scholarly journals Sounds German?: Popular Music in Postwar Germany at the Crossroads of the National and Transnational

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Kirkland A. Fulk
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar Germany

A musical undercurrent has long permeated German culture and intellectual life. For more than a century, theories and practices of folk, art, and classical music—variously understood both in their mutual interrelation and as entirely distinct—have anchored definitions of German national identity and the German cultural heritage. More recently, musical styles such as jazz, rock and roll, and hip-hop have also played a key role in the emergence of new social movements and alternative sensibilities in Germany. Indeed, since the end of World War II, popular music practices in Germany have been alternatively decried as drivers of Americanization and hailed as catalysts of technological development that prompt new ways of producing and consuming music to emerge.

scholarly journals Post-World War II Rhythm and Blues: Jump Blues, Club Blues, and Roy Brown

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-39
Author(s):  
Rob Bowman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
North American ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Rhythm And Blues ◽  
American Popular Music

The classification of different styles of North American popular music has often been problematic. This paper investigates some of the music referred to as rhythm and blues (r & b) in the late 1940s and early 1950s by specifically looking at the works of one of the music's leading practitioners of the time, Roy Brown. Brown recorded both jump and club blues between 1947 and 1955, placing fifteen records in the Top 20 of the Billboard rhythm and blues charts. For the purposes of this paper fifty-four of the seventy-four songs that Brown recorded in this period were analyzed with respect to structure, performing force, performance style, tempo, arrangement, bass lines, approach to the beat, rate of singing, vocal ornamentation, and lyric content and structure. Three main subdivisions were found within Brown's repertoire, all connected to social behaviour, namely, dance. In the process, a basic biography of Brown is provided and his influence on many subsequent rhythm and blues and rock and roll performers is contextualized.

scholarly journals Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-282
Author(s):  
Laura Emmery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
New Wave ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Comprehensive Discussion ◽  
Made In

Made in Yugoslavia: Studies in Popular Music (edited by Danijela Špirić Beard and Ljerka Rasmussen) is a fascinating study of how popular music developed in post-World War II Yugoslavia, eventually reaching both unsurpassable popularity in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, and critical acclaim in the West. Through the comprehensive discussion of all popular music trends in Yugoslavia − commercial pop (zabavna-pop), rock, punk, new wave, disco, folk (narodna), and neofolk (novokomponovana) − across all six socialist Yugoslav republics, the reader is given the engrossing socio-cultural and political history of the country, providing the audience with a much-needed and riveting context for understanding the formation and the eventual demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

scholarly journals Symbolic Geographies and the Politics of Hungarian Identity in the ‘Populist-Urbanist Debate,’ 1925-44

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard S. Esbenshade
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Mental Maps ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Cultural Concepts ◽  
The Way

This article examines intellectuals’ debates about national identity in interwar and World War II Hungary to uncover their connection to underlying “symbolic geographies” and “mental maps.” Focusing on the way in which Hungarian identity and history have been informed by, and indeed inserted into, virtual spatial rubrics that rely on the historically developed cultural concepts of “Europe” and “Asia,” and “West” and “East,” the paper looks in particular at the “populist-urbanist debate” that raged between two groups of writers, both opposed to the ruling neo-feudal order. The populists were composed mostly of provincial-born intellectuals who saw the recognition and uplift of the peasant as the key to Hungary’s salvation. The urbanists were cosmopolitan intellectuals, mostly of assimilated Jewish origin, who saw the wholesale adoption of progressive Western rights and norms as the only way forward.

Ballad for Incarcerated Americans: Second Generation Japanese American Musicking in World War II Camps

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTA ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
American Popular Music

AbstractDuring World War II, the United States government imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens, half of whom were children. Through ethnographic interviews I explore how fragile youthful memories, trauma, and the soundscape of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Incarceration Camps shaped the artistic trajectories of three such former “enemy alien” youth: two pianists and a koto player. Counterintuitively, Japanese traditional arts flourished in the hostile environment of dislocation through the high number ofnisei(second generation) participants, who later contributed to increasing transculturalism in American music following resettlement out of camp. Synthesizing Japanese and Euro-American classical music, white American popular music, and African American jazz, manyniseiparadoxically asserted their dual cultural commitment to both traditional Japanese and home front patriotic American principles. A performance of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's patriotic cantata,Ballad for Americans(1939), by the high school choir at Manzanar Incarceration Camp demonstrates the hybridity of these Japanese American cultural practices. Marked by Popular Front ideals,Ballad for Americansallowedniseito construct identities through a complicated mixture of ethnic pride, chauvinistic white Americanism allied with Bing Crosby's recordings of theBallad, and affiliation with black racial struggle through Paul Robeson's iconicBalladperformances.

Understanding the Trajectory of Japanese Capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-161
Author(s):  
Heidi Gottfried ◽  
David Fasenfest
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
Regional Dynamics ◽  
Japanese Capitalism ◽  
Historical Examination

How can we understand the trajectory of Japanese capitalism? This Afterword situates Japan on a broad canvas stretching across both the region and the globe. East Asia’s regional dynamics figure prominently, shaping the trajectory of Japanese capitalism not only in the formative Age of Empire and postwar reconstruction, but also in the emergent Asian Century. An historical examination of geo-politics highlights imperial entanglements and both the routes and the roots of capitalist development in Japan. This discussion begins by setting the stage of post-World War II Japan, elaborating on the reproductive bargain that characterizes Japan’s political economy, investigating the importance of national identity as it informs who can participate in Japan’s economy, revealing the underbelly of contemporary Japan, discussing forces for change, and revisiting the methodological approach used to understand Japanese capitalism.

Air Wars and Empire: Gandhi and the Search for a Usable Past in Postwar Germany

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-696
Author(s):  
Andrew Oppenheimer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
Peace Activists ◽  
Massive Scale ◽  
Usable Past ◽  
German Cities ◽  
Modern War

A manWho sets a house ablaze is anArsonist who is prosecuted and punishedUnder the law.A manWho turns entire cities toDebris and ash is aConquerorWho is hailed as a hero.This poem, published in an early postwar edition of the German-language pacifist journalDer Friedensbote, encapsulates a vision of modern war that circulated among German peace activists during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is an image of war as arson on a massive scale, of strategic bombing campaigns that burned cities and civilians to ashes. Of course, the less than subtle allusion here is to the aerial assaults carried out on select German cities by British and American forces during World War II, which inflicted tremendous damage, population displacement, and loss of life in and around cities including Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Hamburg, and throughout the Ruhr industrial basin. Some 131 locales were subject to and an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 deaths resulted from air assaults that used the tactics and weaponry of area and firebombing. Read with this recent history in mind, the stanza evokes images of the wartime Allies as criminals and Germans as their civilian victims.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document