Message #24876

[guest2]

Thank you Mr. Gauk for that clarification. From our own Mr. Hinton's younger brother Stephen comes this interesting addition about Gebrauchsmusik:

Gebrauchsmusik is a term adopted in Germany in the early 1920s, first in musicological circles and then in music criticism. Within a decade it had become a slogan with international currency, causing some of those who had initially contributed to its prominence either to distance themselves from it or to abandon it altogether.

The term arose from attempts to challenge, or at least to relativise, its conceptual antonym – musical autonomy. Invariably its use implies, if not actually involves, an opposite term as part of a dualistic system of thought. One of the first writers to employ Gebrauchsmusik systematically as one half of a binarism was the musicologist Paul Nettl. In his study of 17th-century dance music he distinguished between Gebrauchsmusik and Vortragsmusik. By the former term Nettl referred to ‘dance pieces that were really danced to’, by the latter to ‘music without any secondary purpose’. With historical developments in mind, Nettl observed an ‘increasing stylization’ that attended dance music’s emancipation in the cyclical suite of mixed dance forms, a stylization that involved a ‘certain removal from popular primordiality [volkstümliche Ursprünglichkeit]’. Around the same time Leo Kestenberg, music adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Science, Culture and Education, used Gebrauchsmusik to describe ‘occasional music’ as distinguished from ‘concert music’. In making this distinction, Nettl and Kestenberg openly expressed a value judgment soon to be widely shared by musicologists, critics and composers alike. Gebrauchsmusik, Kestenberg wrote, ‘is artistically as important as, and nowadays materially more promising than, concert music’. Like other Germans, he was no doubt influenced by parallel developments in France, especially the group of composers known as Les Six.

But it was Heinrich Besseler, in whose work the descriptive and the normative nicely combine, who produced the philosophically most sophisticated account of Gebrauchsmusik at the time. An early-music specialist, he had studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. Beyond a scholarly, historical attempt at understanding earlier musical cultures on their own terms, Besseler also raised general phenomenological questions of the kind posed by Heidegger. In his dissertation on the German suite in the 17th century, Besseler noted that ‘the aesthetic access [Zugangsweise] to this music is not through listening but through participation, whether through playing, dancing or singing along; in general, through use [das Gebrauchen]. Besseler pursued this basic perspective further in his Habilitationsschrift, this time focussing on 13th- and 14th-century motets. This music, he stressed, was not ‘created for “aesthetic enjoyment”’; nor did it ‘concern the “listener” in the usual sense, but rather only believers in prayer and observation’. In a much-quoted lecture, delivered as part of his dissertation defence, he addressed ‘basic questions of musical listening’, both from an historical, diachronic perspective and from a systematic one. Acknowledging his debt to Heidegger, he translated his philosophy teacher’s fundamental distinction between ‘thing’ (Ding) and ‘equipment’ (Zeug) into specifically musical concepts: ‘autonomous music’ (eigenständige Musik) and ‘utility music’ (Gebrauchsmusik). The first type he associated with concert music, a relatively recent phenomenon, but one which ‘for generations has counted as the highest and, as it were, solely legitimate form of performing and listening to music’. With the second type, aesthetic contemplation is secondary or even irrelevant. Invoking Heideggerian terminology, one could say that its mode of existence belongs to the sphere of ‘readiness-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit), as opposed to ‘presentness-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit). Besseler defined such music as ‘umgangsmässig’, something analogous to the vernacular in language (Umgangssprache) in the sense of being inseparable from everyday life rather than autonomous. Active participation or involvement is key. The gist of Besseler’s theory is encapsulated in this central passage from his lecture:

For the individual, Gebrauchsmusik constitutes something of equal rank to his other activities, something with which he has dealings in the way he has dealings with things of everyday use, without first having to overcome any distance, that is, without having to adopt an aesthetic attitude. With this in mind we might define the basic characteristic of Gebrauchsmusik as something with which we are directly involved [umgangsmässig]. All other art … in some way stands in contrast to Being as self-sufficient, as autonomous [eigenständig].

In later writings Besseler replaced his original binarism with Darbietungsmusik (‘presentation music’) versus Umgangsmusik (literally ‘ambient music’, a term which has unfortunately become synonymous with background music).

Besseler’s interest in Gebrauchsmusik did not stop with his scholarly work as a music historian; it spilled over into the opinions he held about contemporary trends in composition. Epistemology, aesthetics and cultural politics overlapped. Besseler found himself supporting current efforts to create ‘umgangmässige Musik’, above all in the work of the German Youth Movement, but also in the cultivation of Gebrauchsmusik by composers such as Hindemith, Fortner and Pepping.

Besseler ended the first chapter of his magisterial handbook Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance with an account of the effects of historicism on the present, seeing in the call for ‘community music’ (Gemeinschaftsmusik) the protest of a younger generation against the artistic stance of traditional musical life, against large symphony orchestras and the professional specialization of virtuosos. ‘One avoided patriarchal tradition’, he wrote in a confessional tone, ‘in order to learn from earlier ancestors’.

Although Hindemith was not responsible for coining the term Gebrauchsmusik, as is often asserted, he could maintain in 1930, without too much exaggeration, that he had ‘almost completely turned away from concert music in recent years and written, almost without exception, music with pedagogical or social tendencies: for amateurs, for children, for radio, mechanical instruments, etc.’. One of the principal genres developed to reflect these tendencies was the Lehrstück. The piece entitled Lehrstück, a collaboration between Hindemith and Brecht that established the genre, compromised the composer’s autonomy to the extent that the nature of the performing forces was left open. It was thus less a work designed for concert presentation than one which served the learning process of those actively involved. The audience, too, was expected to participate by singing along in the choral sections. Although a secular piece which ironically defamiliarized sacred traditions, it was intended to function in a manner analogous to a sacred cantata in the 18th century.

Recognizing in 1929 that ‘the idea of Gebrauchsmusik has now established itself in all those camps of modern music that it can reach’, Hindemith’s contemporary and rival Weill asserted the need for music to be ‘useful for society at large’. To this end he and Hindemith collaborated with Brecht on the experimental piece Der Lindberghflug, first performed together with Lehrstück at the festival of new music in Baden-Baden in 1929. The question of quality, Weill said, was a separate matter, one that determined whether what he was doing could be considered art. ‘To have this attitude expressed by a representative of “serious music”’, he went on, ‘would have been unthinkable a few years ago’.