Research Catalogue

The emergence of local expectations in listeners of music has been occasionally explained by assuming a sort of musical syntax or grammar. While sharing some superficial qualities, music and language structures are working differently: language syntax is organized in a hierarchical system, working only context-sensitively (the applicability of syntactical rules is influenced by the context), whereas musical structures, especially harmonic progressions, emerge mainly out of constructive, context-dependent processes (the context is able to establish completely new structural principles). Collected examples from musical literature of western tonal music across styles and epochs show five main principles of musical structure-building that distinguish musical models from syntactical rules: Constructivity, mappability, contextuality, individuality and contingence. The main influence of frame and context on musical expectations can be especially demonstrated by means of a harmonic progression frequently used in empirical studies as assumed syntactical violation: the neapolitan sixth chord succeeding the dominant. As a consequence, a re-interpretation of the empirical data should consider the specific context of the observed effects: they might be more a result of the introduction of the listener to a redundant stylistic model instead of the application of syntactical rules proper. According to the provided examples, structural expectations of listeners appear to be rather combinations of general familiarity to styles and composition principles, individual preferences and local framing. Based on these historical and systematic arguments, the structure of music seems to be flexible and integrative, and not bound to a syntax system.

Artistic experience can be interpreted as an embodied sensing of frameworks. In artistic constructions of realities, cognitive experience („Erfahrung“) and aesthetic sensing („Erleben“) interfere. Based on an analysis of aesthetic relativity in general, and of the artistic perspective on reality in particular, an artistic form of „sensuous cognition“ can be described: a genuine artistic understanding of the world as a sheaf of intentional coupling and decoupling manifolds, like an sensuous gauge theory of mind in multiple realities. The main gain of this approach can be found in an epistemological practice of a specific kind of artistic research, aiming for embodied and therefore experienced knowledge.

Art and science are not separate domains, but rather two dimensions in the common cultural space. This means, research is not then or only artistic, if carried out by artists, but deserves the attribute artistic, where, when and by whom whatsoever been made to a specific quality: the mode of artistic experience. Artistic experience is itself a form of reflection. And furthermore, whether implicit or explicit, artistic knowledge is embodied knowledge. The knowledge that artistic research strives for is a felt knowledge.

A taxomanic course through the research collections of the Museum of Natural History Berlin Collecting and classifying defines the daily routine at the Museum of Natural History. Here, in the non-public research collections, the diversity of nature becomes tangible: Thousands of birds, crabs, spiders, snakes, fossils are being collected, labelled and categorized. Comprising more than 30 million specimens, the Berlin collection is one of the world's largest. HUM – The Art of Collecting, an artistic and documentary portrait of the museum created by and starring its scientists, uses texts, spaces, sounds, objects and scenes to tell of a world contained in shelves and specimen jars, of our human passion for collecting and of the power of our love of order: Taxomania. A course in three acts leads visitors through an enormous labyrinth representing the diversity of nature, simultaneously transforming the halls of the research collections into a labyrinth signifying the utopia of knowledge.

“Fine, then,” fluted Fay, “sing me the reasons why you don’t exist, and I will whisper to you why you don’t have to be afraid – as long as you accompany me on the guitar.” – “But I can’t play the guitar!” – “If you don’t exist,” continued Fay, “then you can also play the guitar, because you actually do exist, otherwise you wouldn’t be afraid of not existing, and from one such a false premise follows the entire universe.” And so she played and played, sang her favorite fears and listened to Fay's eleven chords of consolation.

Among the members of the Archaeological Institute of the German Reich, the architectural historian Hans Schleif was notable for the extent of his involvement with the crimes of the National Socialist regime. His achievements in scientific research, for instance as director of excavations at Olympia, are over¬shadowed by his career in the SS. He was director of the Excavation Department of the »Ahnen¬erbe« (ancestral herit¬age) of the SS. After the German invasion of Poland he was briefly appointed Custodian of German Cultural Assets based in Posnan. In 1943, he joined the SS Head Office for Economic and Administrative Af¬fairs and rose to the position of deputy to C Group (Construction) director, Dr. Hans Kammler, whose permanent representative in the Jäger- und Rüstungsstab task force he became. In this role, Schleif was responsi¬ble above all for moving key arms production facilities underground, where fighter planes and the »reprisal weapons« V1 and V2 were built – hence for the largely subterranean concentra¬tion and slave labour camps of the Sonderstab Kammler. His grandson, the actor Matthias Neukirch, created a theatre production about Schleif in collaboration with stage director Julian Klein at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. This text is a result of the research undertaken for the production, and reports on selected stages in Schleif’s biography. This are the addenda and the register of the publication in the yearbook of the German Archaeological Institute, No. 131, 2016.