The Topos Night in the Music of the modern and postmodern era. Investigations on its continuities and discontinuities

• Applicant: Dr. Ellen Freyberg
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417721823

The purpose of the study is to anchor the topos of the night in music research. For the first time, a larger selection of night compositions will be taken into consideration and the influence of the Topos Night on the works of Modernism / Postmodernism will be examined. Furthermore, the aim is to go beyond isolated individual considerations and to describe the essence of the works in the synopsis of the compositions of the night, whereby the working hypothesis of linking to the romantic program of exaggeration and transcendence of language is to serve as an analytical clue here. The focus of the analyzes should be on the compositional strategies with which composers penetrate into other dimensions of linguistic form in order to formulate musical content. In addition, the aim is to show how the music of modernism / postmodernism connects with the complexes of ideas and ideas established in the Romantic era (and outlined above), provides them with new musical interpretations and updates them for the present. The aim of the study is thus to describe the discursive continuities and discontinuities of the Topos Night in Modern / Postmodern Music and to give an answer to the question why music, as the most conceptual of all arts, benefits from the appropriation of the Topos Night.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants