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Seminar with Professor Michael Schmidt and Professor Heiner Goebbels (4.5 ECTS credits)
Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought
June Session / July 1 - 3, 2016
Philosophy of Music & Media
The seminar explores and reflects the clashes and resonances between sound, music,
media and philosophy.
Essential Readings:
Schmidt, Michael (Ed.): Philosophy of Media Sound
Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (Ed.), Multimedia: From Wagner to
Virtual Reality
Suggested Readings:
Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (Ed.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
Dieter Daniels and Sandra Naumann (Ed.), See this Sound. Audiovisuology. Compendium
and Essays.
Module I (Seminar Saas Fee / First Day):
Music between Event, Work and Medium
OUTLINE:
1) The Aura of Audio - Walter Benjamin and the relation between sound and music in the
age of media
2) Determination & Indeterminacy - John Cage and the openness of the musical process
3) Composition & Collage - Toward the rhizome of music and sound
EXCURSUS: Visualization of Music between Art and Intermediation
Music and Video Examples:
1) Walter Ruttmann: „Weekend“
2) Pierre Schaeffer: "Etude Pathetique"
3) Luciano Berio: "Sinfonia"
4) Matthew Herbert: “Mahler Symphony X Recomposed”
5) Wolfgang Mitterer: “Hallo Mr. Bruckner”
6) John Cage: "Roaratorio"
7) John Cage: 19 Questions (DVD)
8) Glenn Gould: "The Alchemist" (DVD)
9) Oskar Fischinger: "Ten Films" (DVD)
10) Hanns Eisler: "14 ways to describe rain" (DVD)
11) Jorge Lopez: "Mountain War Project" (DVD)
12) Christian Marclay: „Video Quartet“ (DVD)
13) Christian Fennesz & Lillevan: „Mahler Remix“ (DVD)
Module II (Seminar Saas Fee / Second Day):
Music between Entertainment, Enlightenment and Ecstasy
OUTLINE:
1) EXCURSUS: Students present their own projects, concepts or ideas
2) The sublime of music - Wagner's total work of art
3) Ethics & aesthetics of Music - From Aristotle to Adorno
4) Difference and Repetition - Deleuze and Guatarri on the Refrain
Music and Video Examples:
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Richard Wagner: Tristan-Prelude
Hector Berlioz: "Symphonie Fantastique
Igor Strawinsky: "Sacre du printemps"
Arnold Schönberg: "Überlebender aus Warschau"
Steve Reich Beryl Korot: "Three Tales" / "Dolly - Finale" (DVD)
Bob Ostertag: "Sooner or Later"
Mauricio Kagel: "Ludwig van" (DVD)
Module III (Seminar Saas Fee / Third Day):
Presentation and Discussion of Heiner Goebbels’ Art and Theory of Music, Theatre and
Media.
Philosophy of Music and Media – Core Readings / Quotations
1) ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER: THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION
“Music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction,
pain sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror,
gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their
essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them…
The nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so
on and on; in fact his happiness and well-being consists only in the transition from desire
to satisfaction, and from this to a fresh desire… corresponding to this, the nature of
melody is a constant digression and deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways… in all
these ways, melody expresses the many different forms of the will’s effort but also its
satisfaction by ultimately finding again a harmonious interval and still more the keynote.”
2) THEODOR W. ADORNO: PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC
“The inhumanity of art has to outperform that of the world for the sake of humanity . . .
Out of the veil known for something that has never existed, the technique of art achieves
its seriousness. It is all the more nowadays, as the attention intrinsic to the consistency of
art technique constitutes the very content of a work of art. The shocks of the
incomprehensible caused by art technique in a time devoid of all meaning become the
opposite. They illuminate a meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this. It
burdens itself with a deep sense of guilt, with all the darkness of the world. To recognize
misfortune is its happiness; to refrain from the mere illusion of beauty is its beauty.”
3) WALTER BENJAMIN: THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL
REPRODUCTION
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its
presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be….
technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out
of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder
halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves
its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in
an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room… The definition of the aura
as a "unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be" represents nothing but
the formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of space and time
perception. Distance is the opposite of closeness. The essentially distant object is the
unapproachable one. Unapproachability is indeed a major quality of the cult image. True
to its nature, it remains distant, however close it may be." The closeness which one may
gain from its subject matter does not impair the distance which it retains in its
appearance.”
4) THEODOR W. ADORNO: THE RADIO SYMPHONY
“The abolition of the "surrounding" quality of music on the radio, has its progressive
aspects. This "surrounding” quality of music is certainly part of music's function as a drug,
the criticism of which, inaugurated by Nietzsche and revived by such contemporary writers
as Jean Cocteau, is justified and has been considerably furthered by radio. The drug
tendency is very clear in Wagner where the mere magnitude of the sound, into whose
waves the listener can dive, is one of the means of catching the listeners, quite apart from
any specific musical content.“
5) JOHN CAGE: THE FUTURE OF MUSIC
On openness and process:
“Many composers no longer make musical structures. Instead they set processes going. A
structure is like a piece of furniture, whereas a process is like the weather. In the case of a
table, the beginning and end of the whole and each of its parts are known. In the case of
weather, though we notice changes in it, we have no clear knowledge of its beginning or
ending. At a given moment, we are when we are. The nowmoment. Were a limit to be set
to possible musical processes, a process outside that limit would surely be discovered.
Since processes can include objects (be analogous, that is, to environment), we see there
is no limit. For some time now, I have preferred processes to objects for just this reason:
processes do not exclude objects. It doesn't work the other way around. Within each
object, of course, a lively molecular process is in operation. But if we are to hear it, we
must isolate the object in a special chamber. To focus attention, one must ignore all the
rest of creation. We have a history of doing precisely that. In changing our minds,
therefore, we look for that attitude that is nonexclusive, that can include what we know
together with what we do not yet imagine. “
On music and media:
“Technology has brought about the blurring of the distinctions between composers,
performers, and listeners. Just as anyone feels himself capable of taking a photograph by
means of a camera, so now and increasingly so in the future anyone, using recording
and/or electronic means, feels and will increasingly feel himself capable of making a piece
of music, combining in his one person the formerly distinct activities of composer,
performer, and listener. However, to combine in one person these several activities is, in
effect, to remove from music its social nature. It is the social nature of music, the practice
in it of using a number of people doing different things to make it, that distinguishes it
from the visual arts, draws it toward theater, and makes it relevant to society, even
society outside musical society. The popularity of recordings is unfortunate, not only for
musical reasons, but for social reasons: it permits the listener to isolate himself from other
people. What is needed is not that the several activities of different people come together
in one person, but that the distinctions between the roles of different people be blurred, so
that they themselves may come together.”
6) GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI: A THOUSAND PLATEAUS / 1837: OF THE
REFRAIN
“Let us recall Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return as a little ditty, a refrain, but which
captures the mute and unthinkable forces of the Cosmos. We thus leave behind the
assemblages to enter the age of the Machine, the immense mechanosphere, the plane of
cosmicization of forces to be harnessed. Varèse's procedure, at the dawn of this age, is
exemplary: a musical machine of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for
reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and
harnesses a cosmic energy. If this machine must have an assemblage, it is the
synthesizer. By assembling modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound
(oscillators, generators, and transformers), by arranging microintervals, the synthesizer
makes audible the sound process itself, the production of that process, and puts us in
contact with still other elements beyond sound matter. It unites disparate elements in the
material, and transposes the parameters from one formula to another. The synthesizer,
with its operation of consistency, has taken the place of the ground in a priori synthetic
judgment: its synthesis is of the molecular and the cosmic, material and force, not form
and matter.”
7) GILLES DELEUZE & FELIX GUATTARI: A THOUSAND PLATEAUS / ON THE RHIZOME
“Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its
traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very
different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the
One nor to the Multiple. .. It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather
directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from
which it grows and which it overspills.”