Zwischen Transfer und Transformation: Horizonte der Rezeption von Musik Michele Calella and Benedikt Lessmann

Abstract

This volume collects contributions to a lecture series held at the University of Vienna in 2017/18. The format of a lecture series offers advantages and disadvantages when discussing fundamental academic questions. One of the advantages is certainly the multiplicity of possible perspectives. One of the disadvantages is that the coherence of the discussion is always at risk. Each speaker, working in isolation, is tempted to develop the topic from scratch rather than in response to colleagues. In the present volume this leads to occasional redundancies and unresolved dissonances. Yet, individualism also has its charm. Each chapter deals with the topic of ‘music reception’ in a more or less direct way, so the authors usually offer introductions to related topics as well. The result is twelve rather free variations on a familiar theme, without further subdivision. In the 1970s musicologists, in exchange with the leading literary theorists, intensively discussed reception aesthetics and reception history. Carl Dahlhaus was sceptical about the feasibility of a reception history, given the confusing and incomplete nature of the sources. He also feared competition for attention with ‘the work’, which he preferred to focus on. Nevertheless, in the 1980s reception studies became firmly established in German musicology. Today’s interest in musical mobility and mediation address questions related to those of reception studies, but negotiate ideas using a different vocabulary: the terms ‘transfer’ and ‘transformation’, to which the volume’s title alludes, suggest this, and authors seek to probe these new perspectives, looking back at the long-established field of reception studies. Michele Calella, one of the co-editors, begins with a historical overview and some basic considerations on the specifics of reception as a musical phenomenon. He identifies successive phases of interest in ‘verbal reception’ of music (dominant in the 1970s), ‘performative reception’ (since the 1980s), followed by interest in ‘compositional reception’ (also since the 1980s). This suggests a musicological evasion of the reception-aesthetic ‘provocation’ (Hans Robert Jauss), according to which the (musical) work is not to be considered as an autonomous object, but primarily in terms of the receptive acts of the reader (listener). Within musicology, research on reception initially became synonymous with history of music criticism and public discourses on music, or was integrated into the work paradigm as musically articulated reception. Calella’s observation that the topic of reception was only taken up in the English-speaking world with some delay (around the turn of the millennium) (p. 21) seems contradictory, since he also points out how musicology in general foregrounded the reception phenomena in the course of its ‘cultural turn’. Perhaps the specifics of the German tradition of reception studies cannot be found in the English-speaking academic world; the reception-aesthetic ‘provocation’ may hide under another name or has been absorbed into a cultural studies-oriented praxeology of music. Calella’s concluding reference to sound studies and cultural-transfer research suggests such an expansion, or perhaps a dissolution, in which everything would somehow end up as an object of reception research that is not strictly related to the autonomous work or to the author’s intention.