Musical Expression in Transforming Cultures

Fall term this year I shall start up a new post.doc. project on the subject of performance practice and cultural transformation. Another three years with intense research I am really looking forward to!
Read the abstract here:

Strindberg – Schönberg – Munch

STRINDBERG SCHÖNBERG MUNCH – Nordic Modernism in Schönberg’s Vienna around 1900

The new exhibition at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna (25 sept 08 – 1 jan 09) displays a unique collection of paintings from three expressionist artists and thus, elucidates the mental and aesthetic proximity of the Nordic avant-garde to their Viennese contemporary.
A symposium on the subject of the exhibition at the Arnold Schönberg Center explores the manifold relationships between the Viennese avant-garde and Nordic artists around the 1900.

The polarization of an objective, scientifically exact world view and a mystical, irrational and subjective one pervaded the thought of the Nordic avant-garde and that of the Viennese moderns of the time. The exhibit is an attempt at detecting and pesenting the affinities among forms of expression in music, painting and writing, as well as tracing the intellectual kinship of the influential cultural milieus in Vienna and northern Europe in the years surrounding 1900.

the gathering of the tribes: Nordic musicoloy congress 2008

15th Nordic Congress of Musicology 2008  Oslo, 5 – 8 August

Four years after the congress in Helsinki, the community of Nordic musicologists met again, this time at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo. The theme of the congress was ‘Voicing – sounding – visualizing’, encouraging scholars working on the expanding fields of film studies, opera studies, performativity, or ‘voice studies’ to deliver inspiring papers in Oslo. As usual, it became a nice blend of disciplines and topics. In many ways, the papers given during the three days mirrored the multiplicity of perspectives and methodologies in international musicology. Not very surprising, the papers closest to the theme of the congress came from scholars examining the complexities of real and ‘unsung’ voices: as Philip Tagg, talking on the functionality and referentiality of European and ‘exotic’ musical elements in Joffé’s The Mission, Stan Hawkins on Prince’s playing with recorded voices, or, as Nila Parly, in her paper on the performativity of death scenes in Wagner opera performances. Intermediality and multimodal perception were further topics, besides papers concerned with the practice of historical performers (Rachmaninov, Liszt, CPE Bach, and Rudolf Kolisch), sound as recorded performance, and the voicing of notated scripts.

Perhaps, it is not fair to expect a congress to push the frontiers of the field. However, listening to the talks and reading the abstracts (abstracts_nmk2008), one got an impression of musicological Zeitgeist. It became obvious, ‘old musicology’ no longer is the strawman to be attacked. As stated in the closing note of the congress, musicology has become ‘new’, also in the Nordic countries.

brilliant moves: Schoenberg homo ludens

The Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna finally got published a new journal, available at amazon.de:
Arnold Schönbergs Schachzüge. Dodekaphonie und Spiele-Konstruktionen. Bericht zum Symposium – Report of the Symposium, 3.–5. Juni 2004 .

From the content:
Arnold Schönbergs Zwölftonmethode / Jan Maegaard
Schönberg-Werkstätte und -Patentrezepte / Therese Muxeneder
Spiel, Kombination und Mechanik in der Musikgeschichte / Hartmut Krones
Schönberg, Bach, and B-A-C-H / Ethan Haimo
Twelve-tone Compositional Strategies and Poetic Signification in Schönberg’s Vier Stücke für gemischten Chor, op. 27 / Richard Kurth
Zur Konstellation von Ausdruck und Spiel in Schönbergs Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment op. 47 / Arnulf Mattes

Hardanger fiddle at Donaueschinger Musiktage

Buy tickets, and get your own idea of the newest “neue Musik” at Donaueschinger Musiktage 17 – 19 oct 2008. Experience world premieres by young composers, amongst them the Norwegian Lars Petter Hagen, who got a prestigous commission of the famous SWR, Germany’s leading symphony orchestra for contemporary music.
First performance of his work To Zeitblom für Hardanger fiddle und Orchester
sunday, 19 october, SWR-orchestra under Sylvain Cambreling.

• Programme 2008
• Video-footage from last year’s events, produced by Lernradio Karslruhe

rethinking Dahlhaus

Carl Dahlhaus und die Musikwissenschaft: Werk, Wirkung, Aktualität
Internationales wissenschaftliches Symposion Berlin 2008

Do we really need a big conference on a dead musicologist? The Berlin conference on Carl Dahlhaus, the grand ol’ man of German musicology, should give the answer. The list of invited speakers dealing with the critical reassessment of Dahlhaus ideas on music history, music esthetics, music theory, historiography, and their political implications, sounds promising. Perhaps, the symposion will show some new possibilities how to bring musicology as a discipline in its own terms through apparently troubled times. Do we need the good old mother Musicology, or should we encourage their babies’ quest for meaning, searching for new identities in a complex, ‘decentered’ world?

viva la meta musica

Whilst Edinburgh celebrated the 2007 Festival, I presented a paper at the Word and Music Studies 6th Conference: Self-Reference in Literature and Music.

heated discussions in hot New York

23 – 27 June, whilst the degrees outside the air conditioned conference venues in Manhattan peaked at 36°C, I was attending intense workshops with distinguished Schoenberg scholars from Harvard, Columbia, Vienna and my hero from the University of Minnesota, Michael Cherlin: The Mannes Institute 2007: Schoenberg and his Legacy.

Michael Cherlin’s recent book on “Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination” (Cambridge University Press, 2007) collects thought-provoking essays, which shed light on the dramatic impulse behind the music of this icon of modernist functionalism.

reflected colours – reflective forms

23 February I defended my dissertation Reflected colours – Reflective Forms. On the Interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s Late Chamber Music at the Gamle Festsaal, University of Oslo.
In my presentation of the thesis, I focused on Gould & Menuhin’s interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s last instrumental work, the Phantasy.

Abstract:

Reflected Colours – Reflective Forms: On the Interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s Late Chamber Music

The aura of Schoenberg’s late chamber music springs from a return to expressionistic textures in the works prior to World War I. In the midst of severe moods and fractured fabric, ethereal moments of suspension appear that immediately recall similar ones located at key moments in expressionistic works. These moments of suspension, evoked by static-oscillating textures denoted as Klangflächen, establish a chiaroscuro contrast to the harsh expressivity and peculiar musical logic of Schoenberg’s String Trio and Phantasy.

In this thesis, the notion of stylistic return is the main concern of a wide-ranging study of interpretive frameworks. Amongst these frameworks, Theodor W. Adorno’s Spätstil-theory and Walter Benjamin’s theory of remembrance are the most prominent. The thesis settles with Schoenberg’s late style conceived of as ‘music about his own music’. In his thesis, Mattes elucidates on the critical-creative faculty of self-reflective mimesis that underlies the String Trio and  the Phantasy’s musical poetics, thus unravelling the musical play with remembrance and resemblance these works are imbued with. Phantasy’s

By exploring dramaturgical and performative aspects of texture and timbre, this thesis seeks to resolve the question of how musical meaning grows and erodes at the moment when expressionistic Klangflächen reappear of the late chamber music works, though transformed into fragile sheets of sound.

A central claim of the thesis is that Schoenberg’s late instrumental works should be considered as an emphatic attempt of the twelve-tone composer to return to central spiritual concerns from his expressionist period. Topical associations with the mystical and spiritual challenge the concept of pure musical meaning. Mattes handles this challenge by developing a comprehensive analytical-hermeneutic approach to the musical and extra-musical dimensions of reflective forms and reflected colours in Schoenberg’s late chamber music.

http://ask.bibsys.no/ask/action/show?pid=070241376&kid=biblio