Musik von einem fremden Planeten?. Variationen über Struktur, Wahrnehmung und Bedeutung in der Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts

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The relationship between musical structure, perception and musical meaning can be understood as a key to the development of a theory of post-tonal music. Preliminaries of this theory are developed in three “variations”. First, a review of the difficult relationship between music theory and new music in the 20th century is explained by (1) an increasingly diverse compositional practice that has lead to a composer-centred “theory”, often amounting to nothing more than a scantily contextualized documentation of a composer’s intentions and techniques, and (2) the universalist and dogmatic tendency of music-theoretical discourse around 1900 which, however, has since developed into an “epistemological pluralism” (Nicholas Cook). The Graz research project “organisation of sound”, initiated and headed by the author, pursues just such a pluralistic methodology by integrating author- and listener-perspectives on post-tonal music based on a morpho-syntactical conceptual framework with references to gestalt theory. This approach emerged not least from the observation that new music, especially after 1945, has increasingly been conceived of “morphologically” with a strong focus on music perception, as argued in the second variation. The idea that musical structure, perception and “worldliness” [Welthaltigkeit] are inseparable allowed composers to retain the idea of musical auto-referentiality while at the same time claiming the social-political impact of contemporary music. This is illustrated by a short discussion of the relationship between structural coherence and (political) meaning in works by Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. The third variation discusses these questions in more detail through an examination of two recent works by Chaya Czernowin and Isabel Mundry. In Czernowin’s Excavated Dialogues – Fragments Western and Chinese instruments are organized in a culturally hybrid space saturated with conflict emerging from a highly gestural material; in Mundry’s Ich und Du solo piano and orchestra go through several stages of an ambiguous identity discourse informed by an essay of Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida. Antinomies between the composers’ self-interpretations and the morpho-syntactical analysis can be understood as results of a music-specific polyvalence that should inform any theory of post-tonal music.