Christoph Türcke thinks about the origin of music.

Many books about music are so unsatisfactory because they want to make it easy for the reader. Because everyone should understand or feel what inspires the author. But music is not easy. It is not easy to understand and it is not easy. It is the philosopher Christoph Türcke in one of the best books written by music, in addition to the language, the complex unique selling point of man. Certainly, animals also give sounds, even melodies, which sometimes differ from the acoustic results of human -made music. But animal sounds are not made, not consciously designed, but functional reflexes or reflective surplus acts: actions that go beyond the original benefit of the mating offensive or area marking. Sounds like music, but none is, the philosopher Christoph Türcke states soberly. But if music, as it later portrays, is not a means of transport for feelings, but a cultural construct that is nevertheless associated with feelings, then it becomes more difficult with the distinction between human and animal music.

Because the type of construct, the structure, is open and not objectively evaluable. For Türcke, however, a reference to the natural overtones is essential, an overcoming of the tonality, as the composer Arnold Schönberg propagated, is actually not possible. Schönberg wanted to dissolve the system of consonance and dissonance into a mystical consonance with the universe. Most people hear tonally and learn music about the tension between consonance and dissonance. And despite impressive theoretical work by Schönberg itself and later, especially through the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, Schönberg’s twelfth tone system was unable to suppress the occidental sound system.

Perhaps at least he has reached what Türcke drives: to question the suspected emotional content of music. Because even as a passionate music listener, you have to admit that music is an acoustic phenomenon that man couples his feelings as it suits him. The belief that these feelings have been caused by the music is not wrong, but also not correct. Because the music contains no feelings. Not even biographical prints, as Türcke states. None of it. It doesn’t matter how good or bad Beethoven was in a mood when he wrote his fifth symphony, whether he was struggling with his deafness and despairing God and the world. This is also difficult to convey, because the desire that music has a conceptless language -like meaning, bravely keeps up and fills many books with concrete work interpretations.

In the beginning man was at the mercy of the unpredictable threats from nature and predators

Difficult for Türcke does not mean impossible. He initially draws the long development from the cry of terror at the archaic human sacrifice to Stockhausen “Singing of the Youth” many thousand years ago, enriching his historical demolition with philosophical points of view from Plato to Adorno’s jazz criticism. The advantage of this very extensive and always exciting representation is undoubtedly the philosophical versatility of the author and his largest successful effort to familiarize yourself with details of music history. It seems to be an advantage to look at them sharply from the outside and not to meet her with the self -confidence of the musician or musicologist. Christoph Türcke was once a talented violinist, but does not speak here from the point of view of the practitioner, who, like almost all theorists, assumes that music was always there in any form.

Unlike the frequent research results of non -specialist scientists – many have a tendency to music and mostly examine Mozart and Bach’s effects on anything – Türcke limits himself to his familiar areas of philosophy, theology and psychology. The latter helps him to derive the origin of music from the original rite, the cultivated human sacrifice. In the beginning was the fear that humans were drafted the unpredictable threats from natural events and predators. Pretty long. At some point, the development of his brain allowed him a counter -reaction, which deals with irritating disposal, about self -defense impulses and follow -up impulses. Fear should now protect against horror and is deliberately triggered by repeating the horror scenario.

Music, so you can grasp it, is less and more than language

The rite arises from the compulsion of repetition, in which the worst experience is staged: the killing of a fellow man. It is crucial, says Türcke, “not to imitate natural figures, but to give a shape to be shaped”. The whole thing happens in a shelter, the “Skene”, and the driving psychological forces are shifting and compression, which Sigmund Freud calls the “Workers of the Dream”. These forces form the “psychological process”, the initial spark of which is the compulsory repeat, as Türcke describes.

The reversal of the direction of instinct is essential with regard to the development of rite and at the end of the music. The ritual process is – shown very shortened – and this is justified by archaeological research: the community throws the lot about who is to be sacrificed, the victim is given by stoning. Pity and solidarity arise. The latter manifests itself in the self -harm of the parties through so -called Cain Signs – they are the preliminary stage of the writing. They are just as much part of the territory of terror, as is accompanied by shame, grief, pity and emotion. It gradually develops in them, over hundreds of years, the traumatic repetition of the absorption reflex of unbearable excess excess, that is, the original horror, “specifically human feelings”.

At the same time, a virtual space “contemporary horror images”, that is, nightmare -like visions, which at some point replace the real human sacrifice with abstract rituals. But music and at the same time language still develop in the specific sacrificial ritual, namely from the cry of the crowd at the moment of killing. The cry, initially reflex, develops demonstrative character, it points to an event, finally becomes the term, for naming, a name. Here, language and music are still one, the gesture of the name is equivalent to the still unknown content of the name. Almost exciting hundred pages followed that lead to Jewish language philosophy, Adorno and his role model and idea of ​​Walter Benjamin and his failed habilitation thesis “The origin of the German tragedy”.

Benjamin says all of Kantian, our conceptual apparatus is interpreted by the world at our idea, but does not capture the truth. However, he then lists all sorts of characteristics of truth that flows into a “largely informative theory of truth”. That cost him the academic career. Adorno continues Benjamin’s thoughts and speaks in relation to music as a demythologized prayer, “freed from the magic of acting”. Here, Türcke contradicts and finally ends up in the well -known example in Plato’s “symposium”, in which the sexual drive of humans should actually be explained. The primeval man was therefore a double man, optionally man man, man-woman or woman woman. The jealous Zeus drove these perfect people, and the stuff pain to this day. That is why people are constantly looking for their counterpart. And this is exactly how you can imagine the relationship between language and music and sharpen the ear for how this basic constellation through the centuries, from Gregorianik to the melodrama of the 19th century to rap and hip-hop is a cultural constant. One thing refers to the other, and even if the language finally gained the upper hand, the value of the other, music, remains not insignificant. Music, so you can grasp it, is less and more than language.

Finally, there are somewhat further acoustic miracles than the vocal carnival of the animals

As Adorno says, she is not a demythological, but, according to Türcke, a pre -verbal prayer that also continues to work securely, for example with Stefan George in his rapture poem “I detach myself in tones”. Türcke keeps rummaging away, it is about the Jewish mysticism of grass gel and sadomasochism and so much that contributes to explanation and can only be described inadequate by the pure phenomenologists and drawing theorists: what music is.

How much you can be wrong if you move on a purely musicology or the common idea of ​​music theory, Türcke shows in turn using the example of the much -not gender musician Adorno. For example, he couldn’t really discover anything new in jazz. Instead, he attacks the claim of the revolutionary in jazz, certified this “gesture of the rebellion to parry the willingness”, “as the analytical psychology teaches about the sadomasochistic type, which matters against the father figure and still secretly admires it, wants to do it equal”.

Adorno wrote this in 1935 when jazz from today’s perspective still sounded very tidy. Türcke nevertheless takes Adorno’s criticism seriously, shows his fallacy, but talks not ossified conservats. It is by no means a simple category error, writes Türcke, to perceive the jazz from the compositional height that classical music had achieved in the age of breaking tonality. From Debussy, the Adorno leads to, among other things, jazz is certainly amateurish, but this dilettantism has its own right, “as soon as it succeeds, which is failing some top -class composition effort: to articulate a spontaneous, liberating promise of happiness with enormous echo effect”.

This is certainly the crucial perspective, which probably applies to all music, from Gregorianik to Bebop, from Palestrina to pop music. At any time there is more or less complex music, but the decisive factor is not the ostensically intellectual effort, but the acting result from the listener. With which we might be with the animals again, with the drögen throttle and the wonderful lerch singing. Türcke would not see it that way, he is forcing a cultural concept of development that deals with design that does not put detailed phenomena into the center, but maintains the view for the whole. And then there are somewhat further acoustic miracles than the vocal carnival of the animals.

Christoph Türcke, philosophy of music. Verlag Chbeck, Munich 2025. 510 pages, 38 euros.