From Sound to Musical Material

The contribution focusses the relationship between sound, its materiality in the phonographic media, actual configurations and the concept of musical material.
The development of a new "literacy of sound" out of the technical notation of sound and its analog and later digital coding leads to new methods of composing and processing musical structure as well as new concepts of performance and reception. The traditional range of musical material (like E. Hanslick and Th.W. Adorno coined the term) which is based on settled melodic and harmonic forms does not cover actual aesthetic strategies of composing with phonographic material and has to be rethinked.