The Resonance of Music Across Cultures

What predestines music to be able to transgress geo-cultural boundaries? I argue that music’s sensuous, bodily-affective immediacy requires a mode of cross-cultural translation via what I call auditory resonance—the spontaneous attunement of listeners with the sonic presence of music through media-technological transmission despite vestiges of cultural colonialism and other sociopolitical barriers. I trace such resonance effects from German Romanticism through our global present, focusing especially on the conversations between two Japanese cultural figures, the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the novelist Haruki Murakami. These texts show that the category of auditory resonance is more suitable for addressing European music’s global significance than its traditional claims to transcultural universality. Keywords: Music, resonance, immediacy, presence, media technologies, cultural translation, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Walter Benjamin, Seiji Ozawa, Haruki Murakami

San Agustín y la estética del romanticismo alemán

El presente artículo plantea posibles conexiones entre el misticismo agustiniano y el pensamiento estético de San Agustín, con los principales fundamentos del Romanticismo alemán representado por tres autores, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder y su texto Confesiones de un monje enamorado del arte, Caspar David Friedrich y su pintura Monje frente al mar, y Novalis y su obra lírica, narrativa y ensayística. De este modo, se busca dejar abierta otra posible vía de acercamiento al movimiento romántico y de conocimiento de sus ideales que pueda completar las perspectivas desde las cuales se han abordado hasta ahora las vidas y obras de estos autores. Igualmente, se podrá valorar la modernidad del pensamiento agustiniano y su vigencia siglos después de su época, no sólo en el ámbito teológico, sino también en el literario y estético.

La oss snakke om musikk: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroders og Ludwig Tiecks musikalske fantasier

In this article, I take as my starting point an opinion that many share: it is difficult to talk about music (Barthes, 1977). This opinion is rooted in the romantic ideal of autonomy (Dahlhaus, 1994), leading to the emancipation of music from language (Neubauer, 1986). I discuss some aspects of this tension between language and music through close readings of the essays in Phantasien über die Kunst [Fantasies on Art] (1799/2000) by the Early German Romanticists Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853). They emphasize music’s distinctive ability to convey various forms of transcendental experiences and insights that language falls short of. At the same time, their essays on music demonstrate an inner tension between a rich and literary experimental discourse discussing the limitation of language in relation to music’s transcendental meaning. In the essays in Phantasien, Wackenroder and Tieck constitute an innovative art-critical discourse that in many ways deals with art by making itself a work of art (Naumann, 1990). The literary-poetic approach to music exemplified in these essays changed the understanding of music itself, and enabled hearing music as an ideal for poetic language. I argue that the tension between language and music, as a historical legacy from the Romantic period, enables us to recognize language’s co-constitutive significance for our musical experience while at the same time making us attentive to language’s own musicality. The effort to say something about what we hear enriches and expands our linguistic involvement with music, as well as other parts of our lives.

Wackenroder and the Doctrine of the Soul

The writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) constitute perhaps the most powerful and original source in the early German Romantic discourse on autonomous music, itself a spearhead of a European trend that matured at he turn of the eighteenth century. Wackenroder's perfervid yet strangely lucid and insightful observations on art and music are founded on the notion ofKunstreligion(‘art religion’), which he uses to replace the rational explanations of art, based on knowledge and representation of the external world, and derived from classical philosophy.

Literarische Musikästhetik

Diese Studie widmet sich dem Phänomen der literarischen Musikästhetik im Zeitraum zwischen 1800 und 1950. Im Rahmen eines transdisziplinären Ansatzes führt sie literatur- und musikwissenschaftliche Interpretationsverfahren zusammen und erschließt damit einen zentralen literarisch-musikalischen Diskurs des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Anhand detaillierter Werkanalysen demonstriert der Autor, dass die romantische Musikästhetik, die um 1800 von Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck und E.T.A. Hoffmann begründet wird, nicht auf kompositionsgeschichtliche, sondern auf literarhistorische Transformationsprozesse im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert reagiert. Das romantische Musikverständnis, das sich sowohl von der barocken und im Umfeld der Oper entwickelten Affektenlehre als auch von der empfindsamen Gefühlsästhetik abhebt, ist somit als ein primär literarisches Phänomen anzusehen. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit widmet die Studie dem Fortleben der romantischen Musikästhetik in Werken von Eduard Mörike, Franz Werfel und Thomas Mann.

From the Mine to the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical Depth

In recent years, the analytical concept of structural depth has been subjected to intense critical scrutiny. But amid debates over the relative merit of depth- and surface-oriented modes of listening and analysis, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the history of the two terms in music journalism. Focusing on the period around 1800, this article examines the entry of the term "depth" into German literature on music and explores the metaphorÕs diverse, even contradictory, meanings. Writers like Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and E. T. A. Hoffmann endorsed the idea, prominent in German Pietism and the criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder, that sound was uniquely able to access the deepest regions of subjectivity. At the same time, such writers began to imagine a musical inner space uncannily similar to the inner space of the listening subject. Unlike earlier aestheticians of a poetic bent, Hoffmann thought that the "deepest" works--works that stirred the soul with special force--required the critic to "penetrate" their "inner structure." Given that earlier technical discourse had treated music essentially as a linear sequence of periods, HoffmannÕs writings exhibit a momentous shift in perspective from the sequential to the vertical. By adding a new dimension to music complementing its axis of horizontal or temporal unfolding, Hoffmann imported the full spectrum of depthÕs meanings, ranging from the scientific to the spiritual, the rational to the irrational, into the modern notion of the masterwork.