Musik & Ästhetik, 2024, Jg. 28, Ausgabe 112

With a detachment of the song Never Will I marry by Frank Loesser from the musical Greenwillow for the TV music program Jazz Scene USA in 1961, Nancy Wilson’s jazz interpretation becomes a saddle point of music-sociological criticism when the bombs fall in Vietnam and brickwork is built in Berlin. The article expands on the controversy raised by Andrea Rödig in 2002 as to why the critique of the exiled theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno did not want to remain silent on jazz from 1947 until 1970 in Germany. The Malinke from West Africa and Franz Schubert from the edge of the Alps know how to shape the basic rhythm in the sound and the melody in the harmonic changes of the art song in such a way that everyday work and emotional analysis without sublimation theory become the avant-garde of musical practice. Alexander Turner and the Arctic Monkeys belong to the Arctic Monkeys because of their voice, their stage presence, their instrumental collaboration and their historically accurate music videos are an important part of the future of post-punk.

This article attempts a preliminary analysis of Caldara’s musical choices for the first setting of Metastasio’s Demetrio, the poet’s first operatic libretto for the court of Vienna. Inspired by hints from Metastasio’s letters, where Caldara’s music is described as not the most mo­dern nor the most expressive, we have a look at the vocal and orchestral aesthetics of this opera, together with the information we have about the original cast and the libretto’s main dramaturgical traits, thus trying to form ourselves a first idea of this music’s capacity to be expressive or modern enough for 1731, and to understand if Caldara really made an effort to contradict his reputation as a counterpoint expert while attempting to set to music a libretto that is theatrically valid and delicately sentimental at the same time. And the results were definitely much more interesting than one would expect without looking at the sources.

This essay considers some of the relationships between the human body, instruments, and instrumentality in the early modern period, pointing out some lines for further investigation. The question of whether instruments are natural or artificial was seen as especially important during this period. Focusing on the relationship between instruments and the human voice, instruments as epistemological tools, and the notion of the human body as instrument, specific moments and scenarios in which instruments operate between dichotomies such as artificial and natural are highlighted. Already in the early modern period, they were considered to be both living and lifeless, both artificial and natural objects. At the same time, the paper shows how instruments were privileged objects for music theoretical investigations, ultimately leading to the establishment of the separate field of study known as organography.

Mark Andre’s music emphasises sonic processes. His orchestral triptych …auf… (2005-07) is characterised by transitions, intermediate spaces and threshold states between harmonic, inharmonic and noisy sound situations, which the composer associates with the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the »most wonderful« form of a transition. The essay analyses the transitions between different types of sound in the first of the three orchestral pieces. Following Walter Benjamin and Dieter Mersch, the simultaneously suggestive and mysterious, appealing and concealing sound mixtures are analysed using the topos of aura, which not coincidentally overlaps with the ritualistic and religious, in the context of which the orchestral works are also to be seen.