Musik-Interpretation als "tour de force" Diskursformationen und "aufführungsästhetische" Positionen nach Adorno

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Hartmut Hein
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2012 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230529661

Experts’ and popular discourses about musical performances are highly divergent. Scholarly interest in the subject has been on the rise for some time. To discuss performances of music, especially per-formances of canonized “classical works” notated and historically conveyed as scores, has become a substantial part of musicology today. Diagnostics of different aesthetical and analytical positions and beliefs belonging to the musical execution or “Interpretation” are now ‘state of the art’. In many cases they go along with claims to historiographically (re-)construct profound changes in perfor-mance concepts during the 20th century. Such diagnostics often start from divergent soundscapes presented in selected (canonized) recordings and/or from (descriptions of) live performances, using polarizing terms to create typologies: Confrontations between analytical, objective executions and subjective, auratic embodiments of “paper music” – which are documented in so called “Vortragsleh-ren” since the 18th century – have formed a tradition of discourse reflected during the 1920ies by the opposition of espressivo style and new objectivity (cf. Detlef Gieses „Espressivo“ versus „(Neue) Sachlichkeit“ and, accordingly, Jürg Stenzl). Lydia Goehr has sharpened this contrast speaking of two conflicting conceptions of musical performance: She discusses an ideal of “perfect performances of music” in which the personality of the performer vanishes into something invisible “behind the work”, and the event of a “perfect musical performance of music” in which the performance as a ritualistic spectacle tends to become itself a (social) work of its own right. Hermann Danuser’s three-part classi-fication of performative modes (“traditional”, “actualizing”, and “historistically reconstructive”) as well as Christoph Hubig’s perspective of “repotentializations” of music in every performance allow to speak of battle fields of musical execution as a criss-cross of discourses in permanent competition. In correlation to their status as executions of a fixed “text”, concerts as well as recorded sound seem to be “res factae”. Seeing them as historical documents, we could compare pregnant historical and actual differences directly. Quite often, this is done without reflecting specific horizons and genealo-gies of historically connected discourses. In my study I attempt to uncover pertinent discursive pat-terns that are bound up with musical reflections about the status of musical scores, perceptions of the term “work” (cf. Goehr et al.), social aspects connected to performance institutions as well as to individual capacities of diverse types of performers and listeners. For some works and times surely there may be specific topics or ideals of musical expression and sound which can change and have changed – but how and why?The point of adequate musical expression expected by great parts of the public audience is best explored through Adorno’s notion of “gestic mimesis”. That notion in turn must be seen within the social and epistemological contexts drawn out in Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (especially its ty-pology of listeners), in Adorno’s fragments of a „Reproduktionstheorie“ and in his late Aesthetic Theo-ry. Adorno’s arguments – including his postulate that great works of art permanently need actualiza-tion – shine through many debates concerning performance practice in the 20th century, sometimes founding the historical expert discourses of “musical interpretation” in musicology and critics, some-times counterfactual as the competing practices itself stand in criticism. Examples, including exam-ples of ‘historically informed performance practice’ (cf. Peter Kivy’s Authenticities) are discussed in the study’s third part. A lot of the work is done by an examination of the central but very problemati-cal term “Werktreue” and its changing horizons in different performative concepts: performances of music are proven to be settled in an open space of alternative verbal and musical discourses as “re-potentializations” of ancient texts and present sound textures. The “work” then turns out to oscillate precisely between tradition, histori(sti)cal remembrance and actuality, between analysis and mimesis, between score and spectacular executions.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants