Utility music

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Utility music describes music that is used for extra-musical contexts. Mostly it is seen as the opposite of Absolute Music .

The term utility music has been common since the 1920s and is also common in English. On the one hand he is independent of time for the terminology of musicology that, sometimes (ab) use it sometimes neutral judgmental, on the other hand, he was about a decade to "aesthetic slogan" a generation of composers after World War II, making it something of a genre for works who opposed the concert system of the time, such as Paul Hindemith's children's opera We Build a City (1930).

Nettl: Scientific origins

The musicologist Paul Nettl was one of the first to use the term in 1922. He devoted himself to the history of dance music and found in the term "music for use" a term for dance music that is also used for dancing - as opposed to music that is performed in concerts . Johann Strauss Sohn, for example, wrote dance waltzes in his earlier days and concert waltzes in his later days , which were no longer premiered for dancing, which helped him to achieve a higher status as a composer. Of course, Nettl was referring to something more distant, the music of the 17th century, and differentiated there “dance forms of use” from “more highly stylized forms of dance”.

Hindemith: New way of composing

After the First World War , “everyday music” seemed to point the way out of a solidification of the musical world and was on everyone's lips during the years of the Weimar Republic . The division of labor and professionalization in music and the lack of life in the concert industry were lamented. Social currents such as the youth movement and artistic ones such as the New Objectivity welcomed a musical practice that dealt more with everyday life than the art music of the 19th century. The “use value” of all art was invoked.

The composer Paul Hindemith made everyday music (for him it was the opposite of “concert music”) for a time as part of his work program. His provocative opera Neues vom Tage (1929) was placed in this context. Some of his contemporaries joined the trend, even if they did not speak of utility music themselves. The German term appeared in the Anglo-Saxon press in the early 1930s. Even as Igor Stravinsky , Kurt Weill , Ernst Krenek , Hanns Eisler , Carl Orff and other composers will be mentioned in connection with use of music.

Besseler: From ideal to political instrumentalization

The musicologist Heinrich Besseler took up the term and used it very generally in a theory of music that was based on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger . Besseler viewed the commercial music of his time critically and contrasted it with an ideal of "the happy self-evident nature of a closed musical tradition" that he saw in late medieval music.

Besseler was able to identify a new turn to the real world, combined with devotion and emotion, in the reform efforts of National Socialism , which from 1933 cultivated a practice of everyday music against its former protagonists Hindemith and Kurt Weill . After 1945 Besseler only used the term "common music".

Adorno: Music-sociological skepticism

The philosopher and music critic Theodor W. Adorno was skeptical of the “common ground” through everyday music, including the appreciation of amateur music, and preferred the “inwardness” and professionalism of Absolute Music . On the other hand, he wrote of Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that this was “music for use that can really be used”.

The sociology of music that Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed in exile in the 1930s viewed musical functions with a critical distance from ideological and commercial instrumentalizations, which led to the term functional music .

"Applied Music"

Related, but less distinctive, is the term applied music (the opposite of which is usually called pure music ). In addition to opera, it is mainly used for stage music , film music , radio music and other media music and can also be found in the names of various university courses.

In the 19th century the mathematical and physical aspects of music theory were called “pure music” and its practical application was called “applied music”.

literature

  • Stephen Hinton: The Idea of ​​Utility Music: A Study of Musical Aesthetics in the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) with Particular Reference to the Works of Paul Hindemith, Garland, New York 1989. ISBN 978-0824020095
  • Wolfgang Lessing: Music and Society. The problem of "everyday music". In: Wolfgang Rathert , Giselher Schubert (ed.): Music culture in the Weimar Republic. Schott, Mainz et al. 2001, ISBN 3-7957-0114-7 , pp. 180-188 ( Frankfurter Studien 8 Schott Musikwissenschaft ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Stephen Hinton: Nutzmusik, in: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht: Terminology of Music in the 20th Century, Steiner, Stuttgart 1995, p. 164.
  2. ^ Paul Nettl: Contribution to the history of dance music in the 17th century. In: Journal of Musicology. 4: 1922, H. 5, pp. 257-265, here p. 258.
  3. Rüdiger Zymner: Handbuch Literäre Rhetorik, de Gruyter, Berlin 2015, p. 159. ISBN 978-3110318159
  4. Stephen Hinton: Nutzmusik, in: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht: Terminology of Music in the 20th Century, Steiner, Stuttgart 1995, p. 168.
  5. "In the Holyell music room, children [...] present the new music for everyday use , which is used extensively in education in Germany. The children perform Hindemith's 'We build a city' ”, ballet and chorale works in Oxford. In: The Times , June 23, 1931, p. 14 (translated from English).
  6. Thomas Schipperges: The Heinrich Besseler Files: Musicology and Science Policy in Germany 1924 to 1949 , Strube 2005, p. 35. ISBN 978-3899120875
  7. ^ Theodor W. Adorno: Nutzmusik, in: Gesammelte Werke, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, Vol. 19, pp. 445–447.
  8. Adorno, Die Dreigroschenoper , in: Die Musik (21), 1928, also in: Gesammelte Werke, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, vol. 19, p. 138.
  9. z. B. Dietrich Stern (ed.): Applied music of the 20s. Exemplary attempts at society-related musical work for theater, film, radio, mass entertainment , Argument, Berlin 1977.
  10. z. B. the diploma course media composition and applied music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (as of 2016).
  11. Ignaz Jeitteles : Aesthetic Lexicon: An Alphabetical Handbook for the Theory of the Philosophy of the Fine and Fine Arts, Gerold, Vienna 1837, Vol. 2, p. 247.