Intimate Spaces
On the Relationship between Contemporary Poetry and Neue Musik
Contemporary poetry and Neue Musik are closely related in the digital age. The range of compositions that link lyrical texts and music reveal different approaches to the connection between word and sound that have been virtually unexplored to date. This interdisciplinary doctoral project will be the first to address precisely these questions about contemporary encounters between poetry and music in a scholarly context. The interactions between poetry and music in contemporary vocal music compositions will be examined from the perspective of musicology, literature, and cultural studies. The argument that the meeting of contemporary poetry and Neue Musik can create “intimate spaces” will form the starting point for thinking about contemporary possibilities for them to approach and encounter each other.
The project will develop an initial theoretical framework by taking up and expanding on approaches to researching the relationship between sound and the word in the genre of the art song. In this minor vocal musical form, the reduced instrumentation of voice and instrumental accompaniment creates tensions that build up within the word-sound structure. These tensions are the starting point for a promising approach toward investigating questions about moments of intimate encounter between the two art forms.
With the introduction of the concept of intimacy, the project will taking various perspectives in order to update views on current relationship forms between poetry and music in contemporary compositions and will capture the dialectical movements between closeness and distance of both art forms inherent in the tensions. Intimacy will initially be assigned two horizons of meaning: firstly, with reference to its etymological derivation from the Latin superlative intimus (innermost, deepest, most intimate) and the philosophical reflections that follow on from this (Julia Kristeva, Josep Maria Esquirol); and, secondly, in comparison with various concepts of intimacy since 1900, such as that of an “intimate aesthetics” (Marianne Streisand).
The objective of this research is to describe encounters between poetry and music in the twenty-first century and to present and reflect on them with regard to their various manifestations in the field of Neue Musik. One focus will be investigating the relationship between the structure and content of the text and the musical composition, which can be identified on the following levels: 1. tensions immanent to the text, 2. tensions immanent to the music, 3. tensions resulting from the encounter between 1. and 2. – all of which allow spaces of intimacy to emerge.
The corpus for this project is currently based on ten compositions, divided into individual works and project series. This division is a result of the fact that a series of song projects have emerged in the last few years that, due to their complex structure, present promising areas for analysis. The focus will be on works by contemporary composers who have chosen (primarily German-language) contemporary poetry for their works, including, for example, anagramm by Isabel Mundry, based on the poem of the same name by Unica Zürn; Sich einstellender Sinn by Eres Holz, based on a poem by Asmus Trautsch; and wiedergutmachungsjude by Hector Docx, based on a poem by Daniel Gerzenberg. Furthermore, the project will examine series such as Lieder für das Jetzt (2022) by Max Czollek and Daniel Gerzenberg, and Give us a poem (2023), which took place within the context of Cresc… Biennale für aktuelle Musik. In both project series, young artists developed concert evenings based on poems and other literary texts.