Bernhard Ziehn

Bernhard Ferdinand Ziehn (born January 20, 1845 in Erfurt , † September 8, 1912 in Chicago ) was a German-American music theorist .

Bernhard Ziehn

Life

Ziehn first worked as a teacher in Mühlhausen / Thuringia before he emigrated to Chicago in 1868 . After initially working at the German-Lutheran school, he became an independent music teacher in 1871. Ziehn acquired extensive knowledge of music theory on his own, and from 1876 he published several books, initially as a piano teacher, and from 1888 as an author of theoretical works. Ziehn enriched music theory with essential knowledge in harmony and counterpoint theory. Both approaches flowed together in the "Canonical Studies" published posthumously in 1912.

Act

Ziehns harmony viewed from Terzschichtungen resulting chords to None chords and leaves every five inverters a major ninth chord as legitimate to (so-called. "Enharmonic Law"). At the turn of the musical era, Ziehn saw himself as the guardian of an evolutionary further development of the classical-romantic musical model.

At the intersection of Ziehn's polyphonic and harmonic investigations is his “symmetrical inversion”. It says that a motif is not true to key in contrapuntal processing, but reversed true to the interval. The tone sequence d'-e'-f'-g'-a ', which comes from the pitch space of D minor, is reversed in Ziehn to d'-c'-hag and leads into the pitch space of G major. The meeting of the two tone sequences in a very small space leads to harmonious extensions.

Ziehn had a large number of students, including Wilhelm Middelschulte , Eleanor Everest Freer , Hugo Kaun , Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler and John Alden Carpenter . Middelschulte regularly applied Ziehn's principles in his compositions, while Hugo Kaun and Ferruccio Busoni occasionally worked with symmetrical inversion during Ziehn's lifetime.

Ziehn took part in the musicological discussion in Germany primarily through publications in the Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung . He was a very astute polemicist who was not afraid to confront the greats of his time, e. B. with Philipp Spitta because of the authenticity of Bach's St. Luke Passion, with Hugo Riemann because of the functional harmonics and his phraseology, with Eduard Hanslick because of his cautious assessment of Anton Bruckner . In all of the disputes mentioned, Zeit agreed that Ziehn was right.

Works

• Harmony and modulation theory. Berlin 1888.
• Manual of Harmony. Theoretical and Practical. Vol I. Milwaukee, Berlin 1907.
• Five- and six-part harmonies / five- and six-part harmonies. Milwaukee, Berlin 1911.
• Canonical Studies. Milwaukee, Berlin 1912.

literature

• Ferruccio Busoni : The "Gothic" of Chicago, Illinois. In: Signals for the musical world, 68th vol., 5 (1910), pp. 163–165.
• Julius Goebel (Ed.): German-American history sheets. Yearbook of the German-American Historical Society of Illinois. Vol. XXVI / VII. 335 S. Chicago 1927. [Contains 23 essays by and three about Bernhard Ziehn].
• Winthrop Sargeant: Bernhard Ziehn, Precursor. In: The Musical Quarterly , Vol. XIX / II. 4/1933, pp. 169-177.
• Hans Joachim Moser : Bernhard Ziehn, the German-American music theorist. Bayreuth 1950.
• Euel Hobson Belcher: The Musical Theories of Bernhard Ziehn. Diss. Indiana University 1975.
• Hans-Dieter Meyer: Like from another world. Wilhelm Middelschulte. Life and work. Kassel 2007.