Music in Nazi Germany

For Hermann Schroeder (1904 - 1984) – German composer, conductor, organist, and pedagogue – music was a "practical" commitment to the "mandatory inheritance" from Bach. When asked what composers he considered “modern leading figures”, his list would hardly be considered “modern” by contemporary standards, citing predominantly Paul Hindemith and Max Reger. Seeming unquestionably old-fashioned, his music is typically characterized as Neoclassical, especially when compared to his prominent avant-garde peers and modernist predecessors. However, rather than merely attempting to mimic or return to aesthetic precepts associated with Classicism, Schroeder saw himself in a continuing lineage, able to look both forward and backward while interacting with and reacting to his contemporaries to create an eclectic yet internally cohesive modern musical language. In what ways has Schroeder synthesized old and new styles in his music? What particularly in his music is “modern” in mid-20th century Germany and even today? Schroeder’s concert and chamber oeuvre composed during the 1950s and thereafter form a repertoire of music that demonstrates his commitment to recasting sounds, styles, and forms of the past. Through examination of some of the pieces from this artistically productive and mature period in Schroeder’s life, not only will it become apparent that he is worthy of the further scrutiny of American scholars, but also the label “modern”.

This essay foregrounds music, radio, and sound in the novels of the German exile author Lion Feuchtwanger. Specifically, it analyzes the narrative techniques in Feuchtwanger’s "Waiting Room Trilogy," a collection of novels written from 1927 to 1939 that chronicled the rise of Nazism. Along with the trilogy’s aim “to document for posterity,” the essay argues that we can see the emergence of an acoustics of exile, primarily though the lead protagonist of the final novel, Sepp Trautwein: an exiled composer living in Paris in 1935. Trautwein composes a symphony called "The Waiting Room," and I engage Feuchtwanger’s symphonic image of “The Waiting Room” as a way of addressing music’s link to the experience of exile and the interwar period. In this reading of the trilogy, the “Waiting Room" symphony sheds light on the role music plays in all three novels, as related especially to Feuchtwanger’s treatment of religion, politics, and modern media.
https://www.peterlang.com/abstract/title/68691?rskey=0ZZsfr&result=1

This article documents and describes Edwin Fischer’s affiliations and compares the ideas most closely associated with them to his output. Reports on Fischer's particular manner of Bach-performance, not by offering a list of superficially observed attributes (as is usually done), but instead by attempting a systematic and detailed reconstruction of the pianist's complex epistemology of musical performance derived from a variety of sources with which Fischer came into contact. Sources include (1) Fischer’s descriptions of his Bach-pianism, the very existence of which suggests just how integral it was to him; (2) his Tonmeister-Ausgabe (Ullstein Verlag) editions of Bach’s clavier works; and (3) his recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) for His Master’s Voice (WTC I recorded from 1933–1934, WTC II from 1936–1937, making it the first complete recording of the cycle), a widely distributed and iconic recording on which Fischer's worldwide reputation as a model of Bach-pianism largely rests. Available at: http://www.bachnetwork.co.uk/understanding-bach/ub11/

An archeo-acustic sci-fi radio play based on the cultural and psychological history of germany after world war 2 with a focus on space related utopias. The radio play is released on limited hand made dubplate vinyl edition with a 30 page booklet designed by Barbara Acevedo Strange and Max Lange.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/34252587/Die-Sternensaat

Melnikova, A. A. W. Braunfels' opera "Birds": on the problem of interpreting an antique plot // Music and Time. - 2018. - No. 2. - p. 43-58.
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Мельникова, А. А. Опера «Птицы» В. Браунфельса: к проблеме интерпретации античного сюжета // Музыка и время. – 2018. – № 2. – с. 43–58.
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Summary: The article is dedicated to the opera Birds by the German composer of the first half of the 20th century, Walter Braunfels. It was written in 1920 and was a huge success with the German post-war public along with the operas of F. Schrecker and R. Strauss. Subsequently, Braunfels' opera was forgotten for many years, and only at the end of the last century interest in it began to revive. The Birds reflects one of the leading trends in the musical theater of the first quarter of the 20th century - an appeal to the subjects of antiquity. But unlike similar works by other authors, this opera is written on the plot of the ancient Attic comedy (“Birds” by Aristophanes), which is a rare case in the history of the development of the genre. In music, the influence of baroque, classicism and late romanticism is noted.
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Аннотация: Статья посвящена опере «Птицы» немецкого композитора первой половины XX века Вальтера Браунфельса. Она была написана в 1920 году и имела огромный успех у немецкой послевоенной публики наравне с операми Ф. Шрекера и Р. Штрауса. В дальнейшем опера Браунфельса была забыта на многие годы, и лишь в конце прошлого столетия интерес к ней начал возрождаться. В «Птицах» отражается одна из ведущих тенденций музыкального театра первой четверти XX века – обращение к сюжетам античности. Но в отличие от подобного рода сочинений других авторов, эта опера написана на сюжет древнеаттической комедии («Птицы» Аристофана), что в истории развития жанра является редчайшим случаем. В музыке отмечается воздействие барокко, классицизма и позднего романтизма.

Recent studies of popular musics (Erlmann, Guilbault, Lipsitz, Slobin, Zheng) struggle with questions about global, regional, and local identities; studies of improvisation in postwar global culture (Smith and Dean, Belgrad) overview improvisation's arts-interdisciplinary aesthetic terrain. My related concerns here are with the "new and improvised" music scene born from American and European free-jazz movements of the 1960s.
My focus on the Berlin-based Free Music Production (FMP), a concert and recording production concern, investigates musical practices/products functioning on the margins of the global music industry (like a parallel universe, also globally, regionally, locally); and sees in the investigation's findings an historically deep and central Western-musical gesture in what at first glance looks like an almost flip, eccentric one.
Through French- and German language scholarship on my subject; close analysis of the international literature on such music; interviews with musicians and others associated with FMP; and analyses of its commercial (and of my own) recordings of performances throughout Germany and Austria in the summer of 1997, I ponder European/German music history as jazz's Western grandparent, and jazz as its prodigal son's son returned to Europe by his African American parent. Through an ethnography of FMP and its artists—in the light of literature (1) on the improvisation issuing, most recently through jazz, from Western composition tradition; (2) on the history of this music in the divided-then-reunified Germany; and (3) of recent ethnographic theory that sees ethnography as an almost literary engagement of worlds variously wider than literacy's—I consider:
(1) what motivates improvisation and composition spontaneously generated in the absence of the shared mental maps of traditional stylistic conventions or paradigmatic prescriptions?
(2) what is the place and impact of this music and its makers in West and East German society and European culture (including their histories)?
(3) how shall the tools of literacy (including those of literature) serve this subject?
(4) what physical phenomena and philosophical frameworks bear on FMP's quest for individual and collective freedom from prescriptive determinants in music generation/reception, and what analytical and theoretical approaches best suit it?

Comparative approaches take for granted that historical, sociological, and anthropological phenomena, as well as art works, systems of ideas, and cultural practices, can be distinct and comparable at the same time. The notion of mutual influence is an old one, but most comparisons assume a sustained separateness of the compared phenomena. In comparing political and social entities, awareness of the exchanges and migrations of people and ideas usually does not alter this basic approach. However, the advent of modernity has brought better documentation of interrelations of this kind and associated them with processes of accelerated change and rupture, making the stability of the comparanda more difficult to maintain. A conceptual framework is called for that permits an account of ongoing reciprocities between the compared entities, such as may result from diasporic connections, direct import and export of commodities and ideas, and other forms of borrowing and integration.
The article offers "intercontextuality" as a framework through which to assess such phenomena, and looks in particular into Musical Currents and Performative Traditions Twentieth-Century Palestine/Israel and Germany.

""Recent studies of popular musics (Erlmann, Guilbault, Lipsitz, Slobin, Zheng) struggle with questions about global, regional, and local identities; studies of improvisation in postwar global culture (Smith and Dean, Belgrad) overview improvisation's arts-interdisciplinary aesthetic terrain. My related concerns here are with the "new and improvised" music scene born from American and European free-jazz movements of the 1960s. My focus on the Berlin-based Free Music Production (FMP), a concert and recording production concern, investigates musical practices/products functioning on the margins of the global music industry (like a parallel universe, also globally, regionally, locally); and sees in the investigation's findings an historically deep and central Western-musical gesture in what at first glance looks like an almost flip, eccentric one. Through French- and German language scholarship on my subject; close analysis of the international literature on such music; interviews with musicians and others associated with FMP; and analyses of its commercial (and of my own) recordings of performances throughout Germany and Austria in the summer of 1997, I ponder European/German music history as jazz's Western grandparent, and jazz as its prodigal son's son returned to Europe by his African American parent. Through an ethnography of FMP and its artists—in the light of literature (1) on the improvisation issuing, most recently through jazz, from Western composition tradition; (2) on the history of this music in the divided-then-reunified Germany; and (3) of recent ethnographic theory that sees ethnography as an almost literary engagement of worlds variously wider than literacy's—I consider: (1) what motivates improvisation and composition spontaneously generated in the absence of the shared mental maps of traditional stylistic conventions or paradigmatic prescriptions? (2) what is the place and impact of this music and its makers in West and East German society and European culture (including their histories)? (3) how shall the tools of literacy (including those of literature) serve this subject? (4) what physical phenomena and philosophical frameworks bear on FMP's quest for individual and collective freedom from prescriptive determinants in music generation/reception, and what analytical and theoretical approaches best suit it? ""

Si existe una ciudad que ha cambiado y se ha renovado a lo largo del s. XX ha sido Berlín. Su historia es la de un Ave Fénix que ha resurgido en numerosas ocasiones de sus cenizas adquiriendo todo tipo de formas y manifestaciones. La historia de Berlín es la historia de Europa, su crecimiento, su destrucción, su supervivencia. Es la historia de dos ciudades convertidas en una; es la Historia en presente. Asimismo, su representación musical a lo largo de la Historia del Cine responde al intento de presentarla como protagonista de los hechos y no como mero escenario, mostrando una ciudad igualmente inestable, multifacética, efímera, creativa. Del cabaret al techno, de Marlene Dietrich a David Bowie, pasando por composiciones de influencia futurista o de inspiración clásica, Berlín ha sido representada musicalmente de la mano de su historia social y política. Su imagen musical en el cine ha huido de clichés, de una imagen idealizada y romántica o de una construcción artificial que podría haber resultado de su reflejo en la pantalla. Muy al contrario, la representación musical cinematográfica de Berlín abraza un planteamiento en ocasiones más próximo al documental que la hace inseparable de la Historia europea del s.XX.