Die Pianistin spricht. Überlegungen zur Epistemologie von Vertonungsanalysen und ihrer Funktion in musikwissenschaftlicher Forschung

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the premise that a pianist like Clara Wieck/ Schumann ‘speaks’ in her song compositions. This, however, raises a number of epistemological questions that will be discussed in this article. First of all, an explicit distinction is made between the examination of the ‘technical’ aspects of her compositional practice – in German: Praktik – (which may allow conclusions to be drawn about the pianist’s implicit knowledge) on the one hand, and the social aspects of her discursive practice – in German: Praxis – on the other. Thus, it is also necessary to discuss the criteria that the structural-analytical methodology must satisfy, as well as to consider to whom the pianist is actually speaking: to us music researchers of the 21st century? Or should we ask ourselves whether our analysis is not rather a “reading of traces” in the sense of Sybille Krämer, through which we invent the ‘producer’ of the analyzed ‘trace’ in the first place? Or to put it another way epistemologically: how do we make the pianist speak? What function does our ‘speaking’ of her compositions – namely the piano parts in her songs – have in scholarly argumentations?