Emphatic Articulation: ‘Klangrede’ as a performative concept in Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s orchestral interpretation

Abstract

In a 2004 interpretation of Schubert’s Symphony in B minor, Austrian conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Berlin Philharmonic foreground a certain awareness regarding articulation. This awareness brings with it a broadening of the concept of articulation that transcends choices regarding accents, endings, slurs, and so on. Harnoncourt’s articulation, that is, incorporates what he refers to as the act of ‘pronouncing’ (as in quite deliberately enunciating) the musical material. This practice – what the author of this article labels ‘emphatic articulation’ – can also be framed as an attempt to clarify the relationship between music and language, an issue of importance to Harnoncourt that is most explicitly represented by his notion of Klangrede. The concept of meaning proves crucial to understanding Klangrede, and this article seeks to shed light on this relation in the context of musical performance. According to the 18th-century German philosopher Herder, the human ability to deal with meaning is based on a reflective awareness that only comes into being through the act of speaking itself. With the support of Herder’s ‘reflective awareness’, this article plumbs the depths of the emphatically articulated musical performance as a timebound act, and asks whether it might be understood in a similar way.

Keywords

• musical performance
• articulation
• music and language
• meaning
• Franz Schubert
• Nikolaus Harnoncourt