Musik & Ästhetik, 2007, Jg. 11, Ausgabe 42

The Future in Ruins Essay on Charles Ives

The second half continues parts I-III of the essay into detailed analyses. Ives' First Violin Sonata is analyzed through its relation between quoted church hymns and sonata form. The Second String Quartet and Fourth Symphony are then read as allegories both of American models of community and of the philosophy of history. The »Concord« Sonata is interpreted as a commentary on slavery and Ives' relation to the European musical canon. »The Unanswered Question« dramatizes tensions of individual and collective. The essay's conclusions suggests that Ives' songs are perhaps his strongest works those which imagine a different America than that of populist violence and aggression against the European cultural inheritance.

Witold Lutoslawski and the »New Simplicity«

Since the 1970s research into the work of Lutoslawski has pointed out a simplification of musical language but not attempted to examine this in relation to intellectual and compositional history. Leaving aside the fact that the reduction of musical language can be a typical feature of a composer's late work it would seem natural to compare this to a movement initiated by a group of young German composers in the mid-1970s: this movement referred to with the misleading label >New Simplicity< shares certain characteristics with the works composed by Lutoslawski around 1975. Admittedly one can almost certainly rule out any direct mutual influence; it is still fascinating however to observe how the zeitgeist led to commonalities that were independant of tradition or location and resulted from completely different motives. One can find an overlap between said German movement and Lutoslawski in four aspects: in the tension field between material dictates and subjective composition as well as between construction and expression in a communicative concept of music and in a new ideal of beauty. While the German movement was intended as a provocative counter-movement to the avantgarde however Lutoslawski's simplification of his own musical language should be viewed not as a break in his work but rather as a consistent development thereof.

»Tönend bewegt«. Four Areas of Research on the Relationship between Music and Motion

Motion has always been recognised as an important experiential dimension in musical performance and perception. Reviews of written accounts on this subject show a great variety of diverse assumptions and definitions which seem to encompass a number of dissimilar phenomena. In this article four theoretical concepts of musical motion are distinguished as an attempt to systematise and categorise these different experiences. 1. Bodily movement as a directly observable reaction to music is common listening. The association of music with dance is widely acknowledged across cultures. 2. The perception of virtual-spatial motion in electronic music is mainly evoked by loudspeakers in different spatial positions. 3. Apparent motion in music is based on grouping and Gestalt principles comparable to those in visual perception: distinct stimulus events in alternation or succession at an appropriate time interval give rise to the experience of a single moving object. 4. Finally the perception of metaphorical motion draws on associations with other domains of experience such as gestures and moving objects.

On Director's Opera. Not a collective review

Using exemplary texts from the fields of musicology and theatre studies written between 1979 and 2006 this essay examines the problems of what is referred to as »director's opera«. It shows that they cannot be understood without first developing a concept of the internal impossibility of the operatic genre as such. At the same time it also criticises the hitherto inadequate intellectual and theoretical approaches to these problems.

Mainstream and Contemporary Art

In this contribution the author expresses concern about the development of contemporary art which has more and more become the plaything of capital and power interests through the increasing influence of pressure groups and networks. It is necessary precisely in the light of the situation as diagnosed here to hold on to a notion of artistic autonomy for neither science nor political ideologies can ensure the continuation of art by means of artistic creations. The clear discourse-oriented nature of contemporary art since the 1990s has not led to greater freedom but rather transformed the field of art into a sociology-dominated zone of capital generation. Here the artists are the ones who truly lose out for their status and their role today are significantly restricted by art managers and curators.

On the Difficulty of Speaking About the Noose While in the Hangman's House. On the Correspondance Between Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Doflein

In Theodor W. Adorno's essays on musical pedagogy there is repeated mention of his personal contact with the Freiburg instrumental teacher Erich Doflein but it is only now that the extensive correspondance between the two (1949-1962) is available in full. It should be read as a document of the intellectual climate in the West Germany of the 1950s a specific mixture of backwardness »Wirtschaftswunder« [economic miracle] and cultural modernisation. In the case of Adorno and the youth music movement this mixture transpires as a polemical conflict that found its clearest literary expression in Adorno's Kritik des Musikanten. Erich Doflein's futile attempt to mediate between the two parties is a defining aspect of the correspondence. It becomes clear that there were misunderstandings too fundamental to be concealed by the mutual personal appreciation between the protagonists. Within a restricted and frequently overlooked field that of musical pedagogy one can find a paradigmatic manifestation of the reception and effect history of Critical Theory in Germany.