TY - JOUR
AU1 - Gur, Golan
AB - In their preface to Musikästhetik in der Diskussion (1981), the editors of the volume, Harry Goldschmidt and Georg Knepler, proclaim that “a new movement has made its mark on the field of music aesthetics,” a movement that promises to enrich the understanding of music with new impulses and approaches.1 In making this statement, the two eminent East German musicologists referred less to a global trend in the music aesthetics of their time than to its internal development in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), beginning in the late 1960s. Yet, the new aesthetic movement they duly identified would not have been possible without knowledge of major scientific developments that flourished outside the Eastern Bloc after World War II. Characterized by concepts about communication and sign systems, this movement was sustained by theoretical models originating in the scientific field of cybernetics and in the closely related area of information theory. As a reporter of the Berliner Zeitung observed in 1968, the new developments in science had a strong impact on Marxist aesthetic theory, which then was already confronted by challenges from art itself: Marxist aesthetics has been on the move in the GDR for some time. New social processes and factors demand their reflection by the socialist artist and thus at the same time [call for] a deepening of the theory of socialist realism: new features and dimensions of modern scientific development (cybernetics, semiotics, sociology, social psychology, etc.) pose new problems for aesthetic theory.2 Although cybernetics and semiotics, as well as information theory, represent distinct fields of inquiry, the historical report reminds us that they shared important points of contact in the early crystallization and scientific application.3 Furthermore, East German musical thinkers who were interested in understanding music as a communication system, often employed concepts from those models interchangeably. In part, this is because the foremost advocate of cybernetics in the humanities in East Germany, the philosopher Georg Klaus, advanced specific arguments in favor of a synthesis between the cybernetic information theory and semiotics, which is discussed below. Another influential factor was the political endorsement of cybernetics in the GDR during the mid-1960s. The reputation cybernetics enjoyed at the time among Soviet and East German politicians made it possible for new theories in the arts and humanities to emerge that drew on cybernetic language while introducing ideas that would have previously been rejected as “bourgeois” and “idealist” by the communist political leadership.4 This led to cybernetics serving as something of an all-purpose paradigm that corroborated a variety of scientific and artistic approaches that, justifiably or not, claimed to be in line with historical materialism.5 To clarify, my use of the term “cybernetics” in this article has less to do with cyborgs, prosthetic devices, or science fiction motifs.6 Rather, my focus is on the cybernetic information theory, on information aesthetics, and on the assorted ways in which these have informed concepts of communication in art and music. Moreover, I am interested in the significance of cybernetic concepts of musical communication for the understanding of the decentering of human agency and, ultimately, for harboring posthuman notions of subjectivity.7 In this sense, I build on and follow scholars of posthumanism and media technology such as N. Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Friedrich Kittler. Although a keen interest in cybernetics was not unique to East German or Soviet intellectuals, I will show that exploring this field adds a new dimension to our understanding of East German music aesthetics and its significance within the broader context of the connection between music, technology and politics in the twentieth century. My discussion will unfold in five stages: First, I will briefly explore the relationship between cybernetics, posthumanism, and East German culture. Second, I will look at aspects of the history of cybernetics as it pertains to discussions of music and the arts during the Cold War era, turning attention to aesthetic models connected to Max Bense’s information aesthetics. Third, I will investigate the reception of cybernetics and semiotics in East Germany, focusing on its implications for aesthetic theory. Fourth, I will discuss the way cybernetic concepts were adopted and critiqued by East German composers, in particular Günter Lampe and Georg Katzer. And finally, fifth, I will explore dimensions of cybernetic and posthuman thought in the work of East German musicologists such as Georg Knepler, Harry Goldschmidt, and Christian Kaden who modified official positions on musical meaning and the nature of contemporary modernist music. On this basis, I will show that the endorsement of cybernetic models not only served as a subtle means of legitimizing new approaches in music aesthetics and composition, in light of potential political interventions; they also intimated the decentering of the human in contemporary culture and the possibility of posthuman ontology and subjectivity. I will further argue that this was no coincidence: East German musical assertions of posthumanism were intricately linked with the attempt to shake off official interpretations of Marxism and humanism, to the point of rejecting altogether conventional anthropocentric concepts of musicality and aesthetic expression. Cybernetics, Posthumanism, and the New Man of Communism The term posthumanism, as I use it here, is intrinsically connected with technological and scientific developments. According to Cary Wolfe, posthumanism marks “a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.”8 Posthumanism, thus defined, is rooted in a recognition of the various ways humans are materially embedded in social, natural, and technological environments, as opposed to the anthropocentrism of traditional humanism. Posthumanism, in this sense, is a specific stance toward the decentering of the human, rather than a description of this decentering as such. A further distinction to be made is between posthumanism and transhumanism, which stands for a kind of enhanced humanism that focuses on the expansion and improvement of humans’ physical, perceptual, and cognitive capabilities.9 While posthumanism and transhumanism signify two different intellectual strands, they both agree on the profound role of technology in our world and in particular those developments set in motion by cybernetics. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles shows that cybernetics, as initially constructed by Norbert Wiener, gave rise to a new perspective on human communication and subjectivity in which the posthuman situation is insinuated through the technological metaphor of humans as machines.10 Although early accounts of cybernetics (not the least Wiener’s) were committed to a liberal humanist view of the self, cybernetics ultimately brought about models of communication that undermine the unique position of humans with respect to meaning and cognition.11 According to Hayles, the emergence of this cybernetic model was “nothing less than a new way of looking at human beings. . . . Humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines.”12 Similarly, Friedrich Kittler recognized Claude C. Shannon’s essay “The Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948), a foundational text of cybernetics, as initiating a new way of thinking about communication, one that places exclusive focus on quantitative–statistical parameters. The new posthuman situation, in Kittler’s view, is the result of the reproduction of human actions and semantics through the effect of technological data processing: Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description impossible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands.13 Taking a more ambivalent position, Hayles describes her projected version of posthumanism as one in which the posthuman … embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.14 To a large extent, the goal of critical posthumanism is to counter the illusions involved in disembodied notions of communication and subjectivity.15 Such notions of communication exerted their influence on a variety of intellectual fields that came under the impact of cybernetics. The idea of disembodied information stood, for instance, at the heart of Max Bense’s model of information aesthetics, a model that served as the point of departure for several theorists, and also some composers, in Western and Eastern Europe. This, despite its status—especially in the East—of being controversial from the beginning. To foreshadow one of the main points of this essay, it was the primacy assigned in Marxist aesthetics of content over form that led prominent East German music theorists to insist on the embodied nature of musical communication and to reject Bense’s aesthetic approach in its original formulation. An important stage in this process of revision is represented by the work of Georg Klaus who sought to bring the materialist emphasis of the Marxist–Leninist theory of knowledge into symbiosis with the fields of cybernetics and semiotics.16 For the most part, academic discussions of cybernetics and posthumanism have focused on the situation in Western countries, yet parallel developments have also taken place in the former Soviet East, here represented by the GDR. In the case of Klaus and other East German thinkers, there is much to suggest that the appeal of cybernetics thrived on the humanist conception—shared also by various versions of Marxism—of a rational world the mysteries of which could ideally be resolved by means of a unified scientific system. Nonetheless, in his attempt to marry Marxism and cybernetics, Klaus also intimated the posthumanist version of materialism that insists on the embedded place of humans in nature, as opposed to the one-sided emphasis on the primacy of technology. In his Kybernetik in philosophischer Sicht (1961), he renounces Wiener’s critique of materialism, arguing that only when cybernetics is understood as a (dialectical) materialist discipline can the problems of biology and medicine be approached from an adequate cybernetic perspective. The result is a mixture of humanist convictions about progress in history and the unique position of human beings in the world with an implicitly posthumanist materialist perspective: The dialectical materialism teaches us that development proceeds from the lower to the higher, whereby new higher qualities constantly arise through changes in quantity and structure. The history of life … gives us one of the most convincing proofs of the correctness of this general philosophical thesis. Cybernetics is now able to show us the general principles of these quantitative and structural changes that lead to the production of new, higher qualities. In a sense, cybernetics bridges the gap between the most general principles underlying this evolutionary process and the abundant facts and evidence gathered over the last hundred and fifty years.17 I will return to Klaus and the issue of his significance for East German music aesthetics later on. Meanwhile, it must be noted that Marxism and posthumanism shared additional points of contact. As Elana Gomel observed, expressions of posthumanism in state socialism involved a unique tension between humanist morality and posthumanist alterity. The socialist utopia of the New Man was directed at the “accomplishment of the humanization of mankind” but at the same time called for “‘sublime’ subjectivity, which is strange, unfamiliar, and frightening in its radical alterity.”18 Additional contradictory elements can be observed in the relationship of the envisioned new human of socialism and the mechanical world. According to Slava Gerovitch, the image of the New Man in Soviet culture was rather ambiguous: “He was both a distinct individual and a ‘little cog’; he strove for personal achievement and wanted to be a good member of the collective; he was to be a master of technology, yet he merged with technology as its intrinsic part.”19 Similarly, the utopia of New Man, and the machine-like efficiency assigned to him, loomed large in East German culture, especially in its early years. In the wake of cybernetics, the metaphor of humans as machines had witnessed a new twist with the latter now being associated with sophisticated information technology that could model the functioning of the human brain and ultimately serve as a means of bringing about a rationally organized society. This resonated with the wish of the East German political leadership during the 1960s to employ new technologies in order to improve the economic situation of the country,20 but also with the concern of intellectuals regarding progress in culture and science. In this spirit, Fred Staufenbiel, a scholar of urban planning, advocated for the use of cybernetics (along with other scientific fields) as a means of achieving a more precise analysis of cultural processes in order to achieve the “perfection of human lives.”21 This and similar statements by East German intellectuals, including Klaus and many of his followers, attest to the trust bestowed on cybernetics as a scientific instrument capable of modernizing socialism in response to the needs and developments of the second half of the twentieth century. Cybernetics and the Arts during the Cold War Era At the highpoint of its academic popularity and prestige, cybernetics was regarded in the West, and later in the East, as a universal paradigm capable of revolutionizing the most diverse areas of knowledge, including art theory. While the reception of cybernetics in the music culture of the GDR involved its own specific emphases and nuances, it was by no means fully independent from developments in Western art and aesthetics. Particularly influential for the transfer of the methods of cybernetics to the field of art in the German-speaking world was the work of the Stuttgart philosopher Max Bense, who developed a model of information aesthetics, elaborating on the pioneering work of George David Birkhoff in Aesthetic Measure (1933).22 According to Bense, this kind of aesthetics was nothing short of a complete break with the aesthetic traditions of the past. He explained: Unlike most classical aesthetics, information aesthetics is not concerned with interpreting what we call the beautiful or the ugly, the tragic or the smug, and so on, with regard to a given object. This modern aesthetics is therefore not an aesthetics of interpretation, but an aesthetics that makes an attempt to presuppose that what we can determine in the designated manner by predicates such as “beautiful,” “not beautiful,” “ugly,” “not ugly” or the like can be objectively determined.23 Thus conceived, information aesthetics aims at evaluating aesthetic objects by quantifying aesthetic qualities and processes where previous aesthetic theories seemingly offered only speculative interpretations and subjective judgments.24 In his Aesthetica, Bense explicitly rejects the socio-culturally oriented models of aesthetics—such as the one represented by the Marxist theorist Georg (György) Lukács—with their focus on the communication of content or meaning: Like Hegel’s aesthetics, Lukács’s aesthetics represents an aesthetics of content, an aesthetics that continually speaks of the adequation between content and form but takes the elements that it brings to interpretation from the realm of meaning of representation or design. That which is called “material” in information aesthetics can be an element of form as well as an element of content, as long as it is accessible to determination in terms of signs and numbers. The manipulation of [this material] is the beginning of the actual aesthetic process, which remains outside of Georg Lukács’s consideration.25 Working along similar lines, though initially without knowledge of Bense’s work, Abraham Moles developed a cybernetic-informational approach to art that was adopted by some Eastern European music scholars, such as the Czech musicologist Antonín Sychra.26 In an article published posthumously in the East German journal Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, Sychra concedes the importance of Bense and Moles, arguing, however, that the “non-Marxist” (that is, Western) science of cybernetics and information theory continues to be preoccupied primarily with questions of syntax, as opposed to the more holistic interest of Marxist scholars in issues of semantics and pragmatics considered essential for unlocking the social meaning and function of art.27 Tellingly, Bense was also a co-initiator of the exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity,” which was first shown in London in 1968 and presented groundbreaking works of computer or computer-aided art.28 The exhibition triggered the production of a music album “Cybernetic Music” with works demonstrating the connection between music and technology, including the computer-based string quartet Illiac Suite (1957) by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson, both composer-programmers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Joining the faculty at Urbana-Champaign in 1962, the Berlin-born composer Herbert Brün, who held seminars with Heinz von Foerster, was another important advocate of cybernetics in music whose work (Infraudibles) was included in the album.29 Brün inspired at least one East German composer discussed here, namely Georg Katzer, who was a pioneer of electroacoustic music in the GDR. Cybernetics also had strong points of contact with the European postwar musical avant-garde associated with the Darmstadt Summer Courses.30 Werner Meyer-Eppler, one of the most important early theorists of electronic music, was also a major author on the cybernetic information theory.31 His writings on cybernetics and communication drew the attention of East German musicologists such as Doris Stockmann decades after their publication.32 Under his influence, Karlheinz Stockhausen applied information theory concepts both in his own compositions as well as in his musical analyses, most visibly in his study of Anton Webern’s String Quartet, Op. 28, in the essay “Struktur und Erlebniszeit” published in the 1955 Webern issue of the journal Die Reihe.33 Cybernetics also informed compositional models seeking to present an alternative to serial music and other postwar forms of avant-garde and experimental music. In sympathy with the principles of information aesthetics, the composer Roland Kayn, who studied with Max Bense in Stuttgart, created a form of music in the late 1960s that he openly described as “cybernetic music.”34 Kayn’s cybernetic music refers primarily to electroacoustic musical works that use analog systems of signals and commands as an input for electronic sound devices. Those works are “cybernetic” not only for the reason of their technical equipment but also, and perhaps most significantly, for acting as self-generating musical events that are created and developed spontaneously in the form of a feedback loop, independently of the active involvement of the composer once a system of signals and commands has been put into place. Perhaps surprisingly, Kayn was critical of the computer music of his time that appeared to produce, in his view, all too predictable musical results lacking true experimentalism: A compositional process, insofar as it is an innovative one, is marked at its inception by a critical degree of indeterminacy. Automatic processes which are pre-programmed with the aid of computers tend to be of a repetitive nature and are not experimental in the true sense of the term, as all the data involved must be on hand at the outset, even granted the fact that unexpected random variants can be integrated into the process in the form of subroutines.35 In spite of his reliance on self-generating musical mechanisms, Kayn’s music aims at revisiting rather than eliminating the role of human agency in art. His cybernetic music attempts to put forward an aesthetic approach that does justice to the latest scientific findings about the integral relations between humans, technology, and the environment. Discussing his electronic project Cybernetics (1966–69), he declares as his guiding principles the elimination of the “opposition[s] between technical and organic systems through cybernetic control in both realms,” with the goal of creating an approximation of “living reality” in which “existential being … takes the place of logically functioning consciousness.”36 Adopting the language of cybernetics alongside that of existentialism, Kayn suggests that his form of cybernetic music articulates a fundamental condition of human existence, beyond the particularist interests of individuals and groups of people.37 The experience of musical processes following their own course gives rise, in this view, to a new mode of listening and, ultimately, to a new kind of social awareness: “The listener is … able to follow the compositional process as it develops; the acoustic construct is hence made more lucid and more of a total auditory experience for the listener—the acoustic sphere is, so to speak, ‘socialized.’”38 This is linked with Kayn’s understanding of the emancipatory function of his music which betrays an affinity with humanist conceptions of self-governing autonomous human beings, albeit in view of analogous self-generating processes in the organic world. Reflecting retrospectively on his musical path, he remarked in an interview from 2008: “My approach, the cybernetic, could also be understood politically: That groups control themselves, determine themselves, and that this should also be possible with tones, sounds and noises—electronically of course … so that they become self-organized mechanisms.”39 This political interpretation takes on an even more concrete meaning when we consider the cybernetic conceptions of music in the GDR. Cybernetics and Aesthetic Theory in the GDR Evoking cybernetics, whether in the arts or sciences, in East Germany was bound to carry political meaning, as did almost every realm of life under state communism. The official Marxist-Leninist ideology of the GDR and the socialist countries was by no means limited to aspects of economic organization and political order; it was, as East German politicians and cultural functionaries constantly emphasized, a universal worldview equally meaningful to academic and artistic pursuits.40 It was also on this ideological basis that political interventions in the arts and sciences were legitimized by the political establishment and became the source of numerous conflicts between the state and individual artists and intellectuals. Among scholars of music, best known are the cases of composers who were confronted with charges of “formalism,” as with Hanns Eisler’s libretto for his Johann Faustus or Paul Dessau and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus.41 Yet, more telling for the current discussion is the extension of the Zhdanov doctrine and its censorship practices to scientific theories. Alongside modern genetics and quantum physics, cybernetics, too, came under the scrutiny of the party during the 1940s and early 1950s, and was firmly rebuffed by Stalin for being nothing but a product of “bourgeois pseudo-science.”42 The origin of cybernetics in the work of American scientists was an obvious reason for its initial rejection in the Soviet bloc, but by no means the only one. At least some elements of cybernetics seemed to pose a real challenge for the underpinnings of historical materialism. As Jérôme Segal observed, the cybernetic definition of work in terms of information processing appeared to relativize the notions of class society and class struggle.43 Moreover, Wiener himself questioned the material nature of information, arguing: “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”44 Another reason for concern about cybernetics on the part of communist politicians might be a fear that the grandiose claims made on its behalf could challenge Marxism–Leninism in its singular status in the Soviet sphere of influence as a universal science. This last explanation could account for the attempt to reinterpret cybernetics as part of Marxism–Leninism itself during the “thaw” period. The attitude toward cybernetics changed drastically after Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s assumption of power.45 In the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party (1961), Khrushchev explicitly stressed the importance of cybernetics for progress in technology, science, and administration.46 The leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) followed Soviet Russia almost immediately in embracing cybernetics, though its climax of popularity in the communist German state arrived only in the late 1960s. Although East German politicians were not alone in their “cybernetic craze,” part of the reason for this in the GDR was the hope of Walter Ulbricht that the new science and the technologies connected with it could help revitalize the stagnating local economy.47 Thus, Ulbricht could hardly have been more enthusiastic about the prospects of cybernetics. An author of the (Western) Der Spiegel magazine sarcastically described in 1967 his impression: Walter Ulbricht, 74, who up to now has only spoken Russian in addition to his mother tongue, learned a second foreign language at an advanced age. The SED leader speaks fluent cybernetic. Concepts of modern control technology such as “interdependence model,” “optimal variant,” “information flow” or “network,” comes from his mouth as easily as vulgar Marxisms like “monopoly capitalism” or “class struggle.”48 Ulbricht’s zeal for cybernetics as his tenure as head of the East German state came to an end, reflects the profound change of attitude toward the new science in the Eastern bloc. At that point, cybernetics was not only tolerated as a scientific theory but was reconceived as a materialist science in full harmony with Marxism–Leninism.49 Cybernetics, it was argued by its East German advocates, had been misunderstood all along by Western scientists and had to be restored to its true materialistic and dialectical nature.50 Nonetheless, Soviet critics still sometimes voiced the view that the study of cybernetics was primarily a means to gain insight into the clandestine plans of the “enemy” in the United States.51 This process of adopting and appropriating cybernetics is particularly striking in view of the analogous communist view of music (and art in general) as a “weapon” in class struggle. Favoring the music and musical language of established traditions as apparently more suitable for socialism, conservative East German critics often disparaged modernist music and the Anglophone popular music industry as a means of Western capitalist countries to spread “nihilism” and “cosmopolitanism.”52 The openness toward cybernetics was part of a broader process of renewal that ultimately affected musical life in East Germany. Starting in the late 1960s, New Music by East German composers slowly gained acceptance in concert halls thanks in part to Erich Honecker’s, Ulbricht’s successor, initially more flexible cultural policies.53 Around the same time that cybernetics made its entry within academic circles in the GDR, the expansion of New Music likewise brought it into contact with the ideals of socialism, both by its producers and by political actors. As Laura Silverberg has observed, modernist music in the GDR “arose within a socialist framework rather than in opposition to it.”54 Discussing the music of Friedrich Goldmann, Rainer Kunad, and Georg Katzer, among others, Fritz Hennenberg wrote that “the relative neutrality of the means of composition and the possibility to refunctionalize them did not mean [their] de-politization; rather, it meant giving them a new function, namely to make [them] useful for the desired social goals.”55 Writing in 1980, Hennenberg expressed a view shared by many East German composers who sought to combine advanced musical techniques with a sensitivity for music’s social and semiotic dimensions. At the same time, the change of attitude toward cybernetics and modernist music could not have been possible without the efforts of scholars who sought to reconcile new intellectual and aesthetic paradigms with Marxism. In the GDR, cybernetics found a particularly strong advocate in Georg Klaus, the “high priest of cybernetics.”56 A member of the Communist Party from before World War II, Klaus enjoyed the attentive ear of politicians during Ulbricht’s tenure and exerted direct and indirect influence in various research fields, including aesthetics and musicology. It was also Klaus who most insistently advocated for the notion that cybernetics and information theory were ultimately a materialist science. In so doing, however, he campaigned for a revision of the conventional cybernetic view of information. The Wörterbuch der Kybernetik, co-edited by Klaus, makes the case for replacing Claude Shannon’s model of communication with a richer, semiotically driven concept of information: The information concept of (Shannon’s) information theory is by nature a statistical concept and semiotically only covers the syntactic aspect of signs or sets of signs. However, signs are not only related to other signs, but also to their meanings (semantic aspect), to the designated objects (sigmatic aspect) and to the systems or subsystems (to their aims, purposes, etc.) between which a sign vehicle takes place (pragmatic aspect). This results in specific limitations of Shannon’s approach, which could not yet be overcome in a satisfactory manner.57 Echoing the charges of communist intellectuals and functionaries against “formalism” in art, this semiotic version of the concept of information rejects the reduction of information to the aspect of syntax and insists on including a consideration of semantic, pragmatic, and sigmatic dimensions.58 Devoted exclusively to natural language, a central hallmark of Klaus’s semiotic model was the concept of sigmatics (Sigmatik).59 In the semiotic tradition, the sigmatic dimension of a sign system refers to the difference between verbal signifiers and intentional content. Klaus proposed to explore—as a subfield of sigmatics—the direct, unmediated link between signs and the objects of reality.60 This approach, which assumes the possibility of a direct access of human consciousness to reality, has remained controversial, but it was in line with Klaus’s attempt to reconcile information theory and semiotics with Marxist–Leninist epistemology. Ultimately, this synthesis provided the basis for new approaches in Marxist aesthetic theory. Although Klaus did not write about art, his rendering of information as consisting of semiotic signs intimates an affinity with the problems of aesthetic communication. Elements of Klaus’s view of cybernetics and semiotics, as they were combined with concepts of thinkers in other disciplines, are thus evident in the East German Handbuch der Musikästhetik, published in 1979. According to the author of the chapter on “communication process,” Wilhelm Baethge, the sigmatic aspect is the most difficult to discern in music because “musical signs are characterized by a high level of ambiguity in comparison with other sign systems.”61 In spite of such connections, Klaus’s most important contribution to East German music culture was probably not on the theoretical plane but rather the institutional and methodological ones. Through his efforts and influence, cybernetics gained popularity and credibility in East German academia and beyond. No less important, Klaus’s scientific rigor, his staunch interdisciplinary orientation, and his openness to international intellectual trends presented a model for GDR scholars in a variety of fields, including the musicologist Georg Knepler.62 In due course, ideas coming from cybernetics and semiotics and the interest in interdisciplinary work gave birth to new thoughts on socialist realism and contemporary music. Here a brief clarification might be in order concerning the notoriously ambiguous concept of socialist realism. The conventional use of the term socialist realism in relation to twentieth-century musical works manifesting certain stylistic features and explicit political content finds surprisingly little resonance in theoretical explorations.63 At least in the East German literature, socialist realism was almost always more than a catchphrase for a particular artistic style; rather, the term signified a certain liaison between art and reality, conventionally considered the source of art’s fundamental content. In this regard, little changed from the early Marxist aesthetic writings of Georg Lukács in the 1930s to publications on the topic in the GDR until the 1970s, whether on literature or music.64 Citing Nathan “Noto” Notowicz, Hanns Eisler concurs that socialist realism is best understood “not as a method of composition but as a certain attitude of the composer toward content and toward the relation of form to content.”65 Similar descriptions are easily found in other writings and statements.66 On the other hand, descriptions of the desirable stylistic features of socialist realist musical works occupy only secondary importance. The meanings attached to socialist realism, rather, encompass issues more properly belonging to the realm of aesthetics: the proper content of socialist art (where “content” refers less to an explicit theme than to artistic intentions), the tie between content and form (which would normally involve establishing the priority of content over form against the formalist tradition), the social function of art, its educational value, the relationship of artistic expression to broader societal processes, and the impact of art on real and potential audiences.67 Underlying these different aspects is a view of art as a reflection of reality, capable of communicating emotional and ideational content and, in so doing, fulfilling social and educational goals.68 Though often gauged in terms of Lenin’s epistemological theory of reflection, the idea of art as a reflection of reality, and the accompanying premise of the priority of content over form, has roots in the humanist tradition of writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, as Party-loyal intellectuals constantly emphasized.69 Hans Koch, the doyen of Marxist–Leninist aesthetics in the GDR, summarized this connection: “Goethe’s word: ‘We know of no world but in relation to the human being; we want no art than [that which] is an imprint of this relation,’ finds its final dialectical–materialist confirmation in the aesthetic theory of Marxism–Leninism.”70 Taking an even wider perspective, one could find the source of this aesthetic theory in Aristotle’s notion of mimesis and its various elaborations in European aesthetic thought.71 Socialist realism, it was argued, is thus only new in its focus on artistic reflection of socialist society. As Erwin Pracht explained in the most comprehensive East German publication on the theory of socialist realism: Since art is a form of social consciousness that essentially depicts the social being as its ultimate object, realism is not something brought to the arts from the outside but corresponds to their historical–social essence as a truthful depiction of social reality… . Socialist realism consequently stands for art that brings to consciousness the epochal transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale in the practical relation of its main protagonist—that is, the revolutionary working class—and which vividly and concisely expresses the new socialist relations, conditions, [and] ideas in representation as well as in material environmental design.72 When read critically, such statements are illuminating not only for what they intend to say on art or the theory of art but also for what they reveal about the tensions between Marxist aesthetic theory and the practice of art in the socialist countries. Pracht’s characterization of socialist art—and numerous similar ones by other East German theorists—left much room for imagining a variety of ways to express or reflect reality in art. Indeed, it was not lost on critical composers and theorists that the perspective that music is—or must be—a reflection of reality is much more likely to mean the very opposite of the heroic and tediously idealized representations of socialist themes.73 Given the complexity of modern society, it could be argued that musical representations of reality call, on the contrary, for diverse and eclectic modes of musical composition. Sensing this, Eisler noted: “The music that comes closest to socialist realism seems to me to be the one that enables the most diverse methods of composition.”74 Under the impact of cybernetics, the view of art as a form of reflecting and exploring reality—one that is different from but analogous to science—came to incorporate concepts deriving from information theory and semiotics. The most distinct manifestation of the influence of such concepts on East German music aesthetics of the 1970s is the above-cited Handbuch der Musikästhetik. In his article on socialist realism in this Handbuch, Walther Siegmund-Schultze maintains that “socialist-realist music can only prove itself fully as such in the social communication process, in the reaction of the addressee, the interpreter, and the listener. Therefore, it is at the same time a challenge to the entire socialist musical society.”75 This model of socialist realism, gauged in terms of communication theory, further provided a new basis for the evaluation and legitimization of New Music. In the same article, Siegmund-Schultze argues that realism and advanced compositional techniques, such as the twelve-tone method, are not mutually exclusive; rather, the relation between them is dialectical one.76 The Handbuch der Musikästhetik represents a summation of a variety of musicological approaches that, at least in part, were developed in dialogue with the cybernetic information theory and semiotics as delineated by Klaus and other critical scholars. At the same time, the work of Klaus was widely read by East German intellectuals operating outside the university system, including composers. Eisler himself became an enthusiast of the new scientific discipline after his encounter with writings by Klaus and Soviet authors on cybernetics.77 In his conversations with Hans Bunge, he expressed confidence that “cybernetics has a tremendous influence on human thinking, on philosophy, on psychology, and even on physiology.”78 In spite of Eisler’s enthusiasm, his interest in cybernetics seem not to have appeared in his compositional work; such an application was the accomplishment of younger East German composers, in particular Günter Lampe and Georg Katzer, who was part of Eisler’s masterclass in the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Cybernetic Concepts in Musical Composition For Günter Lampe, a composer and music theorist from Weimar, the cybernetic information theory presented a pedagogical tool to account for the effect of musical processes on aesthetic perception, an approach akin to Max Bense’s in his information aesthetics. Lampe, intent on introducing information theory in the teaching of musical composition, elaborated on this issue in an essay from 1971: “Music,” he notes, “is information in the cybernetic sense [and] the realization of which … takes place on three levels: the sender (composer)—transferent (interpreter)—receiver (listener).”79 He goes on to apply several key concepts of cybernetic information theory, including the concept of “information content” (Informationsinhalt) which, in his model, refers to the number of bits contained in a musical figure, and the concept of “information flow” (Informationsfluß), which indicates the amount of information transmitted per unit of time. Drawing on the findings of cybernetic psychology, Lampe postulates a value of circa 16 bits per second (bit/s) for human musical perception. He explains that this value applies to short-term memory, which can only store information of around ten seconds and therefore has a capacity of less than 160 bits. A composer of twelve-tone music, Lampe is particularly keen to show how these concepts could be applied not only to tonal music but to dodecaphonic music as well. He does this by comparing two abstract musical figures: 1) a diatonic one, based on the seven notes of the diatonic scale, and 2) a dodecaphonic one, presenting all the twelve tones of the chromatic scale in sequence. He establishes the difference between the two figures in terms of information content by drawing on Claude Shannon’s information measure based on logarithmus dualis of reciprocal probabilities (ex. 1). Lampe calculated the information content of the diatonic figure to be around 20 bits and that of the dodecaphonic figure as amounting to circa 44 bits. A further difference he highlights concerns the information flow of the two figures. While the information flow of the diatonic figure is circa 23 bit/s, he estimates the information flow of the dodecaphonic to be 29 bit/s. Example 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Günter Lampe’s analysis and comparison of the information content of diatonic and dodecaphonic musical figures in “Tonsatz heute,” Der Volksmusiklehrer, 1971. Using these concepts, Lampe calculates the extent to which a twelve-tone musical passage presents a greater amount of information than a rhythmically comparable diatonic passage. Such considerations, he suggests, can inform the compositional decisions of a composer who wishes to take the actual aesthetic perception of the listener into account. Lampe acknowledges that in actual musical practice, additional elements such as tone repetitions can likewise influence the values of information content and flow, but postulates as a general guideline that the perception of something as “interesting” occurs when the information flow is in the range of around 16 bit/s; a higher value might lead to a sense of overstraining, a lower one to boredom.80 Implicated in Lampe’s comparison of the tonal and twelve-tone musical figures in terms of information is a dismissal of the charge that twelve-tone music must be unintelligible for the reason of its denial of tonal center and structures. In the politically motivated Soviet version of this charge, the complexity of twelve-tone or, for that matter, any kind of atonal modernist music was deemed to reflect an essentially solipsistic position that seemingly works against society and its redemption through communism. Lampe does not engage this charge openly, but he was undoubtedly aware of this view, as anyone active in East German cultural life would have been. Against this background, his theory makes the case for twelve-tone music by showing that the problem of musical comprehensibility is not a matter of specific (modernist) musical idiom but a question of the composer’s awareness of listeners’ capacity for information processing. In unpublished notes, he further wrote that a reproduction of reality in music is impossible because the composer “first converts acquired information into feelings and then tries to express these feelings through the possibilities of music.”81 He further adds that a “socialist-realist [approach] can be only the basic attitude with which the composer takes up the information and processes, because when it comes to feelings only subjective judgment is possible.”82 On another level, Lampe’s use of information theory throws a critical light on at least some developments in contemporary music. This is connected to his use of the information–theoretical concept of redundancy. “Redundancy” refers to recurring shapes such as motives and cadences, for which Lampe also adopts the term “super signs” (Superzeichen).83 According to the dictionary of cybernetics edited by Georg Klaus and Heinz Liebscher, a super sign is a “sign of higher order” resulting from a process of abstraction from a series of “elementary signs” or through the “construction of invariants of equivalent (elementary) signs.”84 This fits Lampe’s choice of term, not only because recurring musical patterns are the building blocks of musical form, but also because of the effect of these on the perception and expectations of the listener. From the viewpoint of (information) psychology, Lampe explains, redundancy means the unconscious storage of experiences.85 The recollection of those experiences contributes to a subjective reduction of information content which, in turn, calls for an expansion of the flow of content in the form of musical variety. Insisting on the centrality of redundancy in effective musical communication, Lampe goes on to criticize the disregard of composers for the constraints of human cognition in processing information: It has been shown that many contemporary composers seem to be unfamiliar with these conditions (or at least ignore them) and thus confront the listener with tasks that he cannot cope with. Contemporary works can—roughly speaking—be divided into at least two groups: Works that have the potential to be works of art in the eyes of a few and those that do not because they do not meet certain basic requirements.86 Lampe, it must be noted, did not seek to create a new kind of “cybernetic music,” the way, for instance, Roland Kayn did. It is also not clear whether information theory affected his compositional practice in any systematic manner. One of the few documented occasions in which he referred to his own compositional work in cybernetic or informational terms is in a program note to his clarinet solo piece Tre soli concertante (1976). In it, he described the compositional technique in broad terms as involving twelve-tone structure and redundancy: “All three movements are based on a dodecaphonic melody, developed from a complete row and transformed into fragments and interpolated; a certain freedom in the use of the applied method, furthermore, creates at the same time space for the redundancy necessary for the reception of an artistic work. That is, redundancy with regard to the high flow of information inherent in the serial structure.”87 Lampe’s approach allows some comparisons with aspects of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Like theorists of socialist realism, Lampe considers compositional choices from the viewpoint of the projected impact of music on the listener and the need to make music comprehensible. Defending the necessity of new compositional practices in another unpublished note, he nonetheless distinguishes between experimentation in music as “a purposeful play with newly gained knowledge,” and a negatively connotated “avant-gardism” which is indifferent to experimentation in the scientific sense of trial and error.88 Elsewhere, he argues that the end of twelve-tone music is already foreseeable and this for reasons that could be explained in informational terms: The attempt to give each note of the chromatic scale equal importance in both the horizontal and vertical plane led to the creation of music that was free of perceptible redundancy. But since aesthetic information necessitates redundancy, this development is likely to give way to forms of music that place greater emphasis on redundancy which he identifies with the coming of a “post-serial and neo-symphonic phase.”89 Where traditional theorists of socialist realism would have appealed to tradition and realistic representation, Lampe highlights the importance of the laws of perception in accounting for the communicative power of music. This framework has the theoretical advantage of making room for new compositional approaches and systems without losing sight of cognitive capacities, though it is not clear how he might have approached in this context more specific issues of musical semantics apart from his proclamation: “Information is composed of semantics and a physical carrier.”90 In characterizing the relationship between composers and listeners as comprising a cybernetic system, Lampe employs the language of human–machine analogy with its implied decentering of the human. Yet, his theoretical sketch hardly suggests the decentering or replacement of human agency with another mechanism; nor does he give up the idea of an autonomous subject (whether in relation to the composer, the performer, or the listener) beyond the suggestion that subjective aesthetic experience is constrained by universal laws of perception. If anything, his ruminations represent what Hayles described as a recuperation of the posthuman into liberal humanism.91 In the context of Lampe’s cultural environment in the GDR, an appeal to this version of aesthetic humanism carried a critical function. Like other East German cyberneticians, Lampe seems to grasp the popularity of cybernetics in the GDR of the 1960s and 1970s as an opportunity to introduce and present a rationale for ideas and practices that would have previously been rejected by the regime as “formalist,” which had also been the case with twelve-tone music and other idioms of musical modernism. Here, the fact that both information theory and important developments in contemporary music were connected with quantitative procedures and new technologies proved useful. In addition to serious application of cybernetics, anecdotal evidence suggests that even just mentioning the theory of cybernetics could sometimes serve to fend off political intervention. The composer Friedrich Goldmann, sometimes referred to as the “Pierre Boulez of the GDR,” once described an SED functionary inquiring about the “meaning” of his music. Pointing to Meyer-Eppler’s theories of information, he replied, “That’s what happens in communication! What you ask me, I cannot answer at all!”92 To which the functionary “stared stupidly and gave up at some point.”93 This story may suggest little more than a tactical reason for evoking cybernetics or information theory.94 But even as such it is revealing for the shared fate of New Music and cybernetics on the level of reception: initially deprecated as products of bourgeois ideology by party functionaries, these imported Western inventions were eventually tolerated and accepted, even if simply as a halfhearted pragmatic measure. Though New Music never found the kind of support in the GDR reserved for works of traditional socialist realism, the new theories of communication implied that it, too, could mean something and be useful for the goals of socialism, at least so long as it was backed up with some underlying concept of aesthetic communication. Georg Katzer was another GDR composer who came under the sway of information theory, though he never sought to develop a systematic theory. As a pioneer of electroacoustic music in the GDR, he was well aware of the historical significance of cybernetics for the emergence of this art form. In fact, he was apparently inspired to work in this arena after encountering the ideas of the composer and cybernetician Herbert Brün, mentioned earlier.95 In one of Katzer’s interviews, he also cited Brün in explaining his own understanding of his profession, stating: A composer is not someone who works with notes, but rather someone “who works with the communicative qualities of notes.”96 This understanding of the compositional work as the shaping of information also underscores Katzer’s works for voice and traditional musical instruments: [This point] occupies me compositionally, not only in the electronic pieces, but in general. That is, the targeted and conscious planning of the flow of information. In other words, there are episodes or sections that have a high density of information, and those in which a strong reduction of the flow of information is deliberately carried out, which at the same time mark a phase of relaxation or also a phase of expectation.97 While Brün developed a notion of “anticommunication” in music,98 Katzer stressed the importance of employing the communicative function of music in creating certain impressions or modes. Writing in the late 1970s, the musicologist Frank Schneider described Katzer’s music as “communicative” because it “orients itself toward contact and empathy without that swollen, codified diction which so easily obscures the messianic individualism of some composing avant-gardists of today’s international music scene.”99 Katzer himself attested to his attempt at designing musical processes in view of a listener’s potential reactions: Today it is fashionable to deny such things. Very rarely does a composer admit that he is speculating with these things. It is speculation, of course, in the most general sense, because one never knows whether the considerations one makes will work out. As a composer, one reckons with certain effects, which certainly look different for every composer. But I am firmly convinced that even the composers who vehemently deny [the use of planned effects] work with such things.100 Representative in this regard is the work Empfindsame Musik for fifty-eight strings and three percussionists. The title of the piece itself suggests an aesthetic model that places a strong emphasis on the deliberate attempt to elicit certain emotions or sensations (Empfindungen) in the listener (empfindsam can be translated as “sentimental” or “sensitive” but also evokes the historical empfindsamer Stil of the eighteenth century). According to Katzer, in this piece, he “reclaimed an area that [he] had never completely given up but had not pursued so consistently and programmatically until then: the conscious triggering of emotions.”101 He further clarifies that in this composition he “portrays emotions [and] sensations” that are then “destroyed and smashed by other things.”102 This process of “destruction” is particularly discernible in the formal design of the piece in which blocks of distinct musical sounds or textures trade places or abruptly change the expressive qualities of the performance, as demonstrated, for instance, in the sudden shift from starr to espressivo and back to starr in the two string ensembles.103 Example 2 shows the passage in one of the ensembles. Example 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Georg Katzer, Empfindsame Musik, mm. 52–62. EP 5527.© Copyright 1980 by Edition Peters GmbH, Leipzig. Reproduced by permission. For the present purpose, the most telling aspect of this compositional procedure is the subversion of goal-oriented, narrative-like, musical communication. Such a form of musical communication was adumbrated by the dogma of socialist realism which was, in its own way, based on the idea of controlling emotions and thoughts through art. In contradistinction, in Katzer’s music, the attempt to affect listeners’ emotional reaction is used reflectively: in place of the teleological “per aspera ad astra” patterns of traditional socialist realist musical works, his work treats emotions as informational processes that defy the musical and ideological expectations of official aesthetics. Adding to the political dimension of this interpretation is Nina Noeske’s suggestion (in relation to Katzer’s piece Die D-Dur-Musikmaschine) that mechanical rhythms and sounds in Katzer’s music could be seen as an index for the East German political apparatus,104 which highlights the latter’s obsession with control and uniformity. In Empfindsame Musik, such sounds, which mark the beginning of the piece with the violins in pizzicato and then reemerge in the contrabass (mm. 32–35) and percussion (in particular, toward the end), form an element of contrast that shapes the piece’s characteristic expressive fluctuations. More broadly, Katzer’s musical treatment of the theme of machines, or machine-like conformity, can be understood as attempting to foreground the tension between the spontaneity of subjective human emotions and the search for mastery over nature in the form of technology. This critical aspect is probably what Katzer meant when saying that the deliberate control of emotions is not only “a musical decision but also an expression of political position, broadly speaking.”105 In addressing these issues in his music, Katzer intimated the ideas of posthumanism, albeit without using this term explicitly. This reflects most notably in a series of works based on texts by the eighteenth-century medical doctor and materialist philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. This series of works includes chamber pieces from the 1980s as well as a multimedia chamber opera composed in the years following the GDR’s demise. Here I will discuss only the second piece in this series, leaving a more comprehensive treatment of the other works in the series to another opportunity. Persecuted for his views in France and the Netherlands, La Mettrie found refuge during the last years of his life at the court of Friedrich II in Potsdam where he served as the king’s doctor and continued working on his philosophical treatises, the most well-known of which are L’Homme machine (the machine man), published before his stay in Potsdam, and L’Homme plante (the planet man). La Mettrie famously advocated a uniquely radical version of the materialist philosophy for his time. In L’Homme machine, he extends Descartes’s notion that animals are nothing but machines to human beings as well, arguing that as a surgeon he could find no evidence for the human soul.106 Although La Mettrie by no means abandoned this materialist conception, the focus of L’Homme plante lies elsewhere, namely on the analogy and relationship between human beings and plants, as parts of an organic whole. As he explains at the beginning of this treatise, humans and plants share common formal features: “In our species, as in plants, there is a main root and capillary roots. One is formed by the reservoir of the lumbar region and the thoracic canal, and the other by the lacteal veins. Everywhere we see the same uses and the same functions.”107 Carrying this comparison further, he points out the similarity between leaves and the human lungs. Only toward the end of the text does La Mettrie reiterate his materialist conviction that there is no need for the notion of souls in order to understand the functioning of organic bodies, whether those of humans, plants, or animals. Nonetheless, he uses the concept of soul to dwell on the differences between humans and plants in terms of their dispositions and needs: Man is, of all the beings hitherto known, the one which has the most soul, as if it were necessary for that to be so; and the plant is likewise the one which has, and was destined to have, the least of all, if we exclude minerals. What a splendid soul it would be, after all, paying no attention to any objects or any desires, without passions, without vices, without virtues and above all without needs, and not even entrusted with the care of providing food for its body!108 More than the one-sided human–machine analogy in the L’Homme machine, it is the image of the “plant man”—which includes but is not reducible to mechanic elements—that brings home the posthuman notion of human beings as a unity embedded in the ecology, biology, and technical worlds. This recognition also provides critical insight into Katzer’s La Mettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen (La Mettrie II or Remarks on Plant-Man, for wind quintet with piano) and ultimately into the posthuman dimensions of East German musical modernism. Alluding to La Mettrie’s text L’Homme plante, Katzer’s work was characterized by the composer as being “more ornamental and organic (pflanzlich)” in comparison with his first La Mettrie piece (La Mettrie oder Anmerkungen zum Maschinenmenschen) with its distinct mechanical character. But this is not the only way that La Mettrie II represents a counterpart to the first La Mettrie work. The contrast between the two also involves the role played by mechanical sounds and rhythms in the overall design of the work and the conclusions that can be drawn from this about the relationship Katzer construes between machines, as a symbol for the mechanization of life, and the contrasting idea of vitality and organic growth. The short introductory part of La Mettrie II, until the tempo indication changes from ♩ = 40 to ♩ = 60, presents one of three types of musical elements in the piece: a low register pulsating figure with an almost metallic sound played by the piano (which involves plucking strings of the piano directly) and the bassoon, then joined by the bass clarinet (ex. 3). Example 3. Open in new tabDownload slide First element in the opening section of Georg Katzer‘s La Mettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen. EP 13283. © Copyright 1989 Edition Peters GmbH, Leipzig. Reproduced by permission. The second type of musical element appears after the change of tempo indication. The oboe and the flute present twelve-tone-based rich melodic figurations that initially take the form of a dialogue between the two instruments, with the first mechanical element temporarily operating as something of a signal announcing their entrance (ex. 4). Example 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Second element, Georg Katzer’s La Mettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen. EP 13283. © Copyright 1989 Edition Peters GmbH, Leipzig. Reproduced by permission. While the first element, with its mechanical character assumes a relatively modest scope, the second element, which stands for organic growth, dominates most of the musical work. In taking different shapes and forms, this process of development draws on three melodic building blocks, introduced during the first appearance of the oboe and the flute: a) sustained notes (often with trill), b) large intervallic leaps, and c) fast, sometimes chromatic, stepwise motions (including tremolos). One way of looking at the form of this composition is to focus on the manner in which these building blocks and their combination define the larger musical sections. Following the dialogue and long solo parts of the oboe and the flute, in which other instruments occasionally provide an accompaniment, the ensemble presents a dense polyphonic construction in which the individual parts are based on the melodic building block b, that is, large intervallic leaps (ex. 5). Example 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Polyphonic construction based on b, followed by the horn signal; Georg Katzer’s La Mettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen. EP 13283.© Copyright 1989 Edition Peters GmbH, Leipzig. Reproduced by permission. This intensive musical activity is halted abruptly with the introduction of what, from this point on, becomes a third prominent element of the work, namely a horn signal in the form of a sustained note in crescendo, which sometimes appears reinforced with overlaps and extensions from other instruments such as the oboe or bass clarinet, as in the last measure of example 5. This element, which seems to be taken from the world of romantic music, may serve to suggest the idea of soul, an interpretation that gets support from its sentimental character and the sudden manner in which it upsurges on the musical fabric as if to convey the existence of a stable anchor besides or beyond the perceptible surface of constant motion. Sometimes serving as a formal punctuation between sections of different characters, the horn signal seems to mark the emergence of “new life” in the course of the musical growth. After the first horn signal, the musical activity is dominated by the melodic motive c appearing as brief gestures in staccato in the oboe, horn, and piano with a and b featured in the part of the bassoon. In the subsequent, more meditative, section, the horn signal appears augmented with its own embellishments and extensions, in part through an overlap with the parts of the bassoon and bass clarinet. A Webern-like pointillist texture gradually transforms into a second polyphonic culmination, based on figurations derived from b, followed by melodic motions of ascending and descending scales. A slow passage, which intimates the idea of awakening, leads to what appears to be an almost literary presentation of blossoming in music, with the stemless notes in the score looking like spreading pollen (ex. 6). For a few brief moments, this activity takes place against a repeating note of the piano. Example 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Georg Katzer’s La Mettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen.EP 13283. © Copyright 1989 Edition Peters GmbH, Leipzig. Reproduced by permission. Described by Gerhard Müller as the marching off of the plant-man to the sound of robotic rhythms,109 the final part of the piece is marked by a last exchange—perhaps a conflict—between the mechanical—insinuated by the bassoon and horn—and the organic, with a clear triumph of the latter. Abounding with glissandi and notes lacking exact pitch, the coda is an end of one thing and the emergence of something new, a new creation that dissolves the opposition between the shaping elements of the organic and the mechanical. La Mettrie II represents neither a gloomy dystopia of an emotionless mechanical world nor a celebration of the age of the machine and technical progress, a stance familiar from the “machine-music” of some early Soviet avant-garde composers such as Alexander Mossolow. Rather, Katzer’s treatment of La Mettrie’s imaginaries in his musical work conveys an approach that takes interest in the tension between machines and organic growth while pointing to the possibility of unplanned outcomes resulting from their interaction. That this could still carry political relevance for Katzer in the late 1980s stems from the aforementioned identification of machines in Katzer’s work with the rigidity of the SED regime. Foregrounding the element of wild organic growth and its precedence over the mechanical mode, Katzer’s piece seems to be underlined by the wish to steer the thoughts and emotions of its listeners toward the alternative vision of freedom symbolized by the plant-man. Katzer’s peculiar way of addressing such issues while using the most abstract means of musical modernism goes hand-in-hand with the notion of music as a system of communication, involving not only syntax but also semantics and pragmatics. Katzer himself noted his interest in the dimensions of content and context in exploring new musical materials: “The search for novelty is for me never a search that stems from the ostensible interest in material, although that is of course also there. . . . The reason why I explore the material is that I am looking for certain expressive values that are necessary for a certain situation.”110 In this respect, Katzer’s understanding of communication in music overlaps with the basic notion of socialist realism as an aesthetic theory, namely that art has the function of delivering or communicating knowledge of reality. As noted, this is not a specifically socialist approach, but rather an idea coming from the realist literary tradition to which socialist politicians and intellectuals frequently alluded, though not always genuinely. Yet, “realism” under the early cultural politics of the SED was often tantamount to the use of art in the service of propaganda. Against this backdrop, combining concepts of cybernetics, information theory, and semiotics served to infuse new life into the idea of music as a medium of reality while making room for a more inclusive understanding of what realism in music could mean.111 Whether or not composers were ultimately dependent on such concepts in their artistic decisions, these intellectual models were instrumental in pushing the boundaries of the aesthetics of socialist realism to include practices of modernist music. Posthuman Aspects in East German Musicology Cybernetic and semiotic theories of communication also paved the way for new musicological approaches to modernist music, its meaning, and its historical origins. Long slandered by party functionaries as an expression of “formalism” and “nihilism,” the increasing presence of original modernist music in East German theaters and concert halls from the late 1960s on, called for a reevaluation of the place of this music in state socialism. Though not primarily scholars of contemporary music, Harry Goldschmidt and Georg Knepler were among the foremost GDR musicologists to draw on theories of communication in advancing new historical–materialist approaches that rehabilitated New Music as a legitimate and a (communicatively) meaningful form of art within the framework of socialist realist convictions. Goldschmidt’s interest in theories of aesthetic communication goes back at least to the mid-1960s. In 1964, he gave a lecture at the Second International Seminar for Marxist Music Aesthetics titled “Gedanken zu einer nicht-aristotelischen Musikästhetik” (Thoughts on the Non-Aristotelian Aesthetics of Music).112 In it, he pleaded for a modification of the concept of reflection in music. He suggested that Marxist musicology should not focus exclusively on what he called the “symptomatic function” of music, that is, its emotional expressivity.113 Rather, it must also explore the “non-Aristotelian field”—that is, non-mimetic aspects such as musical material and syntax. Aristotelian notions of mimesis and empathy, he further maintains, can no longer clarify the historical variability of music and therefore one must turn to concepts from the fields of (structural) linguistics and information theory that can proffer adequate explanatory models. Somewhat analogues to Klaus’s critique of the Shannonian concept of information, Goldschmidt nonetheless decries the one-sided focus on form at the expense of content in information aesthetics, using the politically loaded language of the Cold War era: “In the denial of the semantic and pragmatic function, in the declaration of the syntactic function as an ontological criterion of art, for instance in the much-cited Aesthetica by Max Bense, we notice the tenacious persistence of the idealistic myth of ʽabsolute’ music under modern, imperialistically tightened conditions.”114 Comparing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Luigi Nono’s Il canto sospeso, he argues that the two are perhaps using similar terms of syntax and even literary material but stand in complete opposition regarding their treatment of the pragmatic and semantic functions of music.115 Whereas in the former resistance is gauged existentially (and, hence, in connection with a philosophical framework considered “bourgeois” in East Germany), the latter represents a decidedly anti-fascist stance. This leads Goldschmidt to suggest that the new, and more genuine, realism of the non-Aristotelian aesthetics in music entails a synthesis of avant-garde syntax and progressive ideological content, as further demonstrated in historical models such as Hanns Eisler’s Lenin (Requiem) and Paul Dessau’s Appell der Arbeiterklasse116—all works on socialist political themes that also employ advanced musical materials and techniques of their time. Goldschmidt’s conclusion leaves no doubt about the merit he saw for a new kind of ontology of music, one that resonates with current ontological concepts of pluralism and relationality in posthumanism:117 Without the non-Aristotelian dualism there can be no realism today that can shape the socialist [art] object using the most advanced material. In other words, the socialist object is compatible with the most advanced material, provided that it is designed dualistically, i.e. with the double face on both realms of reality. When appropriation and active reflection in the work of art enter into ideal competition with one another, when the ideological aspect of progress coincides with the aesthetic one, then we are really talking about [realistic reflection of] people.118 Goldschmidt, and others following in his footsteps in East German musicology, believed that the new theories of information and communication provided the most promising basis for analyzing the coexistence of different “fields” (as Goldschmidt calls it) that constitute musical works while remaining true to the basic premises of socialist realism.119 Parallel to the adoption of new theoretical frameworks, a new perspective emerged with regard to the history and evolution of aesthetic phenomena. Wishing to advance reforms in aesthetic thought in the GDR, the authors of Ästhetik Heute (1978), which includes the musicologist Günter Mayer, proposed that Marxist–Leninist aesthetic theory must do justice to its own materialist claims by expanding its scope beyond works of art, in order to include “pre-aesthetic” phenomena in nature. In support of this view, the Bulgarian communist politician and philosopher Todor Pavlov is cited: Only those authors … who define aesthetics as a theory of art are right, and even more so those who emphasize that in art all transitional phenomena are dialectically sublated, which we find in the comprehensive work and production activity of the people, especially in crafts and in the building industry, as well as those far in the past, the pre-aesthetic phenomena in animals, plants, and even crystals. 120 Through the focus on broad-scale evolutionary processes in art and music, cybernetic and semiotic approaches found new areas of application in research. The perception that aesthetic phenomena had their origin in nature and pre-human stages of evolution provided a new perspective for the understanding of aesthetic communication as involving elements of different historical and evolutionary origins. This perspective was also conducive to the reevaluation of modernist avant-garde music: since even natural sounds and noises are part of the evolutionary history of music, there could be no closed universal system of purely musical signs that would sanctify only certain historical styles. At least in retrospect, this may also seem to be a posthuman plea for a kind of musical understanding that undermines the notion of music as a uniquely human phenomenon. Driven by such considerations, Georg Knepler developed his theory of musical communication during the 1970s, which drew extensively on cybernetic and semiotic models. Knepler hypothesized that music (as distinct from language) evolved into a separate acoustic system (AKS) during a phase of “Tier–Mensch–Übergangsfeld” (animal–human transition field, or TMÜ), as represented in the “blackbox” figure from his Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis (fig. 1):121 Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Georg Knepler’s representation of the animal–human transition field (TMÜ) in Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis. At the heart of Knepler’s theory is the idea of music as a medium of communication that is shaped by the interplay of various factors: biological, cultural, and historical.122 Knepler was also interested in showing that even New Music—including certain forms of electroacoustic music—contains elements that can be traced to evolutionary processes and ancient cultural practices. According to Knepler, Pierre Schaefer’s musique concrète is an example of a new form of imitation in art since it is based on a reproduction of the sounds in the environment. Taking a different approach than Goldschmidt, Knepler highlights the similarities between Nono’s Il canto sospeso and Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge regarding their use of verbal language.123 Both pieces not only use words but also turn words into musical material, hence creating a new kind of word-based—in his terminology “logogenic”—artworks. Knepler was uncertain about the presence of biological, or “biogenic,” elements in contemporary music, but his findings nevertheless led him to conclude that this music is by no means unnatural or ineffective as a form of aesthetic communication just because it departs from the conventions of tonal harmony and structures.124 Acknowledging the multiplicity of sources of meaning in music, Knepler created something of a posthuman materialist approach to music in which classical and modern musical works, but also non-Western musical traditions, represent different constellations of elements deriving from the realities of culture (including technology) and nature. Finally, cybernetic models have also informed musicological methodologies that, while historically originating in the GDR, continued to flourish after the Wende. Particularly relevant in this context is Christian Kaden’s semiotically-oriented music sociology. As Gerhard Engel noted, Kaden’s use of the concept of communication is not psychological but sociological because communication is what binds individuals into systems whose structures can then be analyzed with the tools of system theory, cybernetics, and communication science.125 “Social structures,” according to Kaden, “are networks of relations between human individuals (as well as groups, classes, etc.).”126 He further clarifies that “as social structures of music, these structures reveal themselves as those relations that people bring about (hervorbringen) in making and hearing music.”127 Kaden first explored how this was possible in his doctoral work of 1977, Hirtensignale: Musikalische Syntax und kommunikative Praxis (Shepherd Signals: Musical Syntax and Communicative Practice).128 In Musiksoziologie (1984), he developed his theory of musical communication more comprehensively and explored a variety of historical case studies. For the present goal, the most revealing aspect in later writings, after German reunification, is his analysis of the rise of autonomous music and elaboration of this concept in relation to twentieth-century modern music. A key factor in this context is the function of eighteenth-century instrumental music in creating a sense of societal cooperation and interpersonal understanding as captured by the concept of Empfindsamkeit: Sensibility and sensualism strive … to create a language that affects “everyone” and that everyone understands. Or better yet: they strive for the naturalization of a basic communicative structure that can be superimposed or subordinated to all special forms of language. It is this one basic structure that the bourgeois commodity producer needs in order to do business everywhere: that of general comprehensibility, of comprehensive efficiency. But it is also a structure in which all those who are subjugated, humiliated, and insulted by feudal-absolutist arbitrariness are able to show solidarity: that of fraternity, of sincerity. . . . However, the purpose of such sentient communication is not limited to organizing the possibility of action for the communicating subject and the opportunity to unite with like-minded people. It has and should also offer [the subject] security: in particular, the security of not being tricked by fellow human beings, but of being taken seriously as a partner, of not being an object of manipulation, but of being a subject of cooperation.129 Writing decades later, Kaden takes this view of Empfindsamkeit and its corollary in autonomous instrumental music as the point of departure in explaining the course of Western art music from the classical period to the present. In a nutshell: in the absence of a concrete social function, music gradually came to reflect the processes that shape modern society in an even more profound way. Drawing on the cybernetically oriented concept of complexity of Niklas Luhmann, Kaden argues that the classicism of the eighteenth century was founded on a tendency to come to terms with the communicative complexity of modern society by reducing or overcoming it.130 Modern avant-garde music faces a similar problem but instead embraces this complexity in giving open expression to the “gulf between overarching construction and deconstructed detail.”131 Seen in this light, the notorious complexity of modernist avant-garde music is not only historically related to eighteenth-century classicism and sensibility, but also an expression of the increased complexity (in the sense of social systems theory) of contemporary society, articulated in forms specific to music. Musical Cybernetics as Mediamorphosis Under the circumstances of the Cold War, the preoccupation of East German musicians and scholars with theories of communication, whether cybernetic or semiotic, was bound to engender objections and endorsements not only for scientific reasons but because of the complex relationship of these intellectual models to Marxism and its aesthetic doctrines. In all the musical thinkers discussed here we find what the Czech musicologist Jiří Fukač identified as the peculiar intellectual intensity with which music scholars in the Eastern bloc elaborated semiotic approaches to music. Outside the GDR, examples of this include the work of Zofia Lissa in Poland, and Jaroslav Jiránek and Antonín Sychra in the Czech Republic. All turned at some point to semiotic or cybernetic theories in developing a variety of interpretative approaches to music.132 Although work in a similar vein has been carried out by scholars in the West, Fukač rightly observed that in the East this trend did not only start somewhat earlier but was also affected by the unique circumstances of cultural life under communism. Elaborating on Fukač’s appraisal, these circumstances include a) the relative political liberalization during the late 1960s that allowed an emancipation from vulgar Marxist approaches and replacing these with new models of language or communication analysis; b) the necessity of coming to terms with the official doctrines about reality’s reflection in art, resulting in various ideas of music as a medium of real-life processes; and c) the political pressure to produce something different than “bourgeois musicology,” even if results sometimes appeared similar. With regard to the latter, Fukač further explains how political pressures and the holistic model of science derived from Soviet Marxism contributed to steering the work of music scholars in interdisciplinary directions: In the end … this demand became naturalized in the minds of most scientists. One worked with the idea of the totality of his subject and of “science in general,” one constantly tried to “methodologize,” one reckoned also that the innovations could be criticized and that one would be forced to defend them. Somehow, therefore, the scientists’ way of thinking was provoked and, moreover, made dynamic. Those musicologists who sincerely declared themselves Marxists, and ultimately the non-Marxists as well, therefore strove for a new and cognitively more complex paradigm of their subject, emphasizing many newer aspects (including the emerging music semiotics) to an extent that was not present in Western musicology.133 No music scholar in the GDR could ignore the circumstances described by Fukač, but the approaches developed in response to these were highly diverse, even when applying the very same scientific paradigms. More important than the tactical appeal to theories of cybernetics and the related field of semiotics is their role in replacing the narrowly defined socialist realist notion of artistic reflection with a more dynamic and multileveled notion of aesthetic communication. Insisting on the presence of a semantic dimension in music, it is the strength of these theories (especially Knepler’s and Kaden’s) that they did away with narrow interpretations of music as a means of ideological education. In the process, the aesthetic conceptions associated with Marxism dissipated into models whose relation to Marxism has remained quite vague, if existing at all. Uniting all the approaches discussed here, however, is the insistence on music as a form of semantically meaningful communication. This is true even in the case of Lampe whose statement about the nature of (musical) information as a combination of physical carrier and semantics brings to mind Klaus’s attempt to rehabilitate the semantic dimension in revisiting Shannon’s communication theory.134 This emphasis on semantics is the single persisting feature shared by the doctrine of socialist realism and the new theories of musical communication. But even in its new semiotic–cybernetic guise, this element can be traced to intellectual traditions that were initially independent from Marxism and cybernetics. Indeed, even Boris Asafiev’s theory of intonations—probably the foremost music–theoretical model to be associated with Marxism–Leninism—had its origin in the “old Russian music theory” and represented a revised version of the energetic theory created by Ernst Kurth.135 However, riding on the cybernetic craze of the late 1960s, the new theories made it possible to bring in new ideas that enriched aesthetic thought in the GDR and contributed to the advancement of modernist music and practices. The significance of these theories lies not only in providing new ways for understanding preexisting music, but also in what seemed to be their capacity to enrich and deepen composers’ semiotic awareness in shaping the communicative function of their own music, a function which East German musicians and critics often considered to be neglected or misunderstood by Western avant-garde composers. At the same time, in adopting and revising cybernetic models, East German musicians and music scholars participated in a larger conversation about the nature of human communication vis-à-vis humanist and posthumanist conceptions of subjectivity. On the one hand, the application of cybernetic approaches to music reinforced a view of the listener as a complex information-processing machine; on the other hand, the concern of critical East German intellectuals with new approaches to materialism and social semantics resonate with a rejection of the dualism between humans and their environment in favor of posthuman relational notions of the self as connected with nature and technology. Perhaps because of the distortion of humanist ideas by the communist political establishment, the shift to ways of thinking beyond the human, with its susceptibility to abuse of power, exerted a particularly strong attraction on groups critical of the SED regime. Such local conditions certainly affected the specific forms taken by cybernetics and its musical adaptation in the GDR, yet they are also part of the history of posthumanism in twentieth-century culture more broadly. In the East as much as in the West, the decentering of the human was connected with technological developments that thinkers such as Friedrich Kittler and Bernard Stiegler have recognized as shaping the conditions of possibility of contemporary culture.136 But even if one does not endorse a strong technologically deterministic position, there is agreement that new technologies of the last decades have increasingly influenced aspects of musical production and reception. The music sociologist Kurt Blaukopf proposed in the 1980s the term “mediamorphosis” to highlight this development.137 According to Blaukopf, the relationship between music and technology is not only quantitative but also qualitative, meaning that technology becomes intertwined with the “message” of music.138 Within this framework, the case of music and cybernetics reveals that technological models of communication could shape modes of musical thought and discourse even in the absence of actual technological intervention. In this form, the specific mediamorphosis afforded by cybernetics manifests the contradictory aspects of the posthuman condition: the danger of confusing humans with information-processing machines and the recognition of the diversity of technological, social, and organic spheres in which societies and their cultures are embedded. Golan Gur is a musicologist specializing in the aesthetics and cultural history of music. He has held positions in several academic institutions, including the University of Cambridge, Tel Aviv University, Berlin University of the Arts, and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. From 2020 to 2022, he served as a Lise Meitner Fellow of the FWF at mdw—University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He studied at Tel Aviv University and at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and completed his doctoral studies at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is currently living in Germany. Email: gurgolan@gmail.com The essay is part of a larger research project dealing with music and aesthetic culture in the German Democratic Republic. I am grateful to the Royal Society and the British Academy for their generous support of the project in 2014–2015 in my capacity as a Newton International Fellow in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. Further research work has been made possible by research fellowships at IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies Vienna (University of Art and Design Linz) and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania). The process of preparing the article for publication overlapped with my time as a Lise Meitner Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, project number: M 2849-G) at mdw—University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. I am grateful to Meli Solomon, Irene Zedlacher, and the reviewers of the Musical Quarterly for valuable remarks and suggestions on earlier drafts. I would like to express my gratitude to Jürgen Lampe who provided me with writings by his father, Günter Lampe, and for clarifying me concepts in information theory. Furthermore, I would like to thank C. F. Peters in Leipzig for providing me with scores and kindly allowing me to reprint excerpts. I am grateful also to Sebastian Katzer for sending me texts and materials by and about Georg Katzer. Notes 1 Harry Goldschmidt and Georg Knepler, eds., Musikästhetik in der Diskussion (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1981), 7. The volume is based on contributions to a series of lectures that took place in East Berlin in winter 1978–79. In addition to Goldschmidt and Knepler, contributors included Eberhard Lippold, Günter Mayer, Doris Stockmann, and Klaus Mehner. Among the participants in the discussions—which are partially reproduced in the volume—were the musicologists Frank Schneider, Gerd Rienäcker, and Rainer Kluge, the philosopher Wolfgang Heise, zoologist Günter Tembrock, and linguistic Manfred Bierwisch. 2 “Die marxistische Ästhetik ist seit einiger Zeit in der DDR in Bewegung geraten. Neue gesellschaftliche Prozesse und Faktoren verlangen nach ihrer Widerspiegelung durch den sozialistischen Künstler und damit zugleich nach einer Vertiefung der Theorie des sozialistischen Realismus: neue Züge und Momente der modernen Wissenschaftsentwicklung (Kybernetik, Semiotik, Soziologie, Sozialpsychologie usw.) stellen die ästhetische Theorie vor neue Probleme.” Joachim Scholz, “Ein Philosoph und Ästhetiker,” Berliner Zeitung, 26 April 1968, 6. All translations in this article are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 Information theory is often considered as a subfield of cybernetics. Semiotics, which studies the structure, function, and meaning of signs—normally with respect to one another and in relation to the world—could be interpreted as the qualitative version of information theory, with the latter representing an “a-signifying” model of communication. See Gary Genosko, Critical Semiotics: Theory, from Information to Affect (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), in particular chap. 1: “From Information Theory to Félix Guattari’s A-Signifying Semiotics,” 13–54. 4 On the reception of cybernetics in the USSR, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 5 Cybernetics models have also served a variety of musical purposes in Western countries, during and after the Cold War era. As Christina Dunbar-Hester showed in her study of music and cybernetics, the musical use of cybernetics was highly diverse and suggests an “open” rather than a closed monolithic discourse of humans as machines. Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 35, no. 1 (2010): 113–39. 6 These elements have been central to discussions of cybernetics in the humanities following Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 291–324. For a critique of the teleological view of the history of cybernetics as a discipline dealing primarily with cyborgs, see Ronald Kline, “Where Are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?,” Social Studies of Science 39, no. 3 (2009): 331–62. 7 For broad discussions of music and posthumanism, see Gary Tomlinson, “Posthumanism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, ed. Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson (New York et al.: Oxford University Press, 2020), 415–34; and Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, “Music,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism, ed. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 363–75. 8 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanismus? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), xv. 9 Ibid., xiii. On music and the transhumanist thread of posthumanism, see David Trippett, “Music and the Transhuman Ear: Ultrasonics, Material Bodies, and the Limits of Sensation,” The Musical Quarterly 100, no. 2 (2017): 199–261. 10 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999). 11 See Wolfe, What Is Posthumanismus?, xii. 12 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. Emphasis in original. 13 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxiv. See also Nicholas Gane, “Radical Post-Humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the Primacy of Technology,” Theory, Culture & Society 22, no. 3 (2005): 25–41. 14 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5. 15 See Wolfe, What Is Posthumanismus?, xv. 16 The authoritative text on Marxist–Leninist epistemology in the Soviet bloc throughout its years of existence is Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, first published in Moscow in 1909. On the context of this book, see David G. Rowley, “Bogdanov and Lenin: Epistemology and Revolution,” Studies in East European Thought 48, no. 1 (1996): 1–19. Interestingly, Klaus studied under Max Bense at the University of Jena during the late 1940s, before Bense moved to West Germany. 17 “Der dialektische Materialismus lehrt uns, daß die Entwicklung vom Niederen zum Höheren verläuft, wobei durch Quantitäts- und Strukturänderungen ständig neue, höhere Qualitäten entstehen. Die Geschichte des Lebens … gibt uns einen der überzeugendsten Beweise für die Richtigkeit dieser allgemeinen philosophischen These. Die Kybernetik nun ist in der Lage, uns die allgemeinen Prinzipien dieser quantitativen und strukturellen Änderungen, die zur Erzeugung neuer, höherer Qualitäten führen, darzulegen. Die Kybernetik schließt gewissermaßen die Lücke zwischen den allgemeinsten Prinzipien, die diesem Entwicklungsgang zugrunde liegen, und den reichhaltigen Fakten und Beweismaterialien, die in den letzten hundertfünfzig Jahren gesammelt wurden.” Georg Klaus, Kybernetik in philosophischer Sicht (Berlin: Dietz, 1961), 358. 18 Elana Gomel, “Our Posthuman Past: Subjectivity, History, and Utopia in Late-Soviet Science Fiction,” in The Human Reimagined: Posthumanism in Russia, ed. Colleen McQuillen and Julia Vaingurt (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 37–54, at 40. 19 Slava Gerovitch, “‘New Soviet Man’ Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” Osiris 22, no. 1 (2007): 135–57, at 139–40. 20 On cybernetics and the economic policies of the GDR, see Steffen Werner, Kybernetik statt Marx? Politische Ökonomie und marxistische Philosophie in der DDR unter dem Einfluß der elektronischen Datenverarbeitung (Stuttgart: Verlag Bonn Aktuell, 1977), 72ff. 21 Fred Staufenbiel, Kultur heute, für morgen: Theoretische Probleme unserer Kultur und ihre Beziehung zur technischen Revolution (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1966), 52. 22 George David Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933). 23 “Die Informationsästhetik ist nicht wie die meisten klassischen Ästhetiken darauf aus, das, was wir an einem gegebenen Objekt als das Schöne oder das Häßliche, als das Tragische oder das Suffisante und so fort bezeichnen, zu interpretieren. Diese moderne Ästhetik ist also keine Intepretationsästhetik, sondern eine Ästhetik, die den Versuch macht, das, was wir in der bezeichneten Weise durch Prädikate wie “schön,” “nicht schön,” “häßlich,” “nicht häßlich” oder dergleichen bestimmen können, als objektiv feststellbar vorauszusetzen.” Max Bense, “Einführung in die Informationsästhetik,” in Kunst und Kybernetik, ed. Hans Ronge (Cologne: DuMont, 1968), 28–41, at 29. Emphasis in original. 24 On Bense’s aesthetics theory in the cultural context of postwar Germany, see Claus Pias, “Hollerith ‘gefiederter’ Kristalle: Kunst, Wissenschaft und Computer in Zeiten der Kybernetik,” in Die Transformation des Humanen: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik, ed. Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), 72–106. 25 “[W]ie die Ästhetik Hegels [stellt] auch die Ästhetik Lukacs’ eine Gehaltsästhetik [dar], eine Ästhetik, die zwar ständig von der Adäquation zwischen Inhalt und Form spricht, aber die Elemente, die sie zur Interpretation bringt, dem Bedeutungsbereich der Darstellung bzw. der Gestaltung entnimmt. Das, was in der Informationsästhetik ‘Material’ genannt wird und ebenso Formelement wie Inhaltselement sein kann, sofern es nur der zeichenmäßigen und zahlenmäßigen Bestimmung zugänglich wird, und mit dessen Manipulation der eigentliche ästhetische Prozeß beginnt, bleibt bei Georg Lukacs außerhalb der Betrachtung.” Max Bense, Aesthetica: Einführung in die neue Ästhetik (Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1965), 207. 26 Abraham Moles, Informationstheorie und ästhetische Wahrnehmung, trans. Hans Ronge (Cologne: DuMont, 1971). 27 Antonín Sychra, “Die Anwendung der Kybernetik und der Informationstheorie in der marxistischen Ästhetik,” Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 12, no. 2 (1970): 83–108, at 83. As with other music scholars in the Eastern bloc, Sychra’s writings from the early 1950s were marked by crude Marxist–Leninist aesthetic dogmas. The situation changed following the relative cultural liberation after Josef Stalin’s death and even more so when cybernetics and semiotics became in vogue in the Eastern bloc. 28 For the exhibition catalogue, see Jasia Reichardt, Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). 29 Their joint teaching on cybernetics generated the book The Cybernetics of Cybernetics: The Control of Control and the Communication of Communication (Minneapolis: Future Systems Inc., 1995 [1974]). 30 See also M. J. Grant, Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29–33. 31 See Werner Meyer-Eppler, Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informationstheorie (Berlin: Springer, 1959). Additional relevant studies include his Elektrische Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und synthetische Sprache (Bonn: Dümmler, 1949) and Experimentelle Untersuchungen zum Mechanismus von Stimme und Gehör in der lautsprachlichen Kommunikation (Cologne: Opladen, 1955). 32 See Doris Stockmann, “Die ästhetisch-kommunikativen Funktionen der Musik unter historischen, genetischen und Entwicklungs-Aspekten,” Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 22, no. 2 (1980): 126–44, at 128. 33 Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Struktur und Erlebniszeit,” Die Reihe 2: Anton Webern (1955): 69–79. 34 Information on Roland Kayn and his music is available on the official website of the composer: https://kayn.nl/. Additional sources on Kayn include Thomas W. Patterson, “The Time of Roland Kayn’s Cybernetic Music,” in Travelling Time, ed. Arie Altena and Sonic Acts (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2012), 47–68; Otto Paul Burkhardt, “Galaktische Klänge aus dem Ur-Chaos: Der Komponist Roland Kayn (1933–2011)—ein Pionier der kybernetischen Musik,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 172, no. 3 (May–June 2011): 50–51; and Fosco Lucarelli, “Roland Kayn and the Development of Cybernetic Music,” Socks, 3 November 2014: http://socks-studio.com/2014/11/03/roland-kayn-and-the-development-of-cybernetic-music/. In his study of music and cybernetics, Daren Pickles also discusses Roland Kayn. See Daren Pickles, “Cybernetics in Music” (PhD diss., Coventry University, 2016), https://pure.coventry.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/41638105/Pickles2016.pdf. 35 Roland Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte: Cybernetics I, Cybernetics II, Entropy PE 31, Monades, Eon, LP, liner notes, 11–12. Colos SM 1474, Colosseum. 36 Ibid., 12. 37 On Kayn and existentialism, see Pickles, “Cybernetics in Music,” 79. On cybernetics and existentialism more broadly, see Steve Dixon, Cybernetic-Existentialism: Freedom, Systems, and Being-for-Others in Contemporary Arts and Performances (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 38 Kayn, Elektroakustische Projekte, 12. 39 “Mein Ansatz, das Kybernetische, könnte auch politisch aufgefasst werden: Dass sich Gruppen selbst steuern, selbst bestimmen, und dass dies auch mit Tönen, Klängen und Geräuschen möglich sein müsste—elektronisch natürlich. Dass sie selbstorganisierte Mechanismen werden.” Roland Kayn in conversation with Otto Paul Burkhardt, published in the Südwest Presse, 3 September 2008. Cited in Burkhardt, “Galaktische Klänge,” 51. 40 See Manfred Buhr and Alfred Kosing, eds., “Marxismus–Leninismus,” Kleines Wörterbuch der Marxistisch–Leninistischen Philosophie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1979), 196–200. Written by East German authors, this dictionary was also published in West Germany. Here I am using the Western version. 41 See Peter Davies, “Hanns Eisler’s ‘Faustus’ Libretto and the Problem of East German National Identity,” Music & Letters 81, no. 4 (2000): 585–98; and Joachim Lucchesi, Das Verhör in der Oper: Die Debatte um die Aufführung “Das Verhör des Lukullus” von Bertolt Brecht und Paul Dessau (Berlin: Basis Druck-Verlag, 1993). 42 On Stalin’s relation to the natural sciences, see Kirill O. Rossianov, “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the ‘New’ Soviet Biology,” Isis 84, no. 4 (1993): 728–45; and Peter Kneen, “Physics, Genetics, and the Zhdanovshchina,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 7 (1998): 1183–202. On Stalin and cybernetics in the Soviet Union, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 4–5; and Benjamin Peters, “Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics,” Information & Culture 47, no. 2 (2012): 145–75. See also Friedrich A. Kittler, “Media Wars: Trenches, Lightning, Stars,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1997), 117–29, at 128. 43 Jérôme Segal, “Kybernetik in der DDR—Begegnung mit der marxistischen Ideologie,” Dresdener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technikwissenschaften 27 (2001): 47–75, at 51. Online at https://tud.qucosa.de/landing-page/?tx_dlf[id]=https%3A%2F%2Ftud.qucosa.de%2Fapi%2Fqucosa%253A27881%2Fmets. 44 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 [1948]), 132. 45 Peters, “Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics,” 151ff. Contributing to the reception of cybernetics in the USSR is also the fact that some of its aspects such as the mind–machine analogy resonated with already established theories there, such as Ivan Pavlov’s theory of “conditioned reflexes,” which was developed in analogy with electric response. Peters, “Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics,” 153. 46 Segal, “Kybernetik in der DDR,” 56. 47 Ibid. 48 “Walter Ulbricht, 74, bislang neben der Muttersprache nur des Russischen kundig, hat im hohen Alter eine zweite Fremdsprache erlernt. Der SED-Chef redet fließend kybernetisch. Begriffe der modernen Steuerungstechnik, etwa ‘Verflechtungsmodell,’ ‘optimale Variante,’ ‘Informationsfluß’ oder ‘Netzwerk,’ gehen ihm so leicht von der Zunge wie sonst nur Vulgär-Marxismen vom Schlage ‘Monopolkapitalismus’ oder ‘Klassenkampf.’” “Neue Welt,” Der Spiegel, 23 July 1967 (no author). Online at https://www.spiegel.de/politik/neue-welt-a-323f1e9c-0002-0001-0000-000046251825. 49 The East German philosopher and mathematician Georg Klaus went so far as to describe Karl Marx as a “cybernetic materialist.” Georg Klaus, Kybernetik und Gesellschaft (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1965), x. 50 Georg Klaus and Heinz Liebscher, eds., “Information,” Wörterbuch der Kybernetik, 4th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 278–91, at 281. 51 See Peters, “Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics,” 162. 52 See, for instance, Hans Schlösser, “Was will der Kongreß Junger Künstler? Gegen Kulturbarbarei und Kosmopolitismus: Für den Frieden und die Einheit Deutschlands,” Neues Deutschland, 27 April 1951, 3; and Leo Berg, “Ist Musik wirklich so harmlos?,” Berliner Zeitung, 10 April 1951, 4. 53 Following his assumption of power, Honecker announced in the 4th conference of the Central Committee of the SED (December 1971) that there would be no taboos in culture as long as it did not depart from socialism. Nonetheless, stricter cultural policies were implemented in the aftermath of Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976. See Manfred Jäger, Kultur und Politik in der DDR, 1945–1990 (Cologne: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1982), 136. 54 Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84, at 45. See also Jonathan L. Yaeger, “Friedrich Schenker and the Third Way,” in Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception, ed. Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015), 219–40. 55 Fritz Hennenberg, “Die Mittlere Generation: Versuch über sechs Komponisten der DDR,” German Studies Review 3, no. 2 (1980): 289–321, at 291. 56 Tellingly, Klaus appears as a character in Marc Schweska’s novel Zur letzten Instanz which revolves around the cybernetic craze in the GDR. Marc Schweska, Zur letzten Instanz (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 2011). 57 “Der Informationsbegriff der (Shannonschen) Informationstheorie ist seinem Wesen nach ein statistischer Begriff und erfaßt semiotisch gesehen nur den syntaktischen Aspekt von Zeichen bzw. Zeichenmengen. Zeichen stehen aber nicht nur zu anderen Zeichen in Beziehung, sondern auch zu ihren Bedeutungen (semantischer Aspekt), ferner zu den bezeichneten Objekten (sigmatischer Aspekt) und zu den Systemen bzw. Teilsystemen (zu deren Zielen, Zwecken usw.) zwischen denen Zeichenverkehr stattfindet (pragmatischer Aspekt). Daraus ergeben sich spezifische Beschränkungen des Shannonschen Ansatzes, die gegenwärtig noch nicht in befriedigender Weise überwunden werden konnten.” Klaus and Liebscher, “Information,” 281. 58 For Klaus’s major study of semiotics, see Georg Klaus, Semiotik und Erkenntnistheorie (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1963). 59 Hermann Kalkofen, “Die Einteilung der Semiotik bei Georg Klaus,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 1, no. 1 (1979): 81–91. 60 See Günter Bentele and Ivan Bystrina, Semiotik: Grundlagen und Probleme (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978), 53–54. 61 Wilhelm Baethge, “Der Kommunikationsprozeß auf dem Gebiet der Musik,” in Handbuch der Musikästhetik, ed. Siegfried Bimberg, Werner Kaden, Eberhard Lippold, Klaus Mehner, and Walther Siegmund-Schultze (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1986 [1979]), 129. 62 See also Christian Kaden, “Music Sociology in the GDR: Under Conditions of Political Dictatorship, Despite of Political Dictatorship,” in Roads to Music Sociology, ed. Alfred Smudits (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2019), 139–58. 63 The use of the term “socialist realism” in relation to artistic style goes back to Andrei Zhdanov’s 1934 speech at the Congress of Soviet Writers and the language of the antimodernist campaigns in Soviet Russia. One may argue that the more sophisticated philosophical views of socialist realism were merely designed to cover up the repressive cultural politics of party, rather than suggest any genuine perspective on the problems of artistic form and content. Although this cannot be ruled out as possible motivation for party-loyal authors on aesthetics, it is nonetheless telling that critical intellectuals and critics often appealed precisely to this broader concept of socialist realism in making the case for artistic and cultural reforms. 64 For a succinct discussion of Georg Lukács’s aesthetics, see Béla Királyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Lukács’s ideas were also elaborated by music scholars in then West Germany; see Albrecht Riethmüller, Die Musik als Abbild der Realität: Zur dialektischen Widerspiegelungstheorie in der Ästhetik (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1976). The most consolidated early text on socialist realism in music by an East German author is Ernst Hermann Meyer, Musik im Zeitgeschehen (Berlin: Bruno Henschel, 1952). Meyer was also representative of socialist realism as a composer. See Golan Gur, “Classicism as Anti-Fascist Heritage: Realism and Myth in Ernst Hermann Meyer’s Mansfelder Oratorium (1950),” in Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception, ed. Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2015), 34–57. 65 “Notowicz hat sehr richtig formuliert, als er sagte, der sozialistischer Realismus ist auch in der Musik keine Methode der Komposition, sondern ein Verhalten des Komponisten zum Inhalt und zu der Beziehung der Form zum Inhalt.” Hanns Eisler, “Über den Begriff des sozialistischen Realismus,” in Materialien zu einer Dialektik der Musik, ed. Manfred Grabs (Leipzig: Reclam, 1973), 282–86, at 282. 66 See also Stephan Hammel, “Music, the Realist Conception of Art and the Materialist Conception of History,” Twentieth-Century Music 16, no. 1 (2019): 33–50. 67 On the various meanings of socialist realism, see Klaus Mehner, “Sozialistischer Realismus,” in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Kassel et al.: Bärenreiter/J. B. Metzler, 1998), Sachteil (subject matter section), vol. 8, 1618–623. 68 See also Buhr and Kosing, eds., “Ästhetik,” in Kleines Wörterbuch der Marxistisch-Leninistischen Philosophie, 36. 69 On the appropriation of those traditions in the reception of classical and romantic music in the GDR, see Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 70 “Das Goethe-Wort: ‘Wir wissen von keiner Welt als in bezug [sic] auf den Menschen; wir wollen keine Kunst, als die ein Abdruck dieses Bezuges ist,’ findet in der ästhetischen Theorie des Marxismus-Leninismus seine endgültige dialektisch-materialistische Bestätigung.” Hans Koch, Marxismus und Ästhetik (Berin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 239. 71 This connection was also widely acknowledged by Marxist and East German authors. See Harry Goldschmidt, “Gedanken zu einer nicht-aristotelischen Musikästhetik,” in Um die Sache der Musik (Leipzig: Reclam, 1976), 304–21. Matthias Tischer shows that the notion of art as reflection of reality has sources also in Russian art theory, in particular Vladimir Stassov’s. See Matthias Tischer, “Inhaltsästhetik—überzeitlich und zeitbedingt,” in Zwischen Macht und Freiheit: Neue Musik in der DDR, ed. Michael Berg, Albrecht von Massow, and Nina Noeske (Vienna: Böhlau, 2004), 63–76. 72 “Da Kunst eine Form des gesellschaftlichen Bewußtseins ist, das wesentlich gesellschaftliches Sein als Gegenstand letzter Instanz abbildet, ist Realismus nicht etwas von außen an die Künste herangetragenes, sondern entspricht als wahrheitsgemäßes Abbild gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit ihrem geschichtlich-sozialen Wesen… . Sozialistischer Realismus ist folglich jene Kunst, die den epochalen Übergang vom Kapitalismus zum Sozialismus im Weltmaßstab im praktischen Bezug seines Hauptakteuers, der revolutionären Arbeiterklasse, zu Bewußtsein und in Darstellung wie materieller Umweltgestaltung die neuen sozialistischen Beziehungen, Verhältnisse, Ideen anschaulich und prägnant zum Ausdruck bringt.” Erwin Pracht, “Marxistisch-leninistische Theorie und künstlerische Methode,” in Zur Theorie des sozialistischen Realismus (Berlin: Dietz, 1975), 380. Emphasis in original. 73 For a systematic critique of this theory, see Vladimir Karbusicky, Widerspiegelungstheorie und Strukturalismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1953). 74 “[D]ie Musik, die dem sozialistischen Realismus am nächsten kommt, mir diese zu sein scheint, die die verschiedensten Methoden der Komposition ermöglicht.” Eisler, “Über den Begriff des sozialistischen Realismus,” 283. 75 “Die sozialistisch-realistische Musik kann sich als solche nur voll erweisen im gesellschaftlichen Kommunikationsprozeß, in der Reaktion des Adressanten, des Interpreten und des Hörers. Deshalb ist sie zugleich eine Aufforderung an die gesamte sozialistische Musikgesellschaft.” Walther Siegmund-Schultze, “Theorie und Methode des sozialistischen Realismus in der Musik,” in Handbuch der Musikästhetik, 149–83, at 180. Emphasis in original. 76 Ibid., 164. 77 According to Hans Bunge, Eisler at the time of the conversation read various works by Soviet authors on cybernetics as well as Klaus’s early writings on the topic. See Hanns Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1975), 398. 78 Ibid., 240. 79 “Ist doch Musik, wie alles sinnlich Wahrnehmbare, eine Information im kybernetischen Sinne, deren Realisation—das sei hier bemerkt—im wesentlichen auf drei Stufen, nämlich Expedient (Komponist)—Transferent (Interpret)—Perzepient (Hörer) erfolgt. So gilt in diesen Ausführungen der Informationstheorie und der Informationsästhetik, als für den Musiker besonders interessanten Teilgebieten der Kybernetik, die spezielle Aufmerksamkeit.” Günter Lampe, “Tonsatz heute,” Der Volksmusiklehrer 20, no. 1 (1971): 8–13, at 9. 80 Ibid., 10. 81 “Der Künstler (Komponist) setzt erlangte Informationen zuerst in Gefühle um u. versucht dann, diesen Gefühlen durch die Möglichkeiten der Musik Ausdruck zu verleihen.” Günter Lampe, “Notizen zu Musik und Informationstheorie (ca. 1967–1975),” handwritten notes. Online at http://www.guenter-lampe.de/doks.html. 82 “Sozialistisch-realistisch kann nur die Grundhaltung sein, mit der der Komponist die Informationen aufnimmt u. verarbeitet, weil über das Gefühl wirkend nur subjektive Beurteil[ung] möglich.” Ibid. 83 Lampe, “Tonsatz heute,” 11. 84 Georg Klaus and Heinz Liebscher, eds., “Zeichen,” Wörterbuch der Kybernetik, 4th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 915–20, at 919. It is likely that Lampe had access to earlier editions of this dictionary, the first edition of which was published in 1967. 85 Lampe draws on Helmar Frank’s work in information psychology and cybernetic pedagogy. See Helmar Frank, Kybernetische Analysen subjektiver Sachverhalte (Quickborn: Verlag Schnelle, 1964). 86 “Es hat sich nämlich gezeigt, daß vielen Komponisten der Gegenwart diese Bedingungen unbekannt zu sein scheinen (oder sie zumindest ignorieren) und damit den Hörer vor Aufgaben stellen, die er nicht bewältigen kann. Die zeitgenössischen Werke lassen sich—grob gesehen—zumindest in zwei Gruppen einteilen: Werke, denen wenigstens die Möglichkeit innewohnt, Kunstwerke zu sein und solche, für die das nicht gilt, da sie schon gewisse Grundanforderungen nicht erfüllen.” Lampe, “Tonsatz heute,” 12. 87 “Allen drei Sätzen liegt dodekaphonische Melodik, aus einer vollständigen Reihe heraus entwickelt und bis in Fragmente hinein verwandelt und interpoliert, zugrunde; eine gewisse Freizügigkeit der Handhabung der angewandten Methode schafft—hinsichtlich des einer o.a. Reihenstruktur innewohnenden hohen Informationsflusses—damit gleichzeitig Raum für die zur Rezeption eines künstlerischen Werkes notwendige Redundanz.” Günter Lampe, program notes for Tre soli concertante (1976). Online at http://www.guenter-lampe.de/doks.html. 88 Günter Lampe, “Notizen zum Verhältnis Kunst und Technik (ca. 1967–1975),” handwritten notes. Online at http://www.guenter-lampe.de/doks.html. 89 Lampe, “Tonsatz heute,” 11. 90 “Information setzt sich zusammen aus einer Semantik und einem physikalischen Träger.” Günter Lampe, “Notizen zu Musik und Informationstheorie (ca. 1967–1975).” 91 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 287. 92 Friedrich Goldmann in conversation with Albrecht von Massow in Zwischen Macht und Freiheit: Neue Musik in der DDR, 168–69. 93 Ibid. 94 Nonetheless, it seems that Goldmann’s initial interest in this field was genuine and had its origins in his attendance at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1959. 95 Conversation with the author in Berlin-Zeuten on 26 April 2018. Katzer was probably exposed to Brün’s ideas through broadcasting of the latter’s radio lectures in West Germany between 1960 and 1961. 96 Gerd Belkius, “Interview mit Georg Katzer,” Weimarer Beiträge 28, no. 4 (1982): 30–55, at 33. 97 “Hier komme ich auf einen Punkt, der mich auch kompositorisch beschäftigt, nicht nur in den elektronischen Stücken, sondern überhaupt. Das ist die gezielte und bewußte Planung des Informationsflusses im Musikstück. Das heißt, es gibt Episoden oder Abschnitte, die eine hohe Informationsdichte besitzen, und solche, in denen ganz bewußt eine starke Reduzierung des Informationsflusses vorgenommen wird, die zugleich eine Entspannungsphase oder auch eine Erwartungsphase markieren.” Georg Katzer, interview with Stefan Amzoll in Komponieren zur Zeit: Gespräche mit Komponisten der DDR, ed. Mathias Hansen (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1998), 130. 98 See Herbert Brün, “For Anticommunication,” in When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün, ed. Arun Chandra (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 60–70. 99 Frank Schneider, Momentaufnahme: Notate zu Musik und Musikern der DDR (Leipzig: Reclam, 1979), 104. 100 “Es ist heute Mode, so etwas in Abrede zu stellen. Ganz selten ringt sich einmal ein Komponist zu dem Eingeständnis durch, daß er mit diesen Dingen … spekuliert. Es ist Spekulation, natürlich im allgemeinsten Sinne, weil man nie weiß, ob die Überlegungen, die man anstellt, aufgehen. Als Komponist rechnet man mit bestimmten Wirkungen, die sicher für jeden Komponisten anders aussehen. Aber ich bin fest davon überzeugt, daß auch die Komponisten, die das heftig in Abrede stellen, mit solchen Dingen arbeiten.” Belkius, “Interview mit Georg Katzer,” 32. 101 “Mit diesem Stück habe ich mir einen Bereich zurückerobert, den ich zwar eigentlich niemals ganz aufgegeben, bisher jedoch nicht so konsequent und programmatisch verfolgt hatte: Die bewußte Ansteuerung von Emotionen.” Interview with Ursula Stürzbecher, in her Komponisten in der DDR: 17 Gespräche (Hildesheim: Gersten Verlag, 1979), 183. 102 “Ich schildere in meiner Komposition Emotionen, Empfindsamkeiten. Dagegen werden dann andere Dinge geführt, die diese Empfindsamkeiten zerstören und zerschlagen.” Ibid. 103 For an analysis of Katzer’s piece, see Nina Noeske, Musikalische Dekonstruktion: Neue Instrumentalmusik in der DDR (Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2007), 300–302. 104 Ibid., 292–93. 105 Stürzbecher, Komponisten in der DDR, 183. 106 Ann Thomson, “Introduction,” in Julien Offray de La Mettrie, La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi. 107 La Mettrie, “Man as Plant,” in La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings, 78. 108 Ibid., 85. 109 Gerhard Müller, “Georg Katzer: LaMettrie II oder Anmerkungen zum Pflanzen-Menschen (1987),” in Musik in Deutschland 1950–2000, Konzertmusik: Instrumentale Kammermusik, Spiel—Kritik—Parodie, CD (Deutscher Musikrat), liner notes. RCA RED SEAL 74321 73595 2, 10. 110 “Die Suche nach Neuartigem ist bei mir nie eine Suche, die aus dem vordergründigen Materialinteresse herrührt, obwohl das natürlich auch da ist… . Der Grund, weshalb ich am Material herumforsche, ist der, daß ich bestimmte Ausdruckswerte suche, die für eine bestimmte Situation notwendig sind.” Belkius, “Interview mit Georg Katzer,” 35. 111 See also Noeske, Musikalische Dekonstruktion, 21–22. 112 Reproduced in Goldschmidt, “Gedanken zu einer nicht-aristotelischen Musikästhetik,” in Um die Sache der Musik, 304–21. 113 Ibid., 305. 114 “In der Leugnung der semantischen und pragmatischen Funktion, in der Deklarierung der syntaktischen Funktion zum ontologischen Kriterium der Kunst, wie etwas in der vielzitierten ‘Aesthetica’ von Max Bense, bemerken wir das zähe Weiterleben des idealistischen Mythos von der ‘absoluten’ Musik unter modernen, imperialistisch verschärften Verhältnissen.” Ibid., 317. 115 Ibid., 319. 116 Ibid., 320. 117 On posthumanist ontology, see Francesca Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 166–70. 118 “Ohne den nichtaristotelischen Dualismus kann es heute keinen Realismus geben, der den sozialistischen Gegenstand mit dem avanciertesten Material gestaltet. Anders ausgedrückt: Der sozialistische Gegenstand verträgt sich mit dem avanciertesten Material, sofern es dualistisch, d. h., mit dem doppelten Gesicht auf beide Bereiche der Wirklichkeit gestaltet ist. Wenn Aneignung und aktive Widerspiegelung im Kunstwerk in Idealkonkurrenz zueinander treten, wenn der ideologische Aspekt des Fortschritts mit dem ästhetischen zusammenfällt, dann ist wirklich vom Menschen die Rede.” Goldschmidt, “Gedanken zu einer nicht-aristotelischen Musikästhetik,” 320. 119 As Ludwig Finscher noted, Goldschmidt’s preoccupation with the problem of the content of instrumental music could hardly be understood without the doctrine of socialist realism, even if Goldschmidt “left behind its crude and undifferentiated formulations.” Ludwig Finscher, “Harry Goldschmidt (1910–1986),” Die Musikforschung 40, no. 1 (1987): 1–2, at 1. 120 “Recht haben nur die Autoren … , die die Ästhetik als Theorie der Kunst definieren, die dabei aber nicht vergessen, ja noch mehr, die hervorheben, daß in der Kunst sowohl alle Übergangserscheinungen dialektisch aufgehoben sind, die wir in der umfassenden Arbeits- und Produktionstätigkeit des Menschen, besonders im Handwerk und im Bauwesen vorfinden, als auch die weit zurückliegenden, die vorästhetischen Erscheinungen bei Tieren, Pflanzen und sogar Kristallen.” Todor Pawlow, Aufsätze zur Ästhetik (Berlin: Dietz, 1975), 41. Cited in Joachim Fiebach, Michael Franz, Heinz Hirdina et al., Ästhetik Heute (Berlin: Dietz, 1978), 179. 121 Georg Knepler, Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis (Leipzig: Reclam, 1977), 72. 122 See also Golan Gur, “The Other Marxism: Georg Knepler and the Anthropology of Music,” Musicologia Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies 1 (2016): http://www.musau.org/parts/neue-article-page/view/28. On Georg Knepler in the context of Cold War methodological debates in musicology, see Anne C. Shreffler, “Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus, Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History,” Journal of Musicology 20, no. 4 (2003): 498–525. 123 Georg Knepler, “Versuch über die Entwicklung zeitgenössischer Musik,” in Gedanken über Musik: Reden, Versuche, Aufsätze, Kritiken (Berlin: Henschel, 1980), 105–6. 124 Ibid. 125 Gerhard Engel, Die Logik der Musiksoziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1990), 232–33. 126 Christian Kaden, “Struktur–Funktion–Bedeutung, Bedeutung–Struktur–Funktion, Funktion–Struktur–Bedeutung,” in Struktur, Funktion, Bedeutung: Beiträge zur Analyse von Musikprozessen (Jena: Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, 1985), 43–64, at 45. 127 Ibid. 128 Christian Kaden, Hirtensignale: Musikalische Syntax und kommunikative Praxis (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1977). 129 “Empfindsamkeit und Sensualismus trachten … danach, eine Sprache zu schaffen, die auf ‘alle’ wirkt und die jedermann versteht. Oder besser noch: Sie mühen sich um die Einbürgerung einer kommunikativen Grundstruktur, die allen speziellen Sprachformen über- bzw. unterleget werden kann. Es ist dies eine Grundstruktur, die der bürgerliche Warenproduzent braucht, um allerorten ins Geschäft zu kommen: die der Allgemeinverständlichkeit, der umfassenden Effizienz. Es ist dies aber auch eine Struktur, in der sich all jene, die von feudalabsolutistischer Willkür unterjocht, erniedrigt und beleidigt werden, zu solidarisieren vermögen: die der Brüderlichkeit, der Aufrichtigkeit… . Allerdings erschöpft sich die Bestimmung solch empfindungsreichverständlicher Kommunikation nicht darin, dem kommunizierenden Subjekt Wirkungsmöglichkeiten zu organisieren und die Gelegenheit, sich mit Gleichgesinnten zusammenzuschließen. Sie hat und soll ihm auch Sicherheiten bieten: insbesondere die Sicherheit, vom lieben Nächsten nicht schlechterdings übers Ohr gehauen, sondern als Partner ernst genommen zu werden, nicht Objekt von Manipulation zu sein, sondern Subjekt der Kooperation.” Christian Kaden, Musiksoziologie (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1984), 145–46. 130 Complexity is a central concept in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 131 Christian Kaden, Das Unerhörte und das Unhörbare: Was Musik ist, was Musik sein kann (Kassel and Stuttgart: Bärenreiter/Metzler, 2004), 278. 132 See also Jaroslav Jiránek, “Kurzgefaßte Bilanz der von marxistischen Ansätzen inspirierten Ergebnisse tschechischer Musikwissenschaft nach dem II. Weltkrieg,” in Musikwissenschaftlicher Paradigmenwechsel? Zum Stellenwert marxistischer Ansätze in der Musikforschung, ed. Wolfgang Martin Stroh and Günter Mayer (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg, 2000), 76–80. Online at https://www.musik-for.uni-oldenburg.de/publikationen/MusikwissParadigmenwechsel1999.pdf. In this essay Jiránek refers to the influence of Asafiev’s theory of intonations on his musical semiotics. This connection is further addressed in Eberhard Lippold’s essay in the same volume, “Einige Bemerkungen zu Geschichte und Perspektiven materialistischer Ansätze in der Musikästhetik,” 122–31, at 126. 133 “[L]etztlich bürgerte sich … diese Forderung im Bewußtsein der meisten Wissenschaftler ein. Man arbeitete mit der Vorstellung der Gesamtheit seines Faches und der ‘Wissenschaft überhaupt,’ man versuchte ständig zu ‘methodologisieren,’ man rechnete auch damit, daß die Neuerungen kritisiert werden können und daß man gezwungen werden wird, sie zu verteidigen. Irgendwie wurde also die Denkart der Wissenschaftler dadurch provoziert und darüber hinaus dynamisiert. Diejenigen Musikforscher, die sich aufrichtig als Marxisten deklarierten, letzten Endes aber auch die Nicht-Marxisten, strebten daher nach einem neuen und kognitiv komplexeren Paradigma ihres Faches und betonten viele neuere Aspekte (darunter auch die der entstehenden Musiksemiotik) in einem Ausmaß, das in der westlichen Musikwissenschaft nicht vorhanden war.” Jiří Fukač, “Musiksemiotik und Marxismus,” in Musikwissenschaftlicher Paradigmenwechsel?, 165–77, at 171–72. 134 For an additional Marxist critique of abstract communication theories, see Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” in Culture and Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2005 [1980]), 50–63. 135 Lippold, “Einige Bemerkungen zu Geschichte und Perspektiven materialistischer Ansätze in der Musikästhetik,” 126. 136 See Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Cultural Techniques: Preliminary Remarks,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (2013): 3–19. 137 Kurt Blaukopf, Beethovens Erben in der Mediamorphose (Heiden: Verlag Arthur Niggli AG, 1989). 138 Ibid., 5–6. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Socialist Realism or Cybernetics? Music, Information Theory, and Posthumanism in the German Democratic Republic
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdac008
DA - 2022-11-30
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/socialist-realism-or-cybernetics-music-information-theory-and-aN1ryKsqyT
SP - 357
EP - 405
VL - 105
IS - 3-4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -