“Die Saitenspiele ergossen sich über mein Innres”: Hölderlin's Auditory Atmospheres

Summary

Introduction: Hölderlin's Soundscapes

IN FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN's writings, music—exemplified by terms like “Saitenspiel,” “Gesang,” harmony, dissonance, etc.—plays a major role. Especially the “Saitenspiel,” as Dieter Burdorf has argued, stands metonymically for the very medium and material of poetry itself, while the “Gesang” represents the idea that the poet creates his works with the entirety of his bodily self. Many of Hölderlin's hymns, odes, and especially his novel Hyperion—in Walter Silz's words, “a unique creation that stands in the broad border zone between poetry and music”—evoke a special kind of auditory atmosphere, a term that I adapt in part from Gernot Böhme's concept of “acoustic atmosphere.” In opposition to the post-Hegelian concepts of aesthetics as a theory of the work of art and the development of aesthetic judgment, Böhme, in a programmatic essay on the topic, refocuses aesthetics on the “field of sensory experience and affective resonance.” For Böhme, atmospheres are exemplary manifestations of this field of perceptive sensibility in everyday life. The diffuse and theoretically challenging concept of atmosphere “denotes an intermediate phenomenon,” situated between the experiencing subject and the properties of objects radiating into space as “ecstasies” and transforming the “sphere” of their presence. With the historical expansion of musical material, from classical tonalities and chromaticism to the technologically reproducible sounds of street scenes, nature, and the factory, music has revealed its character as producing a “conquest of acoustic space,” as an environmental art filling spaces through resonance and reverberation that are manageable and recognizable through modern electronic techniques and installations. This “tendency toward environment art” has “moved music into the realm of an aesthetics of atmospheres,” unfolding in topological space as the “expanded space of the body, i.e., the sensing out into space, which is shaped and articulated by music” to reveal that “music as such is the transformation of physically sensed space.” For Böhme, this reconceptualization of music as acoustic event enables a necessary shift in listening practices, from tracing sounds back to their presumed origin to focusing on their material presence as such, “filling the space and traveling across it almost like objects.”