Publication of the book “Hörsinn und ‚Ton‘. Ästhetische Anthropologie der Musik nach Herder und Händel“ ["Sense of Hearing and ‘Tone’. Aesthetic anthropology of music according to Herder and Handel "]

• Applicant: Dr. Rainer Schmusch
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2021 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470458481

In a detailed study of Herder’s writings on aesthetics, his draft of an aesthetic based on the perfor-mance of the human senses is elaborated for music and the sense of hearing It is expanded into a music-analytical method and verified using the example of a contemporary paradigm. The draft is then positioned in the musicological discourse on an “anthropology of music”. As a pioneering thinker of pluralistic cultural research, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) analyses how living conditions in interaction with physical conditions lead to artistic expressions of people in very different manifestations of self-confidence. He combines cultural anthropology with the "phe-nomenological" analysis of aesthetic subjectivity. The present investigation is designed to be interdisciplinary. In three consecutive studies, it addresses the desiderata of literary and philosophical Herder research as well as music aesthetics and musicology. Herder's conception of music, seldom and mostly anthologically presented, proves to be central to his thinking. The first study: “Aesthetic Sensus Between Empiricism and Metaphysics” systematizes the aesthetic and anthropological implications relating to music using Herder's most progressive aesthetic design, the “4. Kritisches Wäldchen” from 1769, which is supplemented by later writings. The second study, "On the Analysis of Composed Anthropology", develops a method of musical work analysis that includes explicitly and systematically the act of listening and reveals anthropological semantics in structures in the score. This new analytical method is exemplified by Georg Friedrich Handel's oratorical ode Alexander’s Feast (1736), a work in which a conceptual aesthetic effect in the sense of Reception Theory is paradigmatically condensed and still received today. On this basis, in the third study “Musical subjectivity as an anthropological category”, the interface between aesthetics and anthropology is examined, where music is usually considered a rather mar-ginal subject. The “phenomenological” investigation of the structure of consciousness of musical experience has methodological consequences for musicological research. The treatise sees itself as a new draft of music aesthetics and music anthropology, which at the same time honours in a systematic presentation the view of music as a central part of Herder’s thinking.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants