ABSTRACT
The Platonic notion of philosophy as the supreme form of mousike, whose aim is to purify the soul from its associations with the body and its worldly desires, has been of paramount importance to the history of musical aesthetics. With respect to 'Tubingen, Janner', one of Celan's best known and most frequently interpreted poems, the capability of musical contexts to partake in the poetic production of meaning is laid particularly bare. Holderlin is of course a key figure in the German tradition of thinking of poetry in terms of music. But the intertextual role of Holderlin in this poem has been discussed at length elsewhere and will not be the focus of my attention here. The emphasis on the acoustic aspects of language draws the poem towards the notions of vocal sound, without erasing or even counteracting the written character of Celan's poetry. Dittrich's piece contains several restatements of material, sometimes corresponding perfectly to the anaphoric repetitions of Celan's poem.
