Lines of inquiry

For something so eminently practical, musical notes are profoundly fascinating. Music-literate players can read the melody of a composition off the page; they do not even need an instrument to know how it sounds. And by fixing pieces of music in writing, systems of notation preserve music across centuries that would otherwise be ephemeral.

“The first European notation systems emerged during the Middle Ages in a liturgical context,” says musicologist Irene Holzer, who has been researching and teaching at LMU as Professor of Musicology since April 2020. In medieval times, the Church was the principal steward of culture and there was a compelling motivation to develop clear notations for sacred music – after all, chorales and psalms were a form of prayer, which required accurate rendition and intonation. The Carolingian period in the 9th century was a crucial era which saw the emergence of numerous notation systems.

Irene Holzer investigates these complex systems. Because she first has to understand which sign systems underpin the notations – such as the so-called neumes or mensural notation – and how this semiotic basis allows music to be visualized and reproduced, her research has a strong paleographic bent. “We’re confronted with a plethora of notation systems quite unlike our modern standardization,” emphasizes Holzer. “Reading these different systems can be akin to deciphering hieroglyphs.” And to do the latter, Egyptologists rely on transcription sources.Holzer laments that so few notations have come down to us from outside the realm of sacred music. The popular music of the Middle Ages was written down only in exceptional cases and is therefore difficult to reconstruct. “In sacred music, you couldn’t just sing as you pleased, and this created the impetus for putting the music in writing.”

Music as a medium of communication

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Holzer laments that so few notations have come down to us from outside the realm of sacred music. The popular music of the Middle Ages was written down only in exceptional cases and is therefore difficult to reconstruct. “In sacred music, you couldn’t just sing as you pleased, and this created the impetus for putting the music in writing.”

Notation systems are living systems that have repeatedly undergone change, explains the musicologist, who hails from the Austrian province of Salzburg. It was only in the 15th century that the slow march toward standardization began, which itself would be called into question in the 20th century. “Numerous modern composers created their own models with the aim of loosening the strictures of standardized notation.”

Having studied in Salzburg and Newcastle upon Tyne, Irene Holzer worked as a researcher at UCLA Berkeley and in Basel, among other places. More recently, she was a junior professor at the University of Hamburg before coming to LMU. Although the main research field of the “musicological medievalist,” as she sees herself, concerns the Middle Ages, she is also interested in the broader lines of music history – particularly the study of music as a medium of communication.

For example, she has carried out research into Anton Diabelli, a contemporary of Beethoven. The Austrian composer and music publisher eventually undertook the task of editing the works of famous composers of the day for domestic use. To this end, he arranged scores for the guitar, say, or the csakan – a flute in the shape of a walking stick, which was a popular instrument at the time – so that they could be played by amateurs. “Music was considered an important means of communication in that society and musicality was always very pronounced in the various cultures of the time,” she observes. Another phenomenon was the gradual differentiation of music into “popular music” and “art music,” which occurred as music became an object of scholarly study and a musical intelligentsia began to form. The new intellectual class tended to have a lofty attitude toward popular music. “This reflects erstwhile hegemonic structures and the intellectuals’ desire for Brahmin status,” notes Holzer.

How music influences ideas of the past

Another focus of Holzer’s work is music historiography since the 1970s. “For me, it’s about figuring out how historical concepts are developed and fictions constructed in contemporary music,” explains the scholar. In this context, she is researching the Hamburg medieval folk rock band Ougenweide, which was founded in 1970 and is considered a pioneer of this musical genre. “Through the use of modal systems and minor modes in particular, which can sound alien to the listener, such bands can construct a historical image of a prelapsarian world, which is idealized in contradistinction to the fallen present, even though this picture of history has actually got nothing to do with the historical reality.”

Irene Holzer views herself as an interdisciplinary researcher whose fields of interest have interfaces with historiography and sociology. She sees promising opportunities here not only at LMU, but also in the area of digitalization. “In the field of music semiology and notation, I’m seeking to forge stronger engagement with digitalization formats. I don’t mean scanning notated sources – that’s not what this is about – but finding out how such formats influence ways of thinking with regard to the visualization of music.” She thinks there is great scope here for collaboration with computer scientists and experts in the burgeoning discipline of artificial intelligence at LMU.

Holzer, who plays the piano, flute, and zither, chose LMU because of its excellent scholarly environment. The fact that Munich brought her closer to the land of her childhood was less of a draw. “LMU is an outstanding university, which offers numerous interfaces between art, culture, and modern technologies for my fields of research,” she stresses. The only fly in the ointment is that she has not yet been able to give in-person classes due to the coronavirus restrictions in 2020.