Lieferbar

With a detachment of the song <italic>Never Will I marry</italic> by Frank Loesser from the musical <italic>Greenwillow</italic> for the TV music program <italic>Jazz Scene USA in 1961</italic>, Nancy Wilson’s jazz interpretation becomes a saddle point of music-sociological criticism when the bombs fall in Vietnam and brickwork is built in Berlin. The article expands on the controversy raised by Andrea Rödig in 2002 as to why the critique of the exiled theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno did not want to remain silent on jazz from 1947 until 1970 in Germany. The Malinke from West Africa and Franz Schubert from the edge of the Alps know how to shape the basic rhythm in the sound and the melody in the harmonic changes of the art song in such a way that everyday work and emotional analysis without sublimation theory become the avant-garde of musical practice. Alexander Turner and the Arctic Monkeys belong to the Arctic Monkeys because of their voice, their stage presence, their instrumental collaboration and their historically accurate music videos are an important part of the future of post-punk.

Nancy Wilson

This article attempts a preliminary analysis of Caldara’s musical choices for the first setting of Metastasio’s <italic>Demetrio</italic>, the poet’s first operatic libretto for the court of Vienna. Inspired by hints from Metastasio’s letters, where Caldara’s music is described as not the most mo­dern nor the most expressive, we have a look at the vocal and orchestral aesthetics of this opera, together with the information we have about the original cast and the libretto’s main dramaturgical traits, thus trying to form ourselves a first idea of this music’s capacity to be expressive or modern enough for 1731, and to understand if Caldara really made an effort to contradict his reputation as a counterpoint expert while attempting to set to music a libretto that is theatrically valid and delicately sentimental at the same time. And the results were definitely much more interesting than one would expect without looking at the sources.

Vokalästhetik im Demetrio von Caldara & Metastasio (Wien 1731)

»Un’opera tutta delicata«

This essay considers some of the relationships between the human body, instruments, and instrumentality in the early modern period, pointing out some lines for further investigation. The question of whether instruments are natural or artificial was seen as especially important during this period. Focusing on the relationship between instruments and the human voice, instruments as epistemological tools, and the notion of the human body as instrument, specific moments and scenarios in which instruments operate between dichotomies such as artificial and natural are highlighted. Already in the early modern period, they were considered to be both living and lifeless, both artificial and natural objects. At the same time, the paper shows how instruments were privileged objects for music theoretical investigations, ultimately leading to the establishment of the separate field of study known as organography.

Instrumentendenken in der Frühen Neuzeit

»Ein künstlich gemachtes Thier«

Mark Andre’s music emphasises sonic processes. His orchestral triptych …<italic>auf…</italic> (2005-07) is characterised by transitions, intermediate spaces and threshold states between harmonic, inharmonic and noisy sound situations, which the composer associates with the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the »most wonderful« form of a transition. The essay analyses the transitions between different types of sound in the first of the three orchestral pieces. Following Walter Benjamin and Dieter Mersch, the simultaneously suggestive and mysterious, appealing and concealing sound mixtures are analysed using the topos of aura, which not coincidentally overlaps with the ritualistic and religious, in the context of which the orchestral works are also to be seen.

Mark Andres Orchesterwerk ...auf… I

Aura und Übergang

Erinnerungen an Peter Förtig

Über Arnold Schönberg und Luigi Nono

Am Ende Fuge

Künstlerische Forschung

Gesammelte Schriften Brian Ferneyhoughs (1978 bis 2009) auf Deutsch

Kraftlinien

Nam June Paiks musikalische Kompositionen (1945-63)

»Was er uns gibt, ist der reine Klang…«

Zur neuen CD der Schola Heidelberg

Eros und Gewalt

Ein Kulturdiagramm zwischen Sein und Sollen

Weltverbesserung durch Kunst…?

Proust Questionnaire

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 112

Zum Tod von Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)

Der große Musikerzähler

The author reads Homer’s <italic>Iliad</italic> and <italic>Odyssey</italic> as a coherent work, or as a work to be perceived as such, at the center of which is the handling of emotions. Starting from the first line of the Iliad, which sings of Achilles’ anger, he traces the »emotional curves« of important protagonists in the Trojan War. The story ends with the shared mourning of Achilles and Priam, who both try to come to terms with the loss of someone close to them (best friend and son respectively) – across the line of enmity that divides them. This portrayal of dealing with moving emotions continues in the <italic>Odyssey</italic>, which ends with the violent conflict between the returning war hero and the suitors being ended by the humane power of the voice.

Vom Zorn zur Stimme

E. T. A. Hoffmann’s <italic>Six canzonas</italic> (1808) are among the first compositions aiming at regaining an historical musical style, that one of late Renaissance. But according to composers’ names he mentioned in a letter and some years later in reviews, he obviously at this time had no real knowledge of the composition technique of that period, even more as music from the late 1500s was rather hard to find. In Hoffmann’s first writings composers from the Bach era (and younger) serve as examples for the »old style«, and only in an article from 1814 he mentioned Palestrina. On the other hand around 1800 there was circulating a number of pieces allegedly written by that composer (but in fact weren’t) which were not characterized by polyphonic setting, but written in a rather homorhythmical chordal style. Thus, the ali­enness of old music for Hoffmann and his contemporaries likely rather consisted in being performed a cappella than in vocal polyphony. As in the <italic>Six canzonas</italic> polyphony is rarely used, those pieces likely served as templates for their style, combined with a number of harmonic features which come from Hoffmann’s own time. A real awareness of the historically changing character of music didn’t yet exist.

E. T. A. Hoffmann und historisierendes Komponieren in der Romantik

Forward to the past

In the conventional historiography of early nineteenth-century German-language opera, the aesthetic beliefs of the early Romantic German poets often play a significant role. This article points out that their aesthetic explanations were not actually predictions for future operas, but rather the result of their reflection on the Opera buffas of the eighteenth century, especially those by Mozart. To elucidate the Romantic image of Mozart reflected in his Opera buffas, this text first outlines the poetic and artistic perspectives on irony and humor of the early Romantic writers (Friedrich Schlegel, Jean Paul, Ludwig Tieck), as well as their aesthetic connections to Mozart’s Opera buffas. Subsequently, this article highlights the positive reactions that romantic irony elicited among German music criticism and German composers. Only then does the significance of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s idea of opera in the Romantic reception of Mozart and Mozart’s often overlooked influence on subsequent times become clear.

Die romantisch-ironische Mozart-Rezeption um 1800

Opera buffa als »wahre romantische Oper«

In »musique sa­turée« (»saturated music«), a relatively young movement in French music whose main re­presentatives are the composers Franck Bedrossian (*1971) and Raphaël Cendo (*1975), the instrumental sounds taken to extremes resemble the process of audio-technical distortion: The acoustic signal is misinterpreted by a microphone, creating a variety of sound artifacts. As a result of this interpretation, new frequencies are created that are not contained in the original signal and which also construct a new sound quality. But already advanced playing techniques such as the circular bow or overpressure in string instruments can be related to electronic music techniques such as granular synthesis. Musique saturée is linked to spectral music in many ways, because it places the parameter of timbre at the center of composing and derives further musical fields of relationships from its properties. Contrary to what the adjective »saturée« suggests, compositional saturation is not only related to high volume, but also to the density of the use of a sound gesture. Therefore, an important feature of this compositional style is an excessive (or saturated), almost excessive use of one or more sound gestures within a composition, which creates a saturation of the structure that spans the entire piece. Such sound trajectories, in which sound, texture and form are inextricably interwoven, are examined in the article using Bedrossian’s string quartet <italic>Tracés d’ombres</italic> (2007).

Zu Franck Bedrossians Streichquartett Tracés d’ombres

Gesättigte Klänge

Pop gegen Populismus – Taylor Swift

Neue Alte Musik

How can one understand the hopelessness of a victim or feel empathy for it when there are no words left? At a time when language and its arguments seem to trigger more contradictions and controversies than ever before, music apparently makes it possible to reflect more calmly and thus to develop a more attentive and, above all, more differentiated sense of the increased vulnerability among people in the context of war and violence in the current world. The essay focuses on two music projects related to Israel. In the Caravan Orchestra & Choir joint project of Haifa University, the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar and the Yiddish Summer festival Weimar, Jewish and Arab students from Israel, together with students from the Weimar University of Music, develop a concert program with Eastern European Jewish or Yiddish and Arabic music. Another recent project is Iván Fischer’s <italic>Compassion</italic> (Kompasszió), based on J. S. Bach’s <italic>St. Matthew Passion</italic>, where Jewish and Arab music enter into a dialogue with Bach’s composition. Fischer defines this concert project as <italic>St. Matthew Passion and other passion stories</italic>. Individual parts of an abridged version of Bach’s passion work are alternated with Jewish music and the repertory of the Arabic lute Ud and the Near Eastern frame drum Daf. Both projects seem absolutely necessary in contemporary musical life. The important role of music in a time of conflict proves as effectful, at least for those involved. In the end, perhaps a strong humanity supported by music may awake legitimate hopes for more optimistic visions of the future.

Was kann Musik angesichts von Gewalt und Krieg in Israel und Palästina?

Musical Humanity

Keith Jarrett und András Schiff, Johann Sebastian und Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

Musikalische Aufklärung

Bob Dylan, Philosophie des modernen Songs

Eberhard Geisler über Wagner und Sprache

»… es bricht aus der Musik hervor …«

Die neue Musikgeschichtsschreibung der Cambridge University Press

Perspektiven auf das 20. Jahrhundert

Alles Dirigieren ist ein Gleichnis (oder doch ein Glückskeks?)

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 111

In our view, the social character of listening has changed radically. Listeners of traditional old music can perceive themselves as belonging to a counterculture, as can listeners of battle rap sessions. We regard the fact that they do this as a rational decision. We are experimenting with a concept of text that is close to the musical concept of a work and/or directly neighbouring it. For us, there is no such thing as »the opera«; nor is there an opera crisis or a crisis of music theatre. There is a playful approach to opera as a performance, to its proximity to ritual and to the desire to sing along to well-known arias, as is also the case with pop songs; all of this by allowing theatrical processes to take place on several levels of the text while the music remains ambigue.

Pluriversum Oper

Gustav Mahler’s works suggest an intimate knowledge of historic schemata, presumably rooted in Mahler’s education at the Viennese Conservatory (1875-78) which was still distinctly oriented towards church music and thoroughbass practice. His Ninth Symphony in particular features the »baroque« Romanesca schema in a very prominent role, incorporating it into all four movements. This paper examines the compositional methods of distortion and transformation which allow it to be woven into the very fabric of Mahler’s last completed work.

Kompositorische Veränderungsprozesse des Romanesca-Modells in Gustav Mahlers Neunter Symphonie

»Verzerrung« und Einheit

In the recent discussion within analytical philosophy musical movement is understood as an irreal (imagined, fictional) categorical property. According to the approach proposed in the present study, musical movement can be considered as the ›manifestation‹ of the disposition or power of sonic configurations to produce non-imaginary ideas of movement to perceivers appropriately disposed. Being real in a bidirectional dispositional sense, musical movement has its ›base‹ or ›ground‹ in properties of sounds as well as of human perceivers. Both philosophers discussed, Hegel and Plessner, ground the power of music to move in formal, invariable properties of sounds. Hegel’s idealist conception of the unity of body and mind and Plessner’s phenomenological anthropology centered around the notion of ›excentric positionality‹ support the idea of a direct impact of music on human enminded body. This idea helps us eschew the need for resorting to metaphorical transference or imaginative perception.

Hegel, Plessner und die dispositionale Realität musikalischer Bewegung

Künstliche Kreativität?

Liedforschung

The article explores directions of music innovation in terms of aesthetics and style, with a focus on the influence of Western European modernism on the new creations of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian music. The article also examines modifications of these influences in the work of several outstanding individuals and their importance in undermining the dogma of Socialist Realism. In the context of this article, the term »normative aesthetics,« as used in Soviet art literature, refers to a set of external norms and forms imposed on art by Soviet ideology. The main norms: nationalism as closeness to the masses, in other words, classness; ideologicalness; partyness. The basis for these norms was declared Marxism as a socio-political theory, but in practice, the content of these norms was determined by adapting them to the Communist Party’s current policies, which were declared at its so-called plenums or general meetings.

Zur ästhetischen Überwindung der sowjetischen Normierung 1940-1970

Avantgarde im Baltikum

Frauen, Freies und Kollektives: die Donaueschinger Musiktage 2023

Drei Stränge, viele Perspektiven

Postautonome Kunst

Pascal Rudolphs Studie über präexistente Musik in den Filmen Lars von Triers

Annäherung aus wechselnden Perspektiven

Visuelle Perspektiven auf Musik

Improvisation als Hermeneutik, Hermeneutik als Improvisation

Innere Beteiligung und Auratisches Musizieren als Leitideen des Musiklernens

Erfülltes Miteinander in Musik

Felix Diergartens Bruckner-Biographie

Er war nicht unser

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 110

When it comes to listening, whether to music or to discourse, the answer to the question: how many ears are involved? depends, of course, on the number of listeners; but one thing seems quite sure: it will be a multiple of two. Ears, in the act of listening, work by pairs. There seem to be no exceptions …

Wie viele Ohren? Oder: Der Adressat des Hörens

Fojan Gharibnejad’s <italic>-O- For Trained Female Vocal Cords, Face and Body</italic> (2019) centers its topic on women’s emancipation, self-discovery with a particular focus on masturbation and orgams. This approx. 25 minute-multimedia theater work for solo voice, three video projections and audience participation re-imagines Jacques Lacan’s theory of »mirror stage« as one for a woman who discovers her subjectivity through exploration of her body and emotions. This article offers a feministic interpretation of the work by a musical analysis using the concept of l’écriture féminine.

Weiblicher Orgasmus und Feier der Klitoris

-O- von Fojan Gharibnejad

In Bruckner’s third-to-last motet, the <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> of 1885, sections of great stylistic variety stand side by side, from monophonic chant to the pure diatonicism of a artifical ›cecilian‹ style to the third-related chords of late Romanticism. With this polystylism, <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> takes to extremes a tendency that has characterized Bruckner’s sacred music since the 1860s, and for this reason <italic>Ecce sacerdos magnus</italic> lends itself to a pointed analytical discussion of Bruckner’s sacred music in its liturgical, social, and stylistic context.

Anton Bruckner zum 200. Geburtstag

Ecce musicus magnus

The paper deals with the performance history of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic works in Japan before the Second World War and the cultural-political events connected with it. While Mahler’s symphonies had been a regular feature of concert programs in Japan in the 1920s, in the 1930s attempts to establish a »Japanese harmony« increasingly challenged the previously uncritically adopted music from Germany and Austria. Klaus Pringsheim, who was convinced of the universality of functional harmony, became an enemy of this movement and was dismissed from the Tokyo Music Academy in 1937. His commitment to Mahler in Japan was also criticized. A study of Japanese music journals, however, makes it clear that Mahler’s music did not disappear from the Japanese scene until the last year of the war, despite the intensification of German-Japanese alliance politics.

Die Mahler-Rezeption in der japanischen Musikpublizistik bis 1945

Der junge Mann folgt den Anweisungen

Gibt es eine geschlechtsspezifische Musikalität?

The essay discusses Nikolaus Matthes’ new composition of the lost <italic>St. Marc Passion</italic> by J.S. Bach. It argues that this kind of compositions in historical style should be understood as the compositional representation of a certain interpretation of Bach’s music: they transform contemporary performance practice into new works (I). The article sketches the history of the images of Bach’s music as an oscillation between theology and aesthetics: Bach as <italic>Thomaskantor</italic> or as <italic>Altklassiker</italic> (II). Matthes’ <italic>Markuspassion</italic> is argued to merge the two currents by opting, on the one side, for an opera-style composition full of thrilling effects, and, on the other hand, by representing Bach as sharing the baroque sensibility Walter Benjamin famously identified with the endless multiplication of allegories within the inescapable disaster of immanence (III).

Überlegungen zu Nikolaus Matthes’ Markuspassion nach Johann Sebastian Bach

Trauermusik der Immanenz

Zu Daniel Martin Feiges Musik für Designer

Nicht nur für Designer: hermeneutische Musikphilosophie zur Einführung

Arne Stollbergs Figuren der Resonanz

Ästhetik als angewandte Physiologie

Matteo Nanni über Luigi Nonos Programm des politischen Hörens

»Öffnung zum Unbekannten«

Ins Unbekannte von Simon Tönies

Boulez’ Polyphonie X in neuer Perspektivierung

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 109

This article pays tribute to Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in her home in Paris on June 2, 2023. More than a necrology, it serves as a topography of agendas that are or could be relevant to the reception of her work, from <italic>Bruden</italic> (1977) to <italic>Hush</italic> (2023) as well as her essays. Special emphasis is given to her Finnish environment – heritage, language, and professional surrounding.

Erste Gedanken post mortem

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) – Kunst zwischen Mensch und Maschine

With its history of breaking taboos and courting scandal, as well as its visually stunning stage excesses, Rammstein, one of the most controversial yet also most internationally successful German rock bands, stands for a multidimensional <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic> geared towards provocation. Lyrics, music, performance, artwork, stage design, lighting and pyrotechnics are brought together on a foundation of hard-hitting sounds to form a kind of hypertrophic opera that lends a wealth of connotations to the staged pro­vocations through irony, humour and parody. The musical and scenic realisation is characterised by ambivalence and intertextuality, and thus hews to the paradigms of postmodern aesthetics. The Rammstein sound too, an amalgam of music technology and sonic aesthetics, reveals itself on closer inspection as an ambivalent mixture of sonic concepts pointing in different directions. It lays the foundation for songs that undermine any unambiguous meaning via semantic equivalences and intertextual references. Rammstein’s aesthetic is governed by the law of subverting sense through an overproduction of sense, realised in the web of contradictory references that forms their deliberately provocative <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic>.

Zur Ästhetik der deutschen Rockband Rammstein

Provokation als Gesamtkunstwerk

This essay examines examples of graphic notation by Dieter Schnebel against the theoretical background of notational iconicity. Central to this is the idea, influenced by the work on the grammatology of images by Jacques Derrida and Sigrid Weigel, that traces of traditional notation contained only in the design, not as code, create tonal spaces, though these exist separately from their original contexts as something movable that changes with each new reading. Using examples from Schnebel’s <italic>Glossolalie 61</italic>, the graphic work <italic>MO-NO. Musik zum Lesen</italic> as well as later works from the 1980s onwards, the author shows that even in music since 1950, received and developed notions of tonality left traces in the graphic dimension of works, and can potentially act upon our current understanding of tonality.

Visuelle Traditionen in Dieter Schnebels graphischer Notation

Tonalität zwischen den Linien

Like any work of art, a CD comes into existence through the joint forces of different parties in the course of a (sometimes protracted) production process. And, like any work of art, the recording is shaped by this process. The »complete unreleased recording sessions« of Glenn Gould’s <italic>Goldberg Variations</italic>, released by Sony in September 2017, present a document that also offers outsiders insights into these circumstances and conditions. The main focus of this article is the »group achievement« of the recording. The author considers the concrete nature of the collaboration between Gould and his producer Scott, what constituted Gould’s »recording policy«, how a musician’s artistic – i.e. sonic and interpretive – decisions in the recording process come about, and to what extent the producer/engineer influences them.

Der Tonaufnahmeprozess im Studio

Gould und die anderen

On the occasion of the Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione’s 80th birthday, this essay illuminates certain aspects of his music: his interest in the smallest level of musical time, the microtemporal realm, which was opened up by computer-assisted electroacoustic music and enables composition based on individual samples; the relationship between this micro-world of sounds and the other layers of the musical fabric; the figures and granular textures that constitute his personal style in morphological terms; and the formal structures of his pieces, which the author links to the concepts of the network and the object. These observations are followed by an analysis of his piece <italic>Kitab</italic> (1992) for bass clarinet, piano, double bass and electronics, which is presented as an outstanding example of his compositional work. A few other pieces are also mentioned, with explanations of compositional procedures and the computer programmes employed, and the article concludes by suggesting how Vaggione’s music might act as a model for younger composers.

Horacio Vaggione zum 80. Geburtstag

Penser des temps musicaux

Wünsche zum Bruckner-Jahr 2024

Musik und Tod

Expression in music is taken for granted by most listeners as something that does not need to be discussed at all. However, this opinion has been questioned again and again, and especially in the 20th century there are downright currents of a deliberate denial of expression. Above all, it should be clear that we are not dealing here with something naturalistically imminent, but only with something highly artificial. The article takes a detailed review of Jürgen Stolzenberg (ed.), <italic>Ausdruck in der Musik</italic>, Munich 2021, as an occasion to reflect on the span of the phenomenon of »expressivity« in music. The subject matter is a topic of music psychology, aesthetics, and especially analytic philosophy. The book under review represents an immense achievement in discussing significant fields of research and aspects of musical expression, pointing the way to further research in the fields of performance studies and the history of music aesthetics. It shows that “expression” in music is very largely a phenomenon of European cultural history over the past 300 years, but its understanding can benefit from expansion into other cultures and into the depths of history.

Expressivität – ein lehrreicher Fall für die Musikphilosophie

Wie groß ist Beet­hovens große Missa?

Die drei !!! – oder: Aber etwas fehlt …

Leila Schayegh und Jan Schultsz mit Brahms’ Violinsonaten

Der Interpret als Historiker

Zu Adrian Kleinlosens Morphologie in der Musik

Von der inneren Identität der mannigfaltigen Gestalten

Iannis Xenakis’ elektroakustische Werke auf CD

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 108

This general theory of polyphony presents the concept of difference internal to discursivity as the key to understanding what distinguishes polyphony from other forms of multi-part texture. If the use of multiple voices is thought differentially, the result is a series comprising polyphony, polymorphy, polyprocessuality and poly-work. At the same time, this theory explains semantic issues in diagonal listening as part of a strategy for dealing with the apperceptive surplus, and considers matters of material construction without which polyphony, especially in its higher-level forms, is not possible.

Theorie der Polyphonie

This essay deals with selected aspects of Eco’s engagement with music, looking at both fictional and academic texts that have seldom, or in some cases never, been examined in the field of music research. The reception of Eco’s work has hitherto concentrated mostly on his statements about music in such publications as <italic>The Open Work</italic> (1962) or the semiotic writings. After presenting and discussing selected passages on music from the novels <italic>Foucault’s Pendulum</italic> (1988), <italic>The Island of the Day Before</italic> (1994) and <italic>Numero Zero</italic> (2015), the author considers individual facets of musical reception and interpretation found in scattered academic and occasional texts by Eco. The final summing-up attempts to identify continuities or constants in Eco’s long-standing engagement with music.

Umberto Eco und die »Musik des Denkens«

Since Luigi Nono’s death in 1990, there has been an astonishingly intensive reception of his music. It not only encompasses the late works following the string quartet <italic>Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima</italic> (1980), but has also revived the earlier works with explicit political content. A central factor in this is the Archivio Nono in Venice, made possible by Nuria Schönberg-Nono, with its extensive collection of documents. This makes it possible to explore in depth the history of the works’ genesis and effects, and to present them comprehensively with ›new questions‹ (in Nono’s own words).

Über Luigi Nono schreiben ...

In his works, the French composer Franck Christoph Yeznikian weaves a multitude of references together to form supporting layers of meaning, combining these with a complex, precisely defined rhythmic and microtonal structure. His music, concentrated in contrapuntal lines, develops in slow and calm arcs; its sonic character is clearly a melancholy one. His historical models are merged with his sonic language with different degrees of presence. One particular characteristic of his harmonic and sonic spaces is a ›shining‹ created through a constant re-colouring of fixed-register pitches.

Ein Porträt (mit Analyse)

Franck Christoph Yeznikian

Stimmauthentifizierung und Feinhörigkeit

Iranerinnen

Under the rule of Taliban in Afghanistan, music is no longer possible in the country, since musicians are criminalized. Herewith one of the most significant intangible heritage in Afghanistan has been almost completely silenced and banned from any kind of social or communitarian life. In a close cooperation with the German Foreign Office in 2021 the UNESCO Chair on Transcultural Music Studies at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar was able to name important musicians and representatives of Afghan music and music archives for the official evacuation list of the German government. Aprox. 170 musicians and experts have left Afghanistan and are now mainly based in Germany. The aim is to keep working closely with Afghan musicians and experts on heritage matters, with concerts, workshops, research projects and on archival materials. Besides that, the UNESCO Chair’s »Afghan Music Research Center« (amrc-music.org) is among the largest and most important ones outside Afghanistan, especially regarding the recent music related living heritage of the country.

Afghanistan und die Folgen

Musik als Verbrechen

Briefe von Carl Dahlhaus

Der Zunft ins Stammbuch zu schreiben

Über die Memoiren des Ai Weiwei

Jens Balzers Geschichte des deutschen Pop seit 1945

Deutschstunde mit Musik

Ein Sammelband über musikalische Interpretation im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Institutionen – Medien

Verfestigung des Nichtfesten

Klara Haywards Konzeption musikalischer Mündigkeit

Selbstbestimmung als Qualität im Musizieren

Zu Karin Wetzels Das Werk im Werk. Konzepte des Poly-Werks

Potenzierte Polyphonie

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 107

Art and crime can be close together. Some crimes are so artfully planned and executed that they become art – a constellation that itself often becomes a subject in artistic depictions. This applies especially to the devious machinations of the Kim family in Bong Joon-ho’s <italic>Parasite</italic>, where they attempt to break out of the social underclass with the aid of a comprehensive fictional enactment and masterful acting performance. Drawing on the (neo-)Baroque triad of the <italic>Parasite</italic> film music, consisting of two Handel arias and the original composition <italic>The Belt of Faith</italic>, the film creates a narrative metastructure for this. Yet the combination of ›Western high culture‹ and Korean social drama achieves far more than a mere distancing effect, for the boundaries between play and reality, like those between art and crime, increasingly dissolve.

Zu Theatralität und (neo-)barocker Musik in Bong Joon-hos Parasite

Kunstvolles Verbrechen oder verbrecherische Kunst?

In the pre­ludes, specifically French constellations of sound and an accordingly autopoietic evasion of cadences lead to an increasing suspension of musical time. Various compositional strategies and models of immersion are examined theoretically and aesthetically from the perspective of the musical moment and placed in their historical context.

Zeitgestaltung in den Préludes Louis Couperins

»se perdre agréablement«

Early Music only gains aesthetic significance in conjunction with New Music, for both of these conceive a music whose basic formal principle is not harmonic tonality. Early Music, however, is rarely aware of this. It therefore becomes a problem in three ways: it obscures its non-tonal formal principle, it damages its aesthetic experience and it goes hand in hand with a colourful, authoritarian social character.

Alte Musik als Problem

In the debate on the so-called »crisis« in opera that raged during the early 20th century, numerous artists and members of the music scene argued about the orientation of music theatre, and even feared the death of the genre. Egon Wellesz participated in this discussion as a composer and an academic, exposed numerous problems with his music-historical research and offered concrete solutions with his idea for reforms. He demanded that the works of Wagner should be overcome through a stronger balance between orchestra and voices, as well as an abandonment of naturalism. Instead, Wellesz proposed following on from the principle of the great festival operas of the 18th century and the idea of the <italic>Gesamtkunstwerk</italic>, which embodied timeless ideals for him. He also implemented these approaches using modern methods in his own operas, most importantly <italic>Alkestis</italic> and <italic>Die Bakchantinnen</italic>, hoping to win back the audience that had abandoned opera.

Egon Wellesz’ Beitrag zu Diskurs und Strategien

Die »Opernkrise« der Zwischenkriegszeit – eine selbsterzeugte Hysterie?

Werke von Gewicht

Afrika

In his essay, Alessandro Arbo starts from the legal debates on the status of the art work in digital media and proceeds to a far-reaching redefinition of the concept of the work. The category of works also includes the repertoires of orally transmitted and phonographically preserved music. The foundation is a generally understood concept of trace, as well as that of normativity, which turns musical traces in practices ontologically into »social objects« (in Roman Ingarden’s sense). Arbo’s social ontology of the musical work is attractive in its integrative approach. The price, however – in the tradition of analytic philosophy – seems to be a normative indifference towards its object.

Alessandro Arbo über die Normativität musikalischer Werke

Soziale Objekte

In her habilitation thesis <italic>Was ihr hört – Werke, was sie durch uns gewesen sein werden</italic> (<italic>What You Hear: Works and What They Will Have Been Through Us</italic>), Magdalena Zorn develops a model of music history from a radically subjectivist point of view, starting from the very basic consideration that musical works are meant to be heard. Her search for traces leads her to countless stations in European-American music history, which she examines in order to clarify which imprints the listening subjects have left on the works themselves.

Magdalena Zorn über Musikgeschichte als subjektive Aneignung

Vom Hören der Werke

Einblicke in das Musikleben der Renaissance

Klaviermethodik von Christian A. Pohl

Musik für Solo und Ensemble von Wolfram Schurig auf CD

Konzerte, Kreuzzüge und bedrohte Froscharten

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 106

It is no secret that women have been forced to reinvent the medium for their artistic expression more often than men. Self-doubt or other narcissistic symptoms of failing ego competence can only be overcome if they are driven out of the subject in a kind of exorcism. This starts with the simple conviction that no one needs to be exceptional, to be special or be discovered by anyone as the ultimate genius in order to live up to themselves and the world. In dialogue with a variety of female writers, artists, musicians and philosophers, the present article reflects on what self-empowerment and the associated victory over societal oppression mean, and why both are eminently significant. The decisive turn will not be brought about by female quotas, as important as they are for initiating a change in society. Rather, it will only take place through a rethinking of <italic>sexual difference</italic>, and thus of reality as a whole.

Weibliche Stimme(n)

Digital technologies and media determine work and everyday life. Alongside production, distribution and communication, they change people’s perception of themselves and the world. The term »post-digital« refers to the accompanying dissolution of physical ties to place, time, objects and people. Causes and effects are decoupled, and originals and images become increasingly indistinguishable. Being and appearance merge into virtual simulacra. From this, the composer Alexander Schubert, who was born in 1979 and studied computer science, derives the »virtual imperative« to make such intersections of the digital and the analogue tangible in either concert, installation, music-theatrical or participatory projects. By means of immersive audio-visual electronics including motion sensors, stroboscopic flashes and VR glasses, the performers and sometimes the audience itself appear like holograms or avatars.

Sein, Schein und virtuelle Perspektiven bei Alexander Schubert

Auflösung und Betonung des Körperlichen im Digitalzeitalter

The Czech-Brazilian Philo­sopher Vilém Flusser became known worldwide as the thinker of the new electronic media and even their ›prophet‹, since he seemed to foresee some decades in advance (he died in 1991) technological devices and processes that are now very popular, such as personal computers, satellite-based global communications networks (including social networks), digital cameras etc. The now ubiquitous electronic images are an outstanding example of what Flusser termed ›technical images‹ – a kind of plain code that reigns today after the previous age, he argues, dominated by writing as the linear code par excellence. Taking into account this congenial association between Flusser’s philosophy of communication and technical images, one might ask if there has been room in his thought to approach aesthetic matters related to the sounds and their meaningful organisation in time – to reflect also on the musical language. A close reading of Flusser’s work shows that from his early books on, there has been a concern with the role played by music in human culture as a whole, and it fits both into the more metaphysical (as well as epistemological) context of the first half of the sixties (in such books as <italic>Language and Reality </italic>and<italic> History of the Devil</italic>) and the media-philosophical environment of the mid-eighties, exemplified by such books as <italic>Into the Universe of Technical Images</italic>.

Klangkunst in Vilém Flussers Philosophie

Musik für die Kamera

This text deals with the (presumed) early piano works of Debussy written before 1890, analysing the compositional strategies employed in them. The results reinforce the thesis that, in these works, Debussy not so much anticipates the characteristic sonorities of later works as establishes their preconditions. The analysis reaches the conclusion that, despite the employment of traditional means of development such as cadences and sequences, the articulation of tonality is undermined, avoided and heightened in equal measure. In addition, one can find strong indications that, in these early piano works, Debussy explored the structural preconditions for his later use of parallel harmonies.

Satztechnische Strategien im frühen Klavierwerk von Claude Debussy

Bierzelt und Beisetzung

Krieg in der Ukraine

With his study, Zagorski has published an overview dealing with Adorno’s aesthetics and its influence on the young composers of the Darmstadt Summer Course during the post-war period. He does not offer a mere chronological outline, but also traces the roots of Adorno’s musical aesthetics in his philosophy and cultural criticism. Unfortunately, Zagorski’s assessments very often miss the point of Adorno’s considerations and thus omit some of the key elements in discussions described.

Sonja Dierks

Bücher, Übersetzungen oder Beiträge

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 112

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 111

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 110

Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 109

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 108

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 107

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 106

Musik & Ästhetik, 2023, Jg. 27, Ausgabe 105

Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 103

Musik & Ästhetik, 2022, Jg. 26, Ausgabe 101

Musik & Ästhetik, 2021, Jg. 25, Ausgabe 100

Musik & Ästhetik, 2021, Jg. 25, Ausgabe 99

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

Musik & Ästhetik, 2009, Jg. 13, Ausgabe 51

Musik & Ästhetik, 2008, Jg. 12, Ausgabe 46

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

Musik & Ästhetik, 2002, Jg. 6, Ausgabe 22

Musik & Ästhetik, 1998, Jg. 2, Ausgabe 7