"In ihrer Untersuchung entwickelt Linke eine zeitgemäße Theorie der musikalischen Form aus einer musikphilosophischen und musikanalytischen Perspektive ausgehend von posttonaler Musik nach 1950. Die hier entwickelte musikphilosophische Theorie versteht sich als eine Meta- oder Rahmentheorie für musikalische Analyse von neuer Musik. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht eine grundlegende Reflexion über das Verhältnis von musikalischer Form in neuer Musik und ästhetischer Erfahrung: Musikalische Form entsteht in der Interaktion des ästhetisch erfahrenden Subjekts mit dem ästhetischen Objekt im Prozess der ästhetischen Erfahrung und (...) ist daher weder als bloße Objekteigenschaft des musikalischen Phänomens noch als reine Erfahrungskategorie zu verstehen. Zentraler Anknüpfungspunkt ist sowohl in methodischer als auch in inhaltlicher Hinsicht Theodor W. Adornos Modell der Konstellation bzw. des konstellativen Denkens, welches musikphilosophische, erkenntnistheoretische und ethische Dimensionen miteinander in Verbindung bringt. Der Analyse-Teil zu Helmut Lachenmanns Orchesterkomposition "Schreiben. Musik für Orchester" (2002-05) stellt ein exemplarisches musikanalytisches Komplement zur hier entwickelten musikphilosophischen Theorie dar"--Back cover. (shrink)

A new theory of aesthetics and music, grounded in the collision between language and the body. In this book, Tim Hodgkinson proposes a theory of aesthetics and music grounded in the boundary between nature and culture within the human being. His analysis discards the conventional idea of the human being as an integrated whole in favor of a rich and complex field in which incompatible kinds of information—biological and cultural—collide. It is only when we acknowledge the clash of body and (...) language within human identity that we can understand how art brings forth the special form of subjectivity potentially present in aesthetic experiences. As a young musician, Hodgkinson realized that music was, in some mysterious way, “of itself”—not isolated from life, but not entirely continuous with it, either. Drawing on his experiences as a musician, composer, and anthropologist, Hodgkinson shows how when we listen to music a new subjectivity comes to life in ourselves. The normal mode of agency is suspended, and the subjectivity inscribed in the music comes toward us as a formative “other” to engage with. But this is not our reproduction of the composer's own subjectivation; when we perform our listening of the music, we are sharing the formative risks taken by its maker. To examine this in practice, Hodgkinson looks at the work of three composers who have each claimed to stimulate a new way of listening: Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, and Helmut Lachenmann. (shrink)

RESUMO O ensaio “Vers une musique informelle” é uma das mais conhecidas contribuições da reflexão musical de Adorno, certamente um dos maiores legados de sua filosofia da música. Este artigo procura, em um primeiro momento, especificar o sentido crítico da contribuição conceitual de Adorno, que visava à superação dos impasses e da alternativa entre pensamento motívico-temático e pensamento serial nas práticas composicionais de época. Em seguida, descreve a intenção propositiva de Adorno ao encaminhar uma “teoria material das formas”, teoria que, (...) na realidade, havia sido concretizada na monografia sobre Mahler, publicada no ano anterior ao ensaio. Por fim, busca evidenciar a atualidade do conceito de música informal, questionando, por um lado, a leitura de Fredric Jameson e, por outro, examinando brevemente os procedimentos de dois compositores contemporâneos cujo teor remete ao conceito adorniano: Helmut Lachenmann e Wolfgang Rihm. ABSTRACT Adorno’s essay “Vers une musique informelle” is one of the most well-known contributions of his musical thought and also considered one of the most significant legacies of his philosophy of music. Initially, this article intends to specify the critical sense of Adorno’s conceptual contribution, which aimed the overcoming of the avant-garde compositional stalemate and the alternative between motivic-thematic thought and serialistic thought, at the time. Then, it describes the intention put forward by Adorno in his “material theory of forms”, a theory that had been fully developed in the monograph on Mahler, published just one year before the essay. Finally, the article tries to show some of the contemporary implications of the concept of informal music, by questioning, on the one hand, Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the concept, and, on the other hand, briefly examining the methods of two contemporary composers that seemingly set this concept in motion: Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm. (shrink)

How do artists share, translate, reveal their imagination by using different semiotic systems; how can the audience partake in this imagination receiving only images, words, notation, sounds? Starting from artwork of the novelist Italo Calvino and the composers Helmut Lachenmann and Gyorgy Kurtag, this article addresses the relation among imagination, perception, remembrance and expression. The ‘images’ used, be they visual, verbal, auditory or haptic, are much more than images. They concentrate in themselves layers of subjective and intersubjective perceptual, (...) cognitive and emotive experiences. I will argue that imagination relies upon sensory fluidity. This allows us (1) to integrate sensorial experiences from different perceptual origins — synaesthesia, (2) to link past, present and future by way of sensorial and embodied patterns of remembrance — embodied sedimentation, and (3) to share intersubjective patterns of affect and effect, bridging idiosyncratic and universal human experiences. (shrink)

El problema de la desintegración del aura, tratado inicialmente por Walter Benjamin en el último período de su filosofía y retomado por Theodor W. Adorno, ocupa un lugar central en el pensamiento de ambos autores. Pero mientras que Benjamin parece ver en la decadencia del aura ciertos aspectos liberadores, Adorno elige preservar la categoría de aura como esencial a la experiencia artística, cuestión que se encuentra conectada con el desplazamiento que, según se propondrá, opera la reflexión de Adorno de la (...) cualidad aurática al terreno específico de la música y, con ello, al ámbito de la producción, entendiendo esta cualidad como propia de la objetividad de la obra. Apoyándose en un repaso detallado del tratamiento de la categoría de aura en Benjamin y Adorno y siguiendo el traslado del problema al ámbito musical que propone Adorno, este artículo busca adentrarse en el fenómeno de la decadencia del aura en el dominio de la música a partir del análisis de una serie de obras escogidas de los compositores George Crumb, György Kurtág y Helmut Lachenmann. (shrink)

That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral even to questions (...) of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout. (shrink)

Johannes von Kries’s Spielraum-theory is regarded as one of the most important philosophical contributions of the nineteenth century to an objective interpretation of probability. This paper aims at a critical and contextual analysis of von Kries’s approach: It is contextual insofar as it reconstructs the Spielraum-theory in the historical setting that formed his scientific and philosophical outlook. It is critical insofar as it unfolds systematic tensions and inconsistencies which are rooted in this context, especially in the grave change of mechanism (...) which took place in the late nineteenth century. In this regard, the paper focuses on von Kries’s understanding of natural laws and nomological knowledge in relation to his concept of objective probability. While the formal approach of the Spielraum-theory—as far as developed by von Kries—seems sound, his epistemological claims with respect to nomological knowledge sustain classical mechanism and are hence difficult to substantiate from the point of view of modern science. (shrink)

Gewürdigt wird die Philosophie, die Karl Löwith in der Weimarer Zeit formuliert hat. Es wird gezeigt, wie Löwith zwischen Existenzphilosophie und marxistischer Theorie und aus den Wurzeln des 19. Jahrhunderts eine anthropologische Philosophie entwickelte.

Introducing the perplexed reader to a philosophy requires both a comprehensive understanding of the philosophy in question and a rigorous simplifying strategy. But clarity and accessibility come at a price: one has to cut down on complicated and perhaps unresolved lines of thought and arguments, stratifying the development of theoretical positions into a coherent and accessible narrative. This review will address both the success of this book as an introduction and, rather unjustly, those more complex topics that have been left (...) out and might be of interest to readers of this journal.First of all, let me say that Cornelis de Waal’s Peirce: A Guide for the Pexplexed is a very good introduction to Peirce’s.. (shrink)