Ernst Kurth

Ernst Kurth ( born June 1, 1886 in Vienna, † August 2, 1946 in Bern ) was a Swiss music theorist and music psychologist of Austrian origin.

Life

Kurth studied musicology with Guido Adler in Vienna and received his PhD in 1908 with a dissertation on the early operas of Gluck. After a brief spell as a conductor and as a teacher in the free school community Wickersdorf he habilitated in 1912 in Bern with the requirements of the theoretical harmony. He was a lecturer since 1920 and had by 1927 held the chair of the newly established musicological seminar until his death.

Services

Kurths work, influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and contemporary trends in psychology, deals with the relationship between musical phenomena to processes in the psyche. In the basics of linear counterpoint ( 1917), he explains the compositional technique J. S. Bach as a product of imaginary energy wave movements of individual lines. Kurth developed here is the physics term borrowed pair of potential and kinetic energy ( in the former resolution need of chords, the latter in the shape of the melodic line ).

The Romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagner's " Tristan " (1920 ) considers that the harmony of the 19th century and its history under a philosophical and psychological perspective. The cause of chords and their compounds lies not in physical phenomena, but in unconscious mental stress states for Kurth. "The essence of harmony " was "the overflow of force in appearance" and "chords reflexes from the unconscious ." The focus of the work of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is a climax and turning point in the history of harmony. The Tristan chord and its treatment reflect as acoustic phenomena " the unfulfilled, sad love tendons, which swells from the tenderest emotion to stormy violence, and unsatisfiable sinks back into itself to endless longing. " ( Wagner's explanation of the Tristan Prelude ).

Bruckner ( 1925) combines a thorough biography of an artist with a new approach to the theory of forms in which the emergence of form that emphasizes " shaping " into view and displaces the idea of ​​form as a given template.

The music theorists and psychologists alike neglected Psychology of Music (1931 ) sees itself as an alternative to the truncated tonal psychology by systematically summarizes Kurth's concept of unconscious psychic energy and its relationship to musical phenomena.

Major writings

• The style of opera seria by Gluck to Orfeo, Diss, University of Vienna, 1908.
• The conditions of the theoretical harmonic and tonal representation systems, Habil.schrift, University of Bern, 1912; Bern 1913.
• Fundamentals of linear counterpoint: Introduction to style and technique of Bach's melodic polyphony, Bern 1917.
• Romantic harmony and its crisis in Wagner's " Tristan ", Bern 1920.
• Psychology of Music, Berlin, 1931.