Mathias Spahlinger

Neil T. Smith, Martin Iddon, Martin Iddon

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789383362
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The first book-length study in English of composer Mathias Spahlinger, one of Germany's leading practitioners of contemporary music. One of the most stimulating and provocative figures on the new music scene on Germany, he has long been a touchstone for leftist, 'critical' composition there, yet his work has received very little attention in Anglophone scholarship until now.

Born in 1944, Spahlinger has risen only gradually to prominence in his native Germany and for many years was considered an outsider within the contemporary music scene. Yet, his position as one of the most venerable exponents of post-WWII modernism in his homeland is now undeniable: his music is regularly performed, he has received commissions from many of the major orchestras and new music groups in Germany, and in 2014 he received the Großen Berliner Kunstpreis (Berlin Art Prize – Grand Prize) from the city's Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).

Spahlinger is, however, becoming increasingly known as a significant figure within later twentieth-century music – in 2015, a festival in Chicago focused exclusively on his music, and he was a keynote speaker at a conference on Compositional Aesthetics and the Political at Goldsmiths, University of London.

This new book provides an essential reference for scholars of new music and twentieth-century modernism. There are no other book-length studies of Spahlinger in English, though there is a monograph and a book of essays in German, and books of interviews. This original work promises a more critical perspective upon the composer and his aesthetics and political ideas compared to previous publications. The illustrations include musical examples.

Its primary market will be a specialist musicological readership, including academics, researchers and composers, but the writing style such that it could be accessible also to undergraduates interested in the field. The discussion of aesthetic debates in post-war Germany, and the interesting reading of the work of Jacques Rancière, means that it could also have significant appeal across the disciplines of philosophy and critical theory.

Part 1

1

Modernism Underestimated

‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’

By way of introduction to the composer’s compositional project, this chapter engages with one of Spahlinger’s most important essays. Once this immediate impression of his aesthetic project has been established, a lengthier biography follows in the next chapter, showing how certain traits of German culture are manifest in the composer’s practice. The essay, ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’,¹ despite its rather opaque title, contains many of the ideas that drive Spahlinger, while also introducing the general rhetorical flavour of his writing. First given as a talk in Dresden in 2006, it discusses what it means to be progressive today, both in music and politics. In it, Spahlinger accuses composers of propagating the regressive ideology of the ruling classes: they are said to have blunted the revolutionary potential of the achievements of new music because of a fear of losing their relatively privileged position in society. Issues of politics and aesthetics are seen to have similar challenges and, perhaps, similar solutions. Spahlinger does not put his faith in one shining, positive answer. Rather, progress is to be made by a true reflection of an older revolutionary impulse. Immediately, Spahlinger’s essay presents a composer greatly concerned with the place of music and composers in society. Though he does not mention it by name, the debates around modernism are a vital backdrop to these concerns, an idea explored more fully at the end of this chapter where potential criticisms of the composer are related to pre-existing critiques of modernist positions.

The Potential of New Music and the Composer in Society

Two things immediately strike the reader about this essay, both of which are perhaps surprising for such a recent contribution to debates in new music. The first is Spahlinger’s undaunted belief in the unprecedented nature of the new music revolution: he states that ‘new music is or reflects the very revolution of revolutions’ because it ‘has discarded the conventions, without […] having replaced them with new conventions’.² No other music in the world, he contends, has achieved what music, or rather new music, has achieved since 1910. This thesis, that the revolutionary character of new music has gone unnoticed and is at present ‘underestimated’,³ is more systematically expounded in an earlier essay, ‘against the post-modern fashion’,⁴ which lists various achievements of new music such as ‘rigorous organisation’, ‘the alien or unintegratable in the work of art’ and ‘composition with time rather than in it’.⁵ The fact that these might appear like a list of new anti-convention conventions to replace the old will be returned to, but for Spahlinger it is important that they should be seen as open-ended rather than restrictive, nor does he consider his list exhaustive.

The second arresting feature of ‘this is the time’ is the continued use of unapologetic Marxian terminology to situate the position of the composer in society, a trait usually associated with engaged musicians of the 1960s and 1970s and, therefore, a sign of the legacy of 1968 in Spahlinger’s thought. He claims to know ‘not a single representative of the bourgeoisie who is truly interested in radical art’, while composers ‘look upward in search of funding’ as a ‘kind of competitive bicyclist of culture […] unified only by the name of a mutual sponsor’.⁶ Composers are said to inhabit a middle layer of society, the petit (or petty) bourgeoisie, who do not own the means of production but do have a major impact on the ideology, or dominant worldview, of any particular time. For Spahlinger, this position constitutes a certain kind of power to change society, if composers truly wished it.⁷ There is a utopian strain to this conception of political potential, which again is reminiscent of debates from previous decades.

The class-based analysis offered by Spahlinger, as well as his firm belief in the potential of new music, are employed to explore two theses: first, that the revolutionary potential of new music has still to be fully, or even partially, exploited; and second, in a challenge to composers, or indeed anyone involved in making new music, that ‘the dominant culture-bearer, the petty bourgeoisie, comes up with all kinds of “innovations” which resemble and stand in the way of new music to render her harmless, to rescind her promise’. He argues that ‘out of a poorly understood self-interest’, the petit bourgeoisie carry on the ‘ideological business of the real ruling class, the bourgeoisie’.⁸ So, political and aesthetic regression are combined, as members of this liminal class attempt to soften new music’s radical edge. Spahlinger believes that the way forward is to step outside this ideological cycle, and to embrace what was most radical about the advent of new music, both in aesthetics and politics. He states that ‘petit bourgeois composers want to know which direction is forward; but they don’t want to go there – out of fear of losing their privileges, even if these are not yet fully attained’.⁹

The view of society articulated here depicts the composer as potentially influential in defining the direction that culture takes, yet reliant on those ‘above’ to continue to practise their art. Fear of losing position blunts the radical potential of new music. In this, Spahlinger appears keenly aware of the paradoxes of holding the permanent revolutionary ideal of modernism within fixed institutions: he rejects the idea that composers are part of some monolithic modernist establishment together with arts institutions and the academy, arguing instead that they are creative figures within a financial ecosystem with particular pressures and expectations. Moreover, the composer in his view is not a free autonomous artistic agent making creative decisions as they please, this essay making no appeal to the idea of autonomous art that would excuse artistic collaboration with institutions on any terms.

Autonomy

Debates around musical autonomy have been a mainstay of critiques of modernism. Critics pick up on its supposed belief that there is a sphere of music divorced from society in which the innovation of musical language takes precedence over all else. Fodder for these commentaries is more than forthcoming in Milton Babbitt’s infamous ‘Who Cares If You Listen?’,¹⁰ from which it is not difficult to extract lengthy passages that talk of the ‘elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition’,¹¹ with the void to be replaced by composers writing for a connoisseurship cloistered in universities. For the version of European modernism explored here, however, the figure of Babbitt is fairly peripheral.¹² More significant are the views of Schoenberg, which Susan McClary argues are afflicted by ‘Terminal Prestige’.¹³ She contends that in Schoenberg’s autonomous world, music must advance, must progress, regardless of whether the public is in any way interested. That Schoenberg, according to McClary, took pride in his music being difficult, and worried about any kind of popular success, is a sign of an ‘economy of prestige’ at work that will result in a musical death spiral.¹⁴

Spahlinger in fact makes a similar criticism when he accuses composers, and the petit bourgeoisie in general, of denying their position in society and attempting to neutralize the revolutionary potential of art through insisting on an autonomous artistic sphere. The petit bourgeoisie are said to encourage the idea that art is a ‘dispassionate pleasantry’ without purpose, ‘thus its conception of ideology remains ideological. freedom from ideology becomes itself a kind of ideology’.¹⁵ The idea of autonomous music, according to the composer, is widely accepted even though music that has a function (such as a text) is much more common than that without. The assumption of art’s autonomy is seen as ideology now bereft of its progressive power: it defends the status quo. What was once an emancipatory impulse – the belief that music could stand alone without programme, patron, text or devotional occasion – now serves only to mask music’s social and political implications: ‘the function of autonomous music today is to disguise and deny its function’.¹⁶ This manifests itself in the widespread belief in the ‘transcendental’, that is, other-worldly, power of music. Spahlinger believes music is firmly of this world with potentially powerful real-world effects, a position that has come to some prominence in the Diesseitigkeit or ‘New Discipline’ composers in the twenty-first century.¹⁷

In his faith that the break between the music of pre- and post-1910 is the most important rupture in the history of Western art music (one that cannot even be paralleled in any other tradition), Spahlinger is quite in keeping with certain modernist ideas of teleological progress, including, for example, Adorno’s continued belief in the historical importance of early atonal works.¹⁸ For composers not wishing to follow Spahlinger in accepting the radicality of this break, and the necessity of this new understanding, there is the sense that their failings are not only musical but also political in his eyes. This presents a potentially troubling portrait of occidental superiority, one that would give quite a different perspective to the composer’s engagements with, for example, African drumming or South American Marxism. In this light, Spahlinger remains within the tradition of a politicized modernist discourse, one that was also in evidence in previous manifestations of European modernism such as Dadaism and the Futurists, in the more recent writings of Italian composer Luigi Nono and in the writings of the ’68-inspired German composers. With this he courts the same dangers as these figures, who have been critiqued for significant overestimation of the power of music to engage in political discourse and hostility towards opposing opinions on political, as much as aesthetic, grounds.

New Music and Self-Determination

The title of ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’ is a ‘portmanteau’¹⁹ of two quotations, one from Friedrich Hölderlin, the other from Marx and Engels. Hölderlin’s contribution is taken from his unfinished drama The Death of Empedocles and it introduces the search for apparently outmo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Conclusion
• Mathias Spahlinger: List of Works:
• Index