Number 13, 1993

EN:

Heinrich Schütz's Musikalische Exequien (SWV 279-81), written for the funeral of Prince Heinrich Posthumus von Reuß in 1636, is generally regarded as one of his finest works. Oddly, though, the praise accorded the composition has come almost entirely from critics of the last fifty years, while it is thought to have had negligible resonance in the seventeenth century. The present article suggests that the Exequien may in fact have been used as a model for three compositions by Michael Wiedemann in 1693. Based on comparisons of the circumstances which occasioned the works, on the identification of numerous shared compositional processes exclusive to these works in the seventeenth-century funerary repertory, on certain professional motivations, and on the logistics of publishing and geography which would have made the Exequien available to Wiedemann, it becomes possible to suggest with reason that Schütz's Musikalische Exequien was not without influence in baroque Germany.

FR:

Darius Milhaud, musicien prolifique, a composé plus de 600 œuvres et nombre d’entre elles sont destinées à la musique de chambre. Ce corpus constitue, aux yeux mêmes du compositeur, une des parts principales dans l’ensemble de sa création. Cette étude tente de répondre à trois questions : (1) Quels liens peut-on établir entre le contexte et la création dans la musique de Milhaud? (2) La qualité spécifique de ces partitions peut-elle éclairer une vision globale du corpus? (3) En quoi le langage musical de Milhaud est-il propre à intégrer les éléments d’influences diverses tels que le folklore sud-américain ou le jazz? Ce corpus témoigne du fait que les relations entre les intentions du compositeur et le milieu artistique sont fondamentales. D’autre part, les principales qualités de la musique de chambre de Milhaud résident dans sa diversité plutôt que dans son caractère novateur. Milhaud exerçait un métier, celui de compositeur. Inspiré par la vie quotidienne, il revêt le manteau de l’artiste-artisan plus souvent qu’autrement.

EN:

The injunction to remember – in Hebrew, Zakhor – is perhaps the most powerful command in the Old Testament, and memory of the past has therefore always been a central component of Jewish experience. Alfred Fisher's character and music suggest both erudition and practicality as crucial components of the Jewish heritage that has formed an increasingly central part of his life and music during the past decade. In the song cycle Zakhor: Remember, poetic and musical cross-referencing of memories is the framework for a fascinating dialectic that informs the structure and the language of the cycle. In this article, the author studies the different levels of unity in the cycle and discusses its tonal structure, which can be characterized as post-Schoenbergian chromaticism, in which much of the harmonic language is controlled by a limited number of pitch-class sets. Remembrance and reflection are here interwoven with Fisher's emotional responses into the intellectual framework of a profound work of art.

EN:

As is well-known, throughout most of the nineteenth century the defence of Wagner's music was not undertaken on the same grounds on which it was attacked. Critics such as Ludwig Bischoff and Eduard Hanslick attacked Wagner's music for its alleged "formlessness" and harmonic illogicalities, while Wagner's partisans countered with appeals to vaguer criteria of beauty and truthfulness, couched generally in leitmotivic terms, often focusing on the so-called "symphonic web" of Wagner's late works. One particular strategy is encapsulated by the phrase "Musik als Ausdruck," which forms the basis of a number of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century monographs and articles about Wagner's works. Musical gestures were held to encode a particular emotional state and to reawaken that state in the listener, who would intuit the "meaning" of the gesture instinctively; within such an aesthetic, music was held to represent the essence of phenomenon, the "thing-in-itself."

This article attempts to provide an account of the dual foundations of this aesthetic paradigm in philosophy and science, as manifested by Arthur Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and by Friedrich von Hausegger's Die Musik als Ausdruck respectively, and suggests that the resulting position – as articulated by Hans von Wolzogen and Curt Mey – is not only incompatible with but also incomparable to that of the formalists. The reconciliation of these two positions would not take place until the 1920s and 1930s with the work of Alfred Lorenz.

EN:

Group investigation is a teaching strategy that requires students to work in small groups and solve problems by reaching a consensus or solution. Involvement in the investigative process enables a teacher to provide an environment which alleviates conflict and facilitates cooperation. Further, the quality of the solution is higher when reached through consensus. The students are positively motivated to learn and behavioral skills are expanded.

In this paper, the writer examines the history and effectiveness of group investigation since its inception as a teaching strategy by Herbert Thelen. Based upon this analysis and upon formative trials in varied classroom settings, he postulates how the strategy can be utilized by music educators in school and university settings.

EN:

There are two published versions of Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, though the composer considered the 1928 revision to be the only valid one. The 1909 version was first performed in 1913, but in spite of at least two projected performances, the composer may never had heard the revision. Although the revision was not carried out for a specific performance, the ostensible motivation for it was to reduce the rather excessive orchestral demands of the first version, and thus make it more practical for performance. While many of the revisions do result from the reduced orchestration, there are many changes in dynamics, tempo, phrasing and instrumental emphasis which do not. In fact, the new score is a thorough rehearing of the pieces, and the revisions affect everything from their overall formal conception to often very subtle relationships among the elements of the individual movements. The revisions also reflect the changes both in Webern's personal style between 1909 and 1928, the year of the Symphonie, op. 21, but also the global change from the luxuriant and indulgent post-romantic style to the "lean, athletic" style of Neoclassicism.

EN:

In this study of spatial organization of sound, that is of "spatialization" in music, the term "spatial" refers to the three-dimensional performance space, not to pitch. "Spatialized music," distinct both from polychoral music and from musical theatre, means music with quasi-spatial structure defined by the composer in the score or in another medium of sound coding (digital or analog recording, specific software). Spatialization includes ensemble dispersion, movement of sounds, performers and audience, juxtaposition and interaction of real and virtual sound sources – every situation in which the position of the sound sources and the acoustic quality of the performance space are given compositional significance. A classification of spatial designs in music is followed by examples illustrating three aspects of spatialization: (1) the expression or simulation of geometrical patterns in music, (2) the movement of sound, (3) the symbolic function of spatial designs and movement. Musical examples and graphs of performer placement are taken from Henry Brant's Millenium II (1954), Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen für drei Orchester (1955-57), Iannis Xenakis's Terrêtektorh (1965-66) and John Tavener's Ultimos Ritos (1972).