Diskurse des Sonalen. Klang – Kunst – Kultur by Britta Herrmann and Lars Korten (review)

Herrmann and Korten's volume is the second in the series "Klang – Kunst – Kultur." As Herrmann's introduction explains, the first volume, Dichtung für die Ohren. Literatur als tonale Kunst(ed. Herrmann, 2015) entered an argument for the centrality of sound ( Klang) for literary history and the history of poetics, focusing on the concept of the tonal ( das Tonale) to describe poetic production and the aural ( das Aurale) to characterize perception/reception (Herrmann, "Einleitung," 9). Diskurse des Sonalenendeavors to extend the earlier volume's investigations via attention to "historische und kulturelle Klangmuster, -praktiken und Hörererwartungen" (Herrmann, "Einleitung," 9)—that is, the medial contexts that shape the ways sounds are produced and understood. The concept of sonality ( Sonalität) joins terms like "aurality" ( Auralität), "tonality" ( Tonalität), and "vocality" ( Vokalität) as efforts to analyze cultural objects and artworks that undermine or work across the oral/written dichotomy (Herrmann, "Einleitung," 16). "Sonality" of course is fundamentally connected to sound (and the volume to sound studies); however, Herrmann explains that sonality is an "umbrella term" for "mediatisierte Tonalität wie die von Texten" (Herrmann, "Einleitung," 17). The term thus not only encompasses the sound of phonemes or syllables and the phonetic characteristics of rhythm or prosody but names the "Interdependenz von akustischer Wahrnehmung, kulturellen Klangkonzepten und Bedeutungszuschreibungen" as they appear in particular historical moments (Herrmann, "Einleitung," 17). Herrmann gives several examples, each of which underscores that the medialized sound of sonality cannot be fully separated from the visual, whether in written text, its spatial arrangement, or broader synesthetic blending of art media.

The fourteen subsequent texts are divided into three sections, "Wort/Klang," "Klang/Medium," and "Klang/Kunst." Each author faces several challenges: first, how to connect the general conceptual framework of sonality to the particular object(s) of investigation (and the choice of object); second, presenting sonic-acoustic-aural phenomena in an exclusively textual format; third, the necessarily interdisciplinary lens and knowledge required by intermediality of sonality as a category. It is thus apparent in the first essay, on sonality in Rousseau's philosophy of language and its effects on his Pygmalionmelodrama, that Laure Spaltenstein's primary expertise is in musicology: her readings of Rousseau's text as sound tend to be oversimplified attributions of semantic meaning to acoustic effects, while her analyses of the use of music (by Horace Coignet) in the melodrama are more attuned to cultural-historical context. Janine Firge's contribution, "Das Crescendo. Gradationale Techniken des Sonalen im 18. Jahrhundert" undertakes to discuss the crescendo as a rhetorical-musical figure, in acting technique, and as part of a "sonal aesthetics" around 1800—all in thirteen pages (60–72). Inevitably, one would like to hear more about the individual claims, for example the remark that new techniques in organ-building enabled more gradual swells of sound and volume and that the technological capabilities affected notions of how music evoked feeling (72). Anne Holzmüller works masterfully between the categories of music, sound, and text in her discussion of Christian Morgenstern's "Fisches Nachtgesang" as a parody of Goethe's "Wandrers Nachtlied (Ein Gleiches)," including 'settings' by Sofia Gubaidulina and others, to elucidate the language-critical point of Morgenstern's wordless word-play: "Nicht Reim, Rhythmus, Bild-und Klangqualität der Schrift richten sich nach den Bedeutungen, die Bedeutungen richten sich nach der spezifischen Materialität" (101). In his examination of Chaya Czernowin's Pilgerfahrten, Michael Custodis succeeds in a detailed exfoliation of the strategies of Czernowin's work as it engages with the boundaries of words as signs and words as sounds, but leaves unexplained why precisely this piece, which combines Stefan George's "Mühle lass die arme still" with text from Tove Jansson's Moomin stories, is his choice to demonstrate what he (accurately) notes as the widespread erosion of the word/music boundary in the category of "Klang" within music of...