Von der großen Erzählung zur Mikrologie?: Musikhistoriographische Methodik zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne

Whereas Walter Benjamin’s perception of modernity and its technical progress was predicated on a critical but positive view of human culture and its possibilities, more recent authors seem to advocate more pessimistic positions. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, for instance, distanced himself from more recent developments of 20 th century music in his voluminous music history Musik im Abendland (1991); similarly, the six volumes of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music (2005) are characterised by the author’s conviction of the impossibility of writing a comprehensive history of music in the future: He sees his work as the last effort to describe the history of Western music in its entirety. Both Eggebrecht’s and Taruskin’s accounts show a teleological conception of history based on chronological time concepts; both authors consider theory and written documents as the crucial components of Western musical culture. Their books, however, reveal fractures and passages and therefore raise the question whether, and in which ways, the historical passage from modernity to postmodernity can provide the necessary tools for a music-historiographical methodology. In order to provide insight into the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity and its relevance for musicology, this article introduces Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of historiography. Elaborating on one of Theodor W. Adorno’s central thoughts, Lyotard attempts to combine universality and particularity, discontinuity and continuity, coining the term »micrology« as an alternative model that aims to replace the »grand narrative«. Lyotard’s aim is to develop a sensitivity for the forgotten, for everything that is lost or cannot be represented. Central to his theory are a non-teleological concept of time that favours horizontal passages and an emphasis on aesthetic experience. Taking Lyotard’s theory seriously and applying it to the writing of music history therefore entails considering a more diverse repertoire including musical phenomena that lack written evidence

Adorno as Critics – Mozart, Wagner and Strauss in the Light of the Aesthetic Theory

There is no doubt, that Adomo's critical monographs and essays on Wagner and Strauss, as well as the text on Sibelius, number among the most controversially discussed parts of his oeuvre. One important reason for this controversial reception is the fact that these writings combine philosophical and musical views. As far as the musicologists are concerned, the texts lack a detailed analytical perspective; from the philosophical point of view on the other hand, the deliberations are too much dominated by musical phenomena. This text, which was written for a lecture held at the Musicology Department of the University of Ljubljana in April 2005, aims at placing Adorno's music criticism in the context of his critical aesthetics and in his musical philosophy respectively, which he summed up in his Aesthetic Theory. By doing so the most important criteria, which refer directly to the critical perspective of his thought concerning language and culture in general, shall be focused upon. The article consists of four parts: The first part will focus on Adorno's ideas on 20th century art in general, for these theoretical thoughts constitute the basis of his thoughts on music and musicians. In the second part, Adorno's demands of musical criticism are placed in the centre of interest. The third part discusses Adorno's critique of Wagner by comparing it to his views on Mozart. The fourth and last part provides a detailed analysis of Adorno's two essays on Richard Strauss. Beside Adorno's Aesthetic Theory his writings on music criticism, in particular the paper held in 1967 at the Institute for Musical Criticism and Aesthetical Research of the former Music Academy in Graz entitled »Reflections on musical criticism«, his Essay on Wagner and his two papers on Richard Strauss written in 1924 and 1964 serve as textual basis for the following consideration

“A Nomad of Sound”: The Austrian-born Composer, Interpreter, and Performer Pia Palme

This paper is an introductory study of the works by the Viennese-born composer Pia Palme, who characterised the community of Austrian female artists as a productive and particularly innovative one. Palme herself is part of this productive and lively scene, but her role in it is twofold, for she is well known not only as a performer and composer but also for her cultural, political, and feminist engagement. From 2007 to 2013, together with the vocalist Gina Mattiello, she organised e_may, a festival dedicated to commissioning and performing pieces by contemporary women composers. Both e_may’s international programme and Palme’s œuvre show that Pia Palme is an internationally oriented artist. Born and living in Vienna, she has been collaborating with artists from all over the world since the beginning of her artistic career. Without a doubt, the exploration of Pia Palme’s works and their specific position in the Austrian music scene relates to gender and women’s studies, as well as to Austrian music studies. Writing a portrayal of Pia Palme means exploring a specific female contribution to contemporary Austrian music. However, at the same time her œuvre raises questions about the terms “female” and “Austrian” themselves: How can these categories be understood? This article’s objective is therefore to illuminate, with the help of Pia Palme’s œuvre, what the label “woman composer” and “Austrian music” might mean in this specific context

Begriffsloses Verstehen, Autonomie und Kritik: Zum qualitativen Moment künstlerischer Sprachlichkeit

Responding to criticism of his Versuch über Musik und Sprache, Albrecht Wellmer has discussed critically semiotic and symbolic approaches to music. Following Theodor W. Adorno, Wellmer emphasised art’s materiality alongside critical reflections concerning the subject and the idea of autonomy as found in new music. Taking up these views, this essay aims at completing Wellmer’s notion of understanding, which is strongly oriented towards verbal explication, by autonomous and nonverbal aspects. As far as Wellmer’s discussion of the subject’s crisis in new music is concerned, the nonverbal dimensions of artistic language are crucial: art that is conceived as a critique of verbal language comprises critical reflections of a specific form of subjectivity. Interest in the socio-critical dimensions inherent in art’s critique of verbal language not only unites critical theory and poststructuralist philosophy, but can also be found in the work of contemporary composers such as Helmut Lachenmann and Clemens Gadenstätter. By taking their music as an example, the essay demonstrates that the critical nonverbal aspect of musical language brings its specific aesthetic quality to the fore

Foucault und "Das Leben der Anderen"

Diese Diplomarbeit untersucht die Disziplinierung und Überwachung in der DDR, speziell im Film Das Leben der Anderen, anhand einer Studie von Michel Foucault.The thesis analyses the surveillance in the GDR, especially the motion picture The life of others, by using the study "discipline and punish" of Michel Foucault

Art as a Critique of Language: On the Continuity of the Tradition of the Avant-Garde Aesthetic in the Modern and the Postmodern

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions

Sprechen durch Musik im Komponieren der Gegenwart: Podiumsdiskussion mit Clemens Gadenstätter, Susanne Kogler, Albrecht Wellmer, Diskussionsleitung: Jörn Peter Hiekel

Commenting on a performance of two musical works that were played as the starting point for this discussion – Anton Webern’s Drei kleine Stücke (1914) for violoncello and piano op. 11 and Helmut Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel (1980) for piano – Jörn Peter Hiekel observes that speaking about music and speaking through music particularly condition one another in new music. Both Webern and Lachenmann, by different compositional means, condense familiar musical gestures until they turn into a »language of their own«. In Lachenmann’s work, which refers to well-known children songs, this process is closely connected to what Albrecht Wellmer has called »wordliness« (Welthaltigkeit). More generally, the serialist »rebellion against music’s resemblance to language« (Adorno) shows a paradoxical twist towards sedimentation in the form of a new emerging language, as Clemens Gadenstätter explains with reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–56). In new music musical idioms have been thoroughly destabilized yet always re-contextualized within established formulae. The panellists agree on a notion of both language and music that is not conceived as a closed system, but rather a network of relations transformed in time. Hence no distinct boundary can be drawn between syntax and semantics in music, nor is there any musical language that communicates a universal meaning (despite Joseph Haydn’s claim to the contrary). In addition – as anecdotes from Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann document – the ambiguity of musical meaning is also relevant for composers who might be (favourably) surprised by unorthodox performances of their works that seemingly contradict the composers’ intentions, but in fact contribute to unfolding the multiplicity of meanings in a work

Neurobiological Divergence of the Positive and Negative Schizophrenia Subtypes Identified on a New Factor Structure of Psychopathology Using Non-negative Factorization:An International Machine Learning Study

ObjectiveDisentangling psychopathological heterogeneity in schizophrenia is challenging and previous results remain inconclusive. We employed advanced machine-learning to identify a stable and generalizable factorization of the “Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS)”, and used it to identify psychopathological subtypes as well as their neurobiological differentiations.MethodsPANSS data from the Pharmacotherapy Monitoring and Outcome Survey cohort (1545 patients, 586 followed up after 1.35±0.70 years) were used for learning the factor-structure by an orthonormal projective non-negative factorization. An international sample, pooled from nine medical centers across Europe, USA, and Asia (490 patients), was used for validation. Patients were clustered into psychopathological subtypes based on the identified factor-structure, and the neurobiological divergence between the subtypes was assessed by classification analysis on functional MRI connectivity patterns.ResultsA four-factor structure representing negative, positive, affective, and cognitive symptoms was identified as the most stable and generalizable representation of psychopathology. It showed higher internal consistency than the original PANSS subscales and previously proposed factor-models. Based on this representation, the positive-negative dichotomy was confirmed as the (only) robust psychopathological subtypes, and these subtypes were longitudinally stable in about 80% of the repeatedly assessed patients. Finally, the individual subtype could be predicted with good accuracy from functional connectivity profiles of the ventro-medial frontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and precuneus.ConclusionsMachine-learning applied to multi-site data with cross-validation yielded a factorization generalizable across populations and medical systems. Together with subtyping and the demonstrated ability to predict subtype membership from neuroimaging data, this work further disentangles the heterogeneity in schizophrenia

Adorno versus Lyotard

It is well known that Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory is grounded in his profound musical knowledge. The importance of music for Jean-François Lyotard, however, has not been adequately recognized until today; neither has the fact that Lyotard was strongly influenced by Adorno. Tracing back the development of Lyotard’s thought from his “pagan” beginnings to his late conception of an informal art, the book intends to initiate an adequate reception of Lyotard’s œuvre from a musicological viewpoint. Moreover, as a first comprehensive comparison of Lyotard‘s and Adorno’s theories on art, the study contributes to the exploration of Critical Theory’s reception in France.Es ist allgemein bekannt, dass Theodor W. Adorno seine ästhetische Theorie auf Basis profunder Musikkenntnisse entwickelte. Dass die Musik auch für Jean-François Lyotard von besonderer Wichtigkeit war und er stark von Adorno beeinflusst wurde, wurde bis heute allerdings kaum entsprechend wahrgenommen. Durch den Vergleich mit der Musikphilosophie Adornos intendiert dieses Buch eine adäquate Rezeption des Werkes von Lyotard aus musikwissenschaftlicher Sicht zu initiieren, wobei es dessen Entwicklung von den "heidnischen" Anfängen bis zur späten Konzeption einer "informellen" Kunst nachzeichnet. Als erster umfassender Vergleich der Ästhetik beider Denker leistet es auch einen Beitrag zur Erforschung der Rezeption der Kritischen Theorie in Frankreich