Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft
Das Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft versteht sich als ein frei zugängliches Publikationsorgan, das sowohl die aktuellen Tendenzen der internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Forschungen als auch der Schweizer Forschungslandschaft widerspiegeln und Forschende weltweit erreichen möchte.
Schweizerische Musikforschende Gesellschaft (SMG) - Société Suisse de Musicologie (SSM) - Società Svizzera di Musicologia (SSM)
Vorwort, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 42
Copyright (c) 2026 Laura Moeckli, Vincenzina C. Ottomano, Lea Hagmann, Margret Scharrer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Poetics of Time and Space in Abdullah Ibrahim
Time is a prominent theme in South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s writing, discourse and music. His elaborations of time converge with ideas about place – a fact that assumes significance, given that he was away from South Africa while developing his aesthetic, in what would later cement into exile. This paper looks at the imaginative ways in which he deploys time as a metaphor for place, both in his writing and in his music between 1965 and 1970. Through a discussion of time as a theme in his discourse, the blurring of time and place in stories and memory, and finally in tracing the ways this finds expression in the tracks “Pye R Squared” and “Heyt Mazurki” (both released in 1965), the article attends to the political commitments that inhere in Ibrahim’s poetics of time and space, and suggests how resistance might be read in the imaginative elaboration of time and space in one musician’s work during exile.
Copyright (c) 2025 Stephanie Vos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Hommage an Marcel Cellier zum 100. Geburtstag. Gespräch mit Alexandre Cellier. Lavaux, Januar 2025
Anlässlich des 100. Geburtstag des Westschweizer Musikethnologen, Musikproduzenten und Radiomanns, Marcel Cellier (1925-2013), spricht Lea Hagmann mit seinem Sohn, dem Multiinstrumentalisten Alexandre Cellier, über das Leben seines Vaters, dessen Wirken während der 1950er - 1990er Jahre und darüber, wie sich die osteuropäische Volksmusik seither verändert hat.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lea Hagmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Concept of Ma in Western Art Music: From Religious Architecture to the Interpretation of Time
Ma is clearly rooted in religious and spiritual practice, foremost in the Shinto tradition. It is an important concept in Japanese culture, influencing all art forms. Ma relates to the Japanese unification of the concepts known in the West as space and time. Therefore, it is applicable to both the performing and visual arts, in other words, to arts in time and arts in space. Beyond its metaphysical dimension, Ma also has a technical meaning in the arts, which affects the performance practice of Japanese music. I am particularly interested in this technical aspect, especially in terms of how it influences the interpretation of Western art music by Japanese composers. As it suggests a degree of rhythmic freedom granted to the performer, it contrasts with the prevailing paradigm of rhythmic rigor in Western art music. An issue that will be explored in my thesis. As a theoretical foundation, I focus on approaches from ethnomusicology and interpretation research, connecting theories of the Kyoto School with Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self. I aim to develop my own theoretical framework based on grounded theory. The final outcome of this research will be the development of guidelines to assist performers in interpreting contemporary Japanese music.
Copyright (c) 2025 Luca Marty https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble (2024): Tarantism Revisited. Produced by EMB – Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern and Petit à Petit Cologne. Italian voice-over, texts & credits english. colour, b/w. 145 minutes (preliminary version).
Il presente contributo è la recensione del film Tarantism Revisited, diretto da Anja Dreschke e Michaela Schäuble, prodotto dalla EMB – Ethnographic Mediaspace Bern and Petit à Petit Cologne nel 2024. Il film racconta un fenomeno molto conosciuto nell’antropologia ed etnomusicologia italiana, quello della meloterapia del tarantismo. Il film gioca in modo sapiente e coinvolgente con l’interpolazione continua tra documentazione storica e riprese contemporanee, costruendo una narrazione stratificata che riflette la complessità del tarantismo, tanto nella sua dimensione storica quanto nelle sue persistenze e trasformazioni nel presente. Non si tratta semplicemente di un confronto tra ieri e oggi, ma di un dialogo fra tempi etnografici e cinematografici, che si intrecciano senza mai fondersi completamente, mantenendo sempre una certa tensione critica. Il suono fa un uso sapiente di voci fori campo, suoni in presa diretta, nuove composizioni e documentazione d'archivio, creando una vera e propria colonna sonora multivocale densa di significato. In questo gioco calibrato di presenze e assenze, di voci che si fanno corpo e corpi che si fanno assenti, si rivela una concezione del documentario che non si accontenta della registrazione oggettiva dei fatti, ma ne mette in discussione i presupposti epistemologici. Il film stesso, attraverso questa articolazione sonora e visiva, diventa un dispositivo riflessivo. Le autrici sembrano interrogare non solo il tarantismo in quanto fenomeno storico e culturale, ma anche le modalità con cui esso è stato e continua a essere osservato, narrato, rappresentato. L’operazione filmica si avvicina così alla logica della “meta-etnografia”, in cui la narrazione include al proprio interno la consapevolezza dei propri strumenti e dei propri limiti.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fulvia Caruso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tic-tac ou « Manon Lescaut mi chiamo » : Puccini et la dramaturgie du temps
Cet article questionne la valeur de la temporalité dramatique dans Manon Lescaut de Giacomo Puccini. Cet opéra s'inscrit dans la lignée des manipulations narratives et formelles d'Angello Zanardini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito et Giuseppe Verdi. Cependant, Puccini et ses librettistes normalisent cette manipulation de la temporalité en abandonnant l'alternance structurelle entre sections statiques et dynamiques. Grâce à une élaboration de la texture orchestrale et à l'assimilation du motif à une valeur temporelle, Puccini parvient à faire du temps un élément objectif et constitutif d'une fresque dramatico-musicale. D'autant plus que dans les déserts de la Nouvelle-Orléans de l'acte IV, le « motif du nom », que Puccini a su définir dans le temps, devient un point de référence de l'inéluctabilité du temps qui passe. Cette définition du temps comme paramètre dramatique tangible nie l'abstraction des numéros lyriques de l'ancienne solita forma et contredit la critique de Mosco Carner selon laquelle le dernier acte de Puccini n'est rien de plus qu'une « lamentation en forme de duo, qui dure dix-huit minutes ».
Copyright (c) 2025 Guillaume Castella https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Performance, Heterochrony, Historiography: The Wooster Group’s 2007–2009 Production of Busenello/Cavalli’s La Didone (1641) and Baroque Opera Representation
The article investigates how the staging of Baroque operas in contemporary performances across Europe and the United States engages with temporal and historiographical concerns. It focuses on the Wooster Group's experimental production of Francesco Cavalli's La Didone, which took place between 2007 and 2009 in Brussels, Rotterdam, Edinburgh, New York, Luxembourg City, and Los Angeles. By contrasting this benchmark production with traditional reconstructionist and modern Regietheater approaches, the article highlights key contradictions in today’s representation of Baroque opera, such as the tension between sonic and visual elements and between historical and contemporary acting styles. The Wooster Group’s intermedial production adopts a heterochronic, non-linear approach, integrating live performance with simultaneous reenactments of Mario Bava’s sci-fi film Planet of the Vampires (1965). This multi-layered strategy challenges conventional ideas of representation in operatic stagings by blending historical and modern elements, live and mediated performance, and linear and non-linear timelines. Through an analysis of specific scenes, the article demonstrates how these strategies produce dialectical images (Benjamin) that destabilize distinctions between past and present while offering an innovative interpretation of Baroque opera. The article concludes that the Wooster Group’s approach can be interpreted as ‘postdramatic’ (Lehmann), providing an alternative paradigm to traditional operatic productions and their differing historiographical implications.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mauro Calcagno https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Ein schlagartiger Einbruch der Ewigkeit in die Zeit” — On the Spatiality of Musical Time
Throughout history and across cultures, music and time have shared a special bond. Philosophers in the Western tradition have illustrated their theories of time with examples of music, while composers have written music that attempts to alter or even undermine our everyday experience of time. In an echo of medieval Christianity, twentieth century Buddhist philosophy, and 2000s rave culture, theorists such as Christopher Hasty describe the results of these efforts as a “spatialisation of time”. In this article, I go a step further and attempt to articulate a notion of musical time that is necessarily spatial. I argue that the modes in which time is contained in music—rhythm, microrhythm, and form—spatialise our experience of the time in which the music is itself contained. Thus investigating these “metaphors we hear by” facilitates a nuanced understanding of time in music and music in time.
Copyright (c) 2025 Lauge Dideriksen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The A-B-A’ structure as a social ‘return’ in opera buffa
The structure A-B-A', typical of a tripartite aria of an eighteenth-century opera seria, could also describe the dramaturgy implied in the plots of the three opere buffe by Da Ponte - Mozart. This structure restores the emotional stability of the characters: at the beginning, they seem to live in a stable world (A), then the characters experience different emotions (B), and at the end of the story, they return to their initial situation. The action’s spiral shows a social circle that finally re-establishes its original order regained after some lively diversions. Every plot displays a vibrant mixed society that appears, at the same time, very static: in fact, the aristocrats confirm themselves as the ruling class that will not lose any privileges by mixing with the medium or low class. The circular narrative of the three stories will overtake time and experiences that run in their B parts, regaining a new A' stability that seems the ‘correct’ one recalling every starting point of the three operas.
Copyright (c) 2025 Gioia Filocamo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Resonances in the Realm of Intercultural Music Education: Insights from Multi-sited Fieldwork
This short article by the RESONANCES project research team explores the starting point of how, based on the first insights from multi-sited fieldwork, intercultural encounters through music education may create connectivity and meaningful shared experiences. For 18 months, this research project, funded by the Haute école de musique de Genève (HEM) and the Portuguese Instituto de Etnomusicologia - Centro de Estudos de Música e Dança (INET-md), is led by Ricardo Castro, with Alix Didier Sarrouy as scientific coordinator, and Maria Peres as research assistant.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Peres Marques, Alix Didier Sarrouy, Ricardo Castro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
«Wir brauchen Vorbilder und keine Kopien». Gespräch mit Noldi Alder über die neueren Entwicklungen der Appenzeller Musik. Urnäsch, November 2024
Arnold (Noldi) Alder (* 1952 Urnäsch, Appenzell Ausserrhoden) prägt die Schweizer Volksmusik mit innovativen Projekten. Wie im restlichen Alpenraum gab es im Appenzellerland verschiedene Entwicklungen, die zur Entstehung der Neuen Volksmusik beitrugen. In unserem Gespräch beleuchtet Noldi Alder diese Entwicklungen, Veränderungen, wichtigen Persönlichkeiten sowie seine eigenen Projekte und Erfahrungen der letzten Jahrzehnte. Ein zentrales Thema dieses Interviews ist die Original-Besetzung der Appenzeller Streichmusik, bestehend aus zwei Geigen, Cello, Kontrabass und Hackbrett, welche als Grundlage dieses Stils gilt.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joshua Broger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bruyantes mécaniques du temps repassé : l’orgue de foire et ses instaurations
While the relationship between time and music represents an extensively addressed topic, much less has been said about the concrete efforts undertaken to produce such a relationship by means of specific devices. In this article, I examine how the mechanical organ, a music distributor and a highly developed mediating tool, acts in order to establish the fair as an event and as an institution. My focus lies on the organ’s peculiar ability to store, deliver and repeat – potentially endlessly – musical sequences. I argue that such a feature had a central role in the way showpeople, their work and the time and space occupied by them were defined during the long 19th century. At the intersection of science’s popularization, migration phenomena, concerns about acoustics and strives for professional recognition, barrel and fairground organs, in their very materiality, testify to the active part they took in the shaping of a downplayed, although essential, social area of Western modernity. By giving an account of the time manipulations allowed, through sound, by these instruments, it is therefore possible to get a better grasp on a set of dynamics still relevant to our present aesthetic, historical and political categories.
Copyright (c) 2025 Achille Kienholz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Balancing Time: Seeing the past, present, future and other time in the productions of Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland
For over five decades, Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland sought to balance a sense of past, present and future in their work as part of an effort to preserve local traditions and remain relevant to contemporary theatre audiences. Although early productions from the 1960s such as Fadó Fadó (1968) focused on the representation of rural Irish life, akin to much of the early twentieth century Irish drama influenced by cultural nationalism, developments from the 1980s in particular sought a greater balance between remembering past practices of intangible cultural heritage and seeking to devise and develop new work that incorporates influences from changes in society and arts practice. Many of the productions utilized a sense of time as a narrative device, inviting audiences back in time or into another realm, as a method to engage a contemporary audience. Reflecting on developments on- and off-stage, in this paper I identify three aspects of time in the work of Siamsa Tíre: the narrative device that invites the audience ‘back in time’, the representation of the passage of time in mythological stories, and the responsiveness of the company to the time in which it exists.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daithí Kearney https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tiefenzeit. Anton Bruckner als Gegenstand der energetischen Musikbetrachtung
This paper attempts to establish and develop the concept of deep time in historical musicology. The idea of deep time, primarily mapped by Stephen Jay Gould, refers to the geological discovery of earth’s history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and considers its far-reaching implications for the relativization and dynamization of human concepts of time. Recent general historical research has also shown the significance of the idea for the establishment of modern historical consciousness and concepts of structural history. A musicological exploration of the idea has not yet materialized, however, proves to be a desideratum, particularly regarding 19th century music. Based on a general foundation of the concept of musical deep time, this paper demonstrates the pre-conceptual presence of deep time thinking in the Bruckner monographs of August Halm and Ernst Kurth. With a view to both formal theory under the sign of geological metaphors and structural-historical considerations, Bruckner proves to be an exponent of musical deep time from the perspective of music theory and aesthetics as well as music historiography.
Copyright (c) 2025 Tim Martin Hoffmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Zivile oder militärische Blasmusik? Ein Vertrag von 1822 zeigt deren Verflechtung
Der vorliegende Beitrag beleuchtet das Verhältnis zwischen zivilen und militärischen Musikensembles in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Anhand von Quellen aus dem Staatsarchiv St. Gallen, insbesondere eines Vertrags von 1822 zur Bildung einer Militärmusik für das 2. Infanterie-Bataillon wird deutlich, dass diese vertraglich aus einer bereits bestehenden zivilen Musikgesellschaft hervorging. Der Vertrag regelte nicht nur die Organisation und Finanzierung, sondern auch die musikalische Qualitätssicherung. Die Musikgesellschaft, bestehend aus jungen Männern aus dem Toggenburg, organisierte sich über die Zuständigkeiten der Vertreter der Militärbehörden, einem Musikdirektor, der auch pädagogische Aufgaben erfüllte, und einem Kapellmeister. Die Dokumente zeigen, dass die Militärmusik im Schweizer Milizsystem oft als kosteneffiziente Lösung für die Erfüllung militärischer Vorgaben diente, während gleichzeitig zivile und militärische Aufgaben eng verflochten waren. Die Dokumente offenbaren zudem Spannungen zwischen der Musikgesellschaft und der Militärbehörden, die nach sieben Jahren Vertragsdauer zu Neustrukturierungen führte.
Copyright (c) 2025 Yannick Wey https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Remembering Imperfectly: Bridging the Past and Future Through Yiddish-American Folk Song Recordings
In the liner notes for the 1957 Folkways Records release Jewish Children’s Songs and Games ethnomusicologist and performer Ruth Rubin explains, “many Jewish children have grandparents who came from the old country. The Yiddish songs on this record were sung by such grandmothers and grandfathers when they were children in Eastern Europe. When we sing them now, it is as if we were paying a visit to the little town or village where they were born, in the old country.” Rubin’s reflection invites an analysis of the role of Yiddish-American folk song recordings in mediating the music of the Yiddish past for future generations of listeners. I argue that ethnographic recordings and commercially released folk LPs in the mid-twentieth century United States represent the preservationist impulses of the period, which themselves coloured and shaped recorded performances.
Copyright (c) 2025 Zeke Levine https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Züri West, „Loch dür Zyt“. Eine Zeitreise zurück in die bewegten 1980er Jahre in Bern
Am 24. November 2023 veröffentlichte die Berner Mundart-Rock-Band Züri West nach einer Pause von sechs Jahren auf den diversen Streaming-Plattformen erstmals wieder neues Material, konkret einen Song mit dem Titel Loch dür Zyt. Dieser erfuhr im Kontext mit der nur zwei Jahre vorher bekannt gemachten Krankheit des Front-Sängers Kuno Lauener – bei ihm wurde 2017 Multiple Sklerose diagnostiziert – besondere Aufmerksamkeit. Die Ärzte verbieten Lauener, in Konzerten aufzutreten. Züri West wird daher wohl nie wieder live zu erleben sein. Der neue Song und das am 8. Dezember 2023 veröffentlichte gleichnamige Album mit weiteren neuen Liedern waren unter solchen Umständen ein aussergewöhnliches Signal der Band. An dieser Stelle soll aufgezeigt werden, dass der Song Loch dür Zyt durch die lyrische Retrospektion sowie die musikalische Sprache das Phänomen Zeit reflektiert.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Pensa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Es handelt sich um einen Lyrik-Zyklus von Gedichten, in denen die Musik und ihr Verhältnis zur Zeitlichkeit im Fokus steht. Dieses ist zuweilen explizit, zuweilen metaphorisch und andeutungsweise präsent. Das Eröffnungsgedicht ist in Erinnerung an den im vergangenen Jahr gestorbenen Pianisten Maurizio Pollini geschrieben. Mehrere Gedichte haben einen Bezug zur Schweiz, das letzte hat einen Venedig-Bezug.
Musik und Zeitlichkeit, Venedig, die Schweiz
Copyright (c) 2025 Tihomir Popović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Disrupted and Stretched Linearity in Stephen Sondheim’s Company
This article analyses Stephen Sondheim’s treatment of time in his seminal 1970-musical Company. I argue that his score presents two distinct temporal modes: disrupted linearity, whereby goal-directed motion is interrupted; and stretched linearity, whereby goal-directed motion is extended. These novel temporal categories are illuminated with respect to a range of songs from the show, with explanation as to how different musical parameters contribute to these experiences of time. I conclude by suggesting that this approach to time forms a backdrop to the unconventional narrative structure and thematic material, both of which resist chronological and linear characteristics.
Copyright (c) 2025 Nick Braae https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Workshop Bericht: Spielstätten und musikalische Praxis in historischen Gärten als kulturelles Erbe, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 41
Copyright (c) 2024 Helena Langewitz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Captured Birdscapes: Artistic Research, Research Art, and Living Cultural Heritage
This article centres on the Birdscapes exhibition held in 2022 at the Nature Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland. The exhibition’s primary objective was to convey the research processes and findings of a project that explored human-nature connections, with a particular emphasis on the auditory, sonic, and musical dimensions of people’s interactions with their physical environment. The paper underscores the potential for expanding similar initiatives beyond academic boundaries and highlights the importance of integrating sound installations and objects within museum spaces while also fostering critical reflections.
Copyright (c) 2024 Matthias Lewy, Helena Simonett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Sharp, Loud, Fast, Fierce: Encounters with a Gannetry
Sharp, Loud, Fast, Fierce: Encounters with a Gannetry, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 41
Copyright (c) 2024 Emily Doolittle, Dawn Wood https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tùn Resùn: Walking in the Sounding Forest
This paper is based on interviews and conversations conducted while walking through the ‘Klangwald’, a ‘sounding forest’ in the Swiss mountains that features various musical instruments. While our initial intent was to reflect on hearing and listening to all the sounds of the forestscape, our walking conversations revealed a much more holistic sensory experience, and we began to ask the broader question of what it means to sensorially be in and move through the forest. Drawing on anthropology of the senses (Le Breton 2017 [2006]) and expanding on Tim Ingold’s work on movement, knowledge, description, and being in the world (2011), we propose a ‘sensory walking ethnography’. By walking alongside people as we interview them, the conversation – like the walking itself – becomes an experiential and sensorial process rather than a purely linguistic and semantic one. Thus, we explore not only people’s perceptions of the forest environment but also a methodology for investigating that perception. Accompanying interviewees as they articulated what they were sensing – particularly in the liminal spaces and concepts between within and outside of the forest, sound and silence, and constancy and change – provided a deeper understanding of how people relate to, experience, and perceive their lived environment.
Copyright (c) 2024 Natalie Kirschstein, Helena Simonett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Inquisitory Birds: Thinking through the Ethics and Assumptions of Playback Responses in Birds
A technique employed by both scientists and birders is the use of song playback to elicit a response from a bird. For birders, the intention is to encourage a hidden bird to reveal itself to the observer. On hearing the recording, the bird reacts with either an aggressive territorial response or inquisitory social approach. While the effects of playback on birds are incompletely understood, repeated exposure appears to influence a bird’s subsequent behaviour. Where playback has been widely used, birds sometimes no longer respond to the sounds of their own species, ignore the sound, and thus deviate from their assumed natural behaviour. These effects have raised ethical questions about the use of playback in birding and in some places the practice is banned. This article examines the use of playback in birding and the wider questions this raises. Ethical debates around playback reveal ideas about what birds are, how they can potentially interact with humans, and how the aesthetics of birding are practiced and debated.
Copyright (c) 2024 Andrew Whitehouse https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Anatomy of a Benign Failure: Péter Szőke’s Ornithomusicology as Represented in Barátom, Bonca, a 1975 Hungarian Children’s Film
The 1975 Hungarian children’s television film Barátom, Bonca (Bonca, my Friend; directed by Ilona Katkics, screenplay by Katalin Varga) contains a remarkable scene in which a ten-year-old boy is initiated into the idea of universal music through a declaration that birdsong has musical quality. In my article I show that the scene was inspired by ornithomusicology, the one-man discipline of Péter Szőke, whose (pseudo)scientific activity in Kádár-era Hungary aimed to prove that birdsong and human music were governed by the same neurological and physical laws. Attending to the history of its genesis, I dissect the scene to demonstrate that everything one hears in it is the result of four consecutive instances of failure: wishful thinking in science, misinterpretation, misrepresentation and misidentification, of which the first can be ascribed to Szőke, the rest to the filmmakers. I show how the filmmakers’ factual errors were conditioned by age-old concepts of European culture, and I conclude that these errors nevertheless contributed to the artistic authenticity of the final product. This authenticity is inseparable from a strong sense of environmental ethics, which is partly conveyed by the specific way the word ‘music’ is used in the film.
Copyright (c) 2024 Gergely Loch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Introduction: Of Birds, Music, and Silence, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 41
Copyright (c) 2024 Helena Simonett, Patricia Jäggi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Vorwort, Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 41
Copyright (c) 2024 Lea Hagmann, Margret Scharrer, Laura Moeckli, Vincenzina Ottomano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Les œuvres solos pour le shakuhachi, une flûte de bambou droite japonaise, se distinguent par une temporalité que nous pourrions qualifier de non linéaire. Ces pièces comprennent de courtes phrases, pouvant parfois n’avoir qu’un seul ton, entrecoupées de respirations obligatoires, donc de silences entre les phrases. Ces œuvres sont considérées par certains comme des pièces de méditation, du fait qu’elles ont été composées par les moines d’une secte bouddhiste. Le tempo est libre. Aucune règle spécifique ne dicte la rapidité d’exécution, bien que ces pièces soient généralement lentes et posées. L’auteur présente le cas des respirations obligatoires dans ces œuvres, celles-ci générant des coupures dans le flot mélodique, et donc des silences entre les phrases.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bruno Deschênes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Wladimir Vogel as a mediator: John Cage in Donaueschingen, Zurich, and Milan
American composer John Cage travelled to Europe three times in the post-war period. These visits have received significant scholarly attention due to their importance in the trans-Atlantic musical interactions following the war. Studies have focused on the reception of Cage’s music and aspects of cross-fertilisation, with considerable effort dedicated to rebuilding early contacts and their role in these processes. Despite such extensive research, however, the connection between Cage and Russian-German composer Wladimir Vogel has remained overlooked. Building on the information disclosed in a letter from Cage to Vogel, preserved at the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, this essay seeks to illuminate the encounter between the two composers in Milan in 1949 and Vogel’s subsequent role as a mediator for the concerts Cage held in Donaueschingen, Zurich, and Milan in 1954.
Copyright (c) 2025 Manuel Farolfi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Compte rendu: Walsdorf, Hanna (2023): Für Gott und die Welt. Musik zu den Statuspassagen Ludwigs XIV (1638–1662). Beeskow: Ortus Musikverlag.
Copyright (c) 2024 Philippe Vendrix https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0