Beschreibung:
This article systematically reviews the dimensions of »passage« as a concept in music and other arts, cultural studies, historiography, and philosophy in eight sections. After an introductory analysis of Jasper Johns’ painting Passage from 1962 and a preamble on the fields of discourse on »passage/transition«, the second section differentiates between the philosophical aspects of a passage-movement in time and space (as well as in music) and the third section discusses historiographically orientated aspects of a multiply concentrated timeline on the cusp of an epoch. The fourth section takes a closer look at the formal-syntactic dimension of the passage concept by discussing the »bridge passage« (also labelled »pont« or »transition«) in the first movement of Beethoven’s third symphony; the fifth section refers to the »transversal« passage of rationality (Wolfgang Welsch), and the sixth section approaches intercultural passages, focussing on the opposition between the concept of cultural antagonism in Arnold van Genepp’s Rites de passage [1908] and the politically informed concept of transcultural recognition by composer Klaus Huber (as documented in his opera Schwarzerde about Russian poet Ossip Mandelstam, 2001). The seventh section relates the passage-concept to diverse experiences of space and time in new music debating orchestral works by Mauricio Kagel ( Trancisión I and II, 1958–59), Helmut Lachenmann ( Staub, 1985/87), and Mathias Spahlinger ( passage/paysage, 1989/90). The final section explores the passage between the flow of images and stills in film focussing on Jean-Luc Godard’s »tableaux vivants«. A dialectic conception of fixation and flow as documented in Hegel’s philosophy has been replaced by a continuous »transition in the transitionless« (Wolfgang Welsch) in postmodern philosophy and art. In certain constellations, passages that cross barriers may turn into »transgressions« that intentionally ignore rules and tear down borders in order to break open the restrictions of systematized and totalized thought and aesthetic practice.