


The awarding of the Sigmund Freud Culture Prize to Dieter Schnebel in June 2011 is an occasion to identify the influences and convergences between psychoanalysis and Schnebel´s compositional and theoretical work against his work biography, offering a critical commentary from a psychoanalyst´s perspective. At the heart of the study (though not in the foreground) is what Schnebel himself called psychoanalytical music.

The Emergency of Vibrato


Music is a way of dealing with great distress. When it lacked the notes to react to the Shoa, it had not so much reached its end as returned to its beginnings. The way in which these beginnings appear in the Old Testament and how they converge with advanced music is the subject of this text.

The Way to Art. Scenes from Pyotr llyich Tchaikovsky´s »Iolanta«


As Tchaikovsky, in the aria of Ebn Hakia »Dva mira«, uses a melody he had encountered during his stays in Constantinople in 1886 and 1889, as Asaf´ev already recognised, his opera Iolante primarily contains internal processes and developments centred, in idea-practical terms, on the teachings of the Moorish doctor Ebn Hakia about overcoming the body-soul dichotomy, as well as dialogues with his father on light and seeing. In this early work of Russian modernity, the composer crafted – aside from the chord suspensions recalling Wagner´s Tristan und Isolde – the acoustically perceptible sphere of nature in Iolante´s garden. Despite his self-doubt, and in full awareness of the high artistic value of the music, Tchaikovsky created a work that captivates the listener through its unity and diversity of lyrical moments, allows us to experience Iolante´s theophany as a process of maturation, not least in musical-narrative terms as a journey from the sombre flat keys to the bright C major finale – a subject that was further developed in complex ways, especially in Czech modernism.

»A paradisiacal region above our heads . . .« The Beginnings of Romantic Music Aesthetics in Wackenroder and Tieck


While aesthetics usually comes after the creation of art as the conceptual articulation of the beautiful or no-longer-beautiful, Romantic music aesthetics was initially a project: over a decade and a half before Weber and Schubert composed the first works of what, in terms of style and period, we now call »Romantic« music, Ludwig Tieck and Heinrich Wackenroder co-authored two collections of texts, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar (1797) and Fantasies about Art (1799), in which they envisaged a music that would break with the real-world orientation of contemporary composition, instead evoking »a paradisiacal region above our heads«. In genre-specific terms, pure instrumental music emancipated from words and concepts, even from »speech in sound« (as a replication of emotions and sensations in melodic constructs whose character displayed a word-like fixity) was destined to become the medium of the new manifestation of music – with this, Tieck and Wackenroder were the first to envisage what Dahlhaus called the »idea of absolute music«. Wackenroder´s texts, however, also reveal the double-edged nature of Romanticism at its very beginning. On the one hand, this highly gifted young man, who lived for barely twenty-five years and probably died of typhoid, speaks in a decidedly anti-Enlightenment, even anti-intellectual voice – which is why, towards the end, the essay casts a sideways glance at the music-philosophical fragments of Friedrich Schlegel, which were also written in the 1790s and had a very different tenor –; on the other hand, however, Wackenroder already questions the truth of the beautiful semblance and the moral legitimacy of the Romantic attitude to the world.

The Amy Winehouse Show


The great attention received by the singer and songwriter Amy Winehouse during her life and after her death stems from at least two phenomena: her extraordinary voice and her idiosyncratic performing style. Both are in turn characterised by an aesthetic discrepancy whose specific qualities are shown using songs from the album Frank, especially in terms of voice and stage performance.

Suffering from Life and In Music: Amy Winehouse


This text came about through the author´s confusion that the countless obituaries and articles on the death of Amy Winehouse on 23 July 2011 only discussed her self-destructive lifestyle, drug addiction, sex appeal etc., not the unique voice that made her what she was in the first place. The text shows how difficult it is to speak about both, and to keep the two things apart; but the subject demands that one does.

Meditation on Holger Noltze´s »Leichtigkeitslüge«


Holger Noltze´s diagnosis of today´s culture scene, published under the bold title Die Leichtigkeitslüge , rightly created something of a sensation. With a dense web of observations covering the most important cultural sectors, he points to a lamentable general trend: the legitimacy of an art with its own intellectual demands has disappeared. Serious engagement with art has been replaced by a mediating industry with many branches, where functionaries and media bosses call the tune. This meditation attempts to illuminate the analytical substance of Noltze´s study, discussing its strengths but also its limits – which become evident, for example, in its proximity to prejudices from the camp of one-dimensional concert reformers.