Made in Germany: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, sociology, and musicology of contemporary German popular music. Each essay, written by a leading scholar of German music, covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of pop music in Germany and provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance. The book first presents a general description of the history and background of popular music in Germany, followed by essays organized into thematic sections: Historical Spotlights; Globally German; Also "Made in Germany"; Explicitly German; and Reluctantly German.
Music and Urban Life in Baroque Germany offers a new narrative of Baroque music, accessible to non-music specialists, in which Tanya Kevorkian defines the era in terms of social dynamics rather than style and genre development. Towns were crucial sites of music-making. Kevorkian explores how performance was integrated into and indispensable to everyday routines, celebrations such as weddings, and political culture. Training and funding likewise emerged from and were integrated into urban life. Ordinary artisans, students, and musical tower guards as well as powerful city councilors contributed to the production and reception of music. This book illuminates the processes at play in fascinating ways. Challenging ideas of "elite" and "popular" culture, Kevorkian examines five central and southern German towns—Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, Gotha, and Leipzig—to reconstruct a vibrant urban musical culture held in common by townspeople of all ranks. Outdoor acoustic communication, often hovering between musical and nonmusical sound, was essential to the functioning of these towns. As Kevorkian shows, that sonic communication was linked to the music and musicians heard in homes, taverns, and churches. Early modern urban environments and dynamics produced both the giants of the Baroque era, such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann, and the music that townspeople heard daily. This book offers a significant rediscovery of a rich, unique, and understudied musical culture. Received a subvention award from the Margarita M. Hanson Fund and the Donna Cardamone Jackson Fund of the American Musicological Society.
Famous letters by a young American pianist, dating from 1869 to 1875, uniquely describe study with Liszt, Tausig, and other luminaries. Fay offers firsthand impressions of performances by Rubinstein, Clara Schumann, Wagner (as conductor), Joachim, and many others.
The story of the phenomenon that is Kraftwerk, and how they revolutionised our cultural landscape 'We are not artists nor musicians. We are workers.' Ignoring nearly all rock traditions, expermenting in near-total secrecy in their Düsseldorf studio, Kraftwerk fused sound and technology, graphic design and performance, modernist Bauhaus aesthetics and Rhineland industrialisation - even human and machine - to change the course of modern music. This is the story of Kraftwerk the cultural phenomenon, who turned electronic music into avant-garde concept art and created the soundtrack to our digital age.
In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade.
For many centuries, Germany has enjoyed a reputation as the ‘land of music’. But just how was this reputation established and transformed over time, and to what extent was it produced within or outside of Germany? Through case studies that range from Bruckner to the Beatles and from symphonies to dance-club music, this volume looks at how German musicians and their audiences responded to the most significant developments of the twentieth century, including mass media, technological advances, fascism, and war on an unprecedented scale.
This book argues for the importance of popular music in negotiations of national identity, and Germanness in particular. By discussing diverse musical genres and commercially and critically successful songs at the heights of their cultural relevance throughout seventy years of post-war German history, Soundtracking Germany describes how popular music can function as a language for “writing” national narratives. Running chronologically, all chapters historically contextualize and critically discuss the cultural relevance of the respective genre before moving into a close reading of one particularly relevant and appellative case study that reveals specific interrelations between popular music and constructions of Germanness. Close readings of these sonic national narratives in different moments of national transformations reveal changes in the narrative rhetoric as this book explores how Germanness is performatively constructed, challenged, and reaffirmed throughout the course of seventy years.
This edited volume explores musical encounters and entanglements between Germany and East Asian nations from 1900 to the present. In so doing, it speaks to their dynamic and multi-faceted musical relations in multiple ways. Despite East Asia and Germany being located at opposite ends of the globe, German music has found remarkably fertile soil in East Asia. East Asians have enthusiastically adopted it, while at the same time adding their own musical interpretations. These musical encounters have produced compositions that reflect this mutual influence, stimulating and enriching each other through their entanglement. After more than a century of entanglement, Germany and East Asia have become kindred musical spirits.
Concert halls all over the world feature mostly the works of German and Austrian composers as their standard repertoire: composers like the three "Bs" of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, all of whom are German. Over the past three centuries, many supporters of German music have even nurtured the notion that the German-speaking world possesses a peculiar strength in the cultivation of music. This book brings together seventeen contributors from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and German literature to explore these questions: how music came to be associated with German identity, when and how Germans came to be regarded as the "people of music," and how music came to be designated "the most German of arts." Unlike previous volumes on this topic, many of which focused primarily on Wagner and Nazism, the essays here are wide-ranging and comprehensive, examining philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents as well as the creation and performance of folk music, art music, church music, jazz, rock, and pop. The result is a striking volume, adeptly addressing the complexity and variety of ways in which music insinuated itself into the German national imagination and how it has continued to play a central role in the shaping of a German identity. Contributors to this volume: Celia Applegate Doris L. Bergen Philip Bohlman Joy Haslam Calico Bruce Campbell John Daverio Thomas S. Grey Jost Hermand Michael H. Kater Gesa Kordes Edward Larkey Bruno Nettl Uta G. Poiger Pamela Potter Albrecht Riethmüller Bernd Sponheuer Hans Rudolf Vaget
