Export von (Militär-)Musikinstrumenten von Berlin nach Zentral- und Südamerika um 1900

The article outlines the significance of Prussian military music of the 19th and early 20th centuries in an international context. It focuses on deliveries of musical instruments and sheet music by the Berlin company C. W. Moritz to Central and South America around 1900. The delivery lists of 1897/98 for the Colombian military bands show that they were equipped according to the Prussian model, which goes back to the ideas of Wilhelm Wieprecht. He reformed and standardised the Prussian military music system between the 1830s and 1860s, thus creating the basis for its success. The sheet music enclosed with the musical instruments gives an insight into the popular musical taste of the period around 1900, which was increasingly introduced to Central and South America. Future research will ask what impact such imports of music and musical instruments had on the development of music in Central and South America. (Vorlage)

Im geschützten Raum

This article explores the musical events organized by the Goethe Institute during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). An examination of the cultural and political discussions around these musical programmes demonstrates that the function of music as a tool for promoting democracy was understood in the context of the cultural activities of the Federal Republic of Germany in Chile. I explore the ways in which projects from the fields of jazz and contemporary music were understood as vehicles of democratic ideals, the consequences of the resulting musical transfers for the local musical life, as well as the shaping of a particular image of West Germany in Chile. (Vorlage)

Fluchtpunkt Techno?

The term “conexión chilena” is regularly used in print media and internet articles to describe a group of DJs, some of them very successful, who fled as children with their families to Europe during the Chilean military dictatorship (1973–1990) and have become part of the growing EDM scene there since the 1990s. Names that are often mentioned in this context include Matías Aguayo, Andrés and Pier Bucci, Luciano (Lucien Nicolet), Martin Schopf/DJ Dandy Jack, Paula Schopf/DJ Chica Paula, Ricardo Villalobos and Cristian Vogel. Based on interviews and the analytical study of selected tracks by three of these artists, this article explores the question of the role that the “conexión” actually played. On the one hand, this question is applied to the work and career of the artists themselves, especially in light of developments in Chilean memory culture. On the other hand, it is applied to the early internationalization and transatlantic exchange in the field of techno and EDM. (Vorlage)

„In naives Plaudern“ geraten?

Kurt Pahlen’s activities in the Ibero-American region from 1939 to approximately 1970 were based on his musicological studies and musical activities in Vienna until 1938. Certificates of his studies at the university or press reports on his engagements in Vienna’s musical life shed light on Pahlen’s formation before his emigration to Switzerland, Argentina and Uruguay. In exile, he transmitted his knowledge of classical music to the Spanish-speaking world via articles and books on music history or radio and television broadcasts. His writings were commercially successful and, after their first edition in Latin America, they were often translated into German. As a result, Pahlen acted as translator between cultural contexts, audiences and media. An analysis of selected paragraphs of the books demonstrates, however, that he mainly transmitted his particular view of music, which was extremely time-bound and lost its relevance in later reprints. The reason for the divergent opinions of Kurt Pahlen’s work Spanish- and German-speaking scientific communities can be found in his rejection of academic musicology as he had got to know it in Vienna, and the increasingly superficial and subjective prose in his German reeditions. (Vorlage)

Franz Schuberts "Wandererfantasie"

Franz Schubert’s D760 is entitled “fantasy”, although the four sections of the work recognisably reference the formal models of a four-movement sonata. Since those models appear in their traditional order, the “fantasy” elements have to manifest themselves differently, transgressing the norms of sonata in two ways: Schubert transforms and deconstructs the individual forms of the four-movement model, while suspending the autonomy of each movement. Both strategies are interrelated: by blurring the form of each movement, Schubert opens them up to the following sections. This is rendered plausible because the movements, which connect seamlessly, are derived from the same thematic material.The deconstruction of the formal models manifests itself in the elision of formal units, the interpolation of non-formal sections, and the startling curtailing of developmental procedures within the formal units. These formal licences generate ambiguous structures that do not lend themselves to definite formal interpretations. Thus formal ambiguity is a constituting element of the “fantastic” in D760.The thematic unity of the work is a result of the continuous transformation of a motif first presented in the main theme of the first movement; a process, in which new variants emerge from the synthesis of previous variations. Furthermore, the Presto, which stands in for the scherzo movement of the Fantasy, reverse engineers the sonata form of the first movement (which had been abandoned before the recapitulation) while completing and normalising the form of the first movement by aligning it with the scherzo form. Thus the Presto assumes the formal function of the missing recapitulation, whose “wrong” key of A flat major is “rectified” through the C-major finale.

Beethoven im „Brockhaus“

Full-length biographies about Ludwig van Beethoven were not published until after the composer's death. During his lifetime, biographical articles in dictionaries and encyclopaedias were therefore a particularly important source of information, since general encyclopaedias achieved a much wider circulation than specialist music publications. The first entry on Beethoven appeared as early as 1790 in Ernst Ludwig Gerber's Historisch-Biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler. The most widely read encyclopaedia for the educated middle class was the Conversations-Lexicon oder enzyklopädisches Handwörterbuch für gebildete Stände, first published by Brockhaus in 1809. This paper comparatively examines the articles on Beethoven from the first decades of the 19th century until the eleventh edition of 1863 and with regard to the emergence of typical narratives. It is noteworthy that the early entries on Beethoven, were shorter than those for other contemporary composers, contained false biographic information and were reluctant in their assessment of Beethoven’s oeuvre. This only changes after the composer’s death and raises the question whether, in the eyes of the general reading public, Beethoven really was the predominant musical figure in the first decades of the nineteenth century.