Joseph Auner

Tufts University, Music, Chair and Professor

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

Joseph Auner is Chair and Professor of Music at Tufts University. His scholarly work focuses on music and technology, sound studies, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, turn of the century Vienna, and Weimar Berlin. His books, Music in the 20th- and 21st Centuries, and Anthology of Music in the 20th- and 21st Centuries were published in 2013 in the series Western Music in Context: A Norton History. Recent publications include, “Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from Abbey Road to IRCAM,” in Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles, eds Monson and Marvin, (U. of Rochester Press, 2013) “Losing your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable,” in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging in an Age of Ubiquitous Computing, ed. Ekman (MIT Press, 2012), “Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality,” in Tonality 1900-1950: Concept and Practice, eds. Wörner, Scheideler, and Rupprecht (Steiner 2012). He has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Vice-President of the AMS. He is recipient of awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The Colorado College.
Address: Medford, MA

less

InterestsView All (8)

Uploads

Papers by Joseph Auner

4. ‘‘The Path to the New Music’’: Mödling, 1918–1925

A Schoenberg Reader, 2017

7. Final Years: Los Angeles, 1944–1951

Yale University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2017

Schönberg und sein Publikum im Jahr 1930: Die Sechs Stücke für Männerchor a cappella op. 35

Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion, 2001

Seinen 1930 entstandenen Essay »Mein Publikum« beginnt Schonberg mit einem Satz, der scheinbar di... more Seinen 1930 entstandenen Essay »Mein Publikum« beginnt Schonberg mit einem Satz, der scheinbar die altbekannte Vorstellung vom isolierten, kampferischen Komponisten im selbstauferlegten inneren Exil zusammenfast: »Aufgefordert, uber mein Publikum etwas zu sagen, muste ich bekennen: ich glaube, ich habe keines.« Auf nur wenigen Seiten spurt Schonberg den bekannten Stationen seines problematischen Verhaltnisses zum Publikum nach. Er fuhrt das Gezische und die Storungen an, mit denen Auffuhrungen seiner Werke aufgenommen wurden, die Feindseligkeit und das Unverstandnis der Kritiker und Musiker, sowie die kurzlebige Popularitat und nachfolgende Ablehnung seiner Musik seitens der jungeren Generation nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Als Gegengewicht zu solcher Opposition erwahnt er nur die in all den Jahren gelegentlichen freundlichen Kommentare seitens Fremder und die Unterstutzung der kleinen Gruppe seiner Freunde, »so wenig es waren, so treu waren sie«.1

Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, part of the Western Music in Con... more Anthology for Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, part of the Western Music in Context series, is the ideal companion to Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Twenty-six carefully chosen works-including music by Claude Debussy, Kurt Weill, William Grant Still, Pauline Oliveros, and Chen Yi-offer representative examples of genres and composers of the period. Commentaries following each score present a careful analysis of the music, and online links to purchase and download recordings make listening easier than ever.

5. Prussian Academy of the Arts: Berlin, 1926–1933

A Schoenberg Reader, 2017

On the Emotional Character of Schenberg's Music

Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

« Le cœur et l’esprit dans la musique » : la genèse de La Main heureuse de Schoenberg

"C’est ainsi que l’on crée...", 2003

En 1946, dans « Le cœur et l’esprit dans la musique », Schoenberg conteste l’idée selon laquelle ... more En 1946, dans « Le cœur et l’esprit dans la musique », Schoenberg conteste l’idée selon laquelle les qualités essentielles d’une musique puissent relever de deux origines différentes : le cœur ou l’esprit. Selon lui, les aspects soi-disant cérébraux de son langage musical, comme le contrepoint et la forme, sont en réalité souvent le résultat d’une inspiration spontanée, alors que les belles mélodies, qui apparaissent comme de purs élans émotionnels, sont le produit d’une création intellectuel..

A Schoenberg Reader

Gamer, Carlton

1. Early Years in Vienna and Berlin: 1874–1906

A Schoenberg Reader, 2017

6. ‘‘Driven into Paradise’’: Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, 1933–1943

A Schoenberg Reader, 2017

Bibliography of Sources

A Schoenberg Reader, 2017

3. ‘‘War Clouds’’: Berlin and Vienna, 1911–1918

Yale University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2017

2. ‘‘Air from Another Planet’’: Vienna, 1906–1911

Berg's "Wozzeck

Journal of Music Theory, 2014

Making Old Machines Speak: Images of Technology in Recent Music*

1. Narratives of progress and innovation have dominated the story of music and technology through... more 1. Narratives of progress and innovation have dominated the story of music and technology throughout the twentieth century. The pursuit of ever-greater expressivity, control, responsiveness, clarity, and power, can be charted in instrument design, the whole story of hi-fidelity audio equipment, and the digital revolutions that are transforming musical production, distribution, and reception. Referring to the visual arts, Leo Marx has identified a rhetoric of the "technological sublime," in which images of technology are invested with "the capacity to evoke emotions—awe, wonder, mystery, fear—formerly reserved for images of boundless nature or for representing a response to divinity" (qtd. in Jones, 631). In music as well, technology has been both used and represented as the embodiment of the modern, of authority, and of the future. One need only think of the celebrations of the railroad, the factory, speed and motion in works by the Italian and Russian Futurists,...

Download

Schoenberg as Sound Student: Pierrot’s Klang

The Oxford Handbook of Timbre

Schoenberg expended enormous energies on rethinking what sound could be and what it could mean in... more Schoenberg expended enormous energies on rethinking what sound could be and what it could mean in ways that anticipate and can be illuminated by sound studies. Focusing on Schoenberg’s understanding of the word Klang, this chapter explores the creative process and reception of Pierrot lunaire in the context of his writings on “sound,” one of the many possible translations of the term. Approaching Schoenberg’s music and his writings in Style and Idea and elsewhere from the vantage point of sound studies can attune us to his interests in destabilizing the boundaries not only between timbre, melody, and harmony, but also between music, sound, and noise, and between sound and our lived experience. The wide-ranging ramifications of his conception of Klang are evident in the ways that he engages with many aspects of music and its technologies and media while also going beyond specifically musical contexts to understand sound as a fundamental dimension of our thought and creativity, our ex...

Reich on Tape: The Performance of Violin Phase

Twentieth-Century Music, 2017

The score of Steve Reich's Violin Phase specifies that the performer is to recapitulate aspec... more The score of Steve Reich's Violin Phase specifies that the performer is to recapitulate aspects of the composer's creative process in the studio. Working with a four-channel tape recorder, the violinist and a sound engineer are given detailed directions for creating the basic tape loop that generates the performance tape used in live performance. And yet – no doubt due to the scarcity of appropriate tape recorders – most present-day performers of Violin Phase use looping hardware or software that make it possible to dispense with many of the instructions in the score, including the necessity of having the engineer on stage. That this significant change in performance practice seemingly passes for the most part without notice demonstrates how the decades-long ubiquity of tape has been replaced by a kind of invisibility, through which the particularities of the medium have been subsumed into more generalized notions of fixed media. I argue that the specific materialities of ta...

Schoenberg's Error

Joseph Auner

Uploads

Papers by Joseph Auner

Log In