God’s Will or Peoples’ Power

Abstract

The article approaches the issue of believing and making believe from the point of view of sound and music. According to the classical aesthetic theory of Hegel, the power of music takes a grip on the subject and animates it. According to a newer theory of cultural techniques and to media thinking, the individual and the social space, the subjective and the objective are much more entangled. Arnold Schoenberg, in negotiating religious space, establishes close relations between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the environmental in his opera “Moses and Aron”. Music and sound do not force themselves upon the listeners, but summon them to perceive and make new differences and decisions. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet in their adaptation of the opera still enforce this entanglement towards an ecological understanding of social relations.