German musicologist
Hanns-Werner Heister (born 14 June 1946) is a German musicologist.
Life and career
Born in Plochingen, (Baden-Württemberg), Heister studied musicology, German literature and linguistics in Tübingen, Frankfurt a. M. and Berlin, received his doctorate in 1977 in Berlin on the aesthetics, sociology and history of the institution of the concert and habilitated in 1993 at the University of Oldenburg with studies on music analysis. From 1971 to 1992 he worked as a freelance music journalist for various radio stations, newspapers and magazines. After numerous lectureships and guest professorships (e.g. in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Weimar and Vienna) he was professor for historical musicology and music communication in Dresden from 1992 to 1998 and professor for musicology in Hamburg from 1998 until his Emeritus in 2011. He is co-editor of the encyclopaedia Komponisten der Gegenwart, which has been published as looseleaf service since 1992.
Research
His research is centered on an analysis of music and music culture that is critical of power and society and can be divided into four areas:
- 1. Music sociological question: Music in social reality, both in the present and in history (since 1970; programmatically musicology as social science at the International Musicological Congress Bonn 1970). The focus is on media/institutions such as the concert or the jukebox, background music, sound ecology, open-air music, music during Nazism, in resistance and exile.
- 2. Music aesthetic question: Social and natural reality in music. The focus here is on music as a specific language. A first focus is political music, in which the conscious reference to society is condensed. Further focal points are the combination of music with other arts, opera and music theatre as well as music and fine arts and finally, aspects of the Gesamtkunstwerk and elements of the arts. Mathematics also belongs to the field of music-language, which has been researched more intensively since 2001; in addition to its significance for structural issues, it also serves to deepen and broaden the musical semantics. For a theory of similarity and a specification of fuzziness, Heister has also been using fuzzy logic since 2009.
- 3. Music-cultural-geographic ("music-ethnological") question: Music in its global cultural and idiomatic differentiation. The starting point was the interest in the new, different, unusual, foreign; scientific occupation with jazz (since 1978), Latin American music (since 1984) and Isang Yun (since 1987), improvisation (since 2008).
- 4. Music anthropological question: Music and human nature / human nature in music (since 1984). The focus here is on the beginnings of music, the development of art, music and the human senses (concretised in the concept of the 'Mimetic Ceremony'). Since 2005, Heister has increasingly included psychoanalysis in his work.
