Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW PRITCHARD

AbstractBy examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Hörens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler's position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert's own ‘community-forming power’ – a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno's outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler's first, negative claim – thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert's social role.




2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Marcela Aragüez

As his friend Niall Hobhouse claimed, Cedric Price ‘wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the Left who stumbled on the post-war ruins of modernism’.1 The role of Price’s unbuilt legacy for Western architectural culture has been praised extensively, with a special emphasis on the unorthodox nature of both his practice and academic contributions.2 Succeeding generations have found inspiration in Price’s personal view of the architectural profession, his work being positioned often within radical and utopian approaches yet involving a committed social agenda. The social role of architecture was for Price tightly linked to the capacity of the built environment to be adapted by its users. Buildings should be understood as temporary commodities, malleable objects with a short lifespan dictated by their usefulness for the community. Conceived as infrastructures, unbuilt projects such as the famous Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt, or Magnet were formulated as productive objects with a profound commitment for socially regenerating the contexts into which they were to be inserted.



2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Matteo Stocchetti

<p>If reality is socially established through practices that, directly or indirectly, depend on communication and therefore on some notion of truth, the idea of a post-truth communicative regime or “age” may seem not only bizarre but also worrying. The dissolution of the real announced by the prophets of postmodernism in the form of either a “perfect crime” or a “liquid reality”, has been interpreted as the effect of the crisis of truth and legitimation that Jean-Françoise Lyotard referred to with his notions of ”performativity” and ”legitimation by force”. In this perspective, reality depends on truth and the possibility of truth depends in turn, by configurations of power that seem too elusive and ephemeral to be effectively engaged with in either theory or practice. In this paper, I mobilize the notions of parrhesia and persona in an effort to establish an alternative standpoint to discuss the epistemological and ontological implications of the postmodern condition and the crisis of truth associated to it. The main point can perhaps be summarized in the idea that, if the new regime of truth (or post-truth) relies on persona expressing the roles/characters compatible with it, the notion of parrhesia may gain a critical relevance for the normative evaluation of these personas and the social implications of their truth. Famously re-introduced by Michel Foucault in his analysis of truth and its discursive conditions, the notion of parrhesia has a heuristic potential that is not fully exploited. While challenging in fundamental ways the social construction of reality on practical grounds, the digitalization of social life presents also theoretical challenges some of which can be addressed by the reconceptualization of parrhesia in relation to the social role of the persona rather than the individual. In my paper, I present some preliminary research notes in this direction.</p>



Muzealnictwo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-73
Author(s):  
Gerard Radecki

Year 2017 marks the 110th birthday anniversary and 40th anniversary of the death of Kazimierz Malinowski. June 2016 marked half a century since he re-took the post of Director of the National Museum in Poznań. The circumstances in question require us to remember an individual who was of great merit to Polish museology and to the National Museum in Poznań. The title of this text paraphrases the title of an article by Kazimierz Malinowski Michał Walicki - museum professional, published in the “Muzealnictwo” magazine and devoted to a renowned art historian and researcher on Gothic art in Poland. Walicki is less known as a museum professional and even less as a mentor to Malinowski himself. However, if one attempted to determine the whole range of the activity of the latter using one word only, the term “museum professional”, rather disregarded today, seems to be the most capacious and adequate. It reminds about Malinowski in some of the most significant aspects of his activity, including the one as: 1/ a museum professional in the strict sense, but also a practician working in a museum and taking part in the life of this environment in the broadest meaning, 2/ a propagator of the social role of museums as institutions open to the general public, 3/ the long-term Director of the National Museum in Poznań, a visionary and a curator of the institution’s new programme. Malinowski was one of a few of the most important figures of the post-war museology in Poland. Today, he is almost entirely forgotten. Almost total absence of this name in today’s museum circles also results from an unsatisfactory state of research into his professional biography. Nevertheless, Malinowski’s activity, even only in the field of museology, as his second major field of activity was conservation, is still to be meticulously analysed. Therefore, many opinions presented below should be treated as suggestions and hypotheses, still to be further verified, given the current state of research. However, his main fields of activity have been roughly, as it may seem, sketched out in this article. They present him as a propagator of the social role of museums – institutions open to the general public, which, in turn, will prove the topicality of Malinowski’s suggestions in comparison with current discussions on museums’ functions.



2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (9) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Natalia V. Kovtun

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to analyze the motive of mastery in modern artistic traditionalism. Results. The works of F. Abramov, V. Shukshin, and V. Rasputin as representatives of the socio-moral, existential, and ‘mystical’ lines of development of this movement were chosen for our research. We separate the motif of craft and the the actual creative act, and analyze the effect of luminophany typical to the latter. In Shukshin’s work, the motive of skill correlates with the plot of civilization, the characters leave the countryside in search of wisdom. In the early texts, the city is presented as a promising space for the formation of personality, in the later ones, on the contrary, the image of the city gets a tragic resolution, the master chooses the path of a hired craftsman who repeats other people's patterns. The real hero here is ‘strange’, ‘foolish’, who does not know how to make practical use of the skill. He creates his world as a miracle, a refuge where you can escape from the cruel present. In Abramov’s work, the themes of labor and skill are key, the social efforts of masters are important, they strive to transform the house, the countryside, and Russia here and now. There is an ethicization of labor, labor becomes a commandment, a prayer, the masters themselves belong to the fabulous chronotope, perform the functions of demiurges, opening up to the profane crafts, culture, and the vertical. Women often show skill in men's professions, which is due to the unique traits of the post-war period. The motif of skill in Rasputin's later texts correlates with the motif of death. The theme of the master and his fate unfolds in the story Izba, where the question arises about a new hero who can lead the nation out of the spiritual impasse. Rasputin, disappointed in the possibilities of a patriarchal man, leaves the chance for the renewal of the universe to a woman whose feat is set off by the presence of the master Savelii, whose image is enhanced by the figure of Orpheus. When the masters no longer have a place, in reality, they establish personal contact with time, and Eternity resonates with the question of man. Conclusion. Over the centuries, the experience of searching for ‘secret freedom’, the creation of the master of light, accumulates, is transmitted from generation to generation, which determines the existence of culture.



Author(s):  
Dr Daniel Yokossi

This study has examined the tenor of discourse and modality in two excerpts from Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. The study aims at decoding the writer’s subtly encoded messages through both the interrelationships established among the participants of the selected excerpts and his use of modality. To attain such objectives, the investigation uses the descriptive quantitative and qualitative methodology. The research has arrived at valuable findings. Among several others presented in the subsection entitled interpretation of findings, the study has unveiled that power among the participants of the excerpts is unequal, contact infrequent, and affective involvement low. The tenor or social role relationship played by such participants as Major Sam, Chris Oriko, and Ikem Osodi is a formal one describing a formal situation. This implies that Achebe’s message in these excerpts is a serious one depictive of the real political unrest and the dominantly unmanageable discontent of Nigerians by the time he wrote these texts. The social role relationship carried out by the salespeople and their potential customers depict an informal tenor highlighting Achebe’s claim for a change in the Nigerians’ mind, and indirectly in the Africans’ ways of life. The overriding use of modalization over modulation in the analyzed excerpts highlights the way the writer creates a less authoritative, more suggestive tenor balancing, by this means, the power inequality inherent in the modulation.



2011 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Pope

AbstractProviding a younger woman's perspective, and born out of the 2006 Cambridge Personal Histories event on 1960s archaeology, this paper struggles to reconcile the panel's characterization of a ‘democratization’ of the field with an apparent absence of women, despite their relative visibility in 1920s–1940s archaeology. Focusing on Cambridge, as the birthplace of processualism, the paper tackles the question ‘where were the women?’ in 1950s–1960s archaeology. A sociohistorical perspective considers the impact of traditional societal views regarding the social role of women; the active gendering of science education; the slow increase of university places for young women; and the ‘marriage bars’ of post-war Britain, crucially restricting women's access to the professions in the era of professionalization, leading to decades of positive discrimination in favour of men. Pointing to the science of male and female archaeologists in 1920s–1930s Cambridge, it challenges ideas of scientific archaeology as a peculiarly post-war (and male) endeavour. The paper concludes that processual archaeology did not seek to democratize the field for women archaeologists.



2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ursula Szillis ◽  
Janine Bosak ◽  
Dagmar Stahlberg
Keyword(s):  


2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover



2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 769-784 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estella Tincknell

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.



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