Helga de la Motte-Haber

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Helga de la Motte-Haber (* 2. October 1938 in Ludwigshafen ) is a German musicologist with the Chair of Systematic Musicology .

Life

Helga Haber was the first child of Paula Haber, b. Kilian, and the physicist and mathematician Gustav Haber. Two brothers followed in 1939 and 1941. According to her own statement, she survived the Second World War and the post-war period “in the furthest Palatinate” (Winseln, Leutershausen and Frankelbach ) - a few kilometers from the French border and the Siegfried Line. She attended school in Kaiserslautern and in Kusel , where she graduated from high school in 1957 . Her father also taught at the grammar school.

In 1957 Helga Haber began studying psychology at the University of Mainz with Albert Wellek , a representative of holistic psychology at the Leipzig School . His fields of work were music psychology and synesthesia . In 1959 Helga Haber moved to Vienna, where Hubert Rohracher taught in the tradition of Viennese psychology. After a short trip to the University of Hamburg to see Peter R. Hofstätter , she then completed her diploma in psychology with Wellek at the Psychological Institute of the University of Mainz in December 1961.

Four weeks later, Helga Haber and Diether de la Motte , composer and music theorist, married. After her husband accepted a call to the Hamburg University of Music and Theater , Helga de la Motte-Haber continued her studies at Hamburg University . Here she met the private lecturer Hans-Peter Reinecke (1927–2003) through Hofstätter . She decided to study musicology and learned to play the piano for a year in preparation .

Reinecke gathered a group of young musicologists around him - in addition to Helga de la Motte-Haber, Klaus-Ernst Behne, Ekkehard Jost , Günter Kleinen and Eberhard Kötter. When Reinecke was commissioned to set up the acoustics department at the State Institute for Music Research in 1965 , the group went to Berlin together.

Helga de la Motte received her doctorate in 1967 in Hamburg with the study A contribution to the classification of musical rhythms - an experimental psychological investigation . In 1968 she met the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus (1928–1989) at a congress , who brought her to the Musicological Institute of the Technical University of Berlin that same year . Helga de la Motte taught there for many years. In 1971 she was able to complete her habilitation cumulatively due to her extensive publications and in 1972 she received a call to the Cologne University of Education . Dahlhaus' efforts to get her permanent at the Berlin institute were successful in 1978: Helga de la Motte received a professorship for systematic musicology at the TU Berlin , which she held until her retirement in 2005.

In 1983, Helga de la Motte, who is committed to teaching sound art , founded the German Society for Music Psychology together with Klaus-Ernst Behne and Günter Kleinen .

Positions

With more than 300 publications (as of 2014), Helga de la Motte-Haber has contributed to the recognition of the subjects of systematic musicology and music psychology and has been developing their forward-looking new concepts since the 1970s.

Realignment

In contrast to the conception of systematic musicology of the 1950s, which was relatively distant from art and based on elementary psychology of hearing and sound psychology , and whose representatives are Heinrich Husmann (1908–1983) or Albert Wellek (1904–1972), Helga de la Motte-Haber saw the The future of the subject can only be secured through a reorientation: de la Motte-Haber viewed the psychoacoustic approaches - such as the determination of hearing thresholds and the degree of consonance of intervals - critically, as there is no clear correspondence between acoustic reality and musical perception. From the 1970s onwards, she replaced these older subject areas with subjects such as understanding music, musical judgment and dealing with music. Her dissertation, A Contribution to the Classification of Musical Rhythms (1968), showed new methodological approaches in the objective recording of music-related judgments. The polarity profile , also known as the semantic differential , played a central role as a psychological measuring instrument.

Understanding music

In her 1982 contribution, Scope, Method and Aim of Systematic Musicology , Helga de la Motte-Haber already formulated the understanding of music as a new objective of the subject . In place of the search for the temporally valid, "the highest laws of the art of music", as Guido Adler still had in mind in his conception of the subject published in 1885, the relationship between music and listener can be changed over time. The emotional impact of music in particular becomes a challenge for research. The expanded concept of music takes into account traditional European art music and includes contemporary and popular music .

Helga de la Motte-Haber programmatically formulated the special demands of music psychology as a branch of systematic musicology in the text on the back of the first yearbook of music psychology (1984) that she edited : “ Music psychology research deals with problems of access to music. The development of music in our century has thus become a prerequisite for scientific work ”.

A comprehensive formulation of this new technical concept can be found in the Handbuch der Musikpsychologie from 1985. It is thanks to this book that German-speaking music psychology, by focusing on cognitive psychology, found connection with the Anglo-American development of psychomusicology. At the same time, however, the specifically German research tradition of music psychology with representatives such as Ernst Kurth and Hermann von Helmholtz was highlighted. The conception of music psychology presented in this book explains the musical experience and understanding from different perspectives: This includes the language analogy of music as well as the development of musical preferences, questions of musical talent or interpretation research.

Helga de la Motte-Haber made a public contribution to the importance of music psychology as a science relevant to everyday life in the late 1980s with her experiments on the influence of listening to music on behavior while driving. The driving simulator studies on the question of influencing driving behavior under the influence of different styles of music resulted in a previously unknown press response in the field of music psychology .

Art-philosophical approach

From the 1990s onwards, Helga de la Motte-Haber developed a further research approach in which the relationship between music and other arts is thematized and a comprehensive art philosophy ( aesthetics ) for the 20th and 21st centuries is developed. Outwardly, this approach is reflected in publication titles such as Music and Fine Arts (1990), Music and Religion (1995), Sound Art (1999) or Music and Nature (2000). Central figures of thought in these publications are the emphasis on the historical limitation of the conception of a temporal art (e.g. music) separate from spatial art (e.g. painting), the "crossing of boundaries as a meaning in the music of the 20th century" (according to the author in the eponymous Chapter of the book Music and Religion ), the special position of music within the arts since antiquity due to the possibility of delimiting everyday consciousness, or the “de-hierarchization of the arts” in the 20th century as the basis for the emergence of new or superimposed art movements (such as sound art ).

Music in the 20th century

One focus of the work of Helga de la Motte-Haber is contemporary music with a special focus on musical trends in which music and the visual arts enter into new relationships. These works are based on sensual perception and aesthetic experience as the basis for the description and interpretation of these new art developments. Helga de la Motte-Haber not only adopts her own approaches from music psychology, but also traces the development in the relationship between the arts, which in the 20th century revived the old ideal of an integral art that appeals to all the senses instead of the aesthetic of the genre. In addition, she helped sound art, which began in Fluxus and the installation art of the 1960s, to gain recognition as an independent new musical appearance. Important publications on this were (in addition to the volume "Klangkunst") the catalogs that she also edited for the two Sonambiente exhibitions in Berlin in 1996 and 2006. Evidence of her commitment to musicological engagement with contemporary music is the volume she published in 2000, History of Music in the 20th Century, Vol. 4: 1975–2000 .

In addition to her fundamental work on the development of art in the 20th and 21st centuries, Helga de la Motte-Haber was also committed to promoting the musical avant-garde for many years , so she was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Positions - Contributions to New Music . Her seminars and lectures at the conferences of the Darmstadt Institute for New Music and Music Education are aimed at conveying the musical avant-garde in school music lessons.

Technical consolidation

The last phase of her life's work for the time being is dedicated to Helga de la Motte-Haber's permanent academic establishment of the subject of systematic musicology . The six-volume manual of systematic musicology , which she designed and published , establishes the professional autonomy compared to traditional historical musicology . The main pillars of the concept can be found in the titles of the individual volumes: music aesthetics (as art theory without normative claims), music theory (as a time-spanning foundation of music), music psychology (as the theory of understanding and experiencing music ), music sociology (as the theory of the social functions of Music), as well as a volume on the acoustic fundamentals of music , edited by Stefan Weinzierl . The concept is supplemented by a "Lexicon of Systematic Musicology". The ethnomusicology is not considered as a sub-area because it has meanwhile established itself as an independent subject. According to Helga de la Motte-Haber the tray has Musicology by the volumes of the Handbook of Systematic Musicology "again reaches its full width."

Prizes and awards

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Music psychology . In: C. Dahlhaus (ed.): Introduction to systematic musicology . Gerig, Cologne 1971, pp. 53-92, ISBN 3-87252-050-4 .
  • B. Barthelmes: German Society for Music Psychology. Annual meeting in Hanover from February 22 to 24, 1985 . In: The music research . Volume 38, 1985, p. 304.
  • Reinhard Copyz et al .: Musicology between art, aesthetics and experiment. Festschrift Helga de la Motte-Haber for her 60th birthday . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998, ISBN 3-8260-1524-X .
  • Andreas C. Lehmann and Reinhard copyz (eds.): 25 years of the German Society for Music Psychology (1983–2008) . University of Music and Theater, Hanover 2008, ISBN 3-931852-79-2
  • Helga de la Motte-Haber: My life in music psychology in Germany . In: Psychomusicology (Special issue: The history of the psychology of music in autobiography), 2009, Volume 20, No. 1 & 2, pp. 79-88, ISSN  0275-3987 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ List of publications up to 1997 in: Reinhard Copyz et al .: Musicology between art, aesthetics and experiment. Festschrift Helga de la Motte-Haber for her 60th birthday . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1998.
  2. ↑ New handbook of musicology. Vol. 10, p. 12.
  3. ↑ Foreword music aesthetics. Vol. 1, p. 13.
  4. ↑ Laudation for the 2010 award ceremony.
personal data
SURNAME La Motte-Haber, Helga de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigshafen am Rhein