Sound Figures of Modernity

German Music and Philosophy

Jost Hermand, Gerhard Richter, Jost Hermand, Gerhard Richter

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780299219307
• eBook ISBN:
  9780299219338
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: German History

The rich conceptual and experiential relays between music and philosophy—echoes of what Theodor W. Adorno once called Klangfiguren, or "sound figures"—resonate with heightened intensity during the period of modernity that extends from early German Idealism to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This volume traces the political, historical, and philosophical trajectories of a specifically German tradition in which thinkers take recourse to music, both as an aesthetic practice and as the object of their speculative work. 

The contributors examine the texts of such highly influential writers and thinkers as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bloch, Mann, Adorno, and Lukács in relation to individual composers including Beethoven, Wagner, Schönberg, and Eisler. Their explorations of the complexities that arise in conceptualizing music as a mode of representation and philosophy as a mode of aesthetic practice thematize the ways in which the fields of music and philosophy are altered when either attempts to express itself in terms defined by the other.

Contributors: Albrecht Betz, Lydia Goehr, Beatrice Hanssen, Jost Hermand, David Farrell Krell, Ludger Lütkehaus, Margaret Moore, Rebekah Pryor Paré, Gerhard Richter, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Samuel Weber

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. German Music and Philosophy: An Introduction
• 2. Doppelbewegung: The Musical Movement of Philosophy and the Philosophical Movement of Music
• 3. Brazen Wheels: F. W. J. Schelling on the Origins of Music and Tragedy
• 4. The Will as World and Music: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Music
• 5. The Ring as Deconstruction of Modernity: Reading Wagner with Benjamin
• 6. “Not Mere Music”: Nietzsche and the Problem of Moral Content in Music
• 7. Bloch’s Dream, Music’s Traces
• 8. Dissonance and Aesthetic Totality: Adorno Reads Schönberg
• 9. Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Adorno
• 10. The Composer as Dialectical Thinker: Hanns Eisler’s Philosophical Reflections on Music
• 11. Double Mimesis: Georg Lukács’s Philosophy of Music
• Contributors
• Index