Giessen, Univ., Diss., 2003

Univ., Diss.--Mannheim, 2002.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral--Technische Universität, Berlin). / Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-327).

The subject of faith has long been a subject of study for both theologians, whose prime concern has usually been with the nature and object of a particular faith, and philosophers of religion who have been more concerned with the relationship between faith and reason. This thesis differs from both such approaches in that its primary aim is to examine the psychological structure, functions and experience of the general phenomenon of human faith; that need to trust, be loyal to and centre one's life in something outside of oneself, It should not be identified with any one school of psychological theory; rather, its intention is to use a psychological description of faith to enhance the theological understanding of faith. Its methodology is to examine the psychology that underlies three particular theologians' understandings of faith: Paul Tillich, H, Richard Niebuhr and Wilfred Cantwell Smith. In addition to examining the psychology of faith, a second aim is to examine what the present author sees as a practical implication of such a psychological understanding of faith as expounded by W. C. Smith in his proposal for the construction of a universal theology. Chapter One is a general introduction to the thesis, a definition of terms and a brief examination of the place a psychology of faith has in the wider field of the psychology of religion. Chapters Two, Three and Four follow a similar format: each is a separate examination of the psychology that underlies Tillich's, Niebuhr's and Smith's understandings of faith respectively. In the case of Tillich and Niebuhr a differentiation is made between an objective psychological understanding of faith which concerns the functions and structure of faith and a subjective understanding which concerns the experience of faith. Chapter Five is in the form of a conclusion and proposes a uniform understanding of the psychology of faith based on the previous three authors. It also examines the main discrepancy between the authors' understandings of faith in their descriptions of the final object and source of faith. Following Chapter Five is a Postscript which examines W. C. Smith's proposal for the construction of a universal theology which the present author sees as a practical application of understanding faith psychologically.

Die Projektgruppe „Für eine Globale Friedensordnung“ stellt im Dresdener Friedenssymposium Arbeitsergebnisse vor.:Gerda Krause, Eröffnung. Autorenbeiträge: Peter Strutynsky, Die Globalisierung der NATO oder die Militarisierung des Globus. Erhard Crome, Gleiche Sicherheit für alle - Alternativen zur NATO. Manfred Sauer, NATO – nicht die Sicherheit, die wir meinen. Horst Schneider, Gedanken zum Kolloquiumsthema Gleiche Sicherheit für alle statt NATO-Vorherrschaft. Nachträglich eingereichter Beitrag zum 13. Dresdner Symposium Für eine globale Friedensordnung, Heft 93/2009: Detlef Bald, Das Beispiel vom Primat der Politik – Die Kontrolle der Atomwaffen in der Bonner Republik.

Wie die tschechische Historiographie überhaupt, so ist auch die tschechische Musikhistoriographie lange Zeit von Stereotypen beherrscht worden, die mit wissenschaftlicher Objektivität wenig zu tun hatten. Daher ist jeder Blick 'von außen' notwendig und willkommen, weil er uns auf die Klischees, aber auch die Lücken in unserer tschechischen Musikgeschichte nicht nur hinweist, sondern uns auch, wie Helmut Loos es in seinem Artikel 'Religiosität bei Smetana und Dvořák' getan hat, dazu veranlasst, unsere Standpunkte unter neuen Fragestellungen zu überdenken.

Helmut Lachenmann’s theory of perception highlights musical moments that step out of a coherent stream of self-contained musical logic and challenges established categories of musical experience. The penultimate scene (No. 23: Shō) of Lachenmann’s »opera« The Little Match Girl (1991-96/2001) and the airy chords in the final section of his large ensemble work Concertini (2004/2005) arguably represent such moments of fundamental musical alterity in the composer’s recent output that are characterised by a specific auratic emphasis. Closer examination, however, suggests that these sections are also multiply mediated by self-references with the larger musical structure of these extensive works. This article provides a loosely connected series of discussions on how a balance between alterity and self-referentiality is achieved in these two examples. The discussions acknowledge the distinction between »extra-opus« and »intra-opus« references derived from cognitive science and music theory and focus on pitch organisation, sectional time structure, narrativity and interculturality. The Japanese mouth organ shō that figures prominently in the opera scene and, according to the composer, provides the »scale« for the concluding sounds in Concertini, without doubt symbolizes a moment of fundamental alterity due to its unique timbre, its unalienated sound and a basic articulation derived from the Japanese court music repertoire tōgaku. A detailed analysis of fingerings and pitch organisation, however, reveals a »double-coding« of Lachenmann’s material: on the »extra-opus« realm it refers to or »deconstructs« both Japanese and European musical conventions, on the »intra-opus« realm it connects to the framing scenes of the opera and forms part of a large-scale »cadence sound« that reconsiders the complete spectrum between pitched and unpitched sounds within the three closing scenes. The »utopian« shō-chords played by wind instruments in the final section of Concertini, in contrast, create a more fragmentary type of »cadence sound« due to their short durations, but nevertheless exert a »magnetic« attraction that temporarily assembles the heterogeneous »sound families« of the piece into transient sonic entities. A detailed overview of the sectional time structures reveals that in both cases the music follows a rather rigid sequence of proportions derived from Fibonacci series and the golden section, and includes several quasi symmetrical time layers. In both examples this time structure supports pivotal formal processes: in the shō-scene from the Little Match Girl it suggests a shift from the predominance of shō-sounds to their increasingly independent orchestral »resonances«, in Concertini the symmetrical position of the »shō-chords« within the final section emphasizes their cadential function and »magnetic« effect. The concluding discussions on narrativity and interculturality suggest that – partly in contrast to the preceding arguments of this essay – the analysed sections tend to subvert the conventional closure concept of a »cadence« and rather create open endings. The self-referential elements in the Little Match Girl’s construction of the shō and its inclusion in a re-invented type of »celestial mechanics« discloses non-essentialist, polyvalent strata of musical meaning that match Lachenmann’s concept of nonconventional musical narrativity and non-exploitative musical interculturality (a concept that he has critically discussed at length in a recent article). This is especially cogent when his shō-music is compared to other recent works for the Japanese mouth organ that recontextualize its sounds by »demythologization« in a much more obvious, arguably didactic manner. Finally, Lachenmann’s key idea of »liberated perception« is associated with this discussion on interculturality and traced back to moments in Keiji Nishitani’s philosophy – leaving this article open to further research.

Helmut Lachenmann’s three string quartets Gran Torso. Musik für Streichquartett (1970/71 with later revisions), »Reigen seliger Geister« (1989) and »Grido« (2000/2001, rev. 2002) introduce a huge variety of extended playing techniques that are first listed systematically allowing for a comparison between the three works on a purely technical level. It becomes obvious that most of the extended techniques are introduced in the first quartet and that the subsequent quartets show increasingly smaller selections of these techniques. This especially applies to the most prominent of these techniques: the pressed bow, described by the composer as »rattling«, which symbolizes Lachenmann’s sound world like no other technique. Although the statistics again show the highest degree of timbral differentiation in the first quartet, the pressed bow indeed takes a crucial formal function in all three works. Each quartet includes a relatively long section or field in which this technique dominates. Although the transformation processes by which these fields are integrated show some degree of similarity, a separate predominant function can be discerned for each field. In Gran Torso, the pressed bow section is part of a complex continuous transformation from »tenuto« sounds to single impulses, not least due to its »perforated« sound quality. Whereas this transformation integrates a huge variety of different timbres, »Reigen seliger Geister« condenses the music to two main sound qualities, »flautato« sounds and pizzicato-impulses. The pressed bow field here forms part of a much more concentrated large-scale development and most prominently figures in the retransition from pizzicato-chords to »toneless« impulses towards the end of the piece. In »Grido«, the pressed bow fields integrate other playing techniques as well as pitched sounds, and can be characterized by a tendency towards rhythmic and pitch-related synchronicity that also describes a large-scale formal tendency in this work. Except for the pressed bow sections, the musical flow in this work cannot be characterised by playing techniques anymore, but might be divided into »calm« and »agitated« fields that are interconnected by the »rattling fields«. The analysis provides evidence for the argument that the pressed bow technique, which often was misunderstood as a simple »negation« of beautiful sound, fulfills an essential structural function in Lachenmann’s music.

Commenting on a performance of two musical works that were played as the starting point for this discussion – Anton Webern’s Drei kleine Stücke (1914) for violoncello and piano op. 11 and Helmut Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel (1980) for piano – Jörn Peter Hiekel observes that speaking about music and speaking through music particularly condition one another in new music. Both Webern and Lachenmann, by different compositional means, condense familiar musical gestures until they turn into a »language of their own«. In Lachenmann’s work, which refers to well-known children songs, this process is closely connected to what Albrecht Wellmer has called »wordliness« (Welthaltigkeit). More generally, the serialist »rebellion against music’s resemblance to language« (Adorno) shows a paradoxical twist towards sedimentation in the form of a new emerging language, as Clemens Gadenstätter explains with reference to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–56). In new music musical idioms have been thoroughly destabilized yet always re-contextualized within established formulae. The panellists agree on a notion of both language and music that is not conceived as a closed system, but rather a network of relations transformed in time. Hence no distinct boundary can be drawn between syntax and semantics in music, nor is there any musical language that communicates a universal meaning (despite Joseph Haydn’s claim to the contrary). In addition – as anecdotes from Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann document – the ambiguity of musical meaning is also relevant for composers who might be (favourably) surprised by unorthodox performances of their works that seemingly contradict the composers’ intentions, but in fact contribute to unfolding the multiplicity of meanings in a work.

Nach Helmut Lachenmanns viel beachteter Unterscheidung von fünf Klangtypen stellt sich das Verhältnis von Klang und Struktur im Sinne eines dialektischen Prozesses dar. Als ein die Hörenden aktivierendes Phänomen repräsentiert der Strukturklang den am meisten vergeistigten Typus. Die auf das eigentlich Klangliche beschränkten Farb-, Fluktuations- und Texturklänge sieht Lachenmann hingegen als primitivere Formen an, die passive und saturierte Rezeptionshaltungen unterstützen würden. Eine Darstellung dieser Theorie des musikalischen Klangs und ihrer Verwurzelung in spezifisch deutschen musikästhetischen Traditionen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts bildet im vorliegenden Text den Ausgangspunkt einer Beschäftigung mit den Fragen, ob Aktivität und Passivität sinnvolle Kategorien der Klangwahrnehmung darstellen und inwieweit nicht auch Fluktuationsklänge engagierte und detailbezogene analytische Hörweisen anzuregen vermögen. Als Beispiele dieses Klangtyps dienen langsame Doppeltremoli und -triller, die Akkorde in triolischem Rhythmus innerlich bewegt und durch die Verschleierung metrischer Schwerpunkte gleichsam schwebend darstellen. Das von Franz Liszt vom Klavier aufdas Orchester übertragene Modell spielt besonders im Streichersatz von um 1900 entstandenen Orchesterwerken eine bedeutende Rolle. In kurzen vergleichenden Analysen zur Behandlung dieser Technik bei Dvořák, Debussy, Balakirew, Skrjabin, Strawinsky, Bartók und Ligeti wird versucht, Kriterien für die Komplexität solcher Klänge und für das Gelingen ihrer strukturellen oder dramaturgischen Einbindung in syntaktische Kontexte zu erarbeiten. / According to Helmut Lachenmann’s much noted distinction of five sound types, the relationship between sound and structure represents a dialectic process. The most spiritual type is the so called »structure sound« because it activates the listeners in a particular way. Lachenmann regards the color, fluctuation and texture sounds, which remain limited to the sound aspect itself, as rather primitive forms, reflecting passive and saturated reception attitudes. In the present article, a presentation of this musical sound’s theory and its roots in the nineteenth and twentieth-century traditions of German music aesthetics leads to a discussion on whether »activity« and »passivity« are reasonable categories of sound perception and to what extent fluctuation sounds can stimulate engaged and detailed analytic modes of listening. Examples for this sound type are slow double tremolos and double trills, representing harmonies quasi pending and inwardly moved, due to triplets and disguises of metric emphases. Franz Liszt transferred the model from the piano to the orchestra, and it plays a prominent role especially in string parts of orchestral pieces composed around the year 1900. In small studies on the treatment of this technique by Dvořák, Debussy, Balakirew, Skrjabin, Strawinsky, Bartók and Ligeti, we attempt to develop criteria for the successful integration of such sound types in structural and dramaturgical contexts of compositions.