A satirical look at music and its science
Mechthild von Schoenebeck as editor and her co-authors look at music and its science with anarchic wit.
Jokes are sometimes a serious matter. While a physicist, for example, can sometimes juggle with his subject in an entertaining way (the underlying laws are set in stone), humorous play is one of the most difficult exercises of all among humanities scholars - after all, it also requires a healthy distance and reflection on one's own actions. And so no distinction is usually made between cheeky correctness and entertaining nonsense of a higher order. Yet in the field of music history, such outstanding "composer personalities" as PDQ Bach, Otto Jägermeier and Giovanni Francesco Bicchini have long since shown that you don't have to go to the cellar to laugh. Max Steinitzer already published the beautiful title in 1910: Straussiana and Andres. A booklet of musical humor mostly with and rarely without, seriously for and jokingly against Dr. Richard Strauss (not a fake!).
And now there are fun contributions under the title Cue notes has been published. As the subtitle promises, you will find astonishing, delightful and shocking things - from a culinary workshop report from the (fictitious) special research area "Music and Nutrition", to stages from the life of musicologist Dr. Gundolf Stellmacher or an article on "New German Minne" to the Divine Tirade. An intellectual highlight here is undoubtedly the extension of the name to Dmitri Shostrakowitrullala later the Dortmund kitchen installation An American in Paris. However, you won't find overly cheap stories about a certain stringed instrument in the alto position here. And that's a good thing.
Cue notes. Amazing, delightful and terrifying things from the world of music, edited by Mechthild von Schoenebeck, 168 p., € 29.90, Lit Verlag, Münster 2019, ISBN 978-3-643-14227-6
