Denken und Hören in der Musik der Gegenwart

The panel discussion focusses on thinking and listening in the context of contemporary music, connecting to the overall topic of the Graz congress, “music theory and interdisciplinarity”, as well as to the conceptualization of listening in music-theoretical approaches informed by cognitive sciences. Andreas Dorschel summarizes the history of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in the humanities and traces its origins to the founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964. More recently, it seems that tendencies of “redisciplinarisation” can be observed and that music theory is also affected by this trend, as it tends to differentiate into diverse sub-fields such as the history of music theory, “historically informed” practical composition, pedagogical music theory and systematic-speculative music theory. In the contemporary arts, however, transdisciplinarity continues to provide a highly influential model. Several examples from twentieth-century music are discussed that incorporate “theories” into the musical fabric, among them Helmut Lachenmann’s Salut für Caudwell, John Cage’s Lecture about Nothing, Morton Feldman’s Elemental Procedures and Gérard Grisey’s L’Icône Paradoxale. In such works, the relationship between musical theory, political theory and compositional structure often is left intentionally ambiguous. The second part of the discussion focusses on theories of listening with cognitive music theories and Lachenmann’s aesthetics providing two main references. Cognitive music theories tend to limit themselves to structural aspects, often guided by the intention to connect to computer sciences and informatics, although the distinction between “extra-opus” and “intra-opus” knowledge, for example, in fact requires the consideration of complex socio-historical contexts. Cognitive frameworks therefore seem to be largely inadequate to grasp prominent modes of listening that have evolved in contemporary music. A highly influential model has been formulated by Lachenmann as the distinction between Hinhören (hearing) and Zuhören (listening): While listening to music generally does not challenge listening habits and the music tends to immerse the listener in a magical sphere, Lachenmann’s aesthetics aims to breach these habits and enter the domain of existential hearing, thus enabling “liberated perception”. Dorschel connects this distinction to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of visual perception (“Spähen” [peering] vs. “Anschauen” [perceiving]), Helga de la Motte to Theodor Lipps’ idea of “Einfühlung” which has been translated as “flow”. Further modes of listening discussed include Peter Sloterdijk’s deep psychological interpretation of listening as the search for prenatal sounds and his idea of a “sonorous cogito”, Dieter Mack’s aim to trigger curiosity by both building upon and breaching listening habits and Clemens Gadenstätter’s utopian concept of entering unknown territories of listening during the compositional process, transcending the “state of listening” [“Hörstand”] of both the composer and the listener.