by Team
What does modern music history have to do with contingency?
Lecture by Prof. Dr Frank Hentschel (Cologne) on 10 February 2015, 6.15 pm, BIS-Saal
The lecture will argue that since the late 18th century, composers and music writers have endeavoured to understand musical works as non-contingent artefacts and music history as a non-contingent process. Presumably not least in order to legitimise the dignity of this acoustic art as the subject of a (new) science and to elevate the practitioners to the status of the educated middle classes, "de-contingentisation strategies" were developed to fulfil this claim. In this sense, the lecture considers the concept of music, the idea of musical logic, the idea of musical truth, development models of compositional practice and the concept of the canon - all terms and ideas that were only invented in the "modern age" - as strategies of de-contingentisation.