Rumours, Whispers and Broken Memories: musical aesthetics of trauma-related memory disorders in the works of Beat Furrer
Swiss-born Beat Furrer counts amongst the most renowned composers in European contemporary music. While his works have been quite extensively studied in regards to their compositional technique, musical aesthetics and their rich cultural and historical references, namely to ancient and modern literature and drama (see: Kunkel 2011, Ender 2014), a less obvious undercurrent that runs through all his works is the relation to personal, musical and cultural memory, and their loss. This is especially prominent in his music theatre works, where memory appears not only in the plot and is present in the musical strucutre, but is even personified as character, such as in FAMA (2007) and its precedent Begehren (1996). But beyond the obvious references, what is it that actually renders the experience of memory loss alive and gives me the chills when attending a performance of Furrer’s works?
Speaking from a joint perspective as scholar and long-time performer of Furrer’s music, in my contribution to NCMM I will look at how phenomena of memory loss are dramaturgized and used as sonic and aesthetical resource in Furrer’s music theatre. My point of view is based on the recently emerging field of music-related trauma studies that is continued e.g. by the Music, Sound & Trauma Research Study Group (https://utrechtmusicsoundtrauma.wordpress.com/). I start my investigations by defining trauma and memory loss as symptoms of post-traumatic disorder (PTSD). Drawing from current research in psychology and neuroscience (Linden & Rutkowski 2013), I show how the actual structure and appearances of post-traumatic memory loss get represented sonically, textually and dramturgically in Furrer’s works. My contribution aims to offer, beyond the specific example given, a novel way to analyze contemporary music that is based on a perspective of embodied neuro-aesthetics (Chatterjee & Cardillo 2022). I argue that by composing for, through and with embodied realities of memory loss, Furrer taps into mechanisms of emotional coping and orientation which helps to explain the intense emotional impact of his music on an empirical base.
Keywords: music theater, trauma, neuro-aesthetics
Biography
Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka (*1984 Regensburg) studied orchestral music, historical musicology and contemporary music in Dresden, Rostock and Graz. Her dissertation on auditory music theatre won the Austrian Theodor-Koerner award for arts & science in 2018. She currently works as freelance musician, researcher and writer, specializing in contemporary music, performance and theatre, listening and auditory media studies. She was part of the EU-MSCA doctoral network „Lullabyte“ that studies sleep at the intersection of music and neuroscience and currently works as external researcher for the FWF-PEEK project “Sound as Score”.
KUG Graz, Austria – margarethe@mur.at