Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe

A Handbook

Klaus Nathaus, Martin Rempe, Klaus Nathaus, Martin Rempe

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783110648089
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110648218
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Music has gained the increasing attention of historians. Research has branched out to explore music-related topics, including creative labor, economic histories of music production, the social and political uses of music, and musical globalization. This handbook both covers the history of music in Europe and probes its role for the making of Europe during a "long" twentieth century. It offers concise guidance to key historical trends as well as the most important research on central topics within the field.

1 Introduction: Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe

Martin Rempe

Klaus Nathaus

In 1958, nine notes from an anthem that announced to the world that a country was “reborn from ruins and turned towards the future” became an apple of discord. Allegedly, the first two bars of Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the anthem of the German Democratic Republic, were identical with Goodbye Johnny, a popular song that looked back to a “good comrade” who had died in battle. Legal experts who had to decide whether the anthem was an original composition saw sufficient differences between the optimistic larghetto and the swinging requiem. Musicologists have since confirmed the verdict; some regard the anthem instead as a paraphrase of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the melody that became the European Anthem in 1972. Irrespective of legal and musicological expertise, however, musical laypeople could get confused. When a West German band played the opening notes of Goodbye Johnny at a concert tour in the GDR in 1976, some listeners solemnly rose from their seats, thinking they were about to hear the anthem. By that time, the lyrics to Auferstanden aus Ruinen were not to be sung anymore at official occasions, which may have contributed to the confusion.¹

In the case of the anthem and the Schlager sharing the same melody, communist Europe clashed with its western counterpart and political music met with the political economy of the music business. A piece of representative music alluded to a “classic” and was confused with pop, showing that the boundaries between art and entertainment music are arbitrary and permeable. While the two songs were on the face of it “just” music, the dispute about their similarity became politically charged and was exploited for propaganda reasons, illustrating the kind of seriousness that music had acquired in twentieth-century Europe.

These and other facets of musical life come closer into view as we follow the protagonists of the story about the Schlager and the anthem and trace their musical activities. Hanns Eisler, the anthem’s composer and a pupil of Arnold Schönberg, was involved in the European musical avant-garde that experimented with new compositional practices. Like many of his European peers, he incorporated elements of jazz into his work. At the same time, he wrote music for amateur choirs, including the Solidarity Song (Solidaritätslied) that was meant to express workers’ protest, but came to be deployed as a propaganda tool by political leaders from Erich Honecker to Hồ Chí Minh. In the 1940s, Eisler fled the Nazi regime and joined European composers like Miklós Rózsa and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who scored film music for Hollywood, thus helping the Old World’s orchestral music to find new opportunities abroad.

Eisler’s career paralleled that of Peter Kreuder, the composer of Goodbye Johnny. Like Eisler, this son of a classically trained singer wrote both art and “light” music from pop tunes to opera. In the 1920s, Kreuder worked as a pianist in a cinema, one of the most common workplaces for professional musicians at the time. As sound film made an army of cinema musicians redundant around 1930, Kreuder shifted from orchestra pit to recording studio and began to write film music. He also supervised studio sessions for record companies, producing music that adapted American jazz to accompany a new “German” dance style.

The anthem and the pop song, their composers and their listeners, their mediation and their transfer, their political use, their symbolic value, and their economic utility represent essential facets of musical life. These facets are at the heart of this handbook, which studies them with a view to their constitutive activities. Drawing on musicologist Christopher Small’s influential concept of “musicking,” the book focuses on activities like composing, recording, or dancing to cut across conventional divisions between “art” and “popular” music or “active” music making and “passive” listening. These distinctions, which have come to inform both music research and people’s engagement with music, have a history, as this book is going to show. The chapters investigate central forms of musicking in a twentieth-century perspective, because many of the social, technological, legal, and conceptual preconditions of contemporary music emerged in the decades around 1900. They do this both in view of the role of Europe in contemporary musical life and with the question about how the various ways of musicking may have contributed to the making of Europe.

The fact that “Europe” did play a role in music history is widely acknowledged, but how it mattered exactly has been rarely addressed, especially not for the twentieth century. Europe is commonly recognized as the home of “classical” music and opera as well as a place where music was deployed for political purposes and where the display of “good” taste generated cultural capital. This perception owes to developments that originated in Europe and started or gathered momentum in the nineteenth century. For instance, Europeans thoroughly formalized music through “standard” notation and tuning. Inspired by evolutionary thinking, they also established a hierarchy of music, with classical music at the top, through institutions from music journalism to conservatories and contemplative audiences. Most importantly, Europeans deployed music as a powerful tool in their “civilizing missions,” rendering non-European musicking “primitive.” Tasking music with the expression of national identity, they created a tournament of musical value that required participants to abide by European rules and excluded others for not having reached European musical standards. These developments amounted to a European musical legacy that both shaped musicking on the continent and left musical traces all over the world. The handbook investigates this legacy under the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the twentieth century.

Paying attention to the historical contingency of this European musical legacy, the handbook avoids the danger of essentializing Europe in music. Indeed, for a long time, the concept of “European Music” appeared self-evident to music historians. Echoing the discourse of musical superiority of the nineteenth century, they interpreted musical works as manifestations of particularly European “values,” “traditions,” or “mentalities.” For instance, the 13-volume “new” handbook of musicology, published in the 1980s, contains two volumes to deal with “Extra-European Music” without indicating its historicity and social functions in their titles, whereas the majority of the volumes are devoted to the study of “The Music” of different periods, from Antiquity to the twentieth century. One volume is reserved for “folk and popular music in Europe,” indicating that “the music” without any specification denotes European art music.² This Eurocentrism has for a long time impeded a critical discussion about the place and significance of “Europe” in music history.

However, Eurocentrism is not a problem specific to music history. Historians were also rather late to investigate Europe in a critical and reflective way. Only about a decade ago, renowned historians still lamented the “historical amnesia of ‘Europe’” in the discipline, and the contributors to an anthology on “Europeanization in the Twentieth Century” felt they were “entering a terra incognita” when drafting their chapters.³ This may be due to the fact that “Europe” is difficult to grasp. Most historians agree that “Europe” cannot be reduced to a—notoriously contested—geographical entity, but should be understood primarily as an imagined and experienced space. According to this view, the term “Europe” stands for visions, projects, and a way of life that is not necessarily tied to geography, but socially constructed and therefore malleable. Such a multi-faceted object is difficult to study, as the normative narratives offered by many political scientists and some historians testify. These narratives subscribe to the seductive teleology of “European integration” and tend to essentialize Europe by attributing to it specific values or traditions in much the same way as the aforementioned music historians do. Adding to the challenges of writing European history is the problem of studying the history of people without understanding their language. Even the brilliant accounts of Europe’s twentieth century by Ian Kershaw, Mark Mazower, and Tony Judt do not forget to mention their authors’ limitations in this regard.⁴

The growing interest in “global” or “world” history is only of limited help to project a contemporary European history. If anything, global historians would pose further questions to our undertaking. They have—effectively and with good reasons—criticized studies that focus exclusively on the nation-state. They have emphasized connections, migrations, and transfers across borders, including those that demarcate Europe from the rest of the world. As they want to overcome national as well as Eurocentric perspectives, they urge us to keep Europe’s global embeddedness in mind. At the same time, however, they offer no rationale why historians should bother about conceptualizing a distinct European history.

The present handbook is mindful of these problems. Instead of approaching Europe as a fixed entity and covering it as comprehensively as possible in order to find an essence of “Europeanness,” we consider “Europe” as a possible effect of practices, in our case musicking. Looking at Europe from this distinct thematic perspective and with a special area expertise, each chapter opens up a spatial horizon in which actors participated in music. At the same time, for Europe to come into existence explicitly, it needs to be imagined, discussed, experienced, and performed, just as music is only in the world as “musicking.” As a consequence, different forms of musicking may amount to different “Europes” in terms of scope, content, and significance.

This praxeological approach to European history leads to the following guiding questions: Did “musicking” contribute to the making of Europe and its people, its economies, and its political realms? To what extent did music foster encounters between Europeans, encourage a common outlook, or even generate a European sense of belonging? Conversely, did it deepen the rifts that separated Europeans for much of the twentieth century? Did musical actors create institutions with a European reach? Did they draw on values they perceived as European, did they conceive music as “European” music, separate it from other music, and promote it as such outside the continent?

These are empirical, open questions, which the chapters of this handbook address with different methods, depending on the form of musicking they take into view. Many authors frame their story in a comparative way. While staying away from a historical comparison sensu stricto, they use this approach flexibly to gain insights from different corners of the continent and point to commonalities and differences in Europe. Other chapters follow transnational perspectives. They trace a range of connections across the continent (and beyond) in order to assess transfers of music, musical events, people, capital, commodities, institutional settings, and so on. These chapters identify both implicit ways of musicking “Europe” and explicit notions of and references to Europe, thus...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• On the “Contemporary European History” Handbook Series
• 1 Introduction: Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe
• Part I: Originating Music
• Part II: Managing Music
• Part III: Mediating Music
• Part IV: Socializing in Music
• Part V: Politicizing Music
• Part VI: Globalizing Music
• List of Contributors
• Index