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MUSIC AND SCIENCE IN THE EARLY WORKS OF PÉTER EÖTVÖS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2021
Abstract
This article presents a survey of philosophical perspectives on the phenomena of ‘nature’ and ‘science/scientific’ in music and does so through a closer look at the first creative period of Péter Eötvös as a composer. Since the beginning of his creative career Eötvös has come into contact with issues scanning the relations between music and science, on the one hand, and music and nature, on the other. Considering Martin Heidegger's reflections on the nature of modern science as he articulated them in his Die Zeit des Weltbildes (1938), one can recognise in Eötvös' first creative period (in works like Kosmos, Elektrochronik, Intervalles-Intérieurs, Tale, etc.) not only the motivating, inspiring force of science, but also the limits of this incentive.
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Footnotes
An updated version of this article was published in January 2022, all of the corrections were minor typographical changes.
References
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4 As in the case of Charles Darwin, now supposed to have been influenced by his wife's daily piano playing; see Julian F. Derry, Darwin in Scotland. Edinburgh, Evolution and Enlightenment (Caithness: Whittles Publishing, 2010).
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8 Ibid.
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14 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 1998), p. 31.
15 In fact much new research in neuroscience confutes this view (see Alain Yuille and Daniel Kersten, ‘Vision as Bayesian Inference: Analysis by Synthesis?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10 no. 7 (2006), pp. 301–08).
16 Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, p. 59.
17 Ibid., pp. 65–66.
18 Martin Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
19 Martin Heidegger, ‘“…Poetically Man Dwells…”’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2001), pp. 209–27.
20 See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Art Work’, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–56.
21 Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, pp. 9–18.
22 https://eotvospeter.com/piece/intervalles-interieurs/ (accessed 29 October 2021).
23 Ibid.
24 https://bmcrecords.hu/en/albums/peter-eotvos-intervalles-interieurs-windsequenzen (accessed 29 October 2021).
25 There is a similar but opposite conflict in Eötvös' Music for New York (1971/2001), in which a layer of live improvisation by the saxophone and percussion interlocks with a recorded and manipulated improvisation of a zither and hurdy-gurdy. Not only is there a contrast between the two improvised layers, but there is a contrast between the live/immediate and modern and the mediated and ancient. The most communicative element of the piece becomes its timbral dimension, something that is also true of another composition from the early 70s, “Now Miss!” (1972), after Samuel Beckett, for violin and electric devices.
26 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 15–16. (For a more detailed account, see Martin Heidegger, On the Essence and Concept of φύσις in Aristotle's Physics B, 1, trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 183–230.)
27 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 16.
28 Boethius, De institucione musica, lib. 1, X, trans. C. Bower, ed. C. Palisca as Fundamentals of Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 17–19.
29 For the subtle connections between nómos (as law and culture) and nomós (as pasture, nature), see Laura Verdi, ‘The Garden and the Scene of Power’, Space and Culture, 7, no. 4 (2004), pp. 360–85. For a more philosophical perspective, see Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics: Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 143–44.
30 Sophocles, Antigone, trans. E. H. Plumptre, vol. 8, part 6, The Harvard Classics (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), www.bartleby.com/8/6/1.html (accessed 29 October 2021).