Musik & Ästhetik, 2021, Jg. 25, Ausgabe 100

Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960) counts among the few modern operas with a lead male role for a countertenor. Oberon however is not the only one with wavering gender identity in this piece. Indeed, young Francis Flute has to cross-dress and appear as a woman as he plays the role of Thisbe in a theatrical performance presented as part of the story proper. In doing this, he sings a ­series of wrong tones. Are they his fault, or is his Thisbe erring? Britten creates an exemplary situation in which fundamental questions of musical performance as such are addressed, like the discrepancy between the written score and its possibly faulty performance, the back-and-forth between authenticity and role-playing that singers may go through on stage, and the significance of gender stereotypes for operatic roles. 

Tempest’s first collection of poems, Everything speaks in Its Own Way, was published in 2012, and her first play, Wasted, in 2013. In 2013 she won the Ted Hughes Award for the spoken word performance Brand New Ancients. In 2014 she released the album Everybody Down, which was nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize. Her first novel, The Bricks That Built the Houses, was published in 2016. In August 2020, Tempest announced on Twitter that would henceforth go by the name Kae (rather than Kate) and use the gender-neutral pronouns ›they/them‹ instead of ›she/her‹. Anyone reading Tempest’s texts is floored by how much socio-critical truth they contain. They create a resolutely free space, a utopia that lies before us. Anyone who hears their voice is overwhelmed and enchanted by the intensity with which their voice, by becoming estranged from itself, constitutively subverts language. The result is a unique sound that traces an arc from Ovid’s poetry to the hardcore rap of the Wu-Tang Clan. The present article attempts to trace the vocal and semantic particularities of Tempest’s work.

According to J. S. Bach, the »fundamental principles of composition« are derived from thoroughbass and the keyboard. The enormous ramifications of this statement have yet to be fully appreciated, for it sheds new light both on Bach’s pedagogy and his music. Until now, the most famous contemporaneous advocate for associating composition with thoroughbass was J. D. Heinichen. Bach not only knew Heinichen’s 1728 treatise, but two recent discoveries also substantiate the notion that Bach’s conception of composition was similar to Heinichen’s. First, the anonymous Vorschriften und Grundsätze, which is attributed to Bach, includes a copy of the table of thoroughbass figures from Heinichen’s 1711 treatise. Second, and more importantly, an autograph manuscript from Bach’s own lessons borrows a concept called »anticipatio transitus« from Heinichen’s 1728 treatise, wherein a contrapuntal license is rationalized by reference to »fundamental tones«. The implication is that Bach’s own »fundamental principles of composition« may refer to Heinichen’s conception of »fundamental tones«. After investigating examples from Christoph Bernhard and C. Ph. E. Bach, two brief analyses of Bach’s music reveal some of the advantages of this kind of historical approach to music theory.

The focus of the essay is posthumanism in the late modern epoch, in which the crisis of humanism is reflected as a philosophical position and habitus. In the new technicist way of thinking, based on sophisticated computer technologies, the historical, socio-political and cultural past of humanity no longer play a role. Instead, the posthuman model of the »improved« human being, shaped by biotechnology and genetic »optimization«, is brought to the fore. In this context, the question about the role of »artificial intelligence« in compositional creation and about the future of music in general is posed anew. Can a musical work be created beyond the human being – with the help of algorithms and computer-produced synthetic sounds? Can music then be redefined? This essay argues that music cannot exist without the leading role of the human individual and his creative will, which artistically models the entire compositional process while keeping it under control.

Hatred of Jews was not only a central component of the National Socialist worldview, but in fact initiated the politics of the Hitler regime in a very concrete manner. Drawing on a solid foundation of historical research, Jörg Osterloh’s book shows what that meant for Jewish writers, musicians and those working in the theatre and film industry: from 1933 onwards, cultural policy was radicalised at both the regional and national level, setting up a bureaucratic system for the purpose of identification and control through the ›Chambers of Culture‹ [Kulturkammern] and culminating – with certain delays – in the successful exclusion of Jews from German cultural life. Just how destructive this development was, both for the victims and for cultural life as a whole, is shown not least by the fact that discrimination and persecution in the 1940s transitioned seamlessly into the Holocaust.

Julian Caskel tries to bring together a historical overview of rhythm as a topic in the humanities in the 20th century and his systematic theory of rhythm without being able to resolve the tension between the two approaches. He posits an »augmented metrical theory« as an alternative to both »esoterical« and »critical« theories of rhythm that have dominated the debate in the 20th century.