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

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 Parasite, 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 Parasite film music, consisting of two Handel arias and the original composition The Belt of Faith, 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.

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.

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.

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 Gesamtkunstwerk, which embodied timeless ideals for him. He also implemented these approaches using modern methods in his own operas, most importantly Alkestis and Die Bakchantinnen, hoping to win back the audience that had abandoned opera.

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.

In her habilitation thesis Was ihr hört – Werke, was sie durch uns gewesen sein werden (What You Hear: Works and What They Will Have Been Through Us), 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.