Odjeci Nietzscheova mišljenja u avangardnoj glazbi 20. stoljeća
The Echoes of Nietzche’s Thinking in Music of the Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde

Summary/Abstract: The primary purpose of this paper is to show how the main Nietzche’s ideas got their expression in the 20th century avant-garde music. In the first and introductive part of the paper, after the short comment on Nietzche’s »adventure« with music composing, we deal with the artist’s metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy, which sets the music into a very high position as an expression of will (worldly primal One), more authentic than any verbal communication, which reveals the Dionysian nature of being in constant becoming. In the next chapter we tried to interpret the meaning of Nietzche’s deliberations on his contemporary music situation, referring to the criticism of late Wagner and the statements that testify about the philosopher’s ambiguous relationship with romanticism in general. With exhaustive use of concrete examples, the central two parts of the article prove that after the Nietzche’s death his subversive ideas echoed throughout the avant-garde music, starting from the compositional activities of Arnold Schönberg and his co-workers. Nietzche’s conception of destruction and re-evaluation of all values becomes the permanent part of the avant-garde programs even when that was not explicitly stated, so we indicated in baselines which musical values, since the establishment of Second Viennese School, have gradually disappeared and were replaced by others. In the microtonal music of György Ligeti we came to recognize Nietzche’s idea of becoming, and in the minimalism of Reiley and Reich the related idea of eternal recurrence. In the final and conclusive part, just after the response on possible objections that can be addressed to this paper, we emphasize that music is not only able to carry ready metaphysical conceptions, but it can also prepare us for asking the fundamental philosophical questions.

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