Wie erscheint das Klingen?

Immanuel Kant popularized the assumption of a complementary relationship between nothing and something in the sense of an a priori form of intuition of space and objects, which as such come to sensory perception within it. A simplistic view of this epistemological concept of perception makes it impossible to understand sound and sounding equally as explicit objects and subjects of sensuality. This becomes all the more problematic the more we have to deal with musical works such as Arnold Schönberg's Farben op. 16 No. 3, the work of György Ligeti or that of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which drastically expose the sounding of sounding itself and recommend it as an objective auditory content of perception. In order to provide a music-philosophical foundation for the aesthetically fruitful approach to such music, the present work therefore attempts to expand Kant's approach to the outer form of a priori intuition by an auditory component and, in the course of this, postulates the auditory form of a priori intuition of silence. These considerations are accompanied by reflections that focus on the work of the international art movement ZERO, to which Stockhausen demonstrably had direct personal relationships. Although the ZERO protagonists were able to integrate sound and sounding into the primarily still visual work contexts in a variety of ways, with Günther Uecker a ZERO artist even showing works that seem to concede a certain objectivity to sounding and, moreover, the musics discussed can all be superficially viewed together with visual codes of ZERO art, it must be stated overall that the art of ZERO is suspiciously positioned towards the object-like in the visual, whereas the musical developments introduced here expressly characterize the profiling of auditory objectivity.

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