Die Hölle zum Klingen bringen: Zur Dialektik der Ordnung in der abendländischen Musikgeschichte

This essay gives an overview on how hell, what or who is unredeemed or detrimental to salvation is represented in Western music from the 18th to the 20th century. The long predominance of Christianity and major-minor tonality in the West facilitate the development of a generally understandable music...

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Bibliographic Details
Subtitles:Hölle
Main Author: Gubatz, Thorsten (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:German
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Published: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2023
In: Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie
Year: 2021, Volume: 36, Pages: 357-370
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Hell / Musik / Tonality / Major / minor scale (Music) / Harmonielehre / History 1701-1800 / History 1801-1900 / History 1901-2000 / Geschichte 2001-
IxTheo Classification:AG Religious life; material religion
KBA Western Europe
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:This essay gives an overview on how hell, what or who is unredeemed or detrimental to salvation is represented in Western music from the 18th to the 20th century. The long predominance of Christianity and major-minor tonality in the West facilitate the development of a generally understandable musical vocabulary for religious beliefs. Whereas Christianity interprets human life in a tension-filled dialectic of sinfulness and the capacity to be redeemed, major-minor tonality organizes sound events in a tension-filled dialectic of dissonance and consonance. The dissonant interval of the tritone and the diminished seventh chord consisting of a tritone pair are fixed commonplaces in representing of the infernal, unredeemed or detrimental to salvation. This is shown using examples from Bach, Mozart and Wagner in particular. However, since dissonances always need to be resolved at the end of musical units of meaning, an appropriate musical representation of hell is never possible, because only continuous dissonance would correspond to hell as the place of eternal non-redemption. Though the end of the major-minor era saw an emancipation of dissonance in many places, it also saw an emancipation from Christianity, which does not simply dissolve the semantic relation of dissonance and non-redemption, but makes it very complicated and demands enormous sensitivity for the contexts of production, reproduction and reception of music.
ISSN:2567-9392
Contains:Enthalten in: Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.13109/9783666558719.357