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COPYRIGHT 2003 University of Washington
RESEARCH FELLOW OF THE FUND FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH--FLANDERS (BELGIUM)
1. INTRODUCTION
AT THE DARMSTADT SUMMER COURSES of 1951, Karel Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen played the second part of Goeyvaerts's Nr. 1, the sonata for two pianos. Immediately after the performance, Adorno, who had taken the place of Schoenberg as the leader of the composition seminar, discussed the disproportion between the scoring and the economical use of the musical material: "Why did you compose this for two pianos?" Goeyvaerts's legitimation of his choice made clear that a composition seminar anno 1951 could not abstain from aesthetic and philosophical issues. Confronted with Goeyvaerts's and Stockhausen's analysis of the sonata, some participants of the seminar pointed out the strong similarity between Goeyvaerts's aesthetic views and the philosophy of Being of Martin Heidegger. At that time, Goeyvaerts apparently wasn't familiar with Heidegger's philosophy in general, let alone his ontological aesthetics. (1) In the correspondence between Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen, which started after the summer courses and is an important source of knowledge concerning the aesthetic and technical aspects of early serialism, the name of Martin Heidegger is mentioned several times. In a letter of August 10th, 1951, (2) Stockhausen makes mention of Heidegger's Holzwege, a volume of essays published in 1950, which contains, among others, the lecture "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" ("The Origin of the Work of Art"). (3)
Although this lecture, originally given in 1936, was widely known among philosophers and artists, it is not clear whether Goeyvaerts effectively read it. On the one hand, Christoph von Blumroder states that Herman Sabbe's mention of "an intensive occupation of both composers [Stockhausen and Goeyvaerts] with Heidegger" must be strongly qualified. (4) On the other hand, it seems to me that it is a risky step to conclude, as does Eduardo Marx in his book Heidegger und der Oft der Musik, that there exists a "principal incompatibility" between Heidegger's aesthetics and the new music, and that all parallels are due to a "superficial reception" of Heidegger's philosophy. (5) At the risk of being myself a superficial reader of Heidegger, I will try to shed some light on this aspect by investigating whether and how certain key concepts of Heidegger's aesthetics can be philosophically corroborating for Goeyvaerts's aesthetic views.
In his preparations for the course on music history he was teaching from September 1950 onwards, Goeyvaerts wrote down some notes containing his aesthetic views on music of that time. (6) Before submitting these to a Heideggerian interpretation, I must for the sake of clarity point to the following: Goeyvaerts's aesthetics are delivered to us not in the form of an elaborated theory, but as a relatively small collection of stray notes which aren't supported by a strong philosophical argument. Nevertheless these notes have to be taken seriously for their historical value as much as for their contents for the following reasons. The notes were probably written down from September or October 1950 onwards, i.e., just after Goeyvaerts had completed his three years of study at the Paris Conservatoire with Messiaen and Milhaud. It is to be expected that the ideas Goeyvaerts developed in Paris under the influence of Milhaud's and especially Messiaen's teachings and in the exchange of ideas with, among others, Pierre Boulez and Jean Barraque' can be found in these notes in their purest form. Above all, the notes are of importance as far as they reveal the deeper-lying aesthetic motives for the development of total serialism. In this respect, their fragmentary character doesn't detract from their value as a key to the deeper sense of...
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