Musik und ethisch-moralischer Wandel um 1700: Paris, London, Hamburg.
Final Report Abstract
For the design of this research project, the applicant drew on studies on music after 1945 in which she had employed a culturologically-oriented approach. In these studies on avant-garde music, the applicant had observed that theories and zeitgeist from diverse intellectual fields that were disseminated through the mass media and in publications stimulated composers to develop new compositional techniques even though the theories and zeitgeist did not directly refer to music or art in general. Against this background, the applicant assumed that similar processes would also be discernible with regard to Baroque music and the radical moral-ethical change from early modern times to the Enlightenment in the decades around 1700. The DFG-funded study brought to light that theories and "Zeitgeist" on the one hand and music on the other were indeed related to each other, but their connection was configured differently from that one in the 20th century. Investigating operas composed for theatres in Paris/Versailles, Hamburg and London, the resulting monograph shows that Baroque and early-Enlightenment operas in the decades around 1700 served as media that performatively articulated visionary moral-ethical ideas as to which, at this time, theoretical, written reflections were not available yet. The visionary ideas comprised the phenomenon of the psychic-communicative split (as a consequence of the imperatives of political prudence and the ethics of "Simulation" and "Dissimulation") in the French post-Lully "tragédie en musique" after 1687; the concepts of absolute certainty and fidelity to oneself articulated in Hamburg opera in the first third of the 18th century; and the paradigm of the ethics of use (related to, but not identical with, utilitarianism) that shaped the London ballad operas from 1728 onwards. They were complemented by the advertisement of relativistic ethics in the so-called Hamburg theatre dispute at the end of the 17th century. While moral-ethical theories of this time period were quite well researched by cultural, social and philosophical historians in the past decades if the theories were available in prints, the new, visionary ideas of the artists that appeared only implicitly in music-dramatic works and, through these media, were conveyed to a larger audience have been investigated in the DFG-funded research project for the first time. Notably, those ideas not only articulate themselves in the verses by the librettists and the design of the plot, but also in the musical means. To this end, the composers chose new compositional, stylistic and music-dramaturgical developments that, in the further course of the 18th and early 19th century, prepared the autonomization of music and the emergence of the Viennese classical and heroic styles.
Publications
-
„The Celebration of Beethoven’s Bicentennial in 1970 – The Anti-Authoritarian Movement and Its Impact on Radical Avant-garde and Postmodern Music in West Germany“, in: The Musical Quarterly, 93:3-4, 2010 (= 2011), S. 560-615
Kutschke, Beate
-
2013. Music and Protest in 1968, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 327 Seiten
Kutschke, Beate und Barley Norton (eds.)
-
2013. „Collagen, Variationensätze und Hommagen. Zitattechniken in der DDR nach der Niederschlagung des Prager Frühlings“, in: Postmoderne hinter dem eisernen Vorhang, hrsg. von Amrei Flechsig and Stefan Weiss, Hildesheim: Olms
Kutschke, Beate
-
2013. „New ‘Old Leftist’ aesthetics in the West German contemporary music scene: the cantata Streik bei Mannesmann (1973)”, in: Music and Communism, hrsg. von Robert Adlington, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Kutschke, Beate
-
Gemengelage. Moralisch-ethischer Wandel im europäischen Musiktheater um 1700: Paris, Hamburg, London (Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft). Hildesheim: Olms 2016, 320 Seiten.
Beate Kutschke
