Publication:
Dialectical music and the Lehrstück

dc.contributor.advisor Mumford, Meg en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Peterson, John en_US
dc.contributor.author Aurin, Andreas en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2022-03-21T13:54:12Z
dc.date.available 2022-03-21T13:54:12Z
dc.date.issued 2013 en_US
dc.description.abstract This thesis contends that the Lehrstück (Learning Play) created by Bertolt Brecht and his composer collaborators – Weill, Hindemith, Eisler, Dessau, and Schwaen – is a dialectical genre that merges the realms of music and text in an interconnected, dialogic manner that is informed by Taoist and Marxist dialectical thought. Commencing with an original in-depth elaboration of how the Lehrstück emerged within the socio-historical and aesthetic framework of Neue Musik (New Music) in Weimar Germany, this thesis illuminates the musical and social strategies of Neue Musik, their impact on the Lehrstück genre, and their usefulness for the development of dialectical music. This thesis also investigates the nature of all Lehrstück collaborations, arguing that they demonstrate a prime example of collective creativity between writer and composer, in which the literary and musical realms are equally involved with, and challenged by, each other. The main argument of the thesis is that music and music-text relations in the Lehrstück are both the product and proponent of a dialectical method for analysing and conveying social realities. The thesis provides clarification of both dialectically conceived music and of how it relates to the text, by applying qualitative content analysis to the music of all six Lehrstücke. This analysis is informed by Jürg Boner’s notion of dialectic as “unity of representation and critique”. Within this unity, musical Verfremdung (defamiliarization) assists in the depiction of the social realities portrayed in each Lehrstück as contradictory, erratic and in a constant state of change. My analysis reveals and elaborates on the various modes of Verfremdung that occur in the Lehrstück choruses, solo vocal forms and purely instrumental pieces. It does so through organizing these modes of musical Verfremdung into a taxonomy consisting of three complexes: 1) musical parody, 2) the outer musical form (style, compositional technique, and instrumentation), and 3) the inner musical form (melody, harmony, and rhythm). This thesis aims to provide a detailed and accessible music-text analysis that results in an illumination of how dialectical music encourages both the performer and the audience participant to take an inquiring attitude towards the events represented and to commence their own social critique. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/53451
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher UNSW, Sydney en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.subject.other Music en_US
dc.subject.other Lehrstück en_US
dc.subject.other Dialectic en_US
dc.subject.other Brecht en_US
dc.title Dialectical music and the Lehrstück en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dcterms.accessRights open access
dcterms.rightsHolder Aurin, Andreas
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/16768
unsw.relation.faculty Arts Design & Architecture
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Aurin, Andreas, Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Mumford, Meg, Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Peterson, John, Arts and Media, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of the Arts & Media *
unsw.thesis.degreetype PhD Doctorate en_US
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