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Band 61 / 2004

Marianne Betz, The Voice of the City. New York in der Musik Charles Ives’ • [Seite 207]

At the turn of the last century, New York began to emerge as the paradigm of the modern twentieth-century city. Not only did it mushroom in size, but its continually transforming appearance, precipitated by its skyscrapers and upward-striving architectur, seemed to illustrate the sum of human ambition. While contemporary painters and writers documented the impressions of its evolving, pulsating sceneries, whose multiculturalism became one of the city’s hall marks, curiosity with regard to its developing urban soundscapes was much less forthcoming. As a businessman Charles Ives commuted daily to the city, as did scores of others who contributed to its heterogeneous population. The city’s changing “voice,” viewed as the urban symbol of the modern age, is a theme in several of his compositions: man, nature, and urban life coalesce in a musical night scene in Central Park in the Dark (1906), and in the second Orchestral Set, the heterogeneity of the melting-pot is movingly portrayed in From Hanover Square North (1915).

Christoph von Blumröder: Zur Problematik kompositorischer Neuorientierung nach 1945 • [Seite 68]

The extent to which the new orientation composition took after 1945 can categorically be dismissed as a completed, as it were, historiographical phenomenon of the 1950s is here reassessed and countered by the German reception of musique concrète from Paris and Francois Bayle’s musique acousmatique, and, in another context, by Henri Pousser’s compositional engagement with Friedrich Hölderlin’s and Robert Schumann’s works.

Claus Bockmaier, Beethoven als finstere Macht? Zum c-Moll-Allegro der Arie des Max aus Webers Freischütz • [Seite 106]

Careful scrutiny of the passage “Doch mich umgarnen finstre Mächte” from Max’s aria in Weber’s Freischütz reveals that the opening of the Allegro di molto e con brio of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 13 (Pathétique) served as its model with regard to the following parameters: key signature and characterization, harmonic progressions and structure, the melodic lines, and motivic and rhythmic patterns. Through the use of discontinuity in its design, Weber lends special emphasis to the music, which, however, positions Max’s recitation of verse in the vicinity of “musical prose,” the concept Franz Grillparzer so strongly opposed. It is nonetheless possible to show that the rudiments of this compositional technique are not founded on the principles of recitative but rather on the Viennese classical idiom, specifically, within the framework of a dependable metric flow. Applicable to the Freischütz in general, Weber’s characters’ use of speech and action in this aria does not represent the protagonists themselves—Max also merely reacts—but stands for the activity of the “dark forces” that seem, so to speak, to be additionally personified through Beethoven.

Michael Custodis, Das Idol Jean Sibelius • [Seite 226]

The life and work of Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)—Finland’s most esteemed composer—has remained the standard by which subsequent generations of Finnish musicians are measured. His romantically inclined preoccupation with the roots of Finnish culture and his enthusiasm for his country’s national movement granted him celebrity status during his lifetime. Although no new works were published in his final thirty years and he gradually retreated altogether from public life, Sibelius’s preeminence remained unbroken, and his name continues to resound as a lasting mainstay of Finnish culture. The composer’s significance as a cultural and political identification figure is even more graphic when his impact on Finland’s political development is assessed together with the role of the “idol” in society.

Hellmut Federhofer, Theodor W. Adornos und Heinrich Schenkers Musikdenken • [Seite 300]

An antithetical perception of the world and contrary assessments of twentieth-century new music did not preclude Adorno’s interest in Schenker’s music theory. Adorno addressed this issue in a lecture given in 1969, which has only recently been published. The two theorists, though not personally acquainted, shared the premise that analysis primarily deals with compositional structure and structural listening and that the mere evidence of conventional formal patterns and thematic relations utilized in traditional forms does not suffice. In contrast to Schenker, Adorno considered analysis—“Denken in Musik”—as a prerequisite for philosophical reflection on music. Hence, the notion of truth in music to which Adorno refers assumes a radical pose, one that jeopardizes itself since such analyses cannot live up to their claims, as Diether de la Motte has observed. Since analysis and philosophical interpretation constantly thwart one another, Adorno’s reductive understanding is unsustainable.

Anselm Gerhard: "Tinta musicale". Flotows Martha und die Frage nach Möglichkeiten und Grenzen musikalischer Analyse in Opern des 19. Jahrhundert • [Seite 1]

Analytical methods formulated in the nineteenth century were based on Beethoven’s instrumental music, which consequently ensures that they are singularly unfit for the analysis of operatic scores. The term tinta musicale, surfacing around 1830 and which by 1859 was taken for granted by the Florentine critic Basevi, affords a more plausible vocabulary for delineating the compositional procedures of nineteenth-century opera. The term refers not only to motivic and thematic correspondence between numbers in a score, but to specific devices of color used in the characterization of harmony, orchestration, scene design, lighting, etc. A concise overview of extant attempts to individuate a specific tinta in operas by Verdi is followed by a first case study which will attempt to ascertain the validity of this analytical category as exemplified by Flotow’s Martha (1847). Although this inquiry confines itself to questions of motivic and thematic unification, the results are no less astounding—all principle melodies of Flotow’s opera appear to be drawn from the score’s intended musical core: the Irish song, "The Last Rose of Summer."

Florian Grampp, Acciaccaturen. Über ein ästhetisches Kuriosum [Seite 117]

The acciaccatura, a curious musical device of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian harpsichord music and thorough bass practice, may be characterized as a “crush” of harmonic and non-harmonic tones or as a combination of sounds, in which a chordal structure is enhanced by a mixture of percussive, harmonic, and coloristic effects. Since it is difficult to classify, being neither a contrapuntal nor harmonic element of composition, the acciaccatura is rarely mentioned in current music lexicography. Spanning from Frescobaldi to Domenico Scarlatti, its treatment was diverse, depending on the musical syntax, and reveals that it belonged to the standard musical vocabulary for generations. Numerous musical examples will illustrate these various applications and serve to highlight the range of the acciaccatura’s sound effects. Thus, this seemingly bizarre phenomenon exhibits upon closer examination its truly novel, aesthetic appeal.

Stefan Hanheide, Die Beethoven-Interpretation von Romain Rolland und ihre methodischen Grundlagen • [Seite 255]

Between 1927 and his death in 1945, Romain Rolland, the famous French writer and former professor of musicology at the Sorbonne, published extensive commentaries on Beethoven’s later life and compositions in which he revealed himself as an unusually noteworthy critic of the prevailing analyses of the composer’s works. He reproached leading Beethoven scholars such as Thayer, Riemann, Halm, Schenker, and d’Indy, for possessing insufficient empathy for his hero’s music, and he consistently maintained that an analysis divorced from content, limited to formal and structural issues, could do no justice to the music. Rolland’s method, which he referred to as an “interprétation psychologique,” perceives Beethoven’s music through the lens of the composer’s biography and psychological disposition. His interpretations are permeated with a creative writer’s imaginative embellishments which, after the Second World War, collided with a musicology that in the meantime had distanced itself from such subjective readings—of the sort Arnold Schering, for instance, published contemporaneously with Rolland. While the French author’s critical questioning of the musical analyses of his time remains valid, the referential basis for his interpretations testify to the bygone era of the last turn of the century, irrespective of their occasional alluring attractiveness.

Oliver Huck, Pietro Mascagnis Rapsodia satanica und die Geburt der Filmkunst aus dem Geiste der Musik • [Seite 190]

Pietro Mascagni’s music to Rapsodia satanica has been hailed by contemporary criticism as signaling the birth of the art film—a seemingly remarkable paradox. Mascagni, whom the motion picture company CINES was attempting to hire exclusively as its composer, was not only permitted to choose the film to be used, but the ending was shot a second time, in accordance with his suggestion, as a Wagnerian Liebestod. While Mascagni was motivated by the prospect of further grandi produzioni sinfoniche cinematografiche, CINES grabbed the chance to expand its audience by cooperating with one of Italy’s most famous composers—to this end, Mascagni was the focal point when the film was marketed. The first performance of the Rapsodia satanica was conducted by Mascagni in a concerto sinfonico; stated as a poema sinfonico in the program, it was accompanied by a cinematographic projection of the film, not presented as a film with music. Both the conception and reception of Rapsodia satanic force the issue of the appropriate genre for this music. Mascagni’s compositional process demonstrates that throughout his intense preoccupation with film as a medium, his intention was to achieve a balance between open and closed form. Thus, this analysis focuses on the dramaturgic and formal relationships between ballet, opera, and symphonic poem.

Nors S. Josephson: On Some Apparent Sketches for Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony • [Seite 54]

Sibelius’s sketches and score drafts for a planned Eighth Symphony evidence a highly complex compositional evolution. The first movement’s development section encountered at least four interrelated transformations; similarly, the Scherzo’s seven versions attest to Sibelius’s intricate reworkings and intense musical thought. Sketches for the Finale reveal that two dance-like versions preceded the more heroic apotheosis Sibelius later decided upon. These preserved materials place the projected symphony within the composer’s final stylistic period between the late 1920s and 1930s. Like other late works, such as Tapiola or the works for violin and piano, opp. 115 and 116, the Eighth’s seminal ideas can be reduced to a central intervallic matrix—in this instance, a tetrachord with an internal minor third and major second—with superimposed modal pitch hierarchies. Sibelius’s fascination with whole-tone clusters and semitonal modulations recalls other late works as well.

Beate Kutschke, Avantgarde-Musik der USA aus bundesdeutscher Sicht um 1970. Personalism versus Subjektphilosophie • [Seite 275]

When in 1972 Steve Reich’s Drumming (1970/71) was performed in West Germany, critics—among them Clytus Gottwald, who published an article on the work in 1975—compared the performance modes of this work to dehumanized assembly-line labor. Reich responded indignantly, recalling years later the wish to “kick with his boots his critics’ minds out of their skulls.” Yet in wrangling over artistic phenomena’s social implications, both Gottwald and Reich failed to grasp that the root of their disagreement derived less from aesthetic or labor-related issues than from differing conceptualizations about the individual, as mirrored in opposing positions toward the category within the context of the New Left movements on both sides of the Atlantic: Drawing on Kant, Hegel, and the Frankfurt School (represented in particular by Adorno), the traditional German position regarding the idea of the human subject—namely, a unique, active, spontaneous and emotive individual—continued to inform musicians’ and musicologists’ views of avant-garde music; the New Left in the United States aligned itself with the value system of personalism, a philosophical classification in which the concept of the individual is set apart from the ideal of a unique, and thus egocentric, isolated being. An analysis of Drumming, a paradigm of minimal music, demonstrates to what degree Reich’s music articulates the personalist concept of the individual.

Christoph Landerer: Ästhetik von oben? Ästhetik von unten? Objektivität und ,naturwissenschafltiche‘ Methode in Eduard Hanslicks Musikästhetik • [Seite 38]

The philosophical source of Eduard Hanslick’s standard work on music aesthetics, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854), has long been the subject of controversy. Modern research is still debating whether it should be placed in a Hegelian context or viewed as a document of modern scientific empirism. This article attempts to investigate Hanslick’s concept of objectivity with regard to music aesthetics through the lens of the intellectual environment he experienced in Vienna and Prague—an influence the literature has largely ignored. Even Hanslick’s well-known association to Herbartianism has been denied a thorough analysis; Robert Zimmermann’s assessment of the methodological differences between philosophy and the natural sciences is therefore plagued with misconceptions that circulate up to today. The tension between metaphysics and the methodology of science common to both Zimmermann and Austrian Herbartianism are also analogously present in Hanslick’s music aesthetics. Although Hanslick’s numerous references to science are not to be underestimated, they do not reflect the theoretical core of his aesthetics, which is more closely related to phenomenology and thus, to a certain extent, to the Bolzanist tradition. Accordingly, the beautiful is not in the eye and ear of the beholder but is solely understood as an expression of objective, ideal characteristics.

Erich Reimer, Die Technik des Vokaleinbaus in den Arien der Weimarer Kantaten Johann Sebastian Bachs (1714–1716) • [Seite 163]

In spite of the significance of vocal settings (Vokaleinbau) in Johann Sebastian Bach’s works, how they were dealt with in the arias of the early Weimar cantatas (1714-1716) has not been seriously examined to date. A chronological review of five selected arias reveals that Bach continually varied the settings, whereby the underlying principle allowed for an instrumental ritornello to serve as the customary prelude, interlude, and postlude as well as the accompaniment for the vocal line. Thus, the secondary placement of the vocal line is so situated as to appear to be the principle part accompanied by the ritornello and not as an additional line of the ritornello. One of Bach’s preferred means of formal construction, therefore, depended on the correspondence between the congruent instrumental lines of the ritornello and the deviating vocal entrances built on different degrees of the scale.

Albrecht Riethmüller, Wagner, Brahms und die Akademische Fest-Ouvertüre • [Seite 79]

In March, 1879 Brahms was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Wroclaw in Silesia. The diploma’s text hailed the composer as “the current leader of the most serious musical art in Germany.” Wagner responded to this claim by ridiculing Brahms in the article “Über das Dichten und Komponieren,” promptly published in his magazine, the Bayreuther Blätter, in July. Brahms completed the Akademische Fest-Ouvertüre in August of the following year and conducted the first performance in Wroclaw in January, 1881 (later that year he dedicated a copy of the printed score to the university). This case study discusses the circumstantial correlation between the degree and Brahms’s composition, the character of the overture—which vacillates between merriment, history, and politics—and the title Brahms chose for it. Due to its extensive use of college songs (Studentenlieder), the work has often been marginalized among Brahms’s orchestral scores, although the coalescence of the compositional material could afford it a more modern frame of reference. Finally, Wagner’s public reaction is assessed with regard to its role as the overture’s impetus.

Rüdiger Ritter: Neuer Wein in alten Schläuchen. Gedanken zu den Konzepten "Nationalmusik" und "nationale Musik" am Beispiel des Komponisten Stanislaw Moniuszko • [Seite 19]

Stanisüaw Moniuszko (1819-1872), composer of the national opera Halka (1858), is customarily regarded as a "Polish national composer." His music, however, was so strongly influenced by Lithuanian and Belorussian cultural elements, alongside those from Poland, that a definitive national classification proves problematic. The example of Moniuszko illustrates the necessity to reassess the term "national music," to no longer limit one’s grasp of it to the traditional, principally ethnic sense according to Herder but to regard it functionally as Carl Dahlhaus suggests, exploring the interchange between music and the processes of nation building. Important in this context are the terminological and methodological differences between "nationale Musik" and "Nationalmusik." When these discrepancies are taken into consideration, the fundamental contradictions besetting Moniuszko’s reception can thus be eliminated, for it becomes evident that the descriptions of the composer as either "Polish," "Lithuanian," or "Belorussian" are founded on disparate understandings of the concept of nation respectively. Also made apparent in the course of this study is the overall critical role music played in the nineteenth-century process of nation building.

Eckhard Roch, Die Lyra des Orpheus. Musikgeschichte im Gewande des Mythos • [Seite 137]

The popularity of the famed Orpheus legend in ancient Greece continued throughout the Middle Ages and has survived up to today. Yet the myth contains discrepancies that challenge some of the assumptions regarding his music, beginning with his relationship to the gods Dionysos and Apollo and his tragic death. Though not of Greek origin, Orpheus received his lyre from the Greek god Apollo. Finally, tales of the supernatural power of Orpheus’s music intimate that he not only played in the Dorian mode but in a combination of Dorian and Phrygian—the so-called chromatic scale.

Michael Zywietz, Dulces exuviae – Die Vergil-Vertonungen des Josquin des Prez • [Seite 245]

For the most part, Josquin des Prez’s Virgil settings have been discussed within the context of conceptual considerations regarding the High Renaissance and humanism. Although all previous theories affiliate the origin of the two Virgil Motets with Isabella d’Este’s Mantuan court, ample external evidence connects them to an equally prominent site for contemporary Virgil reception—Margaret of Austria’s court at Mechlin. The court’s adaptation of the myth of Troy and Margaret’s own identification with Aeneid’s Dido provide important topical references. Additionally, the survival of the Virgil Motets’ source would seem to situate its chronology after 1500 at Mechlin. Questions as to the quantity and nature of the “late works” composed after 1504 at Condé—a central aspect of Josquin research—take on a new perspective when the Virgil Motets are associated with Margaret of Austria’s court.