Концепцията за стилистично преподаване на хармония на Дитер де ла Мот в Harmonielehre
The Conception of Diether de la Motte’s Stylistic Teaching of Harmony in his Harmonielehre

Summary/Abstract: The study examines the stylistic method of teaching harmony in Harmonielehre (1976) by Diether de la Motte – the first German theorist who realizes such a method in textbook on harmony, thus considerably contributing to development of historical approach in the area of music theory. Its purpose is to reveal both the basic mechanisms of functioning of this method and the significance of De la Motte’s work in the history of music theory. The first part sets the question of whether “Harmonielehre” by Diether de la Motte is indeed a Harmonielehre. A comparison between this work and traditional textbooks on harmony written in German displays a “softening” of harden characteristics of the genre Harmonielehre or their replacing with new ones. An analogy between music-theoretical and musical genre definiteness is searched for as well. In this sense, the textbook by Diether de la Motte (if Dahlhaus can be paraphrased) is representative for “the new music theory and the problem of music-theoretical genres”. The second part of the study considers the relationship of historicity – systematicity in the textbook. The historicity is manifested in two basic ways: 1) in a way of “stamping” a given historical state (as a language of the time or an individual language); 2) in a way of tracing historical processes (in relation to Tonalität; the relationship of consonance – dissonance; stylistic examination of harmonic structures with a view to the time in which they enter into practice, with a view to the changeability in their use as well as their own changeability). Systematicity, which is a harden characteristic of the normative Harmonielehren, is not crossed out by Diether de la Motte and at the same time it is to him neither an end in itself nor something universal and over-historical, but rather forms a secondary level that is subordinated to the historical one. Concerning a textbook on harmony, this is a new type systematicity that is conditioned in a concrete historical way and limited to its real historical validity. The third part is devoted to the role of the act of hearing in a stylistic music-theoretical teaching. In this part, the comparison is already not between the traditional Harmonielehren and “Harmonielehre” by Diether de la Motte, but rather between a generalized model of the traditional teaching of harmony and a similarly generalized model of teaching, coming from the act of hearing, which model steps on ideas of Diether de la Motte.

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