Musik & Ästhetik, 2010, Jg. 14, Ausgabe 55

Beauty in Music

The author addresses the question of beauty in all its possible forms (art music popular music ethnological music) with two central theses. Firstly music as such is beautiful in the sense that it possesses for anthropological and philosophical reasons a special erotic (in the Platonic sense) quality that makes music an object of constant and hence everyday desire. Secondly the essay develops a systematics based on three validity claims (beauty [artistic] success and [artistic] truth) of which beauty occupies the lowest as it were basal level which increasingly loses significance in the context of art. At the same time this systematics enables a differentiation of production-aesthetic and receptionaesthetic attitudes in every form of music.

Aesthetic Theory of Praxis:
The Restitution of a Lost Paradigm of the Frankfurt School

It has become conventional to view Adorno´s late philosophy with a degree of suspicion as obsolete aestheticism and hence a dead end. An immanent reconstruction of his texts however paints a completely different picture. In the constellation of »negative dialectics« »musique informelle« and »material morphology« Adorno develops a structural methodology that is central both to the humanities and the social sciences. This can be translated into fundamental-theoretically far-reaching arguments of the linguistic turn for example the model of the constitutive rule. In addition Adorno offers the perspective of a praxeological theory of experience in which the constitutive significance of aesthetic judgements on shape for social processes of structural formation is systematically acknowledged. From this perspective it is also possible to re-establish a lost legacy of Critical Theory.

»Not Minimalism«:
Enno Poppe´s »Keilschrift«

Starting from a short melody-like pitch sequence Poppe elaborates an almost 20-minute orchestral piece. The essay explains the parametric properties of this reductionist initial material and its structurally constitutive effect on the entire work. The piece whose manner of composition could be deemed monothematic and whose title refers to the syllabic (cuneiform) script invented in Mesopotamia almost 4500 years ago shows a strong inner referentiality between rhythm and meter as well as instrumentation quartertone harmony and a heavily associative soundworld.

What is the potential of philosophy art and religion amidst nature technology and capital?
Empedocles. Hoelderlin. Marx

Hoelderlin´s views of the relationship between man nature and technology as he had seen them at the beginning of the industrialization are being reconstructed from the tragedy Death of Empedocles and his theoretical works from 1799. In these texts Hoelderlin reflects the endangerment of man and nature that is being caused by a rupture of their traditionally complimentary as well as rivalling relationship. In order to examine this problem Hoelderlin goes back to the theoretical works of Empedocles and discusses the myth of his fall into the Etna. Empedocles´ system of nature as far as Hoelderlin dealt with it is being reconstructed. By imagining a fictional theatrical encounter of Marx and Hoelderlin in the Tübinger Turm the author shows to which extent the actual linking of Marx to the early German idealism could have been taken from Hoelderlin. Taking the example of Marx´ late philosophical work Die trinitarische Formel in the third volume of Das Kapital obsolete as well as still actual elements of his theory are described. It becomes evident that Marx´ diagnostic capabilities were much stronger than his prognostic ones. Moreover his utopia of a society without classes shows him trapped in a form of idealism that cannot to the least cope with the problems of the relationship between man and nature spirit and materiality.

The Construction of Time in Bruckner´s Fifth Symphony

The Fifth Symphony by Anton Bruckner is examined as a multi-dimensional temporal construction. The essay begins with the relationship between local and global time from the smallest units to the giant formal blocks; it then considers the effects of the different historically-conditioned compositional approaches on the listener´s perception of time. Particular emphasis is given to the »being-like« stasis of Baroque polyphony in opposition to the evolving stream of »becoming « in sonata form and the music of the 19th century. With a sideways glance at Beethoven the combination of the two contrasting temporal structures in Bruckner´s music is interpreted as a paradoxical coincidentia oppositorum not as a harmonious synthesis. This paradox which offers a clear view of the ways in which stylistic properties from different periods are used in a single form results in an overcoming of subjectivism at its core and thus anticipates a central aspect of »future music«: that of plurality which replaces the subjectivist paradigm of the classical unity of the work.