Paper Session 05

07.09.2021 // 9.00-10.30 // Room A 022

Burkhard Meischein (Berlin)
«Das Verhältnis zwischen Musiktheorie und Musikwissenschaft im Vergleich: Wandlungen im Gegenstandsverständnis des Faches in der DDR und der Bundesrepublik» (P14)

Meredith Nicoll (Hamburg)
«Performing the GDR: Songs of a Budding Dictatorship, Musicological Challenges and Opportunities» (P15)

Max Erwin (Malta)
«Telling Tales at Darmstadt. New Music and New Narratives in Post-War Germany» (P16)

«Musicology between Relativism and Neo-Positivism» (S3.1)

Wolfgang Marx (Dublin)

Like virtually all other academic disciplines musicology has to react to the challenge that the post-truth mindset with its rejection of expertise, its unwillingness to accept and engage with complexity and its downgrading of reason as a guiding principle of decision-making poses to the modern university. At the same time all disciplines that value critical theory as well as post-structuralist or postmodernist thinking highly should investigate to what extent they may have unwittingly contributed to the development of this mindset given that simplistic readings of the concepts of deconstruction and discourse analysis can be found at the heart of populist agitators’ strategies. This paper will be argue that the aforementioned methodologies are tools that can be used as well as abused, and that a core challenge today is to combine the teaching of those tools with an engagement with ethics, namely with a commitment to accuracy, sincerity, integrity, decency and empathy – all conspicuously absent from the behavioural patterns of post-truthers. It will be discussed how musicologists fall prey to the polarising pull of our times (between fake-news relativism and fact-checking positivism) just like everyone else, and how the discourses between social constructivist and neo-positivist approaches demonstrate many of the hallmarks of post-truth battles in the wider society. However, due to our discipline’s perennial challenge to engage with both music’s rational aspects as well as its emotional power musicology may actually be in a better position to address these matters than other humanities disciplines.

«Modernist Composers’ Narratives and the Concept of Truth» (S3.2)

Ewa Schreiber (Poznań)

Modernist composers very often conduct their discourse on two planes, musical and verbal. Their verbal statements and narratives serve as parallel messages which contribute to the reception of their work and manifest the composer’s social authority. The axiological component is of particular importance here, sometimes more evident, sometimes more subtle or disguised in metaphorical concepts.

In the discourse of modernist composers the concept of truth or truthfulness may be understood in many different ways and placed in various contexts. It is approached either from the perspective of artist’s inspiration and self-expression or from the perspective of imaginary listener, in terms of awakening people’s full cognitive faculties through music. In the former case truth is understood as internal sincerity opposed to false, in the latter it is closer to some kind of extraordinary experience, wisdom or knowledge, even if full of ambiguities or contradictions. Here the truthfulness is usually opposed to illusion or a cognitive routine.

Different understandings of truth or truthfulness imply its different functions. Truth can help to implement at the individual ethics and maintain a sense of artistic autonomy (e.g. Witold Lutosławski), it can serve as a tool of social critique (e.g. Helmut Lachenmann) but it may also be interpreted in universal terms as a manifestation of deep levels of human personality (e.g. Jonathan Harvey).

When the discourse on values enters the composers’ narratives, it usually helps not only to convey but also to justify the composer’s artistic choices. Therefore, by outlining different concepts of truth I will also try to answer the question why such reflections could have been useful for individual composers. 

«Telling Tales in Musicology» (S3.3)

Peter Tregear (Melbourne)

This paper explores the extent to which we might consider emerging diagnoses of a post-expert, post-truth public culture as something that the discipline of musicology is not just observing from the sidelines but is itself also complicit in generating and sustaining. Whereas our discipline used to value the cultivation of a capacity to understand and evaluate music with reference to the possibility of ‹objective› historical truth and immanent musical quality, today we are more likely to expose such notions as merely the institutionalised expression of the social and aesthetic biases of those who seek to promote them  At the same time, the rise of experience-centred methodologies such as auto-ethnography and action research now effectively grant a disciplinary licence to musicologists to make themselves both the principal subject of research and the principal source of evidence. This privileging of the musicologist’s self as the ultimate repository of musical knowledge inevitably leads to a weakening of the traditional tools of scholarship, and the systems of rational enquiry that once made musicology more than merely the assertions of the institutionally privileged. Given the manifold institutional and social pressures now bearing down on musicology and musicologists today, how might we retain a capacity to speak not only of our own experience of music but to contribute meaningfully and effectively to public knowledge more generally?

Wolfgang Marx is Associate Professor of Musicology at University College Dublin (UCD) and also a member of the UCD Humanities Institute. Among his research interests are György Ligeti, the representation of death in music (particularly in requiem compositions), music and post-truth, and the theory of musical genres. Recent publications include essays on Ligeti’s, on the history of Irish musical institutions, and on the Berliner Requiem by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He is the editor of Dublin Death Studies, as well as chair of the interdisciplinary research strand Death, Burial and the Afterlife at UCD.

Ewa Schreiber is a musicologist, music critic, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Musicology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). She graduated in musicology and philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in 2005 and defended her PhD in musicology in 2011. Her main scientific interests are: the aesthetics of music (the theory of tropes, such as irony and metaphor, applied to music and musicological discourse) and the musical thought of contemporary composers. She is also interested in the creative output of young generation in Poland. In 2012 she published her book Muzyka i metafora. Koncepcje kompozytorskie Pierre’a Schaeffera, Raymonda Murraya Schafera i Gérarda Griseya [Music and Metaphor. The Compositional Thought of Pierre Schaeffer, Raymond Murray Schafer and Gérard Grisey] (The National Centre for Culture, Warsaw).

Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. Previous roles include: a Teaching Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London; Professor and Head of the School of Music at the Australian National University; and a Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. An expert on opera in the Weimar Republic, recent publications also include work on music education, including ‹Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking Tertiary Music Education› (2014). He is also active as a singer and conductor.

«Das Verhältnis zwischen Musiktheorie und Musikwissenschaft im Vergleich: Wandlungen im Gegenstandsverständnis des Faches in der DDR und der Bundesrepublik» (P14)

Burkhard Meischein (Berlin)

Wandlungen im Gegenstandsverständnis des Faches spiegeln sich häufig im Verhältnis zwischen Musiktheorie und Musikwissenschaft: Wie viel Musiktheorie brauchen Musikwissenschaftlerinnen und Musikwissenschaftler, um ihr Fach professionell ausüben zu können, wenn wahlweise die Analyse, die Stilgeschichte, die Sozialgeschichte oder die Kulturwissenschaft als leitend angesehen oder ausgerufen werden? Welche Kompetenzen werden auf diesem Gebiet verlangt, welche Standards jeweils gesetzt?

Solche Fragen lassen sich einerseits abstrakt diskutieren, andererseits aber auch historisch konkretisieren, und die deutsche Teilung bietet dafür ein interessantes und bisher kaum genutztes Anschauungsmaterial, ist doch bei den Forschungen zur Musik und Musikwissenschaft in der DDR die Rolle der Musiktheorie bisher kaum thematisiert worden.

Dass im Call for Paper für die Berner Tagung die Musiktheorie als «unabhängige Nachbardisziplin» der Musikwissenschaft bezeichnet wird, spiegelt Aspekte der heutigen disziplinären Matrix wider, zumal in großen Teilbereichen der Musiktheorie die fachliche Autonomie heute besonders stark gemacht wird. Der vergleichende Blick auf die DDR bereichert m.E. die Sicht auf die disziplinären Wandlungen im Gefüge des Faches und auch auf die Optionen innerfachlicher Zusammenarbeit.

Einige Grundlinien liegen auf der Hand: Das engere Verhältnis zur populären Musik, Einflüsse ästhetischer Kontroversen und russischer und sowjetischer Literatur, das Verhältnis zum Volkslied, die Öffnung in Bereiche der Semiotik oder auch der Bio-Kommunikation hinein sind Aspekte, die für die Entwicklung der fachlichen Matrix und das Verhältnis zwischen Musiktheorie und Musikwissenschaft in der DDR eine Rolle spielen. Im Westen war und ist die Entwicklung dagegen durch die Suche nach internationaler Modernität und nach Anschluss an den anglo-amerikanischen Raum sowie eine zunehmend differenzierte Historisierung bei fortdauerndem Festhalten an den zentralen Werken der europäischen Kunstmusik geprägt. Mir geht es in diesem Gefüge aber nicht um Sternstunden der Fachgeschichte und Meisterwerke der Theoriebaukunst, sondern um die durchschnittliche Realität an Instituten in Ost und West und die Vorstellungen innerfachlicher Zusammenarbeit der beiden Bereiche, die sich in den unterschiedlichen Kontexten gebildet haben.

Burkhard Meischein absolvierte sein Studium in den Fächern Schulmusik, Musiktheorie, Germanistik und Philosophie in Detmold, Bochum und Berlin; Abschlüsse mit dem Staatsexamen im Lehramt Musik/Deutsch sowie später dem Master-Abschluss Musiktheorie. Seine Promotion erlangte er 1998 mit einer Arbeit über die Weidener Orgelwerke Max Regers an der TU Berlin, die Habilitation im Jahr 2010 an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Gegenstand der Habilitationsschrift war die Geschichte der Musikgeschichtsschreibung («Paradigm Lost. Musikhistorischer Diskurs zwischen 1600 und 1960», Köln: Verlag Dohr, 2010). 1999–2004 war er Mitarbeiter bei der Ausgabe der Gesammelten Schriften von Carl Dahlhaus, später Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Hochschule für Musik Dresden. Er übernahm Lehrstuhlvertretungen an mehreren Universitäten. Zurzeit ist Meischein Gastprofessor an der Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin sowie Privatdozent an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

«Performing the GDR: Songs of a Budding Dictatorship, Musicological Challenges and Opportunities» (P15)

Meredith Nicoll (Hamburg)

After the creation of the former German Democratic Republic, composers and musicologists were (knowingly or not) caught in a tug-of-war between two contradictory socio-aesthetic poles. On one hand, musical life still circulated around the ideals of romantic/modernist treatments of music as materials to be studied, replicated, and emulated. Under specifications of socialist ideals, on the other hand, music’s effectiveness was to be analyzed and praised and took priority over theoretical content. Likewise, this isolated performative turn in musicology’s history poses challenges to those who study music of the GDR. Academic musicological standards, that are still largely tailored to work-based performance practices, prompt musicologists to describe and document former musical practices with means that reflect contemporary ideals of autonomy or dissent. Attempts to apply pre-existing assumptions and research methods to the study of the culture of the GDR, according to Mary Fulbrook, have resulted in «the western fixation on dissenting intellectuals» and render the majority of cultural life historically invisible.

Practitioners in the GDR invented what might be called a ‹folksongization process›, by invalidating folk melodies which had been appropriated by the Nazis and by attempting to create a folk-music culture around new compositions. This new sort of folksong practice, which made up a large portion of musical life of the GDR, does not fit neatly into contemporary musical ideals, thereby tempting practitioners to exclude problematic repertoire as well as musical concepts which shaped the era. This presentation uses the institutional production of ideological songs by the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR (VKM) to elucidate the need for self-reflection within current performance and musicological practices.

Meredith Nicoll is a vocalist and musicologist based in Hamburg, Germany. She holds masters degrees in German Studies and Vocal Arts and is currently a doctoral candidate and research assistant at the Hochschule für Music und Theater Hamburg. Der dissertation focuses on song production in the early decades of the GDR while other research areas include performative vocality and gender in historiographical and contemporary musical practices. As a performer, Meredith Nicoll has curated award-winning concerts, performs regularly as a soloist and with contemporary music ensemble, and is a founding member of the music/theater collective picnic (team-picnic.com).

«Telling Tales at Darmstadt: New Music and New Narratives in Post-War Germany» (P16)

Max Erwin (Malta)

Darmstadt is a familiar place in music historiography. It is where a radical new generation of composers ‹pledged their allegiance to Schoenberg’s great pupil [i.e. Webern]› in 1953, breaking in toto with a compromised past in response to the urgent crisis of post-War reconstruction in order to compose the most esoteric, mathematically rigid, and ‹anti-humanist› music the world has ever known, and has remained the quintessential ‹citadel of the avant-garde› ever since (cf. Taruskin, 2005). The problem, as a growing body of scholarship shows, is that there is very little indication that any such music was ever composed or performed, and concerts at Darmstadt continued to be dominated by composers like Carl Orff throughout the 1950s. Indeed, Martin Iddon’s close reading of the program of the 1954 Darmstädter Ferienkurse identifies only a single obscure piece, Michel Fano’s Sonata for Two Pianos, which might fit the bill of a ‹total› serialism (Iddon, 2013). What could account for such a striking divergence between historical narrative and the archive, between discourse and event?

To answer this question, I give a critical analysis of this narrative mythology of New Music, especially the concept of a ‹zero hour›, totalising break with the past, examining how it mobilised musical practices and discourse to misrepresent the music being performed and written in post-war Europe. In particular, I demonstrate how prominent cultural figures like Herbert Eimert and Wolfgang Steinecke universalised the particular practice of Karel Goeyvaerts and Karlheinz Stockhausen into a supposedly normative paradigm of avant-garde musical production. Finally, I examine how precisely this universalising mythology provided narrative and institutional cover for the continuing presence of composers and musicians compromised by the Nazi regime in post-war musical life.

Max Erwin is a musicologist, composer, and lecturer at the University of Malta. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds, funded by a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship, in 2020. His research is primarily focused on musical avant-gardes and their institutional networks, and his writing has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Literature, TEMPO, Revue belge de Musicologie, Nuove Musiche, and Cacophony.

«Reframing the Beginnings of Academic Musicology» (P17)

Alexander Wilfing (Frankfurt am Main)

The nineteenth century saw the institutional establishment of musicology and art history, with tenured positions for the latter being installed in Germany approx. 1810 and Hanslick attaining a lectureship for «musicology» in 1856 as part of Count Thun’s reform of Habsburg education. Besides promising scholarly innovation, Thun’s reform moreover addressed political concerns by fostering scientific positivism as a nation-neutral method, thereby striving to appease conflicts between Austria’s ethnic groups. The great success story of positivism in Habsburg academia is therefore dependent primarily on the specific cultural and political setting of the Austrian empire and its ethnically diverse inhabitants.

Although early musical research betrays close parallels to art-historical methodology (and their common ancestors philology and archeology), both subjects evolved in different directions over the years. While Kunstgeschichte unfolds along the lines of historicist thought, Musikwissenschaft draws from a broader spectrum of academic disciplines, with a more prominent role of natural science. This phenomenon is at least in part due to the specific cultural and political situation from which these subjects emerge. While the German academic landscape favored historicist approaches, the beginnings of musicology are more closely tied to Guido Adler’s 1885 essay «Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft» and its Austrian (i.e. positivist) context.

While Adler’s later works fall more in line with «historicist» scholarship, the 1885 essay paints a broader picture, integrating disciplines such as aesthetics, physiology, and psychology into Adler’s two-pronged concept. Rather than implying a «splitting» of musicology into historical and systematic approaches, Adler’s essay implies an inclusive concept, bridging the gap between Hanslick’s formalism, «philological» musicology, and the natural sciences by way of positivist scholarship. This bridging is reliant on the specific setting of nineteenth-century Austria, which by way of Adler’s reception history affected Western musical research for many decades.

Alexander Wilfing was PraeDoc (2014–17) and PostDoc (2017–21) researcher in several projects on the historical context(s) of Eduard Hanslick’s aesthetics (funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF and the Austrian National Bank OeNB) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He currently is an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow (P.I., FWF, 02/2021–04/2023) in Frankfurt/M. (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, 2021–22), Brno (Masaryk University, Department of Art History, 2022), and Vienna (Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2022–23) as part of the project «Creating an Academic Discipline: Eduard Hanslick, Guido Adler, and the Establishment of Musicological Methodology in 19th-Century Vienna.» Since 2018 he is editor-in-chief of Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies.

«‹The Viennese School of Comparative-Systematic Musicology›: On the Construction, Function, and Discursive Career of a Narrative in the Historiography of Austrian Musicology» (P18)

Malik Sharif (Graz)

The concept of a «Viennese School of Comparative Musicology», later relabelled as «Viennese School of Comparative-Systematic Musicology», plays an important role in received historical accounts of musicology in 20^th century Austria (used as a shorthand for the different political entities of which the territory of post-World War II Austria was a part). The concept was introduced and developed in the second half of the 20^th century, most importantly by Walter Graf (1903–1982) and Franz Födermayr (1933–2020), both former professors of comparative(-systematic) musicology at the University of Vienna. Proponents of this concept refer to Richard Wallaschek and especially Robert Lach as founders and emphasize the role of natural scientific approaches.

The «Viennese School of Comparative-Systematic Musicology» can be theorized as a historical narrative. It tells a conclusive story of how a certain branch of Austrian musicology developed over the course of time, mostly as a kind of «Whig history». The present paper inquires into central aspects of this narrative:

• Who contributed in which way to the construction of this narrative?
• How did this narrative develop over time?
• Which scholars, institutions and kinds of research are part of this narrative? Which are excluded or feature only as minor characters?
• How is this specific kind of comparative-systematic musicology portrayed in relation to other kinds of musicology and other fields of research? How is the regional emphasis of the narrative to be assessed in national and international contexts?
• What discursive function(s) did this narrative fulfil? How was it received? And in how far has it remained relevant in the present?

In addressing these questions, the paper contributes to the larger aim of reflection on various histories within musicology (in regional, national, and international, as well as inter- and intra-disciplinary perspective).

Malik Sharif is research coordinator at the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. He studied musicology and philosophy in Graz and Halle an der Saale and holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Recent publications: Speech about Music: Charles Seeger’s Meta-Musicology (2019), Understanding Musics: Festschrift on the Occasion of Gerd Grupe’s 65th Birthday (2020, co-edited with Kendra Stepputat).

«Ein kritischer Blick auf Hans Heinrich Eggebrechts Mahler-Buch» (P19)

Martin Pensa (Bern)

1985 erschien im Piper Verlag Ernest Ansermets Die Grundlagen der Musik im menschlichen Bewusstsein (Übersetzung aus dem Französischen), in welchem der Antisemitismus offen ausformuliert ist: Von keinem jüdischen Komponisten könne man sagen, er «wäre im Bereich des Stils oder der Form schöpferisch gewesen.» Weil das Buch aber als zu schwierig galt und immer noch gilt, erregten die ideologischen Äusserungen kein Aufsehen.

Im selben Verlag erschien 1982 Hans Heinrich Eggebrechts Die Musik Gustav Mahlers. Aus heutiger Sicht und im Wissen um Probleme rund um Eggebrechts Biographie taucht beim Lesen des Buchs an einigen Stellen die Frage auf, ob im Hintergrund antisemitische Tendenzen wirksam sind. Ein Beispiel dazu: Der Autor ordnet die Sinfonien Mahlers weder der absoluten noch der Programm-Musik zu, im Gegenzug verortet er sie in einer eigenen Kategorie. Dabei argumentiert er konsequent ahistorisch: Bezüge zu den sinfonischen Werken von und nach Beethoven seien als zufällig anzusehen. Aus der Sicht Eggebrechts «horcht[e]» Mahler zudem «[g]eradezu raffgierig […] die Natur nach ihren Lauten ab, um sie möglichst unberührt in seine Musik zu verpflanzen, als wären sie schon selbst Musik». Muss man sich Mahler als komponierenden Alberich vorstellen? War er nicht in der Lage, eigenständige Musik zu erfinden?

Nach einer Erörterung von Mahlers (durch Schopenhauer geprägtem) Verständnis von Natur sowie weiterer Problemfelder (unter anderem Begriffe wie «Plagiat» und «usurpatorisch», «empirisch») möchte ich diskutieren, ob eine retrospektive, kritische Sicht, die sich einer pauschalen Disqualifikation dezidiert verweigert, zu einer Neubewertung des Buchs führen sollte, und was es für heutige Debatten bedeutet, dass es auch 40 Jahre nach dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs möglich war, offen – oder allenfalls versteckt – Ideologeme im (Un-)Geist von Wagners Das Judentum in der Musik fortzuschreiben.

Martin Pensa, Dr. phil., ist Dozent für theoretische Propädeutika an der Universität Bern und Gymnasiallehrer im Fach Musik am Campus Muristalden Bern. Er arbeitet vorwiegend im Spannungsfeld zwischen Praxis und Theorie sowie an der Schnittstelle zwischen Gymnasium und Universität. Studien in Musik, Schulmusik sowie Musikwissenschaft und Philosophie in Bern, Zürich, Basel und Salzburg. 2021 erfolgte die Promotion an der Universität Bern mit der Dissertation Gustav Mahlers Neunte Sinfonie. «Ich sehe alles in einem so neuen Lichte». In dieser Schrift beschäftigte sich Pensa mit Fragen der Rezeption und den Möglichkeiten, Mahlers Neunte Sinfonie als ein Werk zu verstehen, das über die Mittel der absoluten Musik hinausgeht.

Keynote: «Narratives of Musicology in Progress» (K4)

David R. M. Irving (Barcelona)

Narratives of musicology are riven through with ideas of «progress», a fact that has been noted in critiques of the discipline from the mid-twentieth century to the present. When musicology was founded as a formal academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, western ideas about «progress» were tacitly intertwined with industrialization, modernization, and colonialism. Despite individual moves against an unreconstructed notion of «progress» in the early twentieth century by a handful of scholars including leading Indologist Ananda K. Coomaraswamy – who opposed the introduction of mechanization to Indian music – and early music pioneers such as Arnold Dolmetsch, the eurocentric and teleological narratives of «progress» in music history (which had emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) continued to proliferate. These took root not only in academic contexts but also in the public sphere, flourishing with the hegemony of western art music in most university music departments of the «developed world» in the twentieth century and leaving epistemological legacies that still need to be dismantled today. The recent «global turn» in musicology together with ongoing moves to decolonize the discipline and its music history curriculum – as called for by Margaret Walker, Philip Ewell, and many other scholars – seek to challenge the forms of European exceptionalism that teleological narratives present. This lecture seeks to ask how the discipline can produce new narratives that not only draw from previously marginalized voices in music history, but which also align themselves with politically progressive social action.

David R. M. Irving is an ICREA Research Professor in Musicology at the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats–CSIC, Barcelona. He undertook his doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge, and is the author of Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford, 2010), co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Music, and co-general editor of the six-volume series A Cultural History of Western Music, forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2022). He received the Jerome Roche Prize from the Royal Musical Association in 2010 and the McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2015. His new monograph, Transitory Sounds: Performing Praxis of Global Music History, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

«Telling Music. Western Musicology and Its Literary Genres» (S4)

Literary genres – v.g. treatises on music, dialogues, philosophical writings, mathematical and scientific handbooks, encyclopedias, and so on – have shaped Western musicological discourse through the centuries. Three of them will be under scrutiny in this panel: music histories, music dictionaries, and music journalism. These genres will be addressed historically and in relation to their actual function in shaping and moulding musical narration and thinking.

«Latin American musicology: a Euro-(North)American invention» (P20)

Vera Wolkowicz (London)

What defines a «Latin American musicology»? According to Franco-American ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague in the New Grove article «Musicology» (2001), studies of music in Latin America can be divided in two sub-disciplines: historical musicology and ethnomusicology. The former has centred on the history of music «frequently related to concurrent western European trends», while the latter has concentrated on the «origins within the tri-ethnic make-up of Latin American music (Iberian, Amerindian, African)», which have also tended to  «exhibit a high degree of eurocentrism», claiming that Latin American scholars «must attempt to formulate theoretical objectives based on their own conceptualization of research problems and purposes in specific countries».

In line with these ideas, Argentine musicologist Malena Kuss in her prologue to Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History (2004), explains the difficulties posed by the concept of «Latin America» (and hence the studies of its music) as a sort of uniform cultural block, which she rightly argues, was a 19th-Century French invention, that excludes non-Latin perspectives (i.e. African and Indigenous). Moreover, she argues there is a eurocentric gaze in which «when musicologists apply regulative concepts devised by Europeans for the European experience to compositions by Latin Americans […] they are dooming one historical experience and concomitant aesthetics to representation through the discursive modalities of another».

In this paper I address two perspectives on Latin American musicology: one that comes from the «outside» and is posed by Euro-American scholars, and another that comes from the «inside» and is posed by Latin American scholars, who also project different understandings of musicology according to whom they are addressing (i.e. other Latin American or Euro-American scholars). By looking into the different discourses produced by (ethno)musicologists working on Latin American music, I aim to show the problems of building a regional discipline, bringing to the fore the fact that Latin American musicology is a Euro-(North)American invention.

Vera Wolkowicz is currently an Affiliated Researcher at the Instituto de Artes del Espectáculo ‹Dr. Raúl H. Castagnino›, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires as part of the project ‹Historias socio-culturales del acontecer musical de la Argentina (1890-2000)›. Her research focuses on Latin American musical nationalisms at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of Música de América. Estudio preliminar y edición crítica (Buenos Aires: Teseo and Biblioteca Nacional, 2012), and is preparing a monograph titled ‹Inca Music Reimagined: Indigenist Discourses in Latin American Art Music, 1910–1930› to be published by Oxford University Press, among other academic writings.

Unofficial Musicological Transfers and Exchanges between Spain and the Americas during the Cold War (P21)

María Cáceres-Piñuel (Bern)

This paper retraces the unofficial musicological transfers and exchanges operated between Spain and the Americas led by marginal actors during the Cold War. This paper’s primary source material is the dense epistolary relation between Francisco Curt Lange (1903-1997) and José Subirá (1892-1980) from 1947 to 1978. This rich correspondence has been neglected in musicological research. Curt Lange, German-born and later nationalised Uruguayan worked to institutionalise musical scholarship in South American countries (especially in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil), promoting musical Americanism and a fluent academic understanding between the Americas. Subirá, after being persecuted by the Francoism was appointed in 1943 secretary of the Instituto Español de Musicología (IEM) by the director of this institution; Higinio Anglés (1888-1969). Subirá hid his professional collaboration with Large to his superior, who, since 1947, lived in Rome being director of both the Pontificio Instituto di Musica Sacra (PIMS) and the IEM. Anglés distrusted the American musicological scholarship of the afterwar period because exiled German Jewish highly influenced it. Until the end of his life, he maintained a strong collaboration with the official German musicology, at this time hardly opened to its process of denazification.

This paper aims to reassess the impact of the unofficial and marginal academic relations in the institutionalisation, the deontology, and the intellectual discourses of musicology in the Americas. It also seeks to analyse the role that Curt Lange and Subirá played in reconstructing the musical scholarly relations between Spain under Franco and the United States of America and creating new channels of musicological collaboration between Spain and South American countries during the Cold War.

María Cáceres-Piñuel is an associated researcher at the University of Bern. Her PhD analysed the conceptual axes and international cultural trans­fers that led to the emergence of musicology as an autonomous discipline in Spain: El hombre del rincón. José Subirá y la historia cultural e intelectual de la musicología en España (Edition Reichenberger, 2018). She obtained a Balzan visiting fellowship at the University of Vienna University (2014–2015) and a Marcel Bataillon fellowship at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (2019–2020). Her current research project focuses on elite women’s role in the changing patterns of art management related to music in the international exhibitions’ frame at the turn of the 20th century.

«Shifting the Map of Musicology: Émigrés in Latin America, 1930–1960» (P22)

Tina Frühauf (New York)

With millions of immigrants escaping Europe’s totalitarian regimes, the 1930s and 1940s saw an unprecedented migration of musicologists, writers on music, and music intellectuals who would shape the intellectual life in the United States, the United Kingdom, Palestine, and, to a lesser extent, parts of Latin America. With ongoing migrations, the still young discipline of musicology saw a definitive shift in its predominance from German-speaking Europe. In this, the impact of the musicologists who chose as their destination Latin America is a largely unsung chapter in the history of musicology as a discipline. The groundwork for musicology in and for Latin America was laid, amongst others by Franz Curt Lange, who had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1925. Well documented are the lives and activities of those who escaped Francoist Spain and settled in Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico, amongst other places. Aside from Lange, the small but significant number of German-speaking music scholars and has remained largely overlooked. Some passed through Latin America, such as Edward E. Lowinsky who briefly stayed in Cuba before moving north or Hans Helfritz who in 1939 arrived in Bolivia only to later settle in Chile. Musicologist Hans-Joachim Koellreutter went to Brazil; others chose Argentina as their destination. Each of them represents a different trajectory of music’s intellectual migration. Unlike their émigré colleagues in the United States, who trained an almost closed generation of musicologists and provided a musicology with a wide range of thematic and methodological impulses, those who migrated south contributed to an evolving pan-Latin musicology that balanced the established canon and bended it by introducing subjects related to their new locales. It is precisely this balance and the process of intellectual convergence that my paper attempts to reconstruct systematically. It sees itself as a historiography that maps this migration and its impact on musicology as a discipline in Latin America between 1930 and the 1960s. It delves into the intellectual contributions of the émigrés as well as the reaction to and effect on Latin America. It embeds this discourse in the inquiry whether musicology in Latin America can be understood as a «delayed discipline».

Tina Frühauf is Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University in New York and serves on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. In 2019 she was a DAAD Guest Professor, sponsored by the German government, at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich. An active scholar and writer, the study of Jewish music in modernity has been Dr. Frühauf’s primary research focus for two decades, culminating in monographs from Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur (Georg Olms Verlag, 2005) to Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989 (Oxford University Press, 2021). Among Dr. Frühauf’s recent editions is Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014, with Lily E. Hirsch) and the collection of essays, Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts (Boydell Press, 2020).

«Uncomfortable Sounds: Arabic Experimentalism and the New Generation of (Post-)World Music Productions» (P29)

Rim Jasmin Irscheid (London)

The paper presentation is concerned with emerging networks between musicians, cultural institutions and funding bodies aiming to challenge the dominant narratives on Arabic musicianship in Western Europe. In media texts after the so-called «Arab Spring» since 2011, musicians with kin-relations to the MENA region have increasingly been portrayed as victims and subjects of oppression based on Euro-American norms on «liberation» (Nooshin 2017), leading to essentialising narratives of suffering, resistance and struggle in the context of Arab musicianship. In this paper, I address the different representational stages of a Middle Eastern imaginary in a range of media texts. This includes taking a closer look at the politicisation of musical subjects, notions of «discovery» in the context of streaming services, as well as forms of neoliberal orientalism (El Zein 2016) as a theoretical framework to analyse musical phenomena in the Arab-speaking world. Conversely, this paper will offer an insight into the strategic essentialism and absence of imagined markers of artists’ identities as a form of institutional critique. This includes looking at DIY music productions, digital collaborations and multimedia performances as part of a newly established platform in the German cities of Mannheim and Berlin in which audiences and organisers experience and utilise notions of unpredictability, uncertainty and productive conflict in order to reframe narratives on Arab musicianship in academic and commercial contexts. I argue that, at these festival and performance sites, counter-hegemonic collaborative music projects are able to challenge narratives of experimental and electroacoustic music productions through the sonic reclaiming of public space.

Rim Jasmin Irscheid is a doctoral student at King’s College London, working on experimental music and ‹world music› festival culture in Europe. In her AHRC-funded project, supervised by Martin Stokes, she is looking at the social and cultural significance of musical collaborations across Germany and Lebanon. Situated between musicology, anthropology and the sociology of performance and media, her practice-led PhD takes into account her own curatorial work in Berlin and London. She holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford and a joint honours BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg. In 2021, she won a British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) fieldwork grant award.

«Transnational Musicology in World War II Brazil: Mário de Andrade, Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo, and U.S. Good Neighbor Policy» (P27)

Eduardo Sato (Chapel Hill NC)

«Musicologist» is one among many other designations that can describe the career path of two Brazilian intellectuals active during the interwar period: Mário de Andrade (1893‒1945) and Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo (1905‒1992). Despite their limited academic formation in musicology as the field would have been defined by their peers in Europe, both nurtured a profound interest in music and musical scholarship, writing important books and leading institutions that were shaping notions of Brazilian music. Both authors identified Brazilian music within a transnational framework that considered its development through the lens of social miscegenation between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous populations as they were discussed in social theories of their times. The two men had different views, however, on the narratives of the history of Brazilian music and the knowledge produced about as it related to national and international projects. For Andrade, a celebrated modernist author who had a profound impact on composers of art music, the concept of Brazilian music was part of a project of crafting a national identity in which external influences should be kept to a minimum and only as a historical colonial influence buried in the past. For Azevedo, who after World War II was named an international music counselor at UNESCO, Brazilian music was entangled in international musical exchange and should be used to promote the nation abroad. Drawing on newly uncovered archival materials, I investigate how both musicologists responded differently to the interest of the United States in Brazilian music during the period of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933‒1945). I discuss the frictions between competing meanings of «Brazilian music»—a critical concept that paired the idea of nation with of sounds, genres, people, and fields of knowledge—and the role of narrating national histories of musicology, which were shaped in a transnational discursive field. By foregrounding two competing ideologies of Brazilian national music as they intersected with European and U.S. constructions of musical identities, this paper intervenes in current inquiries into the complex and multidirectional historiographies of national and global musicologies and their practices.

Eduardo Sato is a PhD student in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dissertation focuses on how Brazilian music was recurrently negotiated in the context of transatlantic travels in the first half of the twentieth century. He holds a MA degree in Musicology from UNC and has completed a MPhil in Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo, after receiving his BA in Social Sciences from the same institution. His research interests include musical mediations, border studies, modernism, histories of musicology, and archival research.

«Revising the History of Soviet Musicology» (P23)

Olga Manulkina (St. Petersburg)

In February 2020 two institutes of Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Institute of World Literature, sent letters to the President of the Russian Federation, protesting against methods of scientometrics in social sciences and humanities introduced by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and based solely on the number of publications in the sources indexed by Web of Science and Scopus.

Russian musicologists, on the whole, are not yet anxious about the problem, being affiliated mainly with conservatories and music academies (and not universities) and submitting to another ministry (of Culture). While in case of scientometrics this position — apart from other humanities — defends Russian musicology, otherwise it means that the musicology is less integrated in contemporary processes, be it publishing in English or Russian, the number and quality of scholarly journals, discussion and criticism, concepts and methods of contemporary scholarship; it speaks another language in every sense.

This paper claims that the reasons for this situation are to be found in the history of Soviet musicology, which has not been reflected on, and revised, in the Post-Soviet decades — not even the turning point of 1949, a year of ‹courts of honor› on Soviet musicologists, traumatic consequences of which include not only the ruined careers but the damage to the whole sub-disciplines, like historical musicology, as well as suspicion and rejection of the contemporary Western scholarship. Meanwhile, the immutable status of certain scholars and methods is sustained by official institutions and guarded by the strong traditionalist tendencies that exclude polemics and criticism. Reviewing and revising the history of Soviet musicology, therefore, remains an urgent need for Russian scholarship and education.

Olga Manulkina is an Associate Professor at the St Petersburg State University, a founding director of the Master program ‹Music criticism›, and at the St Petersburg State Conservatory; a founding editor-in-chief of the journal Opera Musicologica (2009-2018), a member of editorial board of the journal Music Academy. Fulbright alumna (CUNY Graduate Center, 2002); a music critic of the Russian federal newspaper Kommersant (1995–2002) and Afisha magazine (2003–2009). An author of the book From Ives to Adams: American Music of the 20th Century (2010), numerous articles, incl. Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 Triumph in the Soviet Union (in: The Rite of Spring at 100, Indiana Univ. Press, 2017); ‹Foreign›versus ‹Russian› in Soviet and Post-Soviet Musicology and Music Education (in: Russian Music since 1917, OUP, 2017).

«Writing and Re-Writing Music Histories: Mentality Changes in Romanian Musicology» (P24)

Valentina Sandu-Dediu (Bukarest)

I intend to concentrate on the necessity of writing and re-writing, after 1990, the history of Romanian music (my focus is on classical composition). The severe cultural isolation imposed by Nicolae Ceaușescu affected not only the avant-garde oriented Romanian composers, but had an equally unfortunate effect upon musicology and musicians’ mentalities. Therefore, I propose to discuss: 1. the way in which composers’ biographies and ideas were deformed and manipulated, in order to meet the requirements of the socialist realism propaganda and, later, of the nationalist communis; 2. the nationalist obsession of post-war Romanian musicology about the «tension» between «national» and «universal» character of music; a certain degree of embarrassment in the Romanian musicology when it comes to examination of the communist period. A number of welcome attempts to examine the archives of the Securitate (secret police) have brought to light information that is sometimes ambiguous and controversial, and the documents that have been preserved are inevitably fragmentary. The period of the dictatorships between 1938 and 1944 and their impact on musical life have been studied even less.

On the other hand, I will notice that several musicologists tried to distance themselves from the ideological clay and from the clichés handled during the communist period. They adopted a fresh discourse, ethnographic and anthropologic tools, other methods or ideas taken from the contemporary European and North-American musicology. There are some notable efforts to re-write fragments of older or newer histories of Romanian music (see Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Volume 14, Special Issue 3, December 2017). The archival research proves to be complicated as, for instance, communist repertoires (including songs dedicated to Stalin) disappeared, scores and recordings were simply destroyed. The challenges are multiple and the results still pale.

Dr. Valentina Sandu-Dediu graduated in musicology from the National Music University of Bucharest in 1990. She has been teaching at the same institution since 1993 (professor of musicology and stylistics). She wrote and edited 12 books, over 40 studies and 300 articles: see Ipostaze stilistice și simbolice ale manierismului în muzică (Mannerism in Music, Bucharest 1995), Rumänische Musik nach 1944 (Saarbrücken, 2006); Despre stil și retorică în muzică (Musical Style and Rhetorics, Bucharest 2010); editor of Noi istorii ale muzicilor românești (New histories of Romanian music, Bucharest, 2020). Valentina Sandu-Dediu was a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, she is rector of  New Europe College, Institue of Advanced Study, Bucharest (since 2014), and received the Peregrinus-Stiftung Prize of Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften in 2008.

«‹Historiographisches Schöpfertum›: Strategien bulgarischer Musikgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Nationalismus und Sozialismus» (P25)

Patrick Becker-Naydenov (Berlin)

In Bern musste die Verspätung deutschsprachiger Musikwissenschaft 1996 noch entdeckt werden, weil eine fest etablierte Disziplin unter stärker werdenden interdisziplinären Tendenzen und wachsender fachgeschichtlicher Sensibilität vor neue, unbekannte Probleme gestellt wurde. Verlässt man aber den Raum tonangebender Diskurse in Westeuropa und Nordamerika, ist das Gefühl von Verspätung keine Ausnahme, sondern Regel – und zwar eine Regel, über die offen reflektiert wird und die produktiv gemacht werden kann.

Fällt diese Beobachtung auch in den Bereich einer globalen Fachgeschichte der Musikwissenschaft, so muss dafür nicht erst in fernen Gefilden nach Ansatzpunkten gesucht werden: Am Fallbeispiel bulgarischer Musikwissenschaft zwischen ihrer Etablierung in den 1930er-Jahren und der Ideologisierung im Sozialismus der frühen Nachkriegszeit seien hier selbstreflexive Strategien von Musikhistoriographie vorgestellt. Es gilt einmal, den Einfluss westeuropäischer und russischer Diskurse zu untersuchen, wie sie durch das Studium der frühesten FachvertreterInnen auch in Bulgarien rezipiert wurden. Macht der 1923 von Hermann Abert promovierte Stojan Brašovanov in seiner Geschichte der Musik von 1946 – die erste bulgarische Publikation dieser Art überhaupt – wissenschaftliche Intuition und historiographisches Schöpfertum als Fundamente von Musikgeschichtsschreibung aus, stellt sich ferner die Frage nach einer Positionierung des Diskurses in den virulenten zeitgenössischen Positivismusdebatten.

Schließlich sind die historiographischen Strategien, wo sie Musik als soziale Kunst bestimmen, darauf hin zu untersuchen, wie in der Umbruchszeit zwischen Zarentum und Sozialismus Geschichtsschreibung in den Dienst unterschiedlicher politischer Systeme gestellt wird: Sind die 1940er-Jahre, wie dies – vergleichbar mit dem Diskurs um die Stunde Null in Deutschland – zu den Grundlagen bulgarischer Fachgeschichte gehört, Bruch und Neubeginn unter anderen politischen Vorzeichen oder bilden sich schon in der Vor- und Frühgeschichte bulgarischer Musikhistoriographie Paradigmen und Methoden heraus, die auch über politische und zeitliche Systemgrenzen hinweg anschlussfähig bleiben?

Patrick Becker-Naydenov ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der Universität Leipzig. Er wurde mit einer Dissertation zur Ökonomie des Musiktheaters im sozialistischen Bulgarien an der UdK Berlin promoviert. Sein Studium der Musikwissenschaft schloss er mit einer Masterarbeit zur Volksmusikrezeption der bulgarischen Nachkriegsavantgarde ab, die 2019 den Humboldt-Preis erhielt. 2016 bis 2019 studentische Hilfskraft an der HU Berlin und 2018 bis 2021 wiss. Mitarbeiter am DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Das Wissen der Künste. Forschungsförderung durch die Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung u.v.m. 2022 ist er Fulbright Visiting Scholar an der Arizona State University und Stipendiat bei der Paul Sacher Stiftung.