Musik & Ästhetik, 2012, Jg. 16, Ausgabe 63

»Hostile takeover«. Gottfried Weber, Adolf Bernhard Marx and the bourgeois »Harmonielehre« of the 19th century


Current discourse on a »historical informed music theory« focuses on the 15th to 18th century, while the 19th and 20th centuries are rarely considered in this context. Rather, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music theory is frequently conceived as representative of »systematic« music-theoretical concepts. Nineteenth-century music theory effectively seems to be separated from eighteenth-century music theory by a categorical rupture that can be traced in the origins of the German tradition of »Harmonielehre«. These origins were closely connected to the breakdown of a professional music education supported by aristocracy and church institutions during the ancien régime. In the young bourgeois society the instruction of composition changed its social context: many representative German theorists of harmony, such as Gottfried Weber and Adolf Bernhard Marx, were autodidactically trained music amateurs with only a rudimentary compositional and music-theoretical basic knowledge. Weber transferred a notion of »scientific scholarship« based on logical deduction and analogy (»Folgegleichheit«) that he had encountered during his study of law to music theory – a notion that he does not recognize in the »vexatious figured bass manuals«. In a mechanistic and systematic manner the principles of scale degrees and inversions are expanded into vast combinatorial matrices of possible chord progressions. This highly speculative method removes music theory significantly from compositional practice, thus supporting the idea of impenetrable artistic decisions attributed to the musical genius and their independence from musical craftsmanship. Weber´s »mathematical« exploration of pitch space is representative of the »combinatorial space« (Catherine Nolan) characteristic for nineteenth-century music theory that finds its logical consequence in Arnold Schönberg´s »method of composing with twelve tones which are related only to one another«.

Binary Formal Strategies in Mozart´s Minuets


Minuets in Viennese Classicism fundamentally oscillate between binary and ternary character. Formally speaking they are binary, but their content is rounded off with thematic-motivic reappearances. The minuets with a reprise following a middle section (ternary form) are relatively uniform, while the striving for completion in the forms without a reprise (binary form) leads to a variety of solutions. The different strategies and varieties of thematic rounding are systematically laid out, using the example of Mozart´s two-part minuets. The article ends with a closer analysis of an individual work in terms of its formal effects.

»Structure in Schönberg, figure in Webern«: Harald Kaufmann´s Polemical Analysis


Harald Kaufmann´s physiognomic view of music is not particularly interested in either the person of the composer nor the social aspect. His aim is rather to bring out the particularity of each individual case. Kaufmann points out that his analyses are driven by »polemical opinions«; this takes him away from both Adorno´s and Benjamin´s physiognomic approaches. »Structure« and »figure« are the polar concepts Kaufmann takes from the debate of the 1950s; by switching their respective applications – structure in Schönberg and figure in Webern – he questions the opposition between Schönberg the traditionalist and Webern as the supposed forerunner of serial composition. The result is impressive, and shows several parallels with Derrida´s deconstruction.

What Is the Meaning of Musical Substance?


This essay develops the distinction between form and content in music, drawing especially on Hegel and Eduard Hanslick; it specifies and qualifies the immanentist view that music consists only of formal-aesthetically describable properties. In a second step, it formulates the nature of substance as opposed to content . Content consists of clear world-relations that the music gains through its function, its vocabulary or through texts. Substance, on the other hand, is a more abstract factor: conception, poetic ideas, thoughts. They come into being through the composer´s conscious individuation of the musical form. All decisions involved in this process concern something that is neither form nor content; we can recognize this surplus as the substance of works.

What has music to do with emotion? Hanslick´s question and the »strong« cognitivism


The focus of this paper is on Peter Kivy´s cognitivist account of the relationship between music and emotion whereas the emphasis is placed upon the question of how music arouses emotional responses in listeners. According to Kivy, music is not able to evoke gardenvariety emotions in any aesthetically relevant way which it can embody as its audible properties. However, it can induce full-fledged emotions of a special kind (excitement, awe, wonder, etc.) that are determined by the aesthetic properties of a musical work and not by its emotional character when it possesses any. After presenting Kivy´s position, the author critically examines its underpinning assumptions. It is argued that Kivy´s explication of the mechanism of musical arousal and of the nature of »musical emotions« which is based upon a »reductionist« notion of aesthetic/expressive properties is inadequate.

»An Organic Sense of the Absolute«. E. M. Cioran and His »Ecstatic« Understanding of Music.


E. M. Cioran is considered an outstanding philosophical exponent of pessimism and radical scepticism in the 20th century. His profound attachment to music is barely ever central to his work, but is evident in many peripheral references. What logocentric philosophy considers deficient in music – its aconceptual ambiguity or haziness, its affinity for ecstasy and intoxication – is to Cioran evidence of a higher quality »beyond all reason«. He explicitly admired the »great music« (especially the German) between Bach and Brahms as mankind´s highest cultural achievement. His tendency to mention very few composers by name, and only rarely works, let alone details of works, could indicate that he perceived music – especially in his statements on J. S. Bach – in an ecstatic-mythical fashion as a form of nameless, unrecognisable »cosmic order« – and be taken as a refutation of his own »curses on the world«, which paradoxically affords a mysterious sense-space to the claimed senselessness of all reality.