Musik & Ästhetik, 2010, Jg. 14, Ausgabe 56

Summary The Paradox of Understanding Music – Understanding music is surrounded by paradox, due to the fact that music´s form and content are inseparable. The air of paradox can be avoided, however, provided that understanding is centered around simulation rather than sign decoding. Simulation forms a part of every kind of understanding; in the case of music, it becomes a kind of re-enactment. A theory of musical re-enactment, as developed here, is able to integrate several well-known features of our response to music, including our propensity to connect music to extramusical »content«. Musical re-enactment is nosmooth process, however; the form of music is the result of a process of increasing autonomy. Therefore, it presents itself to our will to understand as simultaneously appealing and elusive. In our attempts to understand by re-enacting music, this turns into a challenge to integrate experiential time into musical form.

Summary The Concert is Dead – Long Live the Concert! Openings and Perspectives of Music in the »Iconic Turn« of the Digital Age – In the last twenty years, the computer has developed into a universal instrument for the production, notation, distribution and reception of music; it has long ceased to serve merely the production, storage and reproduction of any possible sound material. In combination with software and interfaces it has become a mobile, multi-functional nodal point through which one can react to every possible situation and combine, amalgamate and transform music with every conceivable medium in real time. The keywords »hybridisation« and »content-aesthetic turn« are used to explain aesthetic aspects of the combination of audible and visible elements; these could be products of a general socio- and culture-historical »iconic turn« in which, in the wake of the digital revolution, the image has established itself as the new dominant medium. At the same time, it seems that the increasing illustration and computer-assisted intermedialisation of music is an attempt to compensate for the fact that the technically-reproduced image of music has become the primary musical experience for most people. If this means the end of the concert, the medial transmission of music simultaneously provides the best case for the concert as an intense listening experience that speaks to several different senses at once.

Summary The Function of Music in Rites: A Psychoanalytical Contribution to Ritual Research

The significant coexistence of ritual and music begs the question as to the structural foundation of this elective affinity. The author examines this question using the concept of kinaesthetic semantics, an approach he has developed for the psychoanalytical description of events in music. Music generates meaning (semantics) through the inner structuring of sensual motion stimuli (kinaesthetic elements), with a resulting fusion of expectation and event, i.e. between internal and external perception. This perceptual language is at once complex and fusional. If one compares events in music with those in ritual, a structural similarity becomes clear: both processes are based on demonstrative repetitions of rhythmicised, perception-oriented events. In this sense, music transpires as immanently ritual, while ritual, through quasi-musical structures, can draw the participant into a hypnotic fusion with the symbols it presents. The relationship between linguistic and kinaesthetic semantics in ritual is discussed here.

Summary The »Farewell Seventh« and its Transformation in Schubert and Brahms

The harmonic progression known as the »farewell seventh« marks a supplementary formal element after the formally constitutive final cadence. Its roots can be traced back to vocal polyphony in the Renaissance. This essay analyses three closing passages by Schubert and Brahms that can all be connected to this concluding formula, but heighten and reinterpret it in different ways. The text thus aims to contribute to the interpretation of formal-harmonic processes in Romanticism against the background of traditional composition-historical conventions.

Summary »... to give me support by reading in this desperate situation« – Musical affinities between Franz Schubert and James Cooper. In his last letter, written by Franz Schubert shortly before his death, he asked a friend to help him with books from James F. Cooper. On the basis of this seemingly vital request parallels and similarities are shown in the life and work of the Austrian composer and the American novelist. The speculative comparison makes the path clear for a new unconventional look at Schubert´s late work and emphasizes the musical importance of Cooper´s literature which has fallen into oblivion in Germany.