The conceptual space of Matthias Spalinger’s music: Political and philosophical themes in musical composition

Abstract

The article analyzes some of the works of the German composer Matthias Spahlinger (1944) in line with the philosophical dialectics of Hegel and Adorno. Сomposer, who defines his musical thinking as quite traditional, is located in a wide field of diverse musical and extra-musical philosophical influences, trends and styles. The ideas of Hegel, Adorno, Marx, Wittgenstein interact in the philosophical and intellectual space of his compositions, which is due to the specifics of his socio-political thinking. Since the 1970s, in fact, from the very early period of his work, the composer was worried about the conditions for the emergence and subsequent performance of the composition in the context of the relationship between the individual and the collective, where the individual is the personality of the composer himself, and the collective is the union of the performer and the listener. Spahlinger’s creative concept is based on the opposition to stable, historically developed musical structures, which consists of a double statement that generates a negation, and in some cases a final negation, which sometimes suggests the possibility of changing the double minus to the final plus. The conclusion from the article is the position that in the work of Spahlinger, the dialectic of Hegel and Adorno forms a semantic axis, and along its coordinate system its creative intentions are located, and at the same time, neither plus nor minus matter. The performers and listener put the emphasis in their “sympathetic interaction”.