This small volume, the last in what its author describes as a “trilogy” on “die poetische Verwörtlichung von musikalischer Erfahrung” (7), opens a wide range of inquiries on music and literature, music aesthetics, and the philosophy of music. It offers a great deal of reflection on ways of talking about music, considering analytic and metaphorical vocabularies as well as the failings of each. It is, moreover, highly readable, both thanks to its elegant prose and because it avoids becoming weighed down by secondary sources. At the same time, however, the volume often gives the sense of being disconnected from discussions in music aesthetics and literary studies. The strongest chapters are the exceptions to this tendency, in which Görner engages with prior scholarship and cites fewer primary texts with more detail. Elsewhere, he refers rapidly to a large number of texts, often with fairly tenuous and highly associative connections between music and literature or between individuals, e.g., “Wie spielen Erzähler auf der Klaviatur ihrer sechsundzwanzig Grundbuchstaben im Verhältnis zu den achtundachtzig Tasten, auf denen Klaviervirtuosen brillieren?” (17) or “Ein verfremdetes Händel-Thema könnte in der Klangwelt eines Jimmy [sic] Hendrix enden, der ja vermutlich nicht umsonst das Haus neben jenem Händels in Londons Brook Street erworben hatte” (98). Somewhat surprisingly, given the title, the volume discusses the rhythmical elements of most of its texts very little; the expectations raised by the term “Schreibrhythmen” are at odds with the minimal attention to the formal-material features of language in general.
The “Kleines Präludium” explains the term “Schreibrhythmen” as the “klang-poetische[] Motorik im literarischen Schaffen und seinem Umgang mit musikalischen Formen” (7). In the first full chapter, “‘Singen nach unsichtbaren Noten.’ Hoffmanns Erzählen aus dem Geist der Musik,” Görner gives a helpful overview of Hoffmann’s work on and about music, noting analogies between Hoffmann’s own music-compositional techniques—especially modulations—and the narrative techniques of his “Fantasiestücke” (11), suggesting we read Johannes Kreisler as an avatar of Hoffmann’s musical-theoretical experiments (17), and locating Hoffmann within romantic discussions of the relation between music and language (19). Following Hoffmann, he explains that romanticism understands music as a language-like semiotic system that is both “Kunstproduktion und Erkenntnisleistung” (19).
The next two chapters, both on Friedrich Nietzsche, suffer from an unclarity of object and purpose. “Satyrenchor contra ‘einsamstes Lied’. Zu Friedrich Nietzsches Ästhetik des Chorischen” contrasts Nietzsche’s views on the tragic chorus with those of Schiller and Schlegel, ultimately contending that Zarathustra individualizes the chorus to a “Lied” that dramatizes the inner diremptions of a single subject, but in doing so the chapter drifts away from music. In “Denkrhythmen. Bemerkungen zu Friedrich Nietzsches musikpoetischen Überlegungen,” it is difficult to determine the locus of Görner’s arguments: if he aims to reveal something about Nietzsche, we would need more about Nietzsche’s interlocutors and what he responds to (as in quotations that clearly critique Eduard Hanslick and Arthur Schopenhauer [54–55]). If the chapter intends to draw out Nietzsche’s influence on subsequent thought (as in the discussion of Adorno on page 56), then later figures’ views do not receive adequate discussion. And if the goal is to uncover something significant about music by discussing Nietzsche, the chapter needs to make a case for Nietzsche in particular as the source of this significance. As it stands, the chapter hints at all three tasks without accomplishing any of them (though it does include a welcome moment of attention to the materiality of language in considering the rhythmical effects of Nietzsche’s Fettdruck [53–54]).
Chapter Four, “Im Klang der Verwandlung. Rilkes Fragen nach dem Wesen der Musik,” considers Rilke’s complex and changeable relation to music, caught between a desire to hear and elicit the “Melodie der Dinge” and a drive to move through or past music “zu einer noch unerhörten Stille” (63). The chapter considers Rilke’s relation to musicians and composers, indulges in a brief Heidegger excursus (66–67), notes parallels between early discussions of electronic sound and Rilke’s text Das Ur-Geräusch, addresses sounds in Malte (74–75), leaps to the Sonette an Orpheus for a paragraph (75), and then returns to Malte. The next chapter, “Reigen der Stimmen. Zu Arthur Schnitzlers musikalischem Erzählen,” is the strongest in the volume; it links Schnitzler’s interest in music and the voice to his psychological and medical training (80–82). Görner notes the general interest of Viennese modernism in synesthesia, which both took up and ultimately challenged the paradigm of the Gesamt-kunstwerk inherited from Richard Wagner (79). The chapter discusses “Welch eine Melodie,” “Leutnant Gustl,” “Schicksal des Freiherrn von Leisenbohg,” and “Fräulein Else” in some detail; these readings are by and large illuminating. (Though Görner claims incorrectly that only the letter E in Else’s name can be spelled musically [92]; canonically E-flat—in German, Es—is used for S, as in Shostakovich’s “D-S-C-H” [D, E-flat, C, B-natural] motif. This may be petty, but if an author wants to make interpretive hay out of musical spellings, he should get them right.)
Chapter Six, “Fremdklänge oder: Neues vom verlorenen Subjekt” begins by suggesting the performance of music in Auschwitz as paradigm of defamiliarization and then unacceptably aestheticizes the techniques of genocide by describing the numbers tattooed on concentration-camp inmates as a “Generalbaßziffer des Todes” (94). The chapter moves rapidly between interlocutors, for example referring to Dahl-haus, Elgar, Busoni, Mahler, T.S. Eliot, Heinze, and Pfitzner all on two pages (102–103), in order to arrive at the idea that Verfremdung is a fitting category for the aesthetics of music (104), which seems difficult to doubt. In “‘Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms’: Im Grabenkrieg der Dissonanzen,” Görner takes up questions of dissonance and noise in modernism. Recognizing dissonance as both a cultural-metaphorical and a musical category, Görner catalogues strategies of deploying different kinds of lack-of-harmony in music around, responding to, or heard in WWI (for example in war zones, composers tended to emphasize metaphorical dissonances between the harmony of music and the violence of war; in non-war zones, more literal harmonic dissonance in musical structures predominated [112]). He tracks a general emancipation of noise as the extension of the emancipation of dissonance as a cultural as well as musical experience (116). The chapter thus refuses the characterization of musical metaphors as ‘merely’ metaphorical versus literal musical structures as ‘truly’ musical, noting the importance of both as music-based strategies of cultural production.
In “‘Verstehen ist immer gestimmtes.’ Über ein (musik-)hermeneutisches Problem,” Görner addresses the problem of understanding music as the “sprach-und ge-genstandfernste unter den Künsten” (117), most extensively by way of the debates between formalist and hermeneutic approaches in the philosophy of music (119). The chapter raises the question of different kinds of hearing and attention and their location in the body; the need for performative thinking or thinking of performance in music and music interpretation; and the role of literary modernism in posing questions of understanding and/in music with particular urgency precisely because the category of understanding becomes unstable (128–29). Görner takes more note of existing scholarly conversations here than he does elsewhere, in particular in drawing on Roger Scruton and Gunnar Hindrichs. A brief set of notes Görner prepared to interview the composer Wolfgang Rihm makes a sort of coda; they are primarily a description of the opera plus lists of questions, with far more attention to plot and characters than to musical forms, textures, or instrumentation.
In sum, then, this is a well-written and wide-ranging volume that may point to directions of further inquiry to scholars with an interest in music and literature. Specialists in those topics or in any of Görner’s main authors will likely not find much new here but should appreciate the intellectual company their topics keep.
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