Musik & Ästhetik, 2003, Jg. 7, Ausgabe 26

Music and Emotion

The present discussion of the relation between music and emotion focuses on the problem of representationality and expressiveness. Until now this debate has not produced a plausible explanation that does justice to the complexity of either the relationship itself or the complexity of music or emotion. Alternatively this text conceptualizes the relation between music and emotion as the staging of musical emotions. This staging grows out of multiple interactions between musicians instruments listeners and social spatial and temporal arrangements. It will be demonstrated which qualities make emotions musical and which make music emotional. Emotions and music may interact as scenarios and »scenic objects«. Finally: What about the reality of musical emotions?

The melancholy of the powerlessness. The Brahmsian sound and his Intermezzo Op. 119 No.1

Few works have been such a source of fascination for Brahms researchers as the Intermezzo in b minor Op. 119 No. I. This article will show that the apparently autonomous construction of thirds that so fundamentaly shape the Intermezzo are set within a traditional understanding of tonality. Furthermore the crossing of various tonal models make the lyrical piano piece a highly complex creation where falling fifths in particular play an important part. It is against this backdrop that the question regarding conventional and progressive moments in Brahm's works is pursued in a new light. In doing so a central concern remains the attempt to approach some moments of the distinctive Brahmsian sound.

The term chaos in the artistic creative process. An essay

The artistic creative process is situated within the conflict area between notion and performance plan and sketch idea and final form but also between theory and practice a rule and its violation - in a word between chaos and cosmos. In this essay fundamental questions about the artistic creative process are raised based on the term chaos. The artistic creative process as a whole has scarcely been examined theoretically - and can hardly be comprehended - because there is no such thing as »the« artistic creative process. With the aid of various focused comparisons of the terms cosmos and chaos in several of their implications the author approaches the phenomenon by establishing a number of examples from aesthetic (Aristotle Kant) literature (Friedrich Schlegel) music (Haydn Schönberg) and mythology (cosmologies) and makes enquiries into them with regard to the aesthetic premises beginning ending and course as well as the reception and value judgment of their relation to the creative process.

On the uses and disadvantages of music history for muscial life: the critique of interpretations which update using Hans Zender's »Schubert's Winterreise« as an example

Hans Zender's arrangement of Schubert's Winterreise (1993) provides a prominent example of approaches to performance or composition that update existing pieces as are currently wide-spread yet have not been satisfactorily reflected upon with regard to their immanent contradictions. Based on the analysis of this »composed interpretation« principal difficulties of this approach are to be made clear; for example the tendency to give music a pedagogical function and the way in which it lags behind critical claims from an historical and material reflection standpoint. Zender's conceptional inconsistencies and those of every other updating attempt at interpreting music are founded in the attempt to stop a work of art from aging by specifically pointing out that it has aged and that its reception up to the pieces of music would like to overcome distances from the past and approach traditional works with today's reception requirements. At the same time however these distances are supposed to be pointed out and the works are to be taken away from the usually inadequate and automated reception mechanism of the mass-medial-present. The retro-projection of present-day forms of reception on works from the past threatens to level off that aspect of alterity of the works in respect to the present which on the contrary were supposed to be made newly experiencable. The intended updating of the past turns into an hisoricizing of the present if it becomes a leading compositional trend.

Resistenza and the question of the »disobedient«

Luigi Pestalozza has been one of the most admired and most active figures in Italy's musical life since the 1960s. For years he was responsible for the music department in the Partito Comunista Italiano he organized innumerable conferences and concerts and wrote books on various topics beside music. In 1980 he founded the journal Musica/Realtà. Pestalozza who collaborated with Luigi Nono for many years is the editor of the series of books titled Sfere for Ricordi Publishers in which his Collected Works recently appeared. He grew up in the tradition of Marx and Gramsci was influenced by his experiences with Mussolini's fascism and has up to the present day moved the struggle for change in the cultural state of music inexorably forward. Reason enough to present him with a series of questions last summer as a real contemporary witness. This issue contains the first part of his replies which concentrate on biographical aspects and his work in the PCI. The second part which concerns itself with new music Nono and the function of music in general for societal change will appear in Issue 27.