Zwischen Atmosphäre und Narration

Musik kann zweifellos als Medium, aber auch als intermediales Phänomen aufgefasst werden. In dieser Perspektive bewegt sie sich zwischen den Polen Sprechen und Schweigen, Hören und Lesen, Subjektivität und Intertextualität und ist dem Medium der Literatur somit alternierend nah und fern. Am Beispiel der Autoren Imre Kertész und Christoph Ransmayr sowie Komponist*innen aus dem 20. und 21. Jahrhundert wie Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, John Cage, Annea Lockwood, Jennifer Walshe u.a. verortet Karl Katschthaler Musik und Klangkunst im unauflöslichen Spannungsverhältnis von Narration und Atmosphäre.

Zur Poetik und Interpretation des offenen Schlusses

This article reviews the long historical process and changing significance of open endings in music from Haydn's mid-period symphonies of the 1760s to Helmut Lachenmann. Taking two case studies by Alban Berg (Lyric Suite, Wozzeck) as its starting point, the article demonstrates that open endings are often linked to ideas of cyclicity and the permanence of "objective time" as well as to a critique of social or political situations. Therefore, open endings challenge the aesthetic difference between the musical art-work and everyday experience, a tendency, that can be traced back to the emergence of self-reflexivity in early 19th-century music and aesthetics and even to Haydn's earlier listener-responsive musical writing. In later 19th-century and early 20th-century music, large-scale forms increasingly posed the problem of an inability to achieve closure. Further key examples elaborate the tendency of open endings toward musical self-reflexivity and the appearance of the composer-persona at the end of a cyclic work: Schubert's Der Leiermann from Winterreise, Schumann's Der Dichter spricht from Kinderszenen, Schoenberg's concluding piece from Six little Piano Pieces op. 19 as well as Lachenmann's "music with images" The Little Match-Girl. Finally, Schumann's and Schönberg's closing pieces are considered from the perspective of performance history and analysis, highlighting th performer's substantial impact on creating (or limiting) the impression of "openness".

Helene Berg and the Management of Berg’s Legacy, 1936–76

Following Berg’s death the most pressing problem was the completion of the opera Lulu. Universal Edition contracted with Arnold Schoenberg to complete the work but Schoenberg subsequently declined. The opera was premiered in a two-act version in Zurich in 1937. Helene Berg’s involvement with anthroposophy shaped her contention that Berg was still in communication with her and that Lulu’s third act should never be completed. Universal Edition commissioned the completion by Friedrich Cerha, and the premiere of the three-act version was held in Paris in 1979, after Helene Berg’s death. Helene Berg undertook a publication of her husband’s letters to herself, created the Alban Berg Foundation, and donated Berg’s manuscripts and papers to the Austrian National Library. Helene Berg died in 1976. Biographies of Berg were first written by his friends and students, including Willi Reich and Soma Morgernstern, later by those outside of his circle such as Hans F. Redlich.

Berg

This book contains a new study of the life and works of the composer Alban Berg (1885–1935). The major events in his life are recounted, based on a reassessment of archival documents, correspondence, and the recollections of those who knew him. His relationship with other modernists in music, art, and literature—including Arnold Schoenberg, Karl Kraus, and Alma Mahler-Werfel—is traced. The role played in Berg’s personal and artistic life by his wife, Helene, is emphasized, and her management of his legacy—often controversial—for the forty years following his death is explored. The book contains a close study of each of Berg’s major musical works, including his operas Wozzeck and Lulu.

The Expectancy Dynamics of Anti-Tonal Twelve-Tone Rows: A Commentary and Reanalysis of von Hippel & Huron (2020)

This commentary provides two methodological expansions of von Hippel and Huron's (2020) empirical report on (anti-)tonality in twelve-tone rows by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg. First, motivated by the theoretical importance of equality between all pitch classes in twelve-tone music, a full replication of their findings of "anti-tonality" in rows by Schoenberg and Webern is offered using a revised tonal fit measure which is not biased towards row-initial and row-final sub-segments. Second, motivated by a long-standing debate in music cognition research between distributional and sequential/dynamic tonality concepts, information-theoretic measures of entropy and information content are estimated by a computational model and pitted against distributional tonal fit measures. Whereas Schoenberg's rows are characterized by low distributional tonal fit, but do not strongly capitalize on tonal expectancy dynamics, Berg's rows exhibit tonal traits in terms of low unexpectedness, and Webern's rows achieve anti-tonal traits by combining high uncertainty and low unexpectedness through prominent use of the semitone interval. This analysis offers a complementary–and arguably more nuanced–picture of dodecaphonic compositional practice.

Tonal and "Anti-Tonal" Cognitive Structure in Viennese Twelve-Tone Rows

We show that the twelve-tone rows of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern are "anti-tonal"—that is, structured to avoid or undermine listener's tonal schemata. Compared to randomly generated rows, segments from Schoenberg's and Webern's rows have significantly lower fit to major and minor key profiles. The anti-tonal structure of Schoenberg's and Webern's rows is still evident when we statistically controlled for their preference for other row features such as mirror symmetry, derived and hexachordal structures, and preferences for certain intervals and trichords. The twelve-tone composer Alban Berg, by contrast, often wrote rows with segments that fit major or minor keys quite well.