Wie erscheint das Klingen?

Immanuel Kant popularized the notion of a complementary relationship between nothing and something in the sense of an a priori form of intuition regarding space and objects that, within this framework, come to be perceived as such through sensory intuition. A simplistic interpretation of this epistemological concept of perception makes it impossible to conceive of sound and the act of sounding as distinct objects and subjects of sensory perception. This becomes all the more problematic the more we engage with, for example, Arnold Schönberg’s Farben, Op. 16 No. 3, the works of György Ligeti, or those of Karlheinz Stockhausen—musical works that drastically expose the sound of sound itself and present it as concrete auditory content of intuition. In order to provide a philosophical foundation for an aesthetically fruitful approach to such music, this work therefore attempts to expand Kant’s concept of the a priori form of external intuition to include an auditory component and, in doing so, posits the a priori form of auditory intuition of silence. These reflections are accompanied by observations focusing on the work of the international art movement ZERO, to which Stockhausen, after all, had demonstrable direct personal connections. Although the ZERO protagonists knew how to integrate sound and ringing in a wide variety of ways into the primarily still-visual contexts of their works—with Günther Uecker, a ZERO artist, even presenting works that seem to grant ringing a certain concreteness—and although the discussed music can all be superficially viewed alongside ZERO’s visual codes, it must be noted overall that ZERO’s art adopts a suspicious stance toward the object-like in the visual realm, whereas the musical developments discussed here explicitly characterize the emergence of auditory concreteness.

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