The Music of Louis Andriessen

EXCESS. FORUM FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ART (4.-7.8.2016) 48th International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Michael Rebhahn and Fahim Amir (CURATORS) This forum, consisting of an opening, a closing discussion and three panels, seeks to probe the current state of the relationship between music and philosophy, as well as the mutual consonances and dissonances. With a view to the present, it is of particular interest to ask what questions are stimulating New Music today, what challenges it faces, and what shared themes or »contemporaneities« unite and separate philosophy and New Music today. In this way — and very much following on from earlier discussions in Darmstadt — the forum will attempt to show how compositional strategies and concepts exemplify reflections on changes within the whole of contemporary culture. The forum, which will take place in two languages (German and English, with simultaneous interpretation), defines itself as an open-ended discussion whose topics will be introduced in keynote speeches. In each case, one composer and one philosopher will act as hosts and play the part of structuring and further developing, with their guests, the discussion that already started before the course. PANEL 1: SURPLUS Dieter Mersch ChristianGrüny, Jennifer Walshe, Ashley Fure, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Michael Pisaro, Bernhard Waldenfels The term»surplus, «which is also implied in the over- all title EXCESS, allues to today’s increasing expansion of the compositional through approaches like intermediality, heterogeneity of material, body/performance, theatricality, etc. Thus the term »surplus« relates on the one hand to the »derestriction« of the arts towards different forms of expression, representation and production; but, on the other hand, also to a political aspect between the critique of art as a productive force in modern capitalism and the surplus of the aesthetic as something that does not submit to the cycles of economic exploitation. PANEL 2: THE POLITICAL Michael Rebhahn Douglas Barrett, Dror Feiler, Fahim Amir, Chaya Czernowin, Harry Lehmann, Mathias Spahlinger The political dimension touched on in the first group of themes will be explicitly foregrounded in the second complex. It addresses the ever pressing question of the relationship between art, reality and politics, which constantly arises in new ways for music too. Just as the »worldrelation« of music is being intensely debated at the moment, the concern is at once a far more fundamental analysis of the relationship be- tween the aesthetic and all that characterizes and constitutes the polis, the political and lastly the »community«. What is the role of art in this, especially if the practice of art identifies itself first and foremost as critique, as an element of resistance or subversion against claims to political power? A substantial element of this fundamental problem also encompasses the interplay between music and the historical, as expressed in notions of »contemporaneity« and »witness.« Intervention: Fahim Amir and Tomás Saraceno Every work of art is an uncommitted crime After the critique of Eurocentrism new approaches demand to also »provincialise the human«. If dogs are indeed the new feminists as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, curator of dOCUMENTA (13), famously stated in relation to the seminal work of Donna Haraway, what is there to be done in the realms of aesthetics, production and politics? Philosopher Fahim Amir and artist Tomás Saraceno engage in a conversation about challenges and promises of multi species constellations in art starting from both Saracenos work with spiders and Haraways Companion Species Manifesto (2003). A Cyrtophora citricola spider will join the conversation as guest speaker. PANEL 3: MUSIC AS PHILOSOPHY Jörn Peter Hiekel, Simone Mahrenholz, ManosTsangaris, Brian Ferneyhough, Patrick Frank, Gunnar Hindrichs, Albrecht Wellmer Music, like art in general, constitutes its own form of thought and insight that is every bit as advanced as philosophy, but uses other means and follows different »logics.« It is not only a matter of initiating a dialogue between music and philosophy in order to evoke mutual tensions or proximities, but rather of showing how music, or the musical and »compositional,« can be viewed as »a form of philosophy« — and of attributing to it an »epistemic« power of its own. On the one hand, this raises such time-honored questions as that of »truth« in art, which after Hegel was taken up most significantly by Heidegger and Adorno; and on the other hand, it needs to be readjusted to the present conditions. One must therefore interrogate the »self-will« of aesthetic thought and ask what music — especially New Music, as the most »abstract« and at once the most emotional art — »knows,« or how it organizes and reveals its knowledge.

Canadian University Music Review, 2000

New Sound, 2012

2020

“Absolute music” names an idea, an aesthetic concept, a regulative construct, a repertoire, and an aspiration. The term also engages a range of broader claims about aesthetic autonomy, or the possibility of aesthetic experience more generally. This chapter investigates how and why the aspiration towards autonomy has seemed so necessary—and so powerfully subversive—for musical thinkers at certain times in history. It traces the entanglements and misalignments of the various meanings and uses of these ideas, and brings these insights into the remit of contemporary debates about music’s ineffability, and its capacity to facilitate resistance and political agency.

Notes, 2002

Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments, 2022

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was not only a philosopher who loved and wrote about music; he was also a musician, pianist, and composer. In this ground-breaking volume, philosophers, historians, musicians, and musicologists come together to explore Nietzsche’s thought and music in all its complexity. Starting from the role that music played in the formation and articulation of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as the influence that contemporary composers had on him, the essays provide an in-depth analysis of the structural and stylistic aspects of his compositions. The volume highlights the significance of music in Nietzsche’s life and looks deeply at his musical experiments which led to a new and radically different style of composition in relation with his philosophical thought. It also traces the influence that Nietzsche had on many other musicians and musical genres, from Russian composers to current rock music and heavy metal.

Music Theory Spectrum, 2017

Critical Studies in Improvisation, 2017

Philosophical Forum, 2016