Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950

Polyphony [Πολυφωνία, many voices]—the arrangement of several voices performed simultaneously—has been a common technique in Western composition since the Middle Ages. However, the establishment of aesthetics as a new science of sensory perception in the 18th century, accompanied by the “aestheticization of the arts”, threw the theory and practice of polyphony into disarray: For how is it possible to perceive several voices independently of one another and yet simultaneously as a unifying phenomenon? And, if polyphonic perception is not possible at all, how can there be polyphonic composition? Taking these considerations into account, the project examined 18th century musical polyphony not only as a peculiar problem of aesthetics, but also as having a constitutive role in discourses beyond music. Based on readings of musical theory, the project demonstrated how polyphonic music was re-established around 1800, and how, against this purely aesthetic backdrop, novel ideas about the subject and society, about education and literary writing emerged.

Rather than producing a traditional history of concepts, the project explored musical polyphony as a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit framework and point of reference for various non-musical questions and debates from the 18th century to the second half of the 20th century. The project’s guiding theoretical question regarding the technical possibility of polyphonic composition was thus understood to be historically and culturally conditioned. For the 18th century, for example, A. G. Baumgarten’s discussion of the aesthetic “whole” in poetry was considered alongside Heinrich Christoph Koch’s Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition (Attempt at a Guide to Composition) to shed new light on Diderot’s dialogical experiments and Novalis’ literary ideas about community-building. For the 20th century, the project traced a reversal of the previously perceived community-building potential of polyphony, drawing on Adorno’s music-theoretical writings and Hermann Broch’s essayistic work. This analysis was conducted against the backdrop of music-theoretical references in sociology around 1900. By the mid-20th century, the term polyphony had ceased to refer to the composition of interdependent voices in music. Instead, it primarily referred to the parallel execution and disintegration of elements, a concept that, according to Adorno in a lecture in 1957, ultimately led to a “polyphony without community.”

Fig. above: Josef Albers: Fuge (Fugue), ca. 1926, Sandblasted flashed glass with black paint, © 2024 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.