Le 28 juin 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
amphithéâtre 4
Séance - Musical Semiotics and Narrativity
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Sebastian Wanumen
Ecomusicology, as an emerging field within musicology, attempts to give systematic explanations of diverse relationships between nature and music. Consequently, eco-critical interpretation of musical texts has been of cardinal importance for ecomusicology. Hence, this paper addresses different positions towards nature from two modernist composers. On the one hand, Arnold Schönberg’s music has been widely studied in terms of religious status and compositional theories. Similarly, Manuel de Falla’s nationalism and modernism, has been part of several academic works. However, considerations on their views on nature and the way both represented it need to be surveyed. Thus, this paper aims to explain how Schönberg’s Moses und Aron and Falla’s El Amor Brujo represent a natural element and how this representation has a specific meaning in their aesthetic and philosophical conceptions. While analysing the musical language employed to represent fire, it is assessed Schonberg’s and Falla’s positions towards nature, this is ¿What did they think about nature and why? The paper concludes that the music reflects the function of nature that different cultural movements of modernism assigned to it. Therefore, Schoenberg’s representation of fire functions as an icon for “German superiority of the idea” (the twelve-tone-row, in this case) and its connection to Christian God, this is, an anthropocentric representation. On the other hand, Falla offers a more ecocentric representation of fire and nature that it is connected to modernist primitivism and post-tonal and modal devices. Ultimately, the paper calls to think about issues of representation and cultural meaning of nature.
