Author(s): Angelina Petrova / Language(s): English,Bulgarian
Issue: 2/2020
Maria Kostakeva’s book Die Welt klingt. Neue Musik und Naturprozesse (The World Sounds. New Music and Natural Processes) puts a new focus in the domain of European musicology. The work deals with the metaphysical unity of man and nature in the oeuvres of Debussy, Varése, Messiaen, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Cage, Zimerman, Sciarrino, Adriana Hölzsky and Nicolaus A. Huber. The book mainly seeks to formulate hidden internal relations between man and nature, the animal and vegetal worlds, thus bringing forth new environmental aspects in art, i.e. music. The harmony between nature and the New Music is treated by Maria Kostakeva on broad horizons. Central to the music trajectories is the relationship between music and the cosmos expressed by Deleuze-Guattari. Within the book’s construction (seven chapters, three interludes, an introduction and an epilogue) the author creates a rhizomatically unfolding text the intertextual fields of which are along the lines of the postmodern mapping. The initial two chapters lay the foundations of the author’s philosophical and interpretative apparatus: Neue Musik und Selbstreflexion (The New Music and Self-reflection) and Die Spirituelle Revolution (The Spiritual Revolution). The main philosophical view gets developed in the third chapter, Die Kraft der Metamorphose (The Power of Metamorphosis), whereas Interlude 1 depicts a journey through Hölzsky’s world. In the fourth chapter, Die Unfassbare Schönheit: Die Chaos-Ordnung-Beziehungen (The Unapproachable Beauty: Chaos-Order Relationships) are examined concepts dealing with research objects much dear to the author: Ligeti, Boulez, Zimerman... The fifth chapter Die Auskomponierte Mobilität (The Composed Mobility) deals with the central concept-metaphor, namely the rhizome-labyrinth. In Interlude 2 a brilliant and pioneering analysis is made of the fractals in Ligeti‘s Violin Concerto. In the sixth chapter, Die Vibrierende Welt der Komplexitaten (The Vibrating World of Complexities) the author broaches the visionary ideas of Varиse, i.e. the spectralists. Then, in Interlude 3, come analyses of Huber’s music. In the seventh chapter, Der Mikrokosmos (The Microcosm) the fundamental threads of narration get deduced and generalized. The book not only summarizes decades of Maria Kostakeva’s musicological findings, but it is also an interdisciplinary text of awe-inspiring visions depicted in the interstices of philosophy, poetics, sound and composition – a musicological thesis that rediscovers the twentieth century by shedding new light on its boundaries.
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