Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 104

The composer Gawriil N. Popov, the first prominent victim of Stalinist musical policy, refused to abandon a damaged, yet authentic, personal, innovative and intransigent music despite all the attempts at aesthetic adaptation that were necessary for survival, the regular censorship and the condemnations, official and unofficial alike. His quality as an avant-garde classic of Soviet symphonic music alongside Prokofiev and Shostakovich, stigmatised in his lifetime first as anti-Soviet and progressive, then later as Soviet and conservative, is barely registered today. The present essay on the fiftieth anniversary of his death is intended to offer perspectives for a necessary future engagement with his work.

›Variations, With Solemnity‹, the third movement of Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 7 (1984), is presented as an extreme example of natural or ›just‹ intonation. In this music, Johnston goes far beyond Harry Partch, using the whole-number intervallic proportions 3, 5, 7, and 11 to 13. The all-encompassing proportional principle is also applied to the entire temporal structure of the work, with one cent (a hundredth of a semitone) corresponding to a metric value of an eighth-note. This is shown using the central viola line. Johnston constructs a web of complex whole-number relationships that ultimately forms an immense modulational arc leading into areas that go far beyond European methods of modulation. In so doing, he touches on tonal fields whose associations extend back to the Renaissance.

This essay approaches the subject of aesthetic refusal, which was highly significant in the avant-garde and counterculture for much of the 20^th century, from its historical margins: on the one hand, contemporary art, which attempts to rise above ineffectual artistic refusal, and on the other hand, the historical threshold of social modernity evidenced in J. S. Bach’s cantatas, where an imaginarium of evil appears and the congregation is exhorted to resist it. Drawing on Foucault and Hermann Broch, refusal is understood as a secularised element of religious normativity that has survived the structural changes of artistic modernity and persists to this day.

The present text reflects on the paradoxical intersection of disparate artistic worlds in Enno Poppe’s choral piece Der Wechsel menschlicher Sachen [The Changes of Human Things], premiered in 2021, composed on a text by the Baroque poet Quirinus Kuhlmann (Bresslauer Himmlische Libesküsse [Heavenly Kisses of Love from Wroclaw], 1671). This analysis focuses on aspects of modular design, the idea of ars combinatoria realised here as well as the piece’s underlying concept of spectral (›multitonal‹) distinctions, which follows on from procedures already explored in Buch (2016) for string quartet. Finally, the author attempts to apply concepts of musical rhetoric rooted in the 17^th century to Poppe’s score.