(Stand: 25. Juli 2007) ANDERSON, Michael Alan ... - Universität Wien

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE MUSIC CONFERENCE 2007 – WIEN, 7.-11. AUGUST ABSTRACTS
TIETZE, Gwendolyn (CBSO Center, Birmingham)
Gothic Music in 1920s Vienna: inspirations for a language of medieval music
Mittwoch/Wednesday, 8.8., 16.30 Uhr, MuWi, HS 1
Vienna in the 1920s: Arnold Schoenberg and his circle elicited heated controversies, and
Guido Adler and his school worked to embed musicology as an academic subject at the
university and make its work relevant for a wider public. Rudolf Ficker, 1886–1954, was
one of Adler’s students; his particular love was medieval music, which he wrote about,
edited and performed throughout his life. His aim was to bring medieval music to life and
to bring people to understand and love this music that was so different from the classical
and romantic tradition.
In 1927, Adler asked Ficker to put together a programme of Musik der Gotik for the
Beethoven centenary celebrations in Vienna. Adler’s motivation was to satisfy both the
interest by the general public in medieval music, „das schon durch die inneren
Beziehungen zu der Moderne unserer Tage geweckt ist“(Adler), and the scholarly wish to
put into practice theories about how the music worked. The concert, in the Hofburgkapelle,
contained music by, amongst others, Perotin, Vitry, Machaut and Dunstable, and Ficker
was praised for his „divinatorische Kühnheit“ and „künstlerischen Sinn der Interpretation“
(Alfred Einstein).
Ficker was one of the most powerful writers about medieval music of his time.
Working within the paradigms of Geistesgeschichte and Kunstwollen, Ficker used organicist
language, architectural metaphors and borrowed the terms Gothic and Romanesque. He
was greatly inspired by the art historian Wilhelm Worringer and other art historical writers.
His language is full of movement: there is „das Flimmern der rhythmischen
Bewegung“ and „erregte Spannung“ in a motet, or the „nacktes Tongerippe“ of a motet’s
tenor; indeed the thirteenth-century motet becomes „das ebenbürtige Gegenstück zu
unvergleichlichen Erscheinungswelt der gotischen Kathedralen, die aus dem gleichen
geistigen Nährboden emporwuchsen“.
Ficker translated the deep impression the musical notes had made on him into words
to draw in his audience. The drawing of parallels to the better-known world of medieval
art and architecture was just one strategy he employed to make the music familiar. The
language of scholars such as Ficker, concerned with the meanings of medieval music, often
presented the only way into the reality of its sounds. What makes this language of
medieval music even more interesting is that it often moves between the old and the new,
with the discourse about modern music borrowing from that about medieval music, and
vice versa. And for the public this was the only way they would get to know medieval
music in the 1920s, as public concerts were rare and there was not the direct access to the
music one would enjoy later in the century, in the form of popular editions and, above all,
recordings.
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