Walter Wiora

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Walter Wiora (born December 30, 1906 in Katowice ; † February 8, 1997 in Tutzing ) was a German musicologist and music historian .

life and work

Wiora did her doctorate in Freiburg with Wilibald Gurlitt and then worked as an employee at the German Folk Song Archive in Freiburg. He was at the request of 19 May 1937 NSDAP - Member no. 4,715,785. In 1940 he wrote an article on folk song research in Alfred Rosenberg's magazine “Die Musik” under the title: “The minor key in the folk song of the Germans in Poland and in the Polish folk song”. Wiora received his habilitation in 1941 and in 1942 he was a lecturer at the "Reich University of Posen". At the same time he worked as a music critic for the magazine " Das Reich ".

After the Second World War he returned to the German Folk Song Archive in 1946, where he worked as an archivist and head of the music department until 1958. In 1957 he founded the Herder Research Center for Music History, which he headed until 1962. Since October 1958 he was professor of musicology at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel. In 1962/63 he was a visiting professor at Columbia University . He then worked from 1964 to 1972 at the University of Saarland as a musicological professor. Werner Braun was his successor in Saarbrücken .

Wiora first dealt with the German song . In his opinion, the folk song has died out in its first existence , the authentic rural one, and has been replaced by its second existence as a bourgeois representative song.

The four world ages of music

In his main work, The Four World Ages of Music , Walter Wiora gives an overall draft of the history of music . The first chapter, prehistoric and early times, deals with the hunter culture of the Stone Age, it deals with religious rituals ( medicine man ), sedentarism and burials and examines the characteristics of "primeval" music in the survival of indigenous peoples. According to Wiora, large instruments such as huge drums or alphorns are a feature of such cultures. He tries analytically to differentiate between genuinely primitive music and repressed music. This age is more productive than the first impression suggests.

In the second chapter he examines music and musical life in the advanced cultures of antiquity. He draws conclusions about the even older musical cultures of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Mesopotamians from the old Jewish texts and synagogal chants . He examines the trend towards the desensitization and internalization of musical life in Jewish and Christian antiquity. According to Wiora, this is the reason why no organs are used in Orthodox Christian churches.

In the third age he investigated the Orient and Occident and gave occidental music a special position, similar to what the Greeks had in philosophy and mathematics in antiquity. He illuminates the unique theoretical penetration of the subject in the disclosure of the laws of music, without displacing the natural through coercive orders.

In the fourth chapter on the age of technology and global industrial culture, he describes the conquest of "new territory" and the narrowing to the limits of music since the 19th century, for example with Max Reger or Claude Debussy . In part he discovers a reversal of the laws of the first age, in the other part an ideologization, dehumanization and the confrontation with it. The focus here is on the intentions of new music , but includes "revolutionary" rock. Walter Wiora approves of jazz more than a mixture of European harmony and African rhythm and style of presentation.

Wiora has also recorded a multi-part radio program on this subject that was broadcast by Bayerischer Rundfunk.

Fonts

  • The minor key in the folk song of the Germans in Poland and in the Polish folk song. In: Die Musik XXXII / 1940, pp. 158–162
  • The German folk song style and the East = writings on musical folklore and racial studies Volume 4. Kallmeyer, Wolfenbüttel 1940
  • The formation of variants in the folk song: A contribution to systematic musicology , de Gruyter, Berlin, 1941
  • The real folk song Müller-Thiergarten-Verlag, Heidelberg 1950
  • The Rhenish-Bergisch melodies in Zuccalmaglio and Brahms , old songs in a romantic color, Bad Godesberg 1953
  • The special historical position of Western music , Schott's Sons, Mainz, 1959
  • Historical and systematic musicology . - Schneider, Tutzing 1972
  • The four world ages of music, a universal historical draft , dtv 1988, ISBN 342304473X (extended new edition)
  • Saarbrücken studies in musicology , Bärenreiter-Verl., Kassel

Secondary literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Fred K. Prieberg : Handbook of German Musicians 1933–1945 , Kiel 2004, CD-Rom-Lexikon, p. 7796
  2. ^ A b Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 669.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 670.
personal data
SURNAME Wiora, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German musicologist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Katowice
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1997
Place of death Tutzing