Le 29 juin 2017
de 16h00 à 16h30
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Alessandro Cecchi
Historically, the role of timbre and other aspects of music as sound have received scarce attention in Western art music theory and analysis. It is commonly accepted that Adorno was perhaps the first, during the late 1950s and 1960s, to consider timbre as a relevant, even constructive parameter of music in his writings on Wagner and Mahler. An earlier exception, dating back to the mid 1920s, was Ernst Kurth, having devoted considerable attention to music as an overall sound process and particularly to timbre and instrumental density in Bruckner’s symphonies. This idiosyncratic theorist proposed that the special focus on the interrelation of timbre, density, texture, register and dynamics is pivotal to grasp the innovative dimension of Bruckner’s symphonies. Kurth’s position implied an unprecedented epistemological construction of music as sound that relied on metaphysical assumptions leading to an overemphasis of timbre and density to the detriment of other parameters. Aim of this paper is to rethink Kurth’s approach in the light of recent epistemologies of music as sonorous unfolding in time and a listener’s experience. In this framework, the use of software will help to visualize, through spectrograms of recorded Bruckner’s symphonies, elements emerging from Kurth’s analytical insights. In so doing, the paper encourages the cross-fertilization of sound studies and Western art music studies.
