Atonální hudba a nekonečná fragmentarita: Bloch a Schönberg

Abstract

The concept of fragmentarity not only constitutes the central idea of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music, but also the whole of his aesthetics, even of his entire ontology – which can already be characterized as a Marxist ontology of creative, utopian imagination. In spite of the fact that the focus of his musical interest was chiefly classical, tonal music and that, unlike Adorno, he gave relatively little attention to atonal and dodecaphonic music, we would like to show that Schönberg’s atonal music occupied, by way of the problem of fragmentarity, a specific place in Bloch’s socio-utopian ontology. At the same time, we want to highlight problematic aspects of Bloch’s concept of fragmentarity. This concept is perhaps overly connected with the aesthetics of romanticism, and its use to describe new music is in this way limited. The last part of the text is then a corrective of this position using the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, especially his aesthetics and some of his notes on the event nature of music. In fact, from the point of view of Levinas’ critique of ontology, Bloch’s fragmentarity too is overly connected with the idea of ​​totality, albeit only utopianly sketched. In the conclusion itself, we will then attempt to point out the possible combination of Bloch’s conception of new music as a fragment and Levinas’ event approach to music in the broader framework of the aesthetics of ambiguity.

Keywords

• atonal music
• fragmentarity
• event
• aesthetics of ambiguity
• historicity
• historicalness