The music of appropriation
With map, clock and score at the center of his reflections, Johannes Schöllhorn writes about conquest and the music that goes with it.
In his music, the German composer Johannes Schöllhorn (*1962) has repeatedly explored the music of others, transcribing and transforming it, making music about music, such as Bach and Ravel, Purcell and Satie and, wonderfully, Gabriel Fauré. Several of these pieces can be found on the double CD Sérigraphies (bastille musique 20).
Schöllhorn himself is therefore an expert in appropriating and transforming. His 500-page book, a partly loose and yet internally consistent collection of shorter texts, is also about the dialectic of this approach. The conquest of the world is at the center, as well as its accompanying music, which has always been one of appropriation, even theft - and one of ordering: that is why the map, clock and score play the main role in the title.
Our European culture has made the globe its own with the help of these instruments. Schöllhorn follows these traces, to the printing press and across the seas, into painting and compositional technique, into the past and into the future. And because he has a broad horizon, there is an enormous amount to learn from him. The book seems to be written quickly and also reads quickly. This spontaneity is refreshing, full of verve, sometimes the author is gripped by anger, sometimes the thoughts run wild and confuse, because Schöllhorn ventures into unfamiliar territory with the help of good secondary literature.
The whole thing is unsystematic, does not bundle things together, but lays out threads that could be traced back to a core point. There are a few gaps you would like to fill, others you would like to know more about, and you often have objections while reading, many in fact, but they should be fine. Because the book is stimulating - and despite all the doubts and despair, it does not leave us hopeless, because "music can always do one thing - comfort us".
Johannes Schöllhorn: Map, clock and score. Variationen und Volten über Eroberung und ihre Begleitmusik, edited by Rainer Nonnenmann, 512 p., € 24.00, MusikTexte, Cologne 2022, ISBN 978-3-982467-0-2
