Ernst Kurth (musicologist)

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Ernst Kurth (born June 1, 1886 in Vienna , † August 2, 1946 in Bern ) was a Swiss music theorist and music psychologist of Austrian origin.

Life

Kurth studied musicology with Guido Adler in Vienna and obtained a doctorate in 1908 with a dissertation on Gluck's early operas . After a brief activity as a conductor and as a teacher in the free school community of Wickersdorf , he completed his habilitation in 1912 in Bern with the prerequisites for theoretical harmony . From 1920 he was a private lecturer and from 1927 until his death held the chair in the newly founded musicological seminar. He was one of the confidants and sponsors of the reform pedagogical school by the sea on the North Sea island of Juist .

Services

Kurth's work, influenced by Schopenhauer's philosophy and contemporary trends in psychology, deals with the relationship between musical phenomena and processes in the psyche. In the Basics of Linear Counterpoint (1917) he explains J. S. Bach's sentence technique as a product of energetically imagined wave movements of individual lines. Here Kurth develops the conceptual pair of potential and kinetic energy borrowed from physics (the former in the need to resolve chords, the latter in the form of the melodic line).

The romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagner's “Tristan” (1920) looks at the harmony of the 19th century and its history from a philosophical-psychological perspective. For Kurth, the cause of chords and their connections does not lie in physical phenomena, but in unconscious psychological states of tension. "The essence of harmony" is "the overflow of power in appearance" and chords "reflexes from the unconscious". The focus of the work is Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as the climax and turning point in the history of harmony. The Tristan chord and its treatment reflect as acoustic phenomena "the unfulfilled, painful tendon of love, which swells out of the tenderest impulse to storm violence, and unattainably sinks back into itself to endless longing." (Wagner's explanation of the Tristan prelude).

Bruckner (1925) combines a thorough artist biography with a new approach to the theory of forms , in which the emergence of the form, the “formation”, moves into the field of vision and suppresses the idea of ​​form as a given template.

The music psychology (1931), which is equally neglected by music theorists and psychologists, sees itself as an alternative to Stumpf's sound psychology in that it systematically summarizes Kurth's concept of unconscious psychic energy and its relationship to musical phenomena.

Main fonts

  • The style of the opera seria from Gluck to Orfeo . Diss., University of Vienna, 1908.
  • The prerequisites for theoretical harmony and tonal representation systems . Habilitation thesis, University of Bern, 1912; Bern 1913.
  • Basics of Linear Counterpoint: Introduction to the style and technique of Bach's melodic polyphony . Bern 1917. ( archive.org , archive.org )
  • Romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagner's "Tristan" . Bern 1920. ( archive.org )
  • Bruckner . Berlin 1925.
  • Music psychology . Berlin 1931.

Engagements

Between 1925 and 1934 Kurth was one of the shop stewards of the reform pedagogical school by the sea on the German North Sea island of Juist , which u. a. had a strong musical orientation through Eduard Zuckmayer and Kurt Sydow .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Romantic Harmonics , pp. 1f.
  2. ↑ Leaflets of the outskirts of the Schule am Meer Juist , April 8, 1931, p. 31

Non-fiction author (music)

personal data
SURNAME Kurth, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss music theorist
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH August 2, 1946
Place of death Bern