Musik & Ästhetik, 2006, Jg. 10, Ausgabe 40

Wilhelm Furtwängler Thomas Mann and the German Music

Provoked by the exculpatory tone of many writings (by Joachim Kaiser Peter Gülke among others) occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the conductor's death this essay revisits the contentious issue of WIlhelm Furtwängler's relationship to the Third Reich and reconsiders the evidence brought to bear upon the matter by Thomas Mann his harshest German critic. The reassessment draws primarily upon Furtwängler's Aufzeichnungen and upon Mann's diaries as well as his aborted essay on the conductor and situates the controversy in the larger context of the quarrel still unsettled between the exiles from Nazi Germany and the so-called inner émigrés. Furtwängler's thoughts about the superiority of German music and his aggressive defense of German musical supremacy in light of so eminent an international figure as Toscanini illuminate that critical nexus of music and politics that lies at the heart of Doctor Faustus.

Isorhythmic Mobile. On Guillaume Dufay's Motet »O sancte Sebastiane«

Biographical aspects are taken as the first of orientation for a possible classification of the work in terms of his genesis. Beginning with a detailed structural analysis the article then discusses possibilities and solutions for Dufay's isorhythmic motets in the tension field between self-imposed constraints and the aesthetic paradigm of »varietas« that was so central to the music of his time as well as investigating the relationship with the text the vocal hierarchy and its symbolism.

Nono's Working Method. And: the question of his music's unity

The extensive sketches and other material in the Archivio Luigi Nono in Venice paint a fascinating picture of Nono's working method which was astonishingly anti-professional and associative. The second part of the essay takes up the controversial question of a stylistic break in the 1970s interpreting Nono as an artist who anticipated the social and political changes following the heyday of the European Left and already drew conclusions from it for his own work very early on.

Of Two Fugal Cultures. Ritornello form and contrapuntal definition in J. S. Bach's »Well-Tempered Clavier«

Examination of the fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier reveals a contradiction: the common fugal theory of the time described the fugue as an ensemble of contrapuntal techniques whose specific application defined its individual formal sections. In both parts of The Well-Tempered Clavier however half the fugues dispense with any such techniques especially that of stretto and thus - according to the theory - cannot rightfully bear the title »fugue«. In these fugues Bach confronts the fugal tradition with a formal concept of his own based on a constructive modulation order and a constructive use of interludes.

Theory and practice in music tuition in Latin schools. The treatise on music of the cantor Matthias Ebio (1651)

Since Heinrich Faber's Compendiolum musicae pro incipientibus (1548) There has been a clearly-defined barely explored group of writings for school music tuition whose aim increasingly became not that of music theory itself but rather musical practice. It is unclear in most cases how the combination between these two functioned. The Husum cantor Matthias Ebio (1591-1676) offers some answers with the printed texts from 1651 which range from the basics of music theory to the performance of two-part figured bass.

The First Etude from Ernst Helmuth Flammer's Cycle »superverso per organo«. Or: On the Gradual Emergence of Meaning

This analysis focuses on the first piece in this twelve-part cycle which generates musical form from opposed material(sustained chords and small motivic elements) through a gradual process that releases meanings which are here discussed in connection with mythological reflections.