Sächsische Landesbibliothek - Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB): Qucosa
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Zum Konzept musikalischer Gestik
No full textWhen hearing music as music, we hear motion in it, action even. Much of this action is gestural in quality. Richard Wagner’s writings about musical gesture as intimately linked with dramatic gesture, speak of this quality. The corporeality implied in Wagner’s understanding, however, has been largely abstracted away in music aesthetics and music theory since then. The dominant term in formalist analysis is Gestalt, namely, the structure of ideal motion. It appears devoid of the sensual, stripped of its actual bodily feeling and replaced by an act of imagination; in the music aesthetics of Carl Dahlhaus, Roger Scruton and Jerrold Levinson, and in the semiotic approach of Robert Hatten, for instance, the term gesture is retained, but conceptually limited to a metaphoric use: to talk of musical gesture there is to transfer its meaning from the domain of bodily expression. The latter concept does not explain how the transfer makes sense instead of being arbitrary to the musical experience (it only states that it does, and leaves the role of its apt application to the expert critic). My purpose in this text is to rethink the concept of musical gesture, integrate its actual sensual dimension, and hint at its rich potential for the analysis of music. I argue that the proprioceptivity of bodily gestures is extremely rich, spanning kinetic, haptic, topological, even emotional characteristics, all included in their understanding as felt in the lived body. Keeping this in mind, the audio-visual-tactile perception of one’s gesture when making a sound oneself, by sliding one’s hand over a piece of paper, say, provides the experiential backdrop to an empathic completion of a gesture as heard. A heard sonic shape thus becomes more than a Gestalt: it acquires a feel; ambiguous to some degree, but grounded in the very mundane experience of one’s own very refined gestural repertoire. This widened concept, I argue, elucidates music as being something not only understood, but something grasped and felt. I show this elaborated concept of musical gesture to be relevant to the understanding of expressivity in large scale thematic variation, taking Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 118,6 in E-flat Minor as an illustration. Provided one views music as something that occurs in aesthetic experience, then gesture is here shown as intersubjective and musically immanent
Die Sächsische Gartenakademie: Aktiv für den Freizeitgartenbau 2025
No full textDie Gartenakademie des Sächsischen Landesamtes für Umwelt, Landwirtschaft und Geologie wendet sich mit einem vielfältigen Weiterbildungsangebot an alle Freizeitgärtnerinnen und Freizeitgärtner. Der Flyer bietet einen Überblick über das gesamte Angebot der Gartenakademie im Jahr 2025.
Redaktionsschluss: 22. November 202
Die Sächsische Gartenakademie: Aktiv für den Freizeitgartenbau 2023
No full textDie Gartenakademie des Sächsischen Landesamtes für Umwelt, Landwirtschaft und Geologie wendet sich mit einem vielfältigen Weiterbildungsangebot an alle Freizeitgärtnerinnen und Freizeitgärtner. Der Flyer bietet einen Überblick über das gesamte Angebot der Gartenakademie im Jahr 2023.
Redaktionsschluss: 04.11.202
Synagogenordnung Hammelburg. Eine Einführung in den behutsam reformierten jüdischen Gottesdienst – für Außenstehende sorgsam erklärt
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All in the Family: A Transformational-Genealogical Theory of Musical Contour Relations
No full textAlthough the relatively recent proliferation of research into musical contour theory has indeed yielded a plethora of vital analytical and methodological insights, a crucial phenomenological problem therein remains to be fully addressed: its implicit reliance upon what Michael Friedmann (A Methodology for the Discussion of Contour, 1985) has described as a “nonsynchronous” analytical perspective, whereby a contour’s constituent elements, though ordered in time, are in fact interpreted as fully and simultaneously present entities. The musical processes that these contours describe (melodies, rhythms, etc.), however, obviously do not present themselves in this manner – their constituent elements occur in direct succession, not simultaneously. Such contours, therefore, cannot be regarded as truly autonomous musical objects; rather, they represent but a single link – albeit, the crucial, culminating link – in a cumulative transformational chain of contours. The contour ⟨1023⟩, for instance, begins as the singleton ⟨0⟩ and evolves successively into ⟨10⟩ (its first two elements) and ⟨102⟩ (its first three elements) before coming to exist as such. This article develops a system of contour relations that is fully contingent upon this implicit transformational process. First, a sexually “reproductive” model for contour generation is employed to construct a universal contour “family tree”, which provides the foundation for relating contours based on their common “ancestry”. After briefly outlining the fundamental mechanics involved in these kinds of relations, this transformational-genealogical methodology is implemented in order to shed some light on a crucial motivic passage in the first of Alban Berg’s Altenberg Lieder op. 4, thereby illustrating both the efficacy and utility of the approach
Musiktheorie als interdisziplinäres Fach: 8. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie Graz 2008
No full textZur Aktualität der Musiktheorie Ernst Kurths
No full textErnst Kurth’s music theory is grounded on the proposition, most prominently developed in his study Die Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan” [1920], that sound is a reverberation of powerful forces that circulate in the inaudible. According to Kurth, music is a living entity which must be conceived of as hierarchically superior to single tones. Many of his contemporaries were fascinated by these ideas, and although Kurth’s concepts were not discussed on a large scale after 1945, his theoretical framework arguably can provide today appropriate means to describe transitions and relations of sound in post-tonal music. In this article, repercussions of Kurth’s ideas are uncovered in the theoretical writings of Theodor W. Adorno, especially where they allude to Arnold Schönberg’s idea of a “drive force of sounds” [Triebleben der Klänge], and in new French music after 1970 (mainly in aesthetics and works of Gérard Grisey), where the metaphorical idea of “forces” within sound and the intention to “make the inaudible audible” result in gestalt-derived musical structures with clear affinites to Kurth’s energetics. Although Kurth’s objective to discern “invariants” of musical listening has met with legitimate scepticism, a closer re-reading of his texts might provide fresh impulses to tackle the key problem of the relationship between history, perception and structure in twentieth-century music and music theory
States of Balance and Turbulence: Ligeti’s Pièce électronique nr. 3 in Concept and Realization
No full textIn 1957 György Ligeti had recently immigrated to Cologne and was learning about the developments of the avant-garde while working in the electronic music studio of the WDR. His output from this period includes an unfinished work, Pièce électronique nr. 3, a fascinating, yet virtually unknown composition, originally conceived as Atmosphères – the title later used for his orchestral composition of 1961. Pièce électronique nr. 3 looks forward to the innovative texture-driven orchestral compositions for which Ligeti became famous, but also reflects the influence of serialism as practiced by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The serial electronic music composed at the WDR in the 1950s offers a unique perspective on stages of theoretical planning and their relationships to audible realizations; the extensive sketches for this piece are no exception. The piece uses a consistent series of odd numbers to generate durations and pitch material for both small and large scale structures; it also uses sine tones as the predominant type of material, arranged in a way reminiscent of Stockhausen’s structure-group-forms. Shortly after this composition, Ligeti criticized aspects of serial practice, including duration rows and serialized dynamics, and moved away from this theoretical model. Along with comments in interviews, Ligeti’s approach to dynamics in this piece illustrates a significant difference in the artistic ends which Ligeti and Stockhausen sought. The use of such non-serialized parameters as determinants of large-scale form becomes increasingly characteristic in Ligeti’s style in Apparitions and Atmosphères; moreover, the basic shape of Pièce électronique nr. 3 closely resembles the form of the first movement of Apparitions. Thus elements discovered through serial pre-planning in the electronic medium were ultimately realized in non-serial orchestral works
Metaphors of Sound: Cognitive Aspects in the Theories of Pierre Schaeffer, R. Murray Schafer and Gérard Grisey
No full textAccording to the advocates of a cognitive theory of metaphor, such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, metaphor is the basic figure of thought, which enables us to think of one object in terms of another. This ability manifests itself in various areas of human activity and finds its expression in numerous verbal statements. Since the 1980s, the cognitive theory of metaphor has strongly influenced many branches of the humanities. In recent decades, it has also been applied to various forms of discourse about music. Interdisciplinary research into metaphor seems to enrich and modify musicological research. It alters our convictions about the nature of theoretical discourse and musical analysis. It enables us to rethink such divisions as analysis and interpretation, structure and expression, musical and extramusical. The analysis of metaphors used in discourse about music reveals the different spheres which influence musical concepts, and also their hierarchical structure and cognitive content. In the 20th century, many interesting and important musical ideas were conveyed by composers themselves. Consequently, the importance of such an interdisciplinary approach will be illustrated by analysis of the theoretical writings of selected twentieth-century composers (Pierre Schaeffer, R. Murray Schafer, Gérard Grisey) who, with the use of metaphorical language, express their different attitudes to the phenomenon of sound, treating it as an object, a living organism or part of an imaginary landscape. Each of these metaphors lies at the source of different musical currents; each of them has a different structure and different cognitive advantages