German Composer Research Articles

Contemporary German composers

LACHENMANN: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (Tokyo Version, 2000) c. Sylvain Cambreling. ECM New Series 1858/9 (2-CD set).DÖHL: Sound of Sleat; Bruchstücke zur Winterreise for piano; String quintet: Winterreise; Notturno. James Tocco (pno), Hugo Noth (accordion), Ovidiu Dabila (double bass), Auryn Quartet with Boris Pergamenschikov (vlc), Lasalle Quartet. Dreyer-Gaido 21013.HÖLLER: Piano Works. Kristi Becker, Pi-hsien Chen (pnos). cpo 999 954-2.PINTSCHER: Figura I–V; String Quartet No. 4, Portrait of Gesualdo; Dernier espace avec introspecteur. Theodoro Anzelotti (accordion), Arditti String Quartet. Winter & Winter 910 097-2.

Syntagma musicum III

This translation of the third volume of Syntagma musicum is part of a multi-volume work by German composer and theorist Michael Praetorius (1571-1621). Volume III deals with terminology and performance practice, and offers us the most detailed commentary available from the 17th century about the performance of particular pieces of music. For modern scholars, this third volume is the preeminent source of contemporary information on performance practice for the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. Praetorius is the most often quoted and excerpted writer on performance practice. In his translation, Kite-Powell has worked with a notoriously difficult syntax to produce a definitive English edition of this important work.

THE SONATE AUF CONCERTENART AND CONCEPTIONS OF GENRE IN THE LATE BAROQUE

Much recent writing concerning the early eighteenth-century sonata has focused on a subgenre that appropriates stylistic elements from more fully scored works. Thus several of J. S. Bach’s solo and trio sonatas signify the concerto in certain movements by adopting ritornello form and establishing instrumental roles of ‘soloist’ and ‘orchestra’, only to undermine the integrity of these roles during the course of a movement. These Sonaten auf Concertenart, and a number of similar examples by Bach’s German contemporaries, have been viewed as responses to Vivaldi’s solo concertos and especially his so-called ‘chamber concertos’, which feature similar kinds of role playing. This study, by re-examining the phenomenon of the sonata in concerto style from a number of perspectives, shows that the genre was more widespread and its origins and meanings more complex than previously recognized. Evidence for this revised view takes the form of generic titles on manuscripts and prints; music by German, Italian and French composers spanning much of the eighteenth century, from Molter to Mondonville to Mozart; some three dozen sonatas by Telemann, who exhaustively explored the genre over several decades and was perhaps its originator in Germany; and literary amalgamations of genre indicative of a broader eighteenth-century fascination with mixed types.

Performance as Composition

F or more than two decades the German composer Heiner Goebbels has written music for theatre, ballet, opera, radio, TV, and concert hall as well as tape compositions and sound installations. He has created music for many theatre productions, such as Dantons Death, directed by Ruth Berghaus, and Richard III, directed by Claus Peyman. In recent years New York audiences have been introduced to his work with performances of Hashirigaki at the BAM Next Wave Festival and Eislermaterial and Black on White with the Ensemble Modern at the Lincoln Center Festival. Goebbels had worked frequently with the texts of Heiner Muiiller, including The Liberation of Prometheus, Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts, Wolokolamsk Highway, and The Man in the Elevator, seen in New York at The Kitchen within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It featured Miiller himself reading his text, accompanied by the musicians Don Cherry, Arto Lindsay, George Lewis, and Ned Rothenberg. Other authors whose writings have been used in musical settings are Gertrude Stein, Poe, Thoreau, Robbe-Grillet, and Kierkegaard. Paul Auster's In the Country of Lost Things was featured in Surrogate Cities. Heiner Goebbels' music is performed frequently in festivals on several continents (www.heinergoebbels.com). In 2003, Sir Simon Rattle conducted his orchestra piece, From a Diary, in its Berlin Philharmonic premiere. This interview was conducted in New York, March 19, 2003.

Queering the Jew Who Would Be German: Peter Schlemihl's Strange and Wonderful History

The opening episode of Jiri Weil's Mendelssohn is on the Roof recounts the peculiar fate of Jewish-German identity that had riddled Germany's own troubled concept of itself as a Volk since the Enlightenment. Julius Schlesinger, a municipal officer and a candidate for the SS, sends two Czech workmen onto the roof to perform a task that his own fear of heights or climbing will not permit him. The roof, despite its elegant panoply of statues of German composers, is scarred by a single statue, that of the Jew Moses Mendelssohn. Schlesinger, eager – given the suspicions raised by his name – to prove his Aryan origins, orders the workmen to remove the statue. Unversed in the fundamentals of German music and racial science, the workmen have no way to determine which among the many statues is of Mendelssohn. Schlesinger, who has just completed a course on racial science called World View and studied a series of slides illustrating the Jewish difference, instructs the workmen simply to find the statue with the biggest nose and bring it down. After a quick survey of noses and their lengths, the workmen put their noose around the statue with the oddest nose and begin pulling at the rope. Suddenly, the order to desist is given. The statue, it seems, was not of Mendelssohn but rather of Richard Wagner (Weil 5-13). As the above episode suggests, traditional markers of Jewish identity and difference had become increasingly unreliable or irrelevant as Jews, emancipated from the ghe tto, began in the nineteenth century to participate in the social and cultural life of Germany. Although the events in Weil's work occur at a time when efforts to re-secure Jewish difference were accompanied by an unprecedented genocidal campaign, the compulsion to re-affirm the otherness of the Jew surfaced, as we shall see, with the first stirrings of emancipation (Katz 80-103). That effort is perhaps nowhere more effectively encoded than in Adelbert Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl und seine wundersame Geschichte (written 1814, published 1815). Chamisso suggested that the story was originally intended to amuse children (Swales 253). As a result, early critical studies

Sound – Time – Space – Movement: the Space-soundInstallations of the artist-couple 〈sabine schäfer // joachim krebs〉

This article describes the theories and practices of the German installation artists and composers Sabine Schäfer and Joachim Krebs. Much of their work concerns site-specific sound installations involving the articulation of time and space. Their principal work methods and materials are described. In addition, they have formulated a typology of five installation types which they describe using their own installations as examples. Each installation type responds to a particular set of aesthetic and practical challenges both for the artists and the visitors. These are discussed and illustrated in the article. The typology extends beyond the specific work of these artists and can be applied to installations in general, thus providing a framework for critical analysis. Furthermore, the translators have discussed the issues regarding the specialised vocabulary of the artists and the rendering of such language into English.

Music and German National Identity

Is it merely a coincidence that three Bs of classical music - Bach, Beethoven, Brahms - are all German composers? Why do concert halls all over world feature mostly works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire? Over past three centuries, supporters of German music ranging from music scholars to politicians have nurtured notion that German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in cultivation of music. This book explores questions of how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as people of and how music came to be designated as the most German art. Drawing on expertise of leading scholars in German history, musicology, and German literature, essays assembled here examine philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents, as well as creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, and pop to explore ways in which music has continued to play a central role in German national imagination and in shaping German identity.

Helmut Oehring in Profile

He has been called a ‘meteor of German New Music’; he himself will say that he doesn't ‘care a fig about New Music’, and deny even to know what the term means. Be that as it may, there's no question that Helmut Oehring's is one of the most original (and successful) voices within the young generation of German composers.

Wolfgang Rihm's Recent Music

Following Ian Pace's excellent introduction to the music of Helmut Lachenmann, hopes were entertained that similar articles might appear introducing the work of other contemporary German composers, in particular Wolfgang Rihm. The problem is that any article on Rihm is out of date before it is published, even with respect to general trends that have emerged in his recent output. Unlike most composers, Rihm has avoided a mid-life creative crisis, not least by devoting groups of works to particular issues: thus an initial impression may well encourage the belief that his creative personality has several distinct manifestations. This fact alone indicates that Rihm has little in common with Lachenmann. While Lachenmann's music is underpinned by the principles of dialectic, and his rich fantasy tends to be contained within the intellectual framework governing his compositional processes, Rihm's spontaneous approach suggests an uninhibited absorption of influences from every quarter, past and present. We need look no further than some of the items in the recently published two-volume collection of Rihm's lectures, discussions, and introductions to various works, which include reflections on composers as unlikely as Louis Spohr.

Beethoven and melodrama

The recent interest in stage melodrama from the late eighteenth century (1775−c. 1790) has prompted some questions about the technique of melodrama within opera and incidental music, yet the contribution of Ludwig van Beethoven, who set the standard of melodrama's application in German Romantic opera and incidental music, has not been studied in detail. This paper investigates Beethoven's melodrama application and composition in terms of its placement within the overall dramaturgic and musical structure of the particular work; types of melodrama insertions, and music-text interdependence. Besides the commonly understood influence on Beethoven by the French opéra comique of Cherubini and Méhul, there are German practices of melodrama writing associated with stage melodrama, one of the chief composers of which was Beethoven's teacher Neefe. It demonstrates that Beethoven had a profound technical and dramaturgical competence of the different procedures associated with melodrama and a particular familiarity with the German style. His own contribution to melodrama composition represents a blend of French and German practices. Beethoven's use of melodrama not only influenced his contemporaries, but influenced the generation of German composers that was to follow.

Patriotism or Nationalism? Fauré and the Great War

Even though Gabriel Fauré's contemporaries championed his music as quintessentially French, Fauré distanced himself from policies of national exclusion in art, and his own construction of French musical style was cosmopolitan. This essay summarizes Fauré's political choices during the Great War, explains his motives, and indicates how some of his decisions affected French musical life. Fauré's outspoken preface to Georges Jean-Aubry's La Musique française d'aujourd'hui provides one key to the composer's position. Jean-Aubry, following Debussy, reckoned as authentically French only musical styles attached to pre-Revolutionary traditions. Fauré felt that such a narrow characterization of French music falsified the diversity of the historical record. His preface therefore takes issue with Jean-Aubry's book and insists that German composers had played an irrefutable role in the formation of modern French music. We may understand Fauré's-and other composers'-wartime decisions in terms of a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Composers such as Fauré, Bruneau, and Ravel emerge as patriots. Debussy, who sought to purify French music of foreign contamination, emerges as a nationalist. Both nationalism and patriotism call on collective memory and experience, but nationalism exercises its power protectively and tends toward exclusion, while patriotism, favoring political over ethnic determination, tends toward inclusion. Fauré's patriotism emerges through the evidence of the preface; charitable activities; his refusal to sign a French declaration calling for a ban on contemporary German and Austrian music; and his attempt to unite the Société Nationale and the Société Musicale Indépendante. Fauré's wartime music, in contrast to his writings and activities, evades connections with historical events and raises methodological questions about perceived relations between political belief and artistic expression.

Brazilian Electroacoustic Music Concert

made up of complex, jagged, distorted sounds. Its dynamic, almost melodramatic nature is exaggerated by the use of industrial noises and of dirty sources that are granulated beyond recognition. The pieces fit together to make a strong experience of communication, of a message, to use the title of another of Mr. Roads's pieces. The other piece on the program that made heavy use of factory sounds was Fabrica by German composer Michael Obst (winner of several prizes in previous Bourges competitions). In pure Schaeffer musique concrete style, he uses no processing, relying solely on collage and layering techniques to create two contrasting worlds: a realistic one, and another derived from it but with a different, virtual-sounding atmosphere. Fabrica extends the notion of a Klangfarbenmelodie, constructing and developing phrases crafted out of rich and complex machine environments, each of which has its own micro-

Opening up the text

The following text is taken from a talk given by the German composer and director Heiner Goebbels as part of a Performance Forum discussion on German music-theatre and the Berliner Volksbuhne's performance of MURX at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. The forum included Christoph Marthaler (director of MURX), Mathias Lilienthal (dramaturge at the Berliner Volksbuhne), Philip Brady (Birkbeck College, University of London), Friedrich Dieckmann (East German theatre critic) and others, and was chaired by Alan Read (director of talks, ICA). A tape of the complete ICA Performance Forum discussion is available from the ICA, London.

A New Left-Wing Radicalism in Contemporary German Music?

‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.

Helmut Lachenmann's Concept of Rejection

The eminent German composer Helmut Lachenmann enjoys an exalted reputation among a small circle of English contemporary music enthusiasts. To the wider English music public, though, he is little known. There are hardly any comprehensive accounts of Lachenmann in English. His consciously elusive compositional style could even be introduced to the English audience as ‘old-guard avantgarde’ without being challenged at all.

Ferment and new departures: The last generation of East German composers

Ferment and new departures: The last generation of East German composers

Music and German Literature. Their Relationship Since the Middle Ages

The relationship between music and literature is emerging as one of the prominently discussed subjects among literary scholars and musicologists. This volume brings together the scholarly fields of musicology and German literature. Among the areas of research discussed are the study of opera libretti, the history of poetry set to music, metaphorical references to music, and writers' contributions to the formulation of our view of music in the modern period. The present volume is especially valuable as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship of German music and culture because German composers have tended to select products of their own linguistic culture to set to music. And in German literature, more than in any other, music has represented a poetic theme of major significance in the works of many of its best writers.

JOSEPH MAINZER'S ‘SACRED AND BEAUTIFUL MISSION’: AN ASPECT OF PARISIAN MUSICAL LIFE OF THE 1830s

MUSICAL LIFE in Paris in the 1830s conjures up images of extravagance and the conspicuous consumption of spectacle at times bordering on excess: Meyerbeer's dancing nuns (in Robert le diable) and the death of Halevy's Rachel (in Lajuive) by boiling oil. This was spectacle to observe, and to be observed at, by what Countess Greffulhe would later call the 'great anonymous caress' of all the eyes.' Opera was the most popular musical genre, dominating the musical scene along with the virtuoso piano players (who chiefly played operatic arrangements) and the Conservatoire concerts. Yet there was also a diffuse network of smaller concerts and amateur music-making spread throughout Paris.2 And although the vast majority preferred to be transported by the glitter of the Opera, for many music had a more serious, even moral function to play in society. As a critic for La Phalange commented in 1836, 'There is constant and enthusiastic discussion of the sacred and beautiful mission of the artist'.' In London in July 1842, the German music pedagogue, critic and composer Joseph Mainzer (1801-51) founded a music journal designed to advertise his singing classes and his philosophy of music, Mainzer's Musical Times and Singing Czrcular. The journal exists today as the Musical Times and is probably Mainzer's greatest gift to posterity. But before arriving in England, Mainzer had spent some years in Paris, where for a short time he was a figure of some distinction in artistic circles because of his singing classes for 'working men'. My aim here is to illuminate one aspect of music's more serious role in Paris in the 1830s through a study of Mainzer's musical writings and of the comments provoked by his singing classes. I shall also fill out the picture of Mainzer's stay in Paris through his activities as critic and educator, and show how, as Ruth Solie claims, 'the critical language in which music is described and evaluated . . . derives from a common pool applicable to all subjects of discussion, and therefore reveals common concerns and ideological presuppositions of the period'.' Mainzer's music criticism is interesting not only for the information it pro-

‘All our central fire’ Music, mediation and the Irish psyche

The distinguishing characteristics of the psyche within Jungian psychology can be linked to the structures and processes of music in a significant way. The theory of opposites is central to that link. Music mediates emotional conflict and current investigations within neurophysiology, neuropsychology, and biomusicology are exploring the systems by which this occurs. Irish music is here defined as “encompassing all creative music making in Ireland”. The role of music as a mediating force in Irish society is discussed and four Irish musical figures are compared: Carolan, Moore, Potts and O Riada. In all four cases, mediation took place between the indigenous oraltradition music and the literate European art music tradition of the time. A further comparison between the Irish composer Sean O Riada and the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen shows two separate yet contemporaneous approaches to the challenge of orality and literacy as opposing forces within musical tradition. The psychomusical struggle of Sea...

The Annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi Revisionism and the Politics of Appropriation

The infamous photograph of 1937 in Regensburg (see Fig. 1) is difficult to forget: Adolf Hitler, in full Nazi military dress, stands gazing reverently at a marble bust of the Austrian composer. 1 This likeness, created by Adolf Rothenberger in a style consonant with National Socialist realism, is placed on a dark pedestal bordered in gold and topped with the Nazi seal, an eagle clutching the swastika. Bruckner had at long last joined the other luminaries of German culture in Regensburg's Valhalla, a marble replica of the Parthenon completed in 1841 under the direction of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and filled with images of German cultural heroes of the past. A central goal of the Bruckner occasion was the Austrian composer's elevation to the status of a full-fledged German composer brought into the embrace of the Third Reich, a step that no doubt foreshadowed--and helped prepare for--the AnschluJ3 of Austria eight months later.2 The Regensburg ceremony-which included speeches and remarks by Peter. Raabe (president of the Reichsmusikkammer), Max Auer (president of the Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft), Joseph Goebbels, and others-served as a centerpiece for various musicalpolitical events, including a series of concerts, a convention of the Internationale Bruckner-Gesellschaft, and a meeting of the Bavarian District Nazi Party Congress (see Fig. 2). Through the narrow lens of Bruckneriana, this celebration could be interpreted merely as an event capping the festivities of the previous year commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Bruckner's death. But from the wider perspective of Nazi political strategies of the late 1930s, this event should, more correctly, be recognized as a launching point. Beyond this Bruckner anniversary, 1936 marked a time when, according to Goebbels, the 'chains' of Versailles had finally been 'stripped off' ; Germany had once again become a formidable military