Writing about music at a conservatoryListening to and reading music

Manuel Bärtsch - As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote in 1759: "As many advantages as the music academy possesses, it is subject to so many difficulties at the same time" (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: An attempt at the true way of teaching at a music academy. Zweyte Auflage, Erster Theil, Berlin 1759 (Preface, I. Or do you not believe that?)

The benefits would be easy to demonstrate from the fact that complex environments produce captivating texts, and the Difficulties arise from the areas of tension that prevail at a music university. I would like to outline these here, from my perspective as a musician, mentor and research lecturer at the HKB Bern.

As everywhere, the problematic aspects are easy to name. Writing about their own musical-performative activities is not necessarily the first priority for music students, at least at the beginning; the efforts to familiarize them with basic argumentative rules and content-related obligations are sometimes correspondingly intensive. The need to rein in overly creative borrowings from other texts, as can be found in the opening of this text, should not be underestimated either; in any case, different cultural, linguistic and social backgrounds require constant intellectual transfer efforts from all participants. On the other hand, this starting point also broadens the horizon: a discussion about gender-appropriate language, as I recently experienced with Russian and Chinese students, seems much more interesting to me than commenting on German rules because of the radically different linguistic prerequisites of their native languages. And sometimes our own language also benefits from this internationality: I will never forget, for example, how a Japanese student described a scientific text as "full of long words". She was right, I adopted this neologism and have tried to avoid collections of long words ever since.

A further area of tension opens up between the many different types of texts that a conservatoire produces. An important genre here is everything that serves not primarily to gain knowledge, but to perform music. Here it seems important to me to encourage students to use the writing of this enabling literature to reflect on their own actions; when writing about their own programs, they often discover what aesthetic standpoints they actually represent and what these pieces, which they have known for a long time, actually mean to them.

This predominantly creative and spontaneous world of writing is contrasted by academic formats. This includes music theory writing, a core task of music universities in the German-speaking world and a particularly challenging type of text: it is an art in the true sense of the word to write harmonic, contrapuntal or formal analyses that captivate readers beyond hermetic complications or inadmissible simplification. Publications in the fields of interpretation research, composition and organology are also very important at the HKB; alumni, doctoral students and lecturers work closely together in these areas. There is also a field of tension at this level, as most of the writers are also on stage; their questions, methods and solutions are often intensively influenced by their direct access to the performative aspect of the object; it remains an extraordinarily exciting methodological and stylistic challenge to strike intellectual sparks from this dual expertise.

The challenge is to ensure that everyone benefits from this situation, the students from the researchers, the lecturers from the students, crosswise and crosswise. The Specialized Master's in Music Performance with in-depth research occupies a special place in Bern. Here, performers with a high artistic level pursue their own research projects; core subject and research lecturers help to translate their practical performance, organological or source-critical projects into sound and words; they often learn just as much as the students.

Music academies are therefore good habitats for interesting writers. It is worth enduring the specific tensions that arise there, because writing about music enriches them with important dimensions. We benefit from this when reading, attending concerts, in research, and new professional fields open up for students, as authors of concert programs, as radio employees, as artistic directors of ensembles, or as both researching and performing artists, - "insomma: as complete musici*ae; one is not deterred by the difficulty of writing about music, since it completely replaces the effort and time spent on it through its excellent benefits" (C. F. Bach ibidem.F. Bach ibidem, at least almost). Once the work is done, the enthusiasm is usually great among all those involved.

Manuel Bärtsch

... is a pianist, professor and research lecturer at the Bern University of the Arts.

Anja Wernicke - The musical experience cannot be fully expressed in words and yet language shapes how we perceive music. A lecture by Johannes Kreidler provides food for thought. And a new continuing education course at the FHNW Academy of Music deals with the verbalization of music as part of curatorial practice.

Let's start with a little experiment: Turn on some music and pay attention to the first term, the first word that comes to mind. Aha. Perhaps you have mentally thought of the name of the instrument you are listening to or the genre or the structure. We can never completely switch off what we know about music when we listen to it. When we listen to music, we always associate what we hear with concepts. This is the thesis of composer Johannes Kreidler. In a lecture at the FHNW Academy of Music in Basel on March 10 this year, the newly appointed professor of composition advocated a radical approach to the linguistic interpretation of music under the title "Conceptual Listening". "When listening to music, one could speak of reading sound," said Kreidler. He used numerous philosophical statements, such as Martin Heidegger, to justify this: "We always speak; even when we do not utter a word, but only listen ..."

The paradigm of absolute music, as represented by the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus among others, is particularly opposed to such a view. In the age of postmodernism, however, Kreidler believes that such a view is no longer valid. He argues that we always "hear" or rather read the meaning of a piece of music, that basically everything is based on quotations and references. Beethoven's 9th Symphony is also always the ninth with all its history and the aura attributed to it. In John Cage's 4'33 not only is silence perceived, but silence is demonstrated. Reflection on what silence actually is is encouraged.

But the entire musical experience can certainly not be put into words. The composer Peter Ablinger focuses on sensuality beyond semantics. In a lecture at the spring conference of the Institute for New Music and Music Education in Darmstadt in 2018, which was published in the May issue of the journal Positions in 2019, he states: "(s)inner reality and knowledge are therefore mutually exclusive". For him, the increasingly concept-based visual arts in particular suffer from the fact that justifications and attributions of meaning are always at the center of the works and the sensual experience no longer occurs in some cases. "In principle, everything that happens is 'said' rather than 'shown'", argues Ablinger, creating an "art of good reason". Just like Johannes Kreidler, Peter Ablinger also wants to use this problem productively. For Ablinger, the mutual exclusion of art and knowledge is an interesting breaking point. For him, art only becomes really exciting beyond meaning. So could one say that art only begins beyond language? That is certainly too short-sighted. After all, Peter Ablinger himself has also created many text scores and is certainly not against the use of language in connection with art. Rather, both Kreidler and Ablinger are interested in a creative approach to language in connection with music.

Johannes Kreidler appeals to those who write about music to do so as creatively and perhaps even artistically as possible. Music criticism should not so much judge as creatively interpret what it hears. But the listening experience is not only shaped by what we read about music afterwards. What we take in beforehand via program texts, introductory lectures, advertising etc. is also part of it. Johannes Kreidler coined the term "prepared listening" for this and artistically illuminated the mechanism of pre-influencing in works such as "Fremdarbeit".

The story to be told and the framing of musical events are part of the curatorial work that is dealt with as part of a new training program at the FHNW Academy of Music with a dedicated focus on contemporary music. The CAS course with the title Curating Contemporary Music starts in January 2021 and builds on the previous Music Journalism course, which was held several times between 2011 and 2016, not least due to its connection to the university's research department in terms of content and personnel. In addition to the content and applied practical work in cooperation with the festival ZeitRäume Basel - Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur, participants in the new course will also be offered a professional network. In addition to Johannes Kreidler, the lecturers include renowned curators of contemporary music such as Björn Gottstein, Christine Fischer and Daniel Ott. Creative writing about musical content, whether with the aim of making it conceptually comprehensible or dealing with its incomprehensibility, its fleetingness in language, will play a central role in any case.

Anja Wernicke

... is a research assistant at the FHNW School of Music / Department of Research and Development.

Links to the topic

> www.hkb.bfh.ch/de/studium/master/specialized-music-performance-klassik/

> www.sonicspacebasel.ch

Here you can find further information on the continuing education program of the FHNW Academy of Music as well as the online lecture by Johannes Kreidler.

> www.hslu.ch/reviewimpact

Between 2016 and 2019, the Lucerne School of Music launched the research project Between Producers and Consumers: Music Critics' Role in the Classical Music Market realized. It is part of a larger research series on the role of music criticism in the classical music market.