Musik & Ästhetik, 2008, Jg. 12, Ausgabe 45

Beethoven and the Crisis of the Subject Part V-VI

Following examination of the threat to the subject and the signatures of negation and violence in Beethoven's late works the author now addresses two categories that are constitutive for Beethoven: the Promethean and Dionysian. Prometheus stands for the heroic self-assertion of the subject in the middle period and Dionysos for its dissolution or destruction in the late works. Dionysos stands in an antithetically analogous relation to Beethoven's Christianity which is characterised by a longing for restitution and pleas for mercy. At the same time however the Dionysian principle draws Beethoven's late music into a radical temporality and turns it in a precise sense into an art that refers to the future as atemporal mode. In this respect Beethoven's music seems to anticipate Nietzsche's philosophy. Finally a biographical sketch based on the psychoanalytical concepts of the »replacement child« and the »alien self« is devoted to the motif of the threat to and uncertainty of Beethoven's identity as a biographical subject. Such an investigation does not provide any causal explanations of the music's concerns but certainly an additional resonance space that can enrich and stimulate interpretation.

»Shir shavur«: Observations on a choral work by Heinz Holliger

In his 2004 choralwork shir shavur [Broken Song] Heinz Holliger used texts by the Israeli poet David Rokeah. The poems were written in Hebrew but Rokeah also made a rough German translation for Holliger which the latter used together with the original Hebrew. The point of departure for this analysis is the double meaning of the concept of the idea: firstly the constructive idea that occurs to the artist and secondly what Hegel meant when he spoke of the >sensual appearance of the idea<. This difference returns in Holliger's composition. At the moment it becomes sound the work's construction one of the most complex in Holliger's oeuvre takes on a simple clarity and it is precisely this that makes the piece such an undeniable success. For the analysis this led to the decision not simply to show how it was made but rather to approach analytically what it is.

Balancing Acts. On culture shock and musical experience

The experience of a culture shock can but by no means must be accompanied by states of shock as known from medical diagnostics. As a rule culture shocks have phases of differing intensity. Taken as a whole they constitute crises of adaption whose progressions are typical for confrontations with things that are initially remote unfamiliar or alien; hence all people go through these at some point. One case study shows that discourses on unfamiliar musical experiences have a great deal in common with ways of dealing with some of the processes typical for culture shocks. The focus is always on communicative actions where supposedly illogical or unreasonable have played an important part if not caused disturbances. Those who do not give up engaging with such experiences broaden their horizons in the process.

The Concept of Musical Ascription

Following on from Ruth Sonderegger's characterisation of aesthetic experience as a game between interpretative movements that continually dissolve and revive one other listening is defined here as an undecided balancing process between formal and speech-like or structural and material elements. Music is thus understood as multicoloured and listening as discontinuous. The essay then examines a way of ending this confusing game of interpretation prematurely by ascribing in a form of hermeneutic coup the work directly to the ego and retaining only its pragmatic significance and utility. Four characteristics of such an ascription are examined: forcing a connection; pushing things together in images or on stage; the relation to a current context; the awareness of the ephemerality of this very interpretation.

Art as a Way of Coping with Facticity

This essay suggests a functional definition of art as a social system that analogously to politics law economics science and religion solves a specific problem in society. The function of art here is conceived not as an external supplementary aspect but is rather intended as a definition in the sense of a demarcation from other systems. This system-theoretical approach which assigns both a less problematic foundation and an appropriately central position to the Kantian idea of »purposiveness without purpose« is augmented by the phenomenological concepts of facticity and the imaginary in order to be able to represent art as the solution to the problem of facticity. In this way the essay attempts to outline not only a connection between art and society but also a concept of art as a genuinely social system.

A propos of Schönberg and Stefan George

The fact that Stefan George was far from sympathetic to the expressionist modernity represented by Arnold Schönberg does not make their encounter in the musical-literary genre of the piano Lied any less of an event. Certainly it is true that the music needs such poems far more than vice versa. But when the encounter between the two arts is so strongly characterised by an equal footing one could perhaps be tempted to believe that even perfection can still be enhanced. This is illustrated using the two George poems in Schönbergs Second String Quartet in F sharp minor op. 10 - Entrückung and Litanei from the cycle der siebente Ring - and the fifteen poems from Das Buch der hängenden Gärten set in the op. 15 songs. These works composed almost simultaneously from 1908 to 1909 mark the start of Schönberg's period of »free atonality«.

Sound Dramaturgy in Wagner

This text deals with Tobias Janz's book Klangdramaturgie. Studien zur theatralen Orchesterkomposition in Wagners »Ring des Nibelungen« (Würzburg 2006: Königshausen & Neumann). Its innovative capacity notwithstanding isolated problems of representation is enormous. Jazz corrects one-sided aspects of the few existing studies on this subject at the same time presenting his own far-reaching analytical approach to sound in Wagner's music.

Alienating Empathy. An essay on the Kubrick Soundtracks

The idea of »contrasting« film music is as old as the sound film itself; applying this idea to Kubrick's films however as has been done time and time again overlooks the fact that in supposedly »contrasting« scenes one could just as easily speak of an »analogy« rather than a »contrast« between image and sound and of »empathy« rather than »alienation«. The Kubrick Soundtracks achieve something apparently contradictory: they both act as a means of empathy and as means of preventing empathy i.e. a means of alienation: they suceed in this because the soundtracks converge emotionally with film events on the one hand but also as pre-existing and usually very popular compositions render a direct empathic involvement with the events in the film problematic. This discrepancy touches on a central theme of Kubrick's work: the potential for music and art in general to be »charged« both morally and immorally.