Hanns-Werner Heister

Hanns-Werner Heister (born June 14, 1946 in Plochingen , Baden-Württemberg) is a German musicologist .

Live and act

He studied musicology, German and linguistics in Tübingen, Frankfurt a. M. and Berlin, received his doctorate in Berlin in 1977 on the aesthetics, sociology and history of the concert institution and completed his habilitation in 1993 at the University of Oldenburg with studies in music analysis. From 1971 to 1992 he worked as a freelance music journalist for various radio stations, newspapers and magazines. After numerous teaching assignments and visiting professorships (including in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Weimar and Vienna) he was Professor of Music History and Music Communication in Dresden from 1992 to 1998 and Professor of Musicology in Hamburg from 1998 until his retirement in 2011 .

He is co-editor of the lexicon Contemporary Composers, which has been published as a loose-leaf collection since 1992 . Since 1995 he has been an elected member of the learned society Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin .

research

His wide-ranging research is centered on an analysis of music and music culture critical of rule and society and can be assigned to four subject areas:

• 1. Music-sociological question: Music in social reality, both in the present and in history (since 1970; programmatic musicology as social science at the International Musicological Congress Bonn 1970). The focus is on media / institutions such as the concert or the jukebox , background music, sound ecology, open-air music, music during Nazism, in resistance and in exile.

• 2. Aesthetic music issue: Social as well as natural reality in music. The focus here is on music as a specific language. A first focus is on political music, in which the conscious reference to society is concentrated. Further focal points are the combination of music with other arts, opera and musical theater as well as music and visual arts and finally aspects and elements of the arts as a whole. The subject of music-language also includes mathematics, researched more intensively since 2001; In addition to its structural significance, it also serves to deepen and expand the musical semantics . For a theory of similarity and a more precise definition of fuzziness, Heister has also been using fuzzy logic since 2009 .

• 3. Music-cultural-geographic (“music-ethnological”) question: music in its global cultural and idiomatic differentiation. The starting point here was the interest in the new, the different, the unusual, the strange; scientific occupation with jazz (since 1978), Latin American music (since 1984) and Isang Yun (since 1987), improvisation (since 2008).

• 4. Music anthropological question: music and human nature / human nature in music (since 1984). The focus here is on the beginnings of music, the emergence of art, music and the human senses (concretized in the concept of the 'mimetic ceremony'). Since 2005, Heister has also increasingly included psychoanalysis here.

Publications (selection)

• The concert . Theory of a cultural form, 2 volumes, Wilhelmshaven 1983 (Verlag F. Noetzel)
• Jazz , Kassel a. a. 1983 (Bärenreiter-Verlag)
• From the generally applicable novelty . Analyzes of committed music: Dessau, Eisler, Ginastera, Hartmann, ed. by Thomas Phleps and Wieland Reich, Saarbrücken 2006 (Pfau-Verlag)
• (with Ines Gellrich, photographs) Infinity. Encounters with György Ligeti , Freiburg i. Br. 2008 (Modo-Verlag)
• Background sound art. A contribution to acoustic ecology (edition Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, published by Rolf W. Stoll), Mainz 2010 (Verlag Schott Music)
• Music and Music Politics in Fascist Germany , Frankfurt a. M. 1984 (Fischer paperback)
• (with W.-W. Sparrer) The composer Isang Yun , Munich 1987; 2nd ext. Edition Munich 1997 (Verlag text + kritik)
• (with W.-W. Sparrer) contemporary composers (loose-leaf encyclopedia, since 1992, so far 43 deliveries). Munich (Verlag text + kritik)
• Between Enlightenment & Culture Industry , 3 volumes, Hamburg 1993 (Von Bockel-Verlag)
• Charles Ives, 1874-1954. American pioneer of new music ¸ Trier 2004 (Atlantic texts, vol. 23)
• Music and. A series of publications by the Hamburg University of Music and Theater , 3 volumes, 2000, Hamburg, Von Bockel-Verlag; New series, 11 volumes, 2001–2011 (Weidler Buchverlag Berlin)
• Between / tones. Music and other arts , series, from 1995 (Weidler Buchverlag Berlin)
• [Nachlass-Edition] Harry Goldschmidt: The word in instrumental music: The ritornelle in Schubert's Winterreise , Hamburg 1996 (Between / Töne. Music and other arts, Vol. 1) (Von Bockel-Verlag)
• [Estate edition]: Harry Goldschmidt: The word in Beethoven's instrumental accompaniment (Beethoven Studies III), Cologne a. a. 1999 (European Cultural Studies, Vol. 9) (Verlag Böhlau)
• Music / Revolution , 3 volumes, Hamburg 1996/97 (Von Bockel-Verlag)
• "Degenerate Music" 1938 - Weimar and the ambivalence , 2 volumes, Saarbrücken 2001 (Pfau-Verlag)
• History of Music in the 20th Century , Vol. III: 1945–1975, Laaber 2005 (Laaber-Verlag)
• On the ambivalence of modernity (series Music / Society / History), 4 volumes, Vol. 1 2005; Vol. 2-4 2007 (Weidler Buchverlag Berlin)
• Layers, history, system . Geological metaphors and forms of thought in the arts (series Zwischen / Töne, new series, vol. 6), Berlin 2016 (Weidler Buchverlag)
• (with Hanjo Polk) Moving and moving. The concept of motif in the arts and sciences (Music / Society / History series, Vol. 7), Berlin 2017 (Weidler Buchverlag)
• Honorary members of the Stuttgart State Theater 1912–2018 . Theater history in portraits, Stuttgart 2018 (Kohlhammer Verlag)

literature

• Thomas Phleps and Wieland Reich (eds.): Music contexts. Festschrift for Hanns-Werner Heister. 2 volumes, Münster 2011, Monsenstein and Vannerdat publishing houses, ISBN 978-3-86991-320-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Hanns-Werner Heister in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage of Hanns-Werner Heister