Kontinua aus Diskontinuitäten : Dimensionen der performativen Form in Interpretationen von György Kurtágs Kafka-Fragmenten

Building on a comprehensive corpus of quantitative data from 14 recorded performances of György Kurtág’s 40-movement Kafka-Fragments (1985–87) and employing a method that integrates music analysis, historical research, and close and distant listening, the present essay aims to demonstrate the substantial differences among performers in communicating the cyclic form of this work. Despite the composer’s insistence – as evident in his rehearsal practice – to establish an “idiomatic” performance practice for his works, the relative openness of his notational practice and the complexity of the cyclic organization lead to profound differences in marking or weighting performed form, ranging between ironical and dramatic, between processual and architectonic (or “punctuating”) concepts. The “bottom-up” concept of the compositional process and the composer’s consistent focus on musical detail establishes a tension with the complex “top-down” shape of the full cycle that is translated into sound by performers with great variance

Zur Poetik und Interpretation des offenen Schlusses : Inszenierungen raum-zeitlicher Entgrenzung in der Musik der Moderne

This article reviews the long historical process and changing significance of open endings in music from Haydn\u27s mid-period symphonies of the 1760s to Helmut Lachenmann. Taking two case studies by Alban Berg (Lyric Suite, Wozzeck) as its starting point, the article demonstrates that open endings are often linked to ideas of cyclicity and the permanence of "objective time" as well as to a critique of social or political situations. Therefore, open endings challenge the aesthetic difference between the musical art-work and everyday experience, a tendency, that can be traced back to the emergence of self-reflexivity in early 19th-century music and aesthetics and even to Haydn\u27s earlier listener-responsive musical writing. In later 19th-century and early 20th-century music, large-scale forms increasingly posed the problem of an inability to achieve closure. Further key examples elaborate the tendency of open endings toward musical self-reflexivity and the appearance of the composer-persona at the end of a cyclic work: Schubert\u27s Der Leiermann from Winterreise, Schumann\u27s Der Dichter spricht from Kinderszenen, Schoenberg\u27s concluding piece from Six little Piano Pieces op. 19 as well as Lachenmann\u27s "music with images" The Little Match-Girl. Finally, Schumann\u27s and Schönberg\u27s closing pieces are considered from the perspective of performance history and analysis, highlighting the performer\u27s substantial impact on creating (or limiting) the impression of "openness"

Ausweglose Enden : Die Schlussbildung in Salvatore Sciarrinos Werken und die Semantisierung musikalischer Strukturen

Taking its cue from the problem of formal closure in musical modernity in general and Salvatore Sciarrino’s interpretations of two works by Anton Webern (orchestral pieces op. 6, no. 4 and op. 10, no. 4) in particular, this essay discusses a broad number of Sciarrino’s works as reflections of historical and semantic modes of musical listening and understanding. Emerging from a type of composing based on a comprehensive theory of perception, these works aim at problematizing and deferring the boundaries between musical and everyday listening. Sciarrino’s readings of Webern point us at musical situations, where conventional formal functions of beginning, middle, and ending are no longer evident. Later achievements of serial and postserial music radicalize such a re-definition of musical temporality while continuing to employ elements of conventional trajectories of musical form. Analytical discussions of Sciarrino’s music-theatrical works (Vanitas, Lohengrin, Infinito nero, Luci mie traditrici), orchestral music (Autoritratto nella notte, Efebo con radio), and chamber music (Introduzione all’oscuro, Raffigurar Narciso al fonte, Lo spazio inverso, Omaggio à Burri, Muro d’orizzonte) show how changing constellations of duration, density of information, and types of (open) closure communicate particularly evident and transparent “markings” of a semanticized musical material. Retained difference, open questions, and unresolved conflicts revealed in the final moments of these works reflect formal fissures and topical impasses, making them keys to an understanding of the composer’s unique staging of reflexive musical form

»(…) aus mehr oder weniger zerklüfteten Bruchstücken große, weitläufige musikalische Formgebilde (…) bauen.« : Klanglich-aufführungspraktische Gestaltung makroformaler Zusammenhänge in Tonaufnahmen von György Kurtágs Kafka-Fragmenten für Sopran und Violine op. 24

György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments for soprano and violin op. 24 (1985–87) feature 40 individual musical fragments arranged in a complex quadripartite order (19 – 1 – 12 – 8 pieces). A thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of eight complete recordings of the Kafka Fragments dating from 1990 to 2017 offers a promising case study to examine and categorize performers’ strategies in regard to their form-shaping characteristics. By starting from the analysis of ›performed form‹, this article is guided by the hypotheses that varying conceptions of the performance of the large-scale form can shape both the perception and (music-theoretical) analysis of this form