This chapter explores the notion of attunement in correlation with Stimmung, mood, and atmosphere through the understanding of phenomenology. It starts with Edmund Husserl’s lectures on inner time consciousness through music and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of Stimmung and its early reception in the field of music. Philosopher Joseph Kockelmans, musicologist Karol Berger, and English philosopher Andrew Bowie understood the concept of Stimmung, also comprehended as mood, within the field of music. Thus, researchers used a whole series of concepts closely related to the idea of attunement in the analysis of contemporary culture and art. The chapter then notes the emergence of atmosphere, referencing how new phenomenology and its associated aesthetics comprehended that emotions are atmospheres poured out spatially.

Despite the attention that the affective sphere has reached in the last decades, affectivity has generally been supposed to be a consequence of historical processes, not changing their direction. This article argues instead that affectivity can be a driving force in historical change, and it establishes the concept of ‘patheme’ in relation to Michel Foucault’s ‘episteme’, Martin Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ and the notion of regime in William Reddy, Jacques Rancière and Peter de Bolla. What is described as a pathemic change took place in the thoroughgoing affective transformation of European culture during the 18th century, a cultural change that in Sweden was condensed into much more compressed shifts during the Gustav III’s reign (1772–92). This latter period is bestowed an investigation grounded in an understanding of historical processes that considers the interplay between layers such as power relations, social conditions and modes of scientific thought along with affectivity. The interplay is described in terms of polyphony.

In this essay, an interdisciplinary group of researchers sets out to address the period 1780–1840 in Sweden in a new way, by placing nature at its centre. With the help of ecocritical and transcultural theory, combined with renewed attention to the Swedish fine arts, learned discourses, and practices, we suggest a new approach to these revolutionary decades. The perceived dissonance, the interplay between climatic conditions and cultural template in early modern and modern Sweden, has not been fully addressed in current research, despite the fact that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a central issue in contemporary society and scholarship. Representations of nature situate the nation, they negotiate the relationship between a sensed reality and an ideal, between human and more-than-human beings. We suggest a focus on the unpredictable space created by negotiations of nature in Swedish representations during this crucial period, and, furthermore, on the ways in which this creative space is charged with utopian possibilities in the early Anthropocene. This is the background and the driving force of the planned research project ‘Cool Nature: Utopian Landscapes in Sweden 1780–1840’. 

This festschrift was produced during the pandemic time of 2020 in order to celebrate our esteemed colleague Professor of Aesthetics, Cecilia Sjöholm, on her 60th birthday on March 8th 2021.

Wolfgang Rihm often deals with musical history as material – his own works included – using a series of techniques and strategies. Adopting the technique of overpainting, confronting the German-Austrian tradition from J.S. Bach to the Second Vienna School through stylistic borrowings rather than actual quotes, and playing with musical ciphers, Rihm activates and decodes history. The past appears as fragments, but in Rihm’s later works, these fragments are swept away in an unstoppable flow.

Since the 1990s, Rihm’s treatment of the fragment diverges clearly from Romantic and modernist sensibilities, represented by, for instance, Robert Schumann’s song and piano cycles and György Kurtág’s fractured material. During the two last decades, the flow has been a salient feature of Rihm’s works, and the most divergent materials can appear in this inclusive flow.

Rihm’s transgressive treatment of the two seemingly opposite phenomena ‘fragment’ and ‘flow’ is never more apparent than in his ‘opera fantasy’ Dionysos (2009–2010). His starting point is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysos-Dithyramben: he has rearranged and mixed textual fragments from the poems, but he has also turned to Nietzsche’s notebooks from the 1880s, that stockpile of fragments. The dismembering of bodies and the staging of a deteriorating mind enhances the process of fragmentation. These fragments lose their character of being fractured due to a musical flow that is in itself patently heterogeneous.

In this article, I elucidate the relation between the poles of fragment and flow, characterized not by tension, but by attraction. In the same way as with the Romantic and the modernist fragment, Rihm’s flowing fragments can be seen as paradigmatic of a specific period of history, our contemporary liquid culture.

Idag går det inte att läsa Thomas Manns ”Döden i Venedig” utan att slås av de många parallellerna till hotet från den aktuella ”smittan från öst”. Även på ett existentiellt plan kan novellen påminna oss om människans irrationalitet i relation till risktagande, frihetstörst och den egna dödligheten.

Artikel Under strecket

Review of Life as an Aesthetic Idea of Music. Ed. by Manos Perrakis. Pp.  192. Studien zur Wertungsforschung, 61. (Universal Edition, Vienna, London, New York,  2019. €24.99. ISBN 978-3-7024-7621–2.)

The reign of the Swedish king Gustav III (1771–92) was a productive period musically. It has become one of the main fields of research within Swedish musicology: more than 40 scholarly articles have been published and ten book-length studies have been printed since 1920. In the article, these texts are read from a critical perspective in order to scrutinize the foundation of the research and to analyse its conditions, but also to see if a transgression is possible.

If the ethos of Swedish musicology, with its empirical attitude concerning the survey of sources, can be confirmed in many cases, some examples show that there have been important alternatives: the intention of writing the cultural history of the period (especially Walin and Hedwall), the interest in rhetoric during the 1990s, and investigations of nationalism. The shift from a German to an Anglo-American influence can be discerned during the 1950s, and this change can be the reason why a wider cultural approach became obsolete.

Yet, responding to the earlier initiatives, it is suggested finally that musicology can and should turn back to the Gustavian era again after a caesura of fifteen years. Recent work within fields such as affectivity, phenomenology and cultural transfer call upon a re-reading of the manifold sources that have been found during a century of research.