Zur Aktualität der Musiktheorie Ernst Kurths

Ernst Kurth’s music theory is grounded on the proposition, most prominently developed in his study Die Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners “Tristan” [1920], that sound is a reverberation of powerful forces that circulate in the inaudible. According to Kurth, music is a living entity which must be conceived of as hierarchically superior to single tones. Many of his contemporaries were fascinated by these ideas, and although Kurth’s concepts were not discussed on a large scale after 1945, his theoretical framework arguably can provide today appropriate means to describe transitions and relations of sound in post-tonal music. In this article, repercussions of Kurth’s ideas are uncovered in the theoretical writings of Theodor W. Adorno, especially where they allude to Arnold Schönberg’s idea of a “drive force of sounds” [Triebleben der Klänge], and in new French music after 1970 (mainly in aesthetics and works of Gérard Grisey), where the metaphorical idea of “forces” within sound and the intention to “make the inaudible audible” result in gestalt-derived musical structures with clear affinites to Kurth’s energetics. Although Kurth’s objective to discern “invariants” of musical listening has met with legitimate scepticism, a closer re-reading of his texts might provide fresh impulses to tackle the key problem of the relationship between history, perception and structure in twentieth-century music and music theory.