The Movement of a Musical Work : Ernst Krenek’s Opus 20 in the Interwar Years

Sammanfattning: The dissertation studies how one ‘modern’ piece of music from the early 20th century became conceptualised as an idealised musical work: the Third String Quartet, opus 20 (op. 20) by Austrian composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991). The idealistic musical work concept holds that any piece of music has an eternal, non-spatiotemporal existence and that it is the product of an identifiable creator’s work. While this concept has been studied critically, there are too few historical studies on its everyday practices. Drawing on nominalist music philosophy of for instance Lydia Goehr as well as the sociological perspective Actor-Network Theory (ant), op. 20 is studied as an historical actor or actant participating in events and associations of actors and objects, forming a broader movement which constitutes its historical conceptualisation as a musical work. In this movement, aspects of ephemerality, fixity, concreteness, and abstraction are explored and discussed. Together with ant, micro-history is used to explore op. 20’s history and its many gaps. Beginning with Krenek’s composition process in 1922–1923 within the ‘New Music’ networks, then ending with the piece’s reappearance in American exile in 1940, the study identifies three main mechanisms for conceptualising op. 20 as a work. These were the agency of the piece itself in influencing its co-actants, the degrees and repertoires of fixity which helped stabilising it, and its affinity with certain associations and actants such as Paul Hindemith, Universal-Edition, and Ernst Krenek. Having experienced a highly acclaimed premiere in 1923, publication in 1924, recording in 1925, and international performances by various ensembles during the 1920s, op. 20 nearly disappeared from musical life between 1929 and 1937, although it remained as a fixed yet abstract work in musical literature. With New Music associations in Europe scattered following the rise of Nazi Germany, op. 20’s subsequent ‘exile’ reappearances as concrete-ephemeral performances in Switzerland and the u.s. testified to the interplay of agency, fixity, and affinity in the work’s interwar movement.