Die Schriftenreihe Musiktheorie der Kunstuniversität Graz umfasst sechs Bände (2007-2013) und akzentuiert aktuelle Themen im Grenzgebiet von Musiktheorie, Musikästhetik und neuer Musik. Die meisten Bände auf Veranstaltungen an der Kunstuniversität Graz, die häufig auf Schlüsselfiguren und Theoretiker der neuen Musik fokussiert waren (Lachenmann, Zender, Wellmer, etc.). Kompositorische Ansätze werden dabei in musikgeschichtliche und musiktheoretische Kontexte gestellt, die Vielfältigkeit aktueller künstlerischer wie theoretischer Fragestellungen wird reflektiert. Über das engere Feld der neuen Musik hinaus werden allgemeine gesellschaftliche und kulturelle Probleme ebenso aufgegriffen wie interdisziplinäre und interkulturelle Fragestellungen. Der Bericht zum 2008 in Graz ausgerichteten Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (GMTH) in Band 4 Musiktheorie als interdisziplinäres Fach (692 Seiten, 2010) spiegelt die Leitthemen der Reihe in einer besonderen methodischen Breite. Die Bände 4 und 6 sind zweisprachig (deutsch/englisch). Im Verständnis der Herausgeber wird Musiktheorie als monistische Handwerkslehre heute zunehmend abgelöst von einer Fülle an „Theorien der Musik“ (daher der Plural des Reihentitels „musik.theorien“), die in ihrer Pluralität und ihrem Konfliktpotenzial beschrieben werden können, ohne sich jedoch in einem beliebigen Nebeneinander aufzulösen. Vielmehr soll der traditionelle Anspruch der Musiktheorie, durch systemartige Netzwerke neue Erkenntnisse zu gewinnen und neue Zusammenhänge sichtbar zu machen, auf einer übergreifenden Ebene eingelöst werden.

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This essay holds that music is the art of tones, while rejecting the view that music is the universal art of sound; it recognises an emergent non-musical sound art which takes non-tonal sounds as its material. To allow that any sounds can be incorporated into music is not to say that any sounds can constitute music – thus room is left for the conclusion that music makes predominant use of tonal sounds, and increasingly co-exists with a non-musical sound art. This broadly tonal conception of music rests on what I term the objectivity of tone, which several contributors to the present volume seem to question. The article argues that whether a particular sound is musical or tonal is partly an objective matter, independent of how it is experienced by any particular individual. This claim should be understood humanistically and not scientistically – that is, it rests on a humanistic concept of music, and not on an abstract, scientistic standpoint.

Based upon a reading of Arnold Schoenberg’s theoretical writings on the musical idea and its presentation, this essay discusses the possibility of a so-called posthermeneutical perspective on the phenomenon of sound in the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg’s sceptical considerations towards the relevance of sound are confronted with various arrangements, transcriptions, and instrumentations of works by Webern, Schoenberg and Berg. It can be demonstrated that sound here should be conceived neither solely as a means of constituting formal structure, meaning, and sense, nor as the constitutive Other of meaning. Against the background of current discussions on the concept of »Posthermeneutik« (cf. Dieter Mersch, Posthermeneutik, 2010), sound may be understood as a phenomenon oscillating between sense and sensuality.

György Ligeti and Gérard Grisey are undoubtedly among the most important composers of the second half of the twentieth century, for they elevated sound and perception to central categories of their compositional work. The play with thresholds of perception and ambiguities is a common ground of their musical thinking. Grisey and other »spectral« composers emphasized psychoacoustic threshold areas in their aesthetic concepts. Similarly, Ligeti’s love of intermediate ranges (Zwischenbereiche) has led to the shimmering complexity of his music. In Ligeti’s Violin Concerto (1990/92), many passages and compositional techniques illuminate how Ligeti works with the ambiguity and complexity of sound and perception. Different types of chordal mixture constitute an important technique found throughout the concerto, among others as spectral mixtures based on just intonation. Examples from the first and the fourth movement demonstrate the flexible handling of mixtures by Ligeti, which can be understood as an extension and permanent modification of the sound of the solo violin. Varying the number of voices, the spectral or harmonic structure, the position of the solo violin within the mixture, register and dynamics creates diverse sonorities. Progressions of mixtures in the fourth movement can be interpreted dramaturgically, while in the fifth movement a superposition of several mixtures and layers results in highly complex structures. The relation between solo violin and orchestra, between »theme« and »accompaniment« in the beginning of the first movement demonstrates how Ligeti reinterprets traditional structures in order to amalgamate soloistic and orchestral layers. The »splitting of the spatial entity of the instrument« here might be compared to techniques in cubist painting. Finally, tuning systems are combined in the second movement according to the principles of ambiguity and heterogeneity; different tunings are confronted while groups of sonorities connect the quasi-folkloristic with the eminently artificial, the serious with the parodistic, etc. Through a permanently modified contextualization of traditional sounds and gestures, the solo instrument in Ligeti’s Violin Concerto seems to acquire a new kind of instrumental identity.

The huge variety of approaches, goals, and interests in artistic circles, society, science, and industry challenges new methods of evaluating the particularities of culturally formed sound. In the realm of musicological sound research, it might be interesting to compare different musical ways of composing sound from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, and even to compare musical works with non-musical creativity focussed on sound. To this end, the present essay suggests an action-based analytical approach. This ongoing project does not mean to trivialize analytical purposes by narrating biographical circumstances of sound creation, but intends a systematic approach in describing qualitatively aesthetic actions, actors, and their frames of reference.

At the beginning of this discussion, Tobias Janz introduces three areas in which musicology and music theory might benefit from a more thorough study of »sound«: (1) in music analysis, instrumental sound should not merely be understood as the manifestation of an abstract pitch-rhythm structure but the interaction of sound and structure should be acknowledged (a piano reduction from one of Haydn’s symphonies compared to one of Haydn’s piano sonatas reveals a substantially different idea about musical structure); (2) the origins of an exclusion and emancipation of the sound paradigm should be traced in music history and aesthetics, and it might be discussed to what extent a depreciation of sound has shaped our understanding of music until the present; (3) from a sociological perspective, an emphasis on sound has often been associated with popular music; since the early twentieth century, both popular and art music cultures have had a long history of treating the emancipation of sound as a predominant musical tool and medium, and thus these two »cultures« should not be regarded as entirely separate »worlds«, but rather as interactive. The other discussants broadly support the notion that sound is still a neglected area in music research by raising a variety of perspectives: our tools for describing sounds verbally and analytically are underdeveloped, and it is not always clear in which man- ner the idea of »composing [with] sounds«, for example in electronic music, should be grasped theoretically (Elena Ungeheuer); analyses of classical formal types and functions should rethink the common notion that sound and timbre are »secondary parameters« while the perception of form clearly depends on a more complex interaction between the diverse levels or parameters of the sounding events (Markus Neuwirth); established models of pitch-based analysis such as pitch-class set theory have to be complemented by aspects of register, timbre etc. which also would make their results more applicable in pedagogical situations (Lukas Haselböck); a deprecation of »Schöne Stellen« (beautiful moments) as structurally unimportant might often prevent music theorists from integrating auditory experience into analytical practice (Ludwig Holtmeier). Further aspects raised in the discussion with the audience include the idea that theory and analysis should focus more on how sounds are invented intuitively and »haptically«, for example by studying the tradition of the pianiste-compositeur and its interaction of improvisation and composition; the problem faced by a history of musical listening derived from written sources; the necessity to integrate comparisons of different performances of the same piece into a sound-based analysis of musical works; and the necessity of interdisciplinary musical research as exemplified by projects that aim to reconstruct such historical listening spaces and situations as, for instance, the Beethoven era.

As we think about sound and its many competing meanings and uses for musicians over the past hundred years, it is worth keeping in mind that defining sound was also a contentious problem in earlier times. Indeed, since the ancient Greeks first invoked the term psophos as a general concept for sound, there has been a persistent question of how to draw boundaries between musical sounds (covered by such sub-terms as phthongos and phoné) and more general notions of noise (klázō). The Latin term sonus was perhaps even more confusing in this regard, with a numbing variety of meanings and applications that cannot be easily reconciled. Still, one persistent demarcation that we can find in the history of the term’s usage is that between sound as an acoustical (»external«) object, and sound as a perceptible (»internal«) phenomenon. Each of these usages implies a distinctly differing aesthetic stance towards sound that has telling resonance for compositional and analytical issues that are still very much alive today. Indeed, an acoustical turn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prompted music theorists to confront the perception of musical sounds more thoroughly than before as exemplified by Johann Mattheson’s little known treatise Versuch einer systematischen Klang-Lehre (1748).