Victor Zuckerkandl (musicologist)

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Victor Zuckerkandl , also Viktor Zuckerkandl (born July 2, 1896 in Vienna , † April 24, 1965 in Ascona ), was an Austrian musicologist .

Life

He grew up as the son of the well-known urologist Otto Zuckerkandl and his wife Amalie, b. Schlesinger, in Vienna. As early as 1912 he was a student of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker and studied piano with Richard Robert. After serving in the First World War, he initially worked as a choir and orchestra conductor in Vienna. To complement his training, he studied musicology, art history and philosophy at the University of Vienna and graduated in 1927 with a dissertation on "Principles and methods of instrumentation in Mozart's dramatic works". In the years leading up to his escape from the National Socialists in 1938, he initially worked as a music critic, and from 1934 as an editor at Verlag Bermann Fischer. From 1940 to 1942 he taught musicology at Wellesley College in Boston and from 1942 to 1944 he worked in an armaments factory. From 1946 to 1948 he taught music theory at the New School in New York, from 1948 to 1964 at St. John's College in Annapolis. From 1960 to 1964 he gave regular lectures at the Eranos conferences in Ascona, where he also spent the last months of his life.

Act

Victor Zuckerkandl was deeply influenced by his teacher Heinrich Schenker , to whom he also confessed throughout his life. The fact that he mainly had to teach music to non-specialist students in the USA undoubtedly favored one of his main concerns, namely to do musicology not as an abstract approach to work, but always with a view to the human being. His own work aimed at a comprehensive understanding of music and musical experience in the intersection of music-psychological, anthropological and philosophical issues. In 1956 and 1959 he published two of his main works in English, and in 1963 the central work "The Reality of Music" in German. In musicology, he was a neglected outsider. It only found a greater response in the interdisciplinary Eranos Circle, to which such important researchers as Mircea Eliade , Karl Kerényi and Adolf Portmann belonged. A volume of Zuckerkandl's lectures given at the Eranos conferences was published in 1964 under the title “Vom musical thinking”. Zuckerkandl was not rediscovered in German-speaking musicology until the 1990s, primarily through the work of the ethnomusicologist Wolfgang Suppan .

meaning

"He dared to do something that was seldom undertaken and never really succeeded: an answer to the question about the nature of music, about its completely peculiar position and effect among the manifold modes of human expression."

- Erich von Kahler: What is music? On the life's work of Victor Zuckerkandl. in: Mercury. 19th vol. 10, 1965

Works (selection)

  • Sound and Symbol I. Music and the external work. Princeton 1956.
  • The Sense of Music. Princeton 1959.
  • The reality of music. Zurich 1963.
  • From musical thinking. Zurich 1964.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Suppan: Victor Zuckerkandl's Homo musicus . In: Franz Födermayr and Ladislav Burlas (eds.): Oskár Elschek on his 65th birthday . Bratislava 1998, p. 25-35 .
  2. ^ Gerhard Lipp: The music anthropological thinking of Victor Zuckerkandl. Hans Schneider, Tutzing 2002, ISBN 3-7952-1073-9
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Suppan: Article Zuckerkandl . In: The New Grove Encyclopaedia of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (London 2001), 875 f.
personal data
SURNAME Zuckerkandl, Victor
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zuckerkandl, Viktor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 2, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1965
Place of death Ascona