Formt die Technik die Musik? Montageästhetik zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts

Does technology shape music? Aesthetics of assembly at the beginning of the 20^th century. This article deals with the relationship between assembly in production technology and similar processes in musical composition. Can composers like Eric Satie, Igor Strawinsky or George Antheil, who used assembly methods in some of their compositions, be called assemblers? The authors point out that all three composers used assembly methods in different ways and with different purposes. Applying a theoretical approach inspired by media studies they come to the conclusion that the conditions under which musical works using assembly methods are shaped do not originate in technology but in the aesthetic convictions of the composer. Apart from assembly methods there are many other compositional principles the composer relies on. Technology may inspire music but does not determine the musical outcome.     

‘Seeing in the Dark’: Franz Joseph Thun and his Encyclopedia

Abstract

In the late 1790s the extravagant Bohemian aristocrat Franz Joseph Thun (1734–1801) composed a massive encyclopedia containing his wide-ranging and esoteric knowledge, which was not discovered until 2009. In this article I discuss the contents of his encyclopedia and investigate Thun’s place within the broader intellectual climate in Central Europe. I argue that Thun was an exceptional case in the Habsburg context, where scientists generally rejected outright the sort of excesses his encyclopedia contains. None the less, he became famous for his experiments with a spirit named ‘Gablidon’ and for his sessions in Mesmerism. His encyclopedia focuses on three topics: human ethics, man’s place in nature, and the sins of the French Revolution. He saw man as the middle link in the ‘great chain of being’, whose morality must be based on submission to God. Although he distanced himself from the Catholic Church, he rejected the French Revolution as an attempt to establish a state without religious basis.     

A. E. Nordenskiöld in Swedish memory: the origin and uses of Arctic heroism

ABSTRACT

For Nordic nations scientific activities in the Polar Regions proved significant in defining national identities and shaping scientific profiles. Starting in the nineteenth century and continuing throughout the next century, polar research proved instrumental in inculcating national honour and expressing small-state colonial aspirations. It provided a source of heroes for forging collective memory and the fostering of youth by presenting the polar explorer as a model character. This study explores the ideological lineage of the nineteenth century polar hero by first relating this idol to historical archetypes of Western culture. It identifies the special traits of the Nordic polar hero and discusses how it was used for patriotic purposes. As a case in point the article looks at the career of the Finnish-Swedish mineralogist and Arctic expedition leader Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld and the ways he, with the help of others, successfully navigated not only the drift ice of polar seas but also the international republic of science, and the three national scenes of Sweden, Finland and Russia. In the process he was turned into a national hero both in Finland and Sweden, and presented as a patriotic role model for adolescents in the arts of postponing gratification and enduring hardship.