233 31 21MB
English Pages 473 [474] Year 2020
Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe
Contemporary European History
Edited by Corinna Unger and Matthias Middell
Volume 2
Musicking in TwentiethCentury Europe A Handbook Edited by Klaus Nathaus and Martin Rempe
Published with kind support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf; German Research Foundation, Bonn; Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.
ISBN 978-3-11-064808-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-065196-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-064821-8 ISSN 2627-0366 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945024 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Robert Delaunay: Rhythm, Joie de vivre, 1930. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Donation Sonia Delaunay et Charles Delaunay 1964. Photo taken by Guillaume Piolle. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com
Table of Contents On the “Contemporary European History” Handbook Series Martin Rempe and Klaus Nathaus 1 Introduction: Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe
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Part I: Originating Music Frank Hentschel 2 Diversifying Composition: Practices of Inventing Music
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Marc Perrenoud 3 Performing for Pay: The Making and Undoing of the Music 59 Profession Klaus Nathaus 4 Driven by Enthusiasm, Harnessed by Politics: Amateuring in Music 79
Part II: Managing Music Celia Applegate 5 Prestige, Profit, and the Right to Culture: Funding Music Through the State 105 Myriam Chimènes 6 Cultures of Donating: Musical Patronage
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Simon Frith 7 Commodifying Music: Tickets, Copies, and Licenses
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Part III: Mediating Music Hans Weisethaunet 8 Creating Maps, Generating Meanings: Music Criticism Michel Abesser 9 Sounds, Tracks, and Signals: Recording Music
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Morten Michelsen 10 Sounds on Air: Musicalizing Radio—Radiofying Music
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Part IV: Socializing in Music Julia Sneeringer 11 Socially Engaging with Music: Pleasure, Distinction, and 235 Identity James Nott 12 Getting Together to “Get Down”: Social Dancing from Dance Hall to 257 Rave Ulrik Volgsten 13 Extending the Sonic Bubble: Solitary Listening as a Technology of the Self 281
Part V: Politicizing Music Friedrich Geiger 14 Conducting the Masses: State Propaganda and Censorship Friedemann Pestel 15 Performing for the Nation: Perspectives on Musical Diplomacy 325 Jeff Hayton 16 Shouting Back: Popular Music and Protest
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Part VI: Globalizing Music Rachel Anne Gillett 17 Glocal Invasions: Appropriating Music from Abroad
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Bob van der Linden 18 Global Connections: Attuning to European Music Abroad Martin Rempe 19 Backstage Integration: Europeanizing Musical Life Through 417 International Organizations List of Contributors Index
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On the “Contemporary European History” Handbook Series Do we need a new handbook series on contemporary European history? Asking this question leads to a range of related questions. At a time when the idea of “Europe” and the project of European integration are being questioned by some and defended by others, what is the role of historians in writing about Europe? What kind of historical accounts do they have to offer? Should they point out the complexity of European societies and histories as reasons for the difficulties in creating a “European identity,” or should they emphasize the degree to which European integration has successfully taken place on different levels? Should they analyze the tension between national, regional, and local factors in shaping the self-understanding of individuals and social groups, or should they concern themselves more with the functioning of transnational and supranational structures of Europe? More generally, is it at all possible to cover European history in a handbook format? If so, which definition of Europe should serve as the conceptual framework connecting the various volumes, which regions should be included or excluded, and which actors should stand at the center of attention? These questions are difficult to answer but useful to ask because they alert us to the challenges historical research on Europe currently faces. Fortunately, we do not stand empty-handed in front of these challenges. For one, the field of European history has developed remarkably over the past two or three decades, not only within Europe but also in many other parts of the world where Europe has become an increasingly interesting object of investigation since it suggests itself to comparisons and presents an important hub in a connected world. Secondly, the traditional identification of Europe with Western Europe has been challenged by a new generation of historians who are writing histories that leave behind narrow dichotomies like East and West, North and South. Thirdly, European history is no longer presented as a loose bundle of national entities and their predecessor states but is seen more as an assemblage of various imperial structures. These developments have resulted in a research perspective that looks at the interaction between the metropoles of the European empires as well as their colonies and other seemingly peripheral regions. European history is now understood as having been profoundly shaped by empires “striking back.” Relatedly, many historians have replaced diffusionist approaches with concepts like circulation and reception. Finally, the dialogue with global history has challenged traditional periodizations of European histohttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-001
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ry. While the Eurocentric view privileged inward-looking perspectives, the integration of transregional comparisons has produced more nuanced ideas about the relevant timeframe. Contemporary history as the history of trends familiar to contemporaries is not necessarily the history of present times. It has been argued that the history of modern globalization dates back to the mid- or late nineteenth century. Europe has played an important role in such processes, and in many ways its current shape is a product of those processes. This is not to deny the relevance of caesuras like the two World Wars and the end of the Cold War, but it highlights the complicated relationship between politics, economics, the cultural, and the social in the history of a large space like Europe. Not all pieces of this puzzle are following the same logic, as we have learned from recent historical research that has gone through the postmodern school of accepting fragmentation as a crucial feature in society. The Contemporary European History handbook series responds to this situation and draws on it as inspiration and opportunity. Instead of lamenting the difficulties of neatly defining “Europe,” the series consciously embraces a multifaceted approach to studying contemporary European history, one which is driven by an understanding of “Europe in the world” rather than considering Europe a closed entity. Without giving up the belief that some historical accounts are more accurate and persuasive than others, the series emphasizes the multiplicity of approaches and interpretations available and presents them as possibilities to be tested against future research. To live up to this agenda, this series avoids the more conventional structure of handbooks as it has been common in the past, when volumes were built on categories like “nationalism,” “violence,” “economy,” “social movements,” and “gender.” Contrastingly, the Contemporary European History series puts human activities at the center of attention: “Reading,” “cooking,” “administering,” “communicating,” “protecting,” “selling,” “working,” “protesting,” and “musicking,” to name just a few. This allows the volumes to reach across regional and temporal divides, to include a variety of methodological and conceptual approaches, and to provide the basis for comparisons that promise to shed new light on European history. In avoiding narrow and, at times, artificial categorizations, and by promoting an activity-centered view, this handbook series aims to offer a fresh view of European history that reflects the rich body of research available and the methodological diversity that mark the field. Matthias Middell (Leipzig University) and Corinna Unger (EUI Florence)
Martin Rempe and Klaus Nathaus
1 Introduction: Musicking in Twentieth-Century Europe In 1958, nine notes from an anthem that announced to the world that a country was “reborn from ruins and turned towards the future” became an apple of discord. Allegedly, the first two bars of Auferstanden aus Ruinen, the anthem of the German Democratic Republic, were identical with Goodbye Johnny, a popular song that looked back to a “good comrade” who had died in battle. Legal experts who had to decide whether the anthem was an original composition saw sufficient differences between the optimistic larghetto and the swinging requiem. Musicologists have since confirmed the verdict; some regard the anthem instead as a paraphrase of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the melody that became the European Anthem in 1972. Irrespective of legal and musicological expertise, however, musical laypeople could get confused. When a West German band played the opening notes of Goodbye Johnny at a concert tour in the GDR in 1976, some listeners solemnly rose from their seats, thinking they were about to hear the anthem. By that time, the lyrics to Auferstanden aus Ruinen were not to be sung anymore at official occasions, which may have contributed to the confusion.¹ In the case of the anthem and the Schlager sharing the same melody, communist Europe clashed with its western counterpart and political music met with the political economy of the music business. A piece of representative music alluded to a “classic” and was confused with pop, showing that the boundaries between art and entertainment music are arbitrary and permeable. While the two songs were on the face of it “just” music, the dispute about their similarity became politically charged and was exploited for propaganda reasons, illustrating the kind of seriousness that music had acquired in twentieth-century Europe. These and other facets of musical life come closer into view as we follow the protagonists of the story about the Schlager and the anthem and trace their musical activities. Hanns Eisler, the anthem’s composer and a pupil of Arnold Schönberg, was involved in the European musical avant-garde that experimented with new compositional practices. Like many of his European peers, he incorporated elements of jazz into his work. At the same time, he wrote music for amateur choirs, including the Solidarity Song (Solidaritätslied) that was meant to express workers’ protest, but came to be deployed as a propaganda tool by political leaders from Erich Honecker to Hồ Chí Minh. In the 1940s, Eisler fled the Nazi regime and joined European composers like Miklós Rózsa and Erich Wolfgang https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-002
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Korngold, who scored film music for Hollywood, thus helping the Old World’s orchestral music to find new opportunities abroad. Eisler’s career paralleled that of Peter Kreuder, the composer of Goodbye Johnny. Like Eisler, this son of a classically trained singer wrote both art and “light” music from pop tunes to opera. In the 1920s, Kreuder worked as a pianist in a cinema, one of the most common workplaces for professional musicians at the time. As sound film made an army of cinema musicians redundant around 1930, Kreuder shifted from orchestra pit to recording studio and began to write film music. He also supervised studio sessions for record companies, producing music that adapted American jazz to accompany a new “German” dance style. The anthem and the pop song, their composers and their listeners, their mediation and their transfer, their political use, their symbolic value, and their economic utility represent essential facets of musical life. These facets are at the heart of this handbook, which studies them with a view to their constitutive activities. Drawing on musicologist Christopher Small’s influential concept of “musicking,” the book focuses on activities like composing, recording, or dancing to cut across conventional divisions between “art” and “popular” music or “active” music making and “passive” listening. These distinctions, which have come to inform both music research and people’s engagement with music, have a history, as this book is going to show. The chapters investigate central forms of musicking in a twentieth-century perspective, because many of the social, technological, legal, and conceptual preconditions of contemporary music emerged in the decades around 1900. They do this both in view of the role of Europe in contemporary musical life and with the question about how the various ways of musicking may have contributed to the making of Europe. The fact that “Europe” did play a role in music history is widely acknowledged, but how it mattered exactly has been rarely addressed, especially not for the twentieth century. Europe is commonly recognized as the home of “classical” music and opera as well as a place where music was deployed for political purposes and where the display of “good” taste generated cultural capital. This perception owes to developments that originated in Europe and started or gathered momentum in the nineteenth century. For instance, Europeans thoroughly formalized music through “standard” notation and tuning. Inspired by evolutionary thinking, they also established a hierarchy of music, with classical music at the top, through institutions from music journalism to conservatories and contemplative audiences. Most importantly, Europeans deployed music as a powerful tool in their “civilizing missions,” rendering non-European musicking “primitive.” Tasking music with the expression of national identity, they created a tournament of musical value that required participants to abide by European rules and excluded others for not having reached European musical standards.
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These developments amounted to a European musical legacy that both shaped musicking on the continent and left musical traces all over the world. The handbook investigates this legacy under the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the twentieth century. Paying attention to the historical contingency of this European musical legacy, the handbook avoids the danger of essentializing Europe in music. Indeed, for a long time, the concept of “European Music” appeared self-evident to music historians. Echoing the discourse of musical superiority of the nineteenth century, they interpreted musical works as manifestations of particularly European “values,” “traditions,” or “mentalities.” For instance, the 13-volume “new” handbook of musicology, published in the 1980s, contains two volumes to deal with “Extra-European Music” without indicating its historicity and social functions in their titles, whereas the majority of the volumes are devoted to the study of “The Music” of different periods, from Antiquity to the twentieth century. One volume is reserved for “folk and popular music in Europe,” indicating that “the music” without any specification denotes European art music.² This Eurocentrism has for a long time impeded a critical discussion about the place and significance of “Europe” in music history. However, Eurocentrism is not a problem specific to music history. Historians were also rather late to investigate Europe in a critical and reflective way. Only about a decade ago, renowned historians still lamented the “historical amnesia of ‘Europe’” in the discipline, and the contributors to an anthology on “Europeanization in the Twentieth Century” felt they were “entering a terra incognita” when drafting their chapters.³ This may be due to the fact that “Europe” is difficult to grasp. Most historians agree that “Europe” cannot be reduced to a—notoriously contested—geographical entity, but should be understood primarily as an imagined and experienced space. According to this view, the term “Europe” stands for visions, projects, and a way of life that is not necessarily tied to geography, but socially constructed and therefore malleable. Such a multi-faceted object is difficult to study, as the normative narratives offered by many political scientists and some historians testify. These narratives subscribe to the seductive teleology of “European integration” and tend to essentialize Europe by attributing to it specific values or traditions in much the same way as the aforementioned music historians do. Adding to the challenges of writing European history is the problem of studying the history of people without understanding their language. Even the brilliant accounts of Europe’s twentieth century by Ian Kershaw, Mark Mazower, and Tony Judt do not forget to mention their authors’ limitations in this regard.⁴ The growing interest in “global” or “world” history is only of limited help to project a contemporary European history. If anything, global historians would
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pose further questions to our undertaking. They have—effectively and with good reasons—criticized studies that focus exclusively on the nation-state. They have emphasized connections, migrations, and transfers across borders, including those that demarcate Europe from the rest of the world. As they want to overcome national as well as Eurocentric perspectives, they urge us to keep Europe’s global embeddedness in mind. At the same time, however, they offer no rationale why historians should bother about conceptualizing a distinct European history. The present handbook is mindful of these problems. Instead of approaching Europe as a fixed entity and covering it as comprehensively as possible in order to find an essence of “Europeanness,” we consider “Europe” as a possible effect of practices, in our case musicking. Looking at Europe from this distinct thematic perspective and with a special area expertise, each chapter opens up a spatial horizon in which actors participated in music. At the same time, for Europe to come into existence explicitly, it needs to be imagined, discussed, experienced, and performed, just as music is only in the world as “musicking.” As a consequence, different forms of musicking may amount to different “Europes” in terms of scope, content, and significance. This praxeological approach to European history leads to the following guiding questions: Did “musicking” contribute to the making of Europe and its people, its economies, and its political realms? To what extent did music foster encounters between Europeans, encourage a common outlook, or even generate a European sense of belonging? Conversely, did it deepen the rifts that separated Europeans for much of the twentieth century? Did musical actors create institutions with a European reach? Did they draw on values they perceived as European, did they conceive music as “European” music, separate it from other music, and promote it as such outside the continent? These are empirical, open questions, which the chapters of this handbook address with different methods, depending on the form of musicking they take into view. Many authors frame their story in a comparative way. While staying away from a historical comparison sensu stricto, they use this approach flexibly to gain insights from different corners of the continent and point to commonalities and differences in Europe. Other chapters follow transnational perspectives. They trace a range of connections across the continent (and beyond) in order to assess transfers of music, musical events, people, capital, commodities, institutional settings, and so on. These chapters identify both implicit ways of musicking “Europe” and explicit notions of and references to Europe, thus discussing the trajectory and extent of musical Europeanization in further detail. Finally, a few chapters are concerned with forms of musicking that neither carry particularly European dimensions nor promise to have contributed to the making of Eu-
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rope. These chapters follow actors and scrutinize their activities “on the ground,” before they situate their findings within the larger context of twentieth-century history. In sum, our way to keep the question of music’s role for the constitution of Europe in view is to probe aspects of music history for their European dimension, reflecting questions of European integration, European divisions, European particularities, European culture, society, politics, and economy through the lens of music. Putting it differently, the chapters keep looking at whether and how music mattered to “Europe” in the respective facet of the musical life they cover. They take into view cases from Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern Europe as much as this is applicable and possible, given the state of research and the language proficiencies of their authors. At the same time, the chapters do not ignore the European legacy that shaped musicking in twentieth-century Europe. Even as it was constantly changing, Europe remained a geographical, conceptual, or political reference point for musical activities. It was a factor of musical life in the world, engaged in global exchanges and exposed to global trends. The remainder of this introduction does four things: Firstly, it sketches the development of the historiography of contemporary music to make the case for the interdisciplinary approach that this handbook has chosen to take. Secondly, it presents “musicking” as the understanding of music that the chapters share and explains the structure of this book. Thirdly, the introduction discusses the periodization of contemporary “musicking” and makes the case for a “long” twentieth-century perspective. Fourthly, it draws conclusions from the various facets of “musicking” in twentieth-century Europe for contemporary European history.
1 Joint Venture: Historians’ Study of Music and the Potential of Interdisciplinary Research The study of music entered mainstream history some thirty years ago. This makes historians latecomers in comparison to scholars in other academic disciplines, where the subject is studied since the late nineteenth century. Apart from musicology, psychologists tried to measure the effects of sound on the human psyche; anthropologists delved into musical cultures of foreign peoples; physicists studied tonal systems and acoustics. Scholars from all these disciplines speculated about the origins of music. Historians were late to join the fray. When they did, they were partly motivated by a more general “cultural turn” that affected
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their discipline, partly inspired by a small number of social historians who had made first forays into music history. Those historians who concerned themselves with the topic continued to face the skepticism of colleagues who thought that music had little relevance for the discipline. The immediacy and elusiveness of musical sound is an important reason for this. As Celia Applegate has put it, “music can easily be detached from the major changes which have shaped the political formations and economic transformations that continue to hold center stage in the professional study of the past.”⁵ To address this problem, historians studied music in its manifold social contexts: not the music itself, but musical life became the object of investigation, including its artists, institutions, and audiences. Despite some persisting reservations about the significance of music for historical research, the history of musical life has become a small, but thriving field of research for historians. Certainly, some topics, some geographical areas, and some periods have been studied more extensively than others. Among the many topics covered in this handbook, research on the political meanings of music has advanced furthest in historiography. Next to the role of music in European nation-building and nationalism, this encompasses the study of musical diplomacy, which looks at the deployment of music to enhance a country’s reputation abroad and establish favorable international relations.⁶ This research field overlaps with the study of propaganda and censorship in music, which have been topics for historians of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe for some time now.⁷ Work on political, alternative, and new social movements has considered the role of music making in creating community and expressing protest. Histories of working-class “community singing” and of folk music exemplify this research.⁸ In a similar vein, social and cultural historians of urban entertainment, consumer society, as well as youth-, sub-, and pop cultures highlight processes of democratization and stress that commercial music empowered ordinary people as a medium of resistance, defiance, or competence. Studies that belong to this category include histories of turn-of-the-century music halls, the so-called “swing youth” (Swingjugend) in Nazi-occupied Europe, the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s, jazz, rock, and blues behind the “Iron Curtain,” and style-based subcultures from teddy boys and mods to rockers, hippies, and punks.⁹ In contrast to the function of music in these musical communities, more individual modes of musical appropriation await historical investigation. The further we move away from music as political culture, the patchier the research appears. To begin with, few historians have looked at how states shaped musical life beyond cultural diplomacy to study how musical education, be it through the funding of “culturally uplifting” music or the encouragement to
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take up an instrument, became an area of welfare state and cultural policy.¹⁰ Likewise, the history of the music business in Europe, including concert management, music licensing, broadcasting, and the recording industry, has only recently gained the attention of historians.¹¹ The same can be said about the history of musicians’ labor. Performers’ and composers’ workplaces, trade unions and associations, career trajectories, skills development, attempts at professionalization, as well as musicians’ experience and self-perception have not yet attracted much attention from historians. Once again, historians are able to take inspiration from ongoing research in neighboring disciplines, in this instance, the burgeoning interest in “creative labor” in the social sciences.¹² Geographically, the better part of this research on the history of musical life in Europe has been conducted in a national or local framework. Nonetheless, comparative and transnational approaches have become more common in the past decade. Comparative accounts on nineteenth and early-twentieth-century musical life in the great European cultural capitals such as Paris, London, Vienna, Rome, and Berlin flourished.¹³ Additionally, since many musical genres traveled across linguistic borders, historians have traced routes and gauged influences. The worldwide circulation of European music and musical globalization more generally has gained some attention,¹⁴ and the question of a “cultural Americanization” of Europe has been widely discussed among historians, most intensively in the 1990s, when popular music was considered a factor in the collapse of socialist dictatorships in Eastern Europe.¹⁵ Transnational histories of music have since looked beyond jazz and rock ‘n’ roll to include tango, opera as well as religious and military music, detecting multiple directions of musical travel. In addition, media historians have expanded our knowledge of how music reached audiences, including listeners and viewers beyond national borders, and diplomatic historians have recently discovered music as an object of international organizations.¹⁶ Nonetheless, studying European music history is still at an early stage, partly owing to very uneven geographical coverage. Research on music history has a Western European bias, whereas Eastern and Southern parts of the continent have been studied much less. Last but not least, the particularities of national historiographies add to making research on music history from a European perspective quite challenging. In addition to topical and geographical patchiness, we find that several aspects of musical life that are well explored for the nineteenth century have not yet been fully addressed for the twentieth. For example, the concern of nineteenth-century historians for music consumption as a marker of status and key element in the formation of self-conscious middle classes has rarely been carried forward. Twentieth-century historians commonly tell stories in which cultural hierarchies in music diminish, especially in popular genres.¹⁷ Less often do
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they study how gender, class, and racial distinctions were redrawn in music, even though the contentious relationship between what elites and tastemakers labeled “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “middlebrow,” or “authentic,” “independent,” and “mainstream” music remained a central feature of twentieth-century music.¹⁸ Another case in point is musical patronage. This prominent aspect of nineteenth-century musical life has attracted the attention of social historians all over Europe, but has been neglected for the twentieth century. Moreover, patronage’s evolution into both public subventions and commercial sponsorship, which became increasingly visible in the later decades of the twentieth century, awaits its historians. Given the fragmented state of research, drawing on other disciplines such as musicology, popular music studies, media studies, and the social sciences was as necessary as inspiring for this handbook. These disciplines have a lot to offer for the study of cultural policies, the music business, creative labor, composers’ practices, solitary and ubiquitous listening, music criticism, music as a marker of distinction, musical globalization, and many more topics covered in this book. Scholars in these neighboring disciplines not only supply historians with empirical knowledge. Equally important, they provide them with analytical approaches that acknowledge music as a social phenomenon sui generis. In doing so, they take music more “seriously” than historians commonly do and show us, for example, that musical propaganda could be no less consequential than the spoken word, or that music is in itself a factor for social and cultural change, rather than just a mirror of society. As the result of an interdisciplinary endeavor, this handbook covers existing historical research, while also introducing historians to scholarship that puts music closer to the center of the analysis. The weight of music scholarship in this handbook becomes apparent in the fact that musicologists, popular music scholars, media scholars, and sociologists specializing in music have written almost half of its chapters. At the same time, the handbook still positions itself in history. As historians, we believe that our discipline has much to offer to students and scholars of music as well. At a basic methodological and theoretical level, historians acquire an awareness of temporality, spatiality, and contextual complexity. In principle, it is also easier for historians to suspend established aesthetic distinctions between “high” and “low” music and between musical genres, since they have no stake in declaring certain forms of musicking as superior or inferior. To be sure, these distinctions have been criticized thoroughly in musicology and popular music studies in the last forty years. Nonetheless, they appear firmly entrenched in these fields, as handbooks and syntheses on music history written by musicologists or popular music scholars illustrate.¹⁹ In contrast, this book suspends classifications of genre and aesthetic judgment by cut-
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ting across divisions of “high” and “low” in all chapters. As it focuses on actors and practices, the concept of “musicking” transcends these divisions and facilitates the interdisciplinary conversation.
2 From Works and Geniuses to Performances and Relationships: The Practice of Musicking The intellectual concern with music, including music history, is a product of the Enlightenment era and prospered with the rise of the middle classes in the nineteenth century. Before this time, music had not been counted among the fine arts, and the few professional musicians were either employed by the church, at European courts, or worked as itinerant performers. Starting in early nineteenth-century Central Europe, two developments in musicking set the stage for its twentieth-century history. Firstly, the market for music expanded, in the form of tickets to music events, sheet music, and from the turn of the twentieth century also as recordings and licenses. Secondly, music became an object of aesthetic debate and cultural hierarchies, thereby often closely linked to processes of nation-building. This was most obvious in regard to the recognition of some music as art, which was critically acclaimed, ranked in a canon of “great” works and “genius” composers, taught and preserved in conservatories, conspicuously listened to by connoisseurs, and supported by elites and governments as expressions of national identity, if not national superiority. These developments were intertwined during the nineteenth century; so-called “classical” music was also commercial music. State-sponsored art music and entertainment music that has to show its commercial viability in the marketplace became more distinct in the twentieth century, albeit never fully disentangling to form separate social worlds. Genres like jazz and rock exemplify artistic aspirations in commercial music, while blockbuster concerts of classical music or their ample use in film and advertising show that art music continued to harbor a potential for profit. Scholarly concern with music was pivotal in turning music into art. Music criticism, which began from around 1800 in Germany and spread in and beyond Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, promoted the idea of “absolute” music and ascribed to it intrinsic value. It provided musicians as well as listeners with categories with which to make sense of music, not least distinguishing the artistic wheat from the merely entertaining chaff. Music history, which focused on “superior” works and “genius” composers, contributed to the establishment of hierarchies as well.
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Nationalism and the competition between nations for prestige not only informed and motivated the study of art music. It also fed a new interest in indigenous music, since folk music was considered a “pure” expression of the “essence” of a people. In turn, folk music served as raw material or inspiration for musical artworks. Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suites, based on Henrik Ibsen’s drama that in itself employed motives from Norwegian fairy tales, and Bedřich Smetana’s Má Vlast (My Country), which refers to historical and natural landmarks of Bohemia, are two famous examples for folk themes adopted for works of national music by composers who regarded themselves members of a European community of art music creators. Taking up the concern with “greatness” and the nation, musicology emerged in Central Europe at the end of the nineteenth century as an academic discipline that quickly narrowed down its task to the research of great composers and the philological study of canonical musical texts. A hundred years later, leading musicologists still upheld this preoccupation. In his Foundations of Music History from 1983, Carl Dahlhaus subscribes to the view “that the subject matter of music history is made up, primarily, if not exclusively, of significant works of music.” He further declares that music history served a dual function, namely “illuminating the preconditions for a given work” and “shedding light on the implications of the present-day listener’s relation to that work.”²⁰ This implies that music of lesser “significance” deserves to be ignored and forgotten, or left to ethnomusicologists for study. However, by the time Dahlhaus wrote these programmatic lines, the self-assured focus on canonical works of Western classical music was challenged with increasing urgency from both within and outside the discipline. Popular music studies emerged as a research field that not only claimed aesthetic and cultural significance for commercial genres, as rock critics had done from the second half of the 1960s. They also—and even more importantly—addressed sociological questions to the phenomenon. Simon Frith’s pioneering Sociology of Rock took rock music seriously by pushing the analysis well beyond musical works to include the rock music business and the practices of music consumption. For Frith and fellow popular music scholars, the significance of music produced for profit and distributed as consumer products lay not so much in the “works” and their authors but in the context of their production, mediation, and use.²¹ At the same time, sociologists used music as an object to study sociological questions, from the collective production of music to the use of music by individuals and groups.²² Concomitantly, some musicologists conspicuously turned away from the philological study of works and the biographical interest in their individualized composer-creators to the analysis of performances. A hugely influential contribu-
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tion to this shift was Christopher Small’s suggestion to understand music not as a thing (“a work”), but a practice (“to music”). Coining the term “musicking,” he defined the practice of music as “to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.”²³ Small reverted to the gerund “musicking” to return to a wider perspective on music that the founding fathers of musicology had favored and to acknowledge the many instances in which music plays a role in people’s lives, from listening contemplatively in a concert hall to hearing it in a supermarket, in a church, or at home while ironing a shirt. The term “musicking” reminds us that music requires performative reiterations to be in the world. In this way, it shows similarities with the praxeological approach in history, which is based on the observation that “structures” from class to gender and capitalism simply do not exist if no one is actually “doing” them. Moreover, and akin to Howard Becker’s sociological “art world” concept, the idea of musicking directs the researcher’s attention to the large cast of characters who lend a hand in the process, quite literally in Small’s example of the piano mover. While dethroning the “genius” composer and suspending aesthetic value judgments, “musicking” sheds light on the multiple ways and numerous places where people engage with music. The concept raises awareness of the implications of situational contexts, the availability of resources, and the interaction between on-stage performers and audiences as well as between members of the audiences themselves. It allows us to reflect on the “affordances” of music, that is to say its potential for people to “make things happen” with music: to get in the mood, to impress, to arouse, to dominate, to mobilize, to make a living, to get rich.²⁴ This handbook takes up Small’s concept and looks at musical life in twentieth-century Europe as instances of “musicking.” The chapters follow a sequence from (I) the inception of musical ideas and sounds over (II) the management and (III) the mediation of music to its (IV) social and (V) political uses, before a separate part (VI) zooms in on the cross-cutting theme of musical globalization. Tracing this trajectory accounts for the relative autonomy of producers, mediators, and audiences alike. Each of the six parts from creation to political uses consists of three chapters. The first part looks at composers, professional players, and amateur musicians as the originators of music as sounds and texts. The chapters of the second part on managing music turn to the market, the state, and civil society as the three sources of funding for music. They provide histories of European states’ music policies, the music business, and patronage. The third part on “mediating music” studies sound recording, broadcasting, and music criticism as three means by which music was brought to audiences. Part four is concerned with different modes of experiencing music.
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Its chapters look at music as a marker of distinction and a means of community building as well as at dancing and solitary listening as ways in which Europeans used music to socialize with others and encounter themselves. Part five deals with the political deployment of music in propaganda and censorship, diplomacy, and protest movements. The three chapters of part six focus on the transfer of music from and to Europe and on international organizations’ role in European musical life. While other chapters also consider the global entanglement of European music, cultural encounters as well as the organizations they gave rise to have a particular relevance and require to be looked at more closely as separate topics. All chapters focus on key actors and their practices. They present indepth case studies to trace major trends in their respective musical facet in twentieth-century Europe.
3 A “Long” Twentieth Century: The Periodization of Contemporary Musicking Musicking in the twentieth century encompassed many practices that were common at almost any time. Making up songs, playing music either for pay, as part of rituals, or for pleasure, as well as listening and dancing were practices that could be observed in Tudor England as well as the Ukrainian province in the early twenty-first century. What was new in the twentieth century was that these practices were performed with the awareness of another kind of music— music that was produced by specialists at some other place and readily available for consumption or emulation. While contemporary musicking remained in many respects an elementary, spontaneous, and local activity, it took place in a context dominated by codified, recorded, and broadcast music. The latter music did not crowd out or suffocate ordinary people’s active participation in music, as cultural critics feared throughout the period. However, it rendered their musicking increasingly self-conscious, for better or for worse. Contemporary musicking of ordinary people became inspired, provoked, or in some other way informed by music that was offered to them as generic and superior. A bundle of interrelated changes in technology, law and regulation, industry, and perception established this new regime of twentieth-century musicking. Some of the conditions that turned musicking into the very conscious practice it is today were created in the nineteenth century. First of all, the modes of experiencing music changed. As already mentioned, nineteenth-century music criticism expanded musicking to include reading texts about music and made readers feel that they were part of an imagined community of connoisseurs. At
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the same time, voluntary organizations in music emerged, including local choirs and bands, subscription societies to fund concerts, and regional and national associations that integrated local amateurs into larger movements. These organizations confirmed the idea of musical communities by providing opportunities to socialize in music. Like music criticism, music associations made repertoires and tastes an issue for reflection. Secondly, after 1850 and intensifying toward the end of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the music trade had an enormous impact on musicking. The market for musical entertainment and therefore musical labor expanded, as fast-growing cities concentrated potential audiences, and some working people earned more money. The railways, steamships, and the telegraph transported performers and news about performances to remote areas and, around 1900, established connections around the globe, especially between the entertainment trade in Europe and North Americas. Singers and dancers from US-American vaudeville stages toured Europe. Ragtime and other songs from New York’s “Tin Pan Alley” were reprinted by European publishers; British musical comedies and Central European operettas took Broadway theaters by storm, becoming truncated and supplemented with American tunes in due course. At the same time, Bohemian all-female bands toured European colonies in East Asia, the tango “fever” infected European dancers, and military musicians and missionaries disseminated European musical idioms in African colonies. Innovations in music printing supplied the globe with sheet music, with Leipzig becoming the center of this trade.²⁵ Thirdly, transnational agreements to protect intellectual property were another important condition to stimulate the trade first with compositions and later with recordings and licenses. Like in music printing, Europe pioneered the establishment of authors’ rights. The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, signed in 1886 by representatives mostly from European countries, stipulated that authors’ rights were acknowledged abroad, which meant that rights holders were to be compensated when a piece of music was re-printed in another country. Later on, in addition to printed work, intellectual property rights in Europe also reserved for its authors and publishers the right to perform music in public as well as “mechanically” reproduce it on records. To enforce this legal title, European composers, authors, and publishers founded so-called collecting societies, which provided a new and important source of income for these groups. The first of these societies, the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique, had already been founded in France in 1851; composers, authors, and publishers in Italy, Austria, Germany, and other European countries would follow around 1900.
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Fourthly, one of the most important innovations with far-reaching and longlasting consequences was the invention of sound recording and reproduction by Thomas Edison in 1877, which developed into a music medium that was marketed globally from around 1900. Leading firms in Western Europe and the USA established worldwide networks of recording and distribution or sent recording specialists around the globe to capture sounds that they assumed to be specific for the respective people and their region. In this way, the recording industry turned the idea that music was “rooted” in geography and people into the market classification of musical genres. The recording industry also established a secondary music market and allowed for new forms of musicking from solitary listening to DJing. Certainly, subsequent technological developments extended the reach, size, and presence of recorded music even further than the dimensions it had reached in the early twentieth century. However, it seems fair to say that those subsequent developments would not be incomprehensible for someone who lived a hundred years ago, while a person from 1870 would be absolutely astonished by, say, the Walkman or a synthesizer. At the same time, the instruments, institutions, technological devices, and ideas about music established until or during the turn of the twentieth century are still easily recognizable for our contemporaries. In fact, many of them have not fundamentally changed and still shape present-day musicking. Fifthly and finally, aesthetic developments within so-called “art music” around 1900 extended compositional practices and fundamentally altered European conceptions of music. Highly diverse, these practices evolved as composers such as Claude Debussy engaged with non-European music or left tonality behind altogether, as in the oeuvre of Arnold Schönberg. They could also consist of looking at the “deeper truths” of local folk music, an approach that Béla Bartók took very seriously with his extensive musical field work in Hungary, Romania, the Balkans, and other regions of South-Eastern Europe. All these experiments frequently raised the question what actually counts as music. This question has been hotly debated ever since and also affected musicking beyond art music. Looking at music in this way gives us reason to regard contemporary musicking as part of a history of a “long” twentieth century. Historians commonly distinguish between a “long” and a “short” twentieth century. The latter begins with the First World War in 1914 and ends with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The label “short twentieth century” was coined by the Hungarian economic historian Iván Berend and popularized by Eric Hobsbawm, who in his 1994 bestseller called this period the “age of extremes.” While Berend and Hobsbawm put the economy and the conflict between capitalism and communism at the center
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of their accounts, historians of politics and ideas find the “short” century a suitable time frame, too. An example for this is Mark Mazower’s influential book on the “Dark Continent.” Interpretations such as the “age of ideologies” and the “American century” demarcate the twentieth century as the period between the Great War and the Soviet collapse as well.²⁶ The term “long twentieth century” was proposed by Italian sociologist Giovanni Arrighi about the same time as Hobsbawm published his Age of Extremes. Arrighi extended the contemporary period to include the last third of the nineteenth century in order to describe the rise of the United States as a capitalist superpower.²⁷ Another reason to follow Arrighi and take a longer view on the twentieth century is the growing awareness that colonial expansion and imperialism fundamentally shaped the contemporary global world, which means both within and beyond Europe. The description of the present as “postindustrial” has also redirected historians’ attention away from the Industrial Revolution to the transformations in the decades before 1900. These decades mark the beginning of the contemporary period, with topics like media revolutions, globalization, the rise of financial markets, leisure, urbanization, and mass and consumer culture moving to the forefront of research. Whereas the “short” twentieth century suggests precise start and end dates, the “long” century has soft demarcations. As shown, this goes especially for its beginning, but it also holds true for its end. A possible contender to mark an end to the twentieth century and a start of a new period is the Internet, which has affected the production, mediation, and consumption of music in multiple ways. It has shifted the power balance in the music industry, facilitated the transfer of repertoires around the globe, while also increasing celebrity culture. At the same time, it has opened up new possibilities for amateurs to do music. In many other respects, however, we see that most of the innovations from the turn of the twentieth century are still relevant today. Another way of looking at the most recent musical present is to diagnose it as suffering from “retromania,” to declare the end of music history with the last “real” stylistic musical innovations of the 1990s, and to see it caught in an endless loop of remixes.²⁸ However, since we do not want to look at music as “works” nor presuppose an end of history, we refrain from determining a clear endpoint of our twentieth century and continue to observe present-day musicking with interest rather than boredom or impatience. We think that questions of fairness, ownership, value, and power in musicking are pressing and require answers. To be sure, present-day Europeans face far fewer limits to what they may legitimately listen to or perform. This means that struggles about social control, censorship, and symbolic resistance, which have been central in earlier scholarship, have become less urgent, though examples like Pussy Riot remind
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us that such trends are reversible. People still contest who has the right to own and distribute the repertoire and who should be paid how much money for it. They still debate whether some musicking is more valuable than others and deserves state support, or if musicking should be left to private initiative or market actors. Looking at contemporary musicking in a longer-term perspective may contribute to a better understanding of these and other current issues of musical life. Finally, choosing a long twentieth-century perspective to look at overall European developments in musical life means to transcend the narrow national narratives of contemporary history that still prevail in many European countries. Instead of trying to harmonize these traditions, we would rather align our approach with an early dissenting opinion from the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough. He conceptualized contemporary history as world history, and he conceived of the contemporary period as a flexible demarcation of time: “Contemporary History,” he wrote in 1964, “begins when the problems which are actual in the world today first take visible shape.”²⁹ We subscribe to Barraclough’s view and see the “problems” of contemporary musical life beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
4 State Intervention, Hierarchies, and Transnational Connections: Musicking (in) Twentieth-Century Europe One of the most powerful traits to be observed in twentieth-century Europe is the ongoing and increasing commitment of the state to musical culture. This commitment is a legacy from the nineteenth century. European nation-states supported musicking from symphony concerts and festivals to music education in schools, as Celia Applegate shows in her chapter on public funding. During the course of the century, European policymakers and music organizers learned from each other. Their political commitment manifested itself both in the official promotion of a particular vision of amateur music, as Klaus Nathaus’ chapter indicates, and in the way broadcast media were administered and operated in Europe. Morten Michelsen mentions in his chapter that European broadcasters shared a publicservice model in which governments had a controlling stake and where programmers subscribed to the idea that the medium had to inform and entertain. In these areas, state intervention into musical life intensified in many parts of Europe up until the last two decades of the century. The commercialization of radio, the rise of the creative economy, and the scaling-down of public support
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for symphony orchestras suggest a gradual retreat of the state, which went along with the return of private musical patronage, albeit with new protagonists, as Myriam Chimènes illustrates: what in the nineteenth century had been a domain of middle-class philanthropy and upper-class sociability was at the end of the twentieth century often conducted as corporate sponsorship, with generous entrepreneurs at the forefront. The gradual shift from public to private funding should not be overemphasized though. Regardless of financial cuts, public material support for the musical arts has not ceased, and the rhetoric of music’s importance for society is still strong, as Applegate and Nathaus show. This singles Europe out in comparison with other world regions, including the USA. It may also distinguish musicking from other social realms that took more clearly a “neoliberal turn” and thus qualify the common diagnosis that European nation-states shed responsibilities in the last two decades of the twentieth century. State intervention in musical life was particularly strong in times of war, during surges of nationalism, and under authoritarian rule. During the First World War, political uses of music reached new heights, as both the chapters by Friedrich Geiger on propaganda and censorship and by Friedemann Pestel on musical diplomacy illustrate. Concerning the latter, the war marks a starting point and served as a testing ground for a foreign policy strategy that deployed music in order to win the hearts and minds of people abroad. In the interwar period, the European dictatorships most keenly exploited the opportunities of music to disseminate their ideologies, while suppressing dissenting sounds in mass media and on the concert stages. Especially in Eastern Europe, such state practices continued well into the second half of the century. In turn, that made musical opposition most effective, as Jeff Hayton argues in his chapter on protest and political movements. However, the politicization of music was not a prerogative of states in Eastern Europe. As both Geiger and Pestel show, Western European governments also used the “power of music” to represent the nation-state and mobilize the masses. The state’s increasing involvement in musical life and the political charge of music in Europe was partly due to the growth of welfare regimes, which meant that governments and state bodies claimed responsibility for an increasing number of social issues like health, age, education, housing, and employment, to eventually include music. However, this dynamic is only half of the story. For the state to engage in musical life, policymakers had to be convinced of the utility of music first. They had to believe in its power to mobilize, its ability to enlighten and elevate, its potential to impress, and its capacity to foster social cohesion and create community. These values were firmly associated with music in Europe in the nineteenth century and maintained throughout the twentieth.
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Music criticism continued to play a key role in this development, as Hans Weisethaunet describes in his chapter. The social and cultural differentiation that music criticism, in combination with other forms of musicking, drove forward is another major trend in twentieth-century Europe traced in the chapters of this handbook. As critics tied music to verbal concepts that attributed to it particular value and power, the promotion of valuable and powerful music was institutionalized in a range of concepts, practices, and organizations that diversified musical life and established new hierarchies. Weisethaunet shows that music criticism itself extended to new genres such as jazz and rock, which were often evaluated in a similar way to “classical” music, with nineteenth-century concepts like authenticity, ingenuity, and canonicity. As musical hierarchies were introduced to more repertoires in the period of study, they also shaped the relationship between performers and creators of musical works and affected the latter’s practices. As Frank Hentschel points out, numerous alternative ways to generate twentieth-century music from collage to sampling and composing teams, while considerably diversifying the musical spectrum, remained in one way or another concerned with the nineteenth-century ideas of musical “works” and the “genius” composer, even as they aimed to challenge them. The persistence of the idea of the “genius,” who had been unquestioningly a male composer, may also explain why composing in all its “progressive” manifestations remained very much a male domain for most parts of the twentieth century—a finding which holds true for instrumental players in bands and orchestras as well, albeit to a lesser extent. In addition, musical hierarchies affected to some extent the institutions that underpin the modern music industry in Europe. As Michel Abesser mentions, the idea of a “valuable” European music resurfaced frequently in the history of the recording industry. Michelsen argues that broadcasting stations based their organization and the classification of music programs on “classical” hierarchies too. In the music business, covered by Simon Frith, emerging copyright laws stipulated that art music was more valuable and should be rewarded with higher royalties than popular music. The belief in superior art music impinged also on the self-organization of European musicians in trade organizations, as Marc Perrenoud’s chapter shows. Repeatedly, European unions were concerned with upholding status differences between formally trained orchestra musicians and “ordinary” dance and entertainment musicians. Finally, differentiation made itself felt in the way audiences engaged with music, formed communities, and demarcated social distinctions with the help of music. For the practice of solitary listening to become established, recorded music had to be acknowledged as legitimate, as Ulrik Volgsten argues. Again, music critics, together with innovations in sound recording technology, were in-
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strumental in making records a veritable music medium, rendering immersive listening to records a valuable, uplifting musical experience. And while music at times broke down social barriers and furthered inclusion, it was also frequently deployed to demarcate differences of class status, gender, and generation. To be sure, music afforded the expression of individuality and facilitated emancipation, as the chapters by Julia Sneeringer and James Nott demonstrate when they mention phenomena like “Beatlemania” or the presence of women on dance floors in the 1920s. At the same time, however, they suggest that the trajectory throughout the twentieth century did not simply point to greater inclusiveness, but that new forms of exclusion were established as the claim of certain music’s superiority was frequently reiterated. The continuity of musical patronage, described in this volume by Myriam Chimènes, highlights the continual deployment of art music to perform difference. The way musicking in Europe was administered and differentiated also affected race and ethnicity. This becomes most apparent when we compare European developments with those in the United States, where race and ethnicity have come to shape both the commercial repertoire and American music. In contrast, folk traditions in Europe such as Greek rembetiko, Portuguese fado, or Jewish klezmer were rarely taken up by the music industry. Instead, many of them formed a basis to create music that was to serve the nation. In effect, the transformation from folk to pop music that American jazz, blues, and country music exemplify was hindered, and much folk music only rarely gained visibility (Balkan brass music of the 1990s being a case in point) beyond local contexts. The low audibility of ethnic music in our handbook may thus be considered not so much an oversight on our part than a consequence of these trends, which appear to have eclipsed ethnic music in a landscape dominated by commercial genres from outside Europe. The differentiation of musical life fits conventional narratives of contemporary European history, which highlight an increased individualism and the expansion of the consumer society as a consequence of the latest globalization wave since the 1970s. Interestingly, however, the persistence of status demarcation through musicking challenges influential, if not dominant interpretations of popular music as a leveling force, and it may dampen expectations that music may be a remedy to address the current problem of declining social cohesion.³⁰ Shifting the focus to the geographies of musicking in Europe, we see that similarities and shared trends did not simply amount to a musical Europe. As a matter of fact, both state intervention and the differentiation of musicking stood in the way to a musical Europe, as the former adhered to national conditions and the latter strengthened social demarcations. In addition, extra-musical processes that shaped twentieth-century Europe and affected almost all forms of
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musicking covered in this handbook—ranging from colonialism and Americanization to the Cold War, decolonization and globalization—implied other geographical constellations than Europe. To begin with, Europe’s musical influence in the world continued throughout the twentieth century. As Bob van der Linden argues in his chapter, colonialism and imperial encounters in its first half were crucial to maintain and even extend Europe’s global presence. Highlighting the dissemination of European technology, instruments, and musical institutions such as tonality and notation, van der Linden proposes that European music fostered musical standardization around the globe and thus contributed to a loss of musical diversity. At the same time, colonialism and imperialism also left their mark on musical activities in Europe, famously illustrated by Claude Debussy’s study of Javanese Gamelan music. Rachel Gillett discusses the social implications of such “glocal invasions” in further detail. She observes that “foreign” music often challenged established identities, while providing opportunities for creative appropriation. This resonates with the story of social dancing, told by James Nott. He shows that global dance “crazes”—often hailing from Latin America—frequently provoked representatives of the status quo to try to popularize national dance steps as a measure to counter or domesticate imported styles. At the same time, dances from abroad gave dominated members of European societies such as women, youth, and minorities a means to breach social conventions. Gillet’s and Nott’s most prominent example of a musical import to impact on European music in this way is jazz, which underscores the enormous influence of African-American music and the US-American music industry in the twentieth century. A number of chapters highlight the aesthetic, professional, and political repercussions of this influence on musicking in Europe. Aesthetic influences became manifest in the proliferation of new musical styles, from soul and rock ‘n’ roll to funk and hip-hop, as Sneeringer and Hayton show. The chapters on the music trade more generally (Frith) and the recording industry in particular (Abesser) focus on technological transfers, economic cooperation, company mergers, and legal agreements between Europe and the USA. Right from its inception around 1900, the recording industry functioned as an American-European venture in which Europeans increasingly played a junior role. In terms of technological innovations and business practices, actors on both sides of the Atlantic closely observed each other and established strong ties through trade and mergers. The Cold War further complicates the picture. On the one hand, and as a direct consequence of the strong links between the USA and Western Europe after the end of the Second World War, it divided Europe’s musical life into two parts. Eastern European states controlled more tightly than their Western European
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counterparts the production and dissemination of music on their territories, while restricting the import of music from the West. If we look at the recording industry (Abesser), copyright regimes (Rempe), the organization of European broadcasting (Michelsen), and the marketing of musical events more generally (Frith), we see that the Iron Curtain cut across musical life in Europe. To be sure, Eastern Europe never lost its place in the global music industry, but the centers of production and innovation were more clearly located in Western Europe and the USA, with an Anglo-American axis as the major hub. Political divisions within Europe also impinged on the social uses of music. The fact that listening to “rebellious” pop music was understood and often persecuted as political protest in Eastern Europe is explored in further depth by Jeff Hayton in this volume. Heavy-handed reactions by governments and authorities to the consumption of “troublesome” music can certainly be observed in Western Europe as well (Geiger), though these gave way to greater tolerance, if not indifference, a lot earlier in the West than in the East. On the other hand, the Iron Curtain intensified mutual observations, fostered musical transfers, and triggered personal exchanges, often in the name of cultural diplomacy (Pestel). Most of all, the political divide could not prevent the spread of global trends such as “Beatlemania” in the 1960s or the spread of punk in the 1980s (Sneeringer). In the light of recent research and also in view of the series of Contemporary European History, it seems fruitful to ask whether musicking transgressed Cold War divisions more easily than other social practices.³¹ Decolonization is yet another trend that affected musicking in Europe. Even though decolonization at first sight cut the links between colonial powers and their African and Asian dependencies, the political and sociocultural aftermath was as much noteworthy in Europe in general as it became evident in its musical life. Politically, the new independent states changed the balance of power in international cultural organizations such as UNESCO and struggled for less Eurocentric approaches to music, as Rempe shows. In other words and against the dynamic of homogenization described by van der Linden, the normative power of Europeans to define and categorize music on the international stage diminished substantially. Musically, colonial repatriates stirred up local music scenes, as Gillett’s example of the Tielman brothers illustrates, who in the 1950s popularized kroncong in the Netherlands. Similar developments could be observed in all European countries with a colonial past.³² According to Hentschel, such postcolonial repercussions mixed with musical transfers and appropriations that resulted from migration movements and globalization more generally and paved the way for genres such as Raga Rock, R’n’Besk, and the label of “world music.” In sum, musicking in twentieth-century Europe established dif-
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ferent transnational connections and geographical scopes, depending on the practice in question and the forces of nationalism, globalization, American influences, and (de)colonization. Finally, musicking was not particularly effective in the making of Europe because actors rarely musicked with explicit references to Europe. As a result, we find only few sustained, self-consciously European encounters, even though musicking in different parts of Europe shared similar characteristics and were subjected to the same trends. The chapters describe no expressly European communities of listeners or dancers. Musical initiatives that related to the concept of Europe in one way or another—including the interwar European concert series and the postwar European Song Contest (Michelsen), the jazz project Europa spielt sich frei (Weisethaunet), the Eurovision broadcasts of the Rockpalast (Sneeringer), or the offense against “Europeanism” expressed in the Fluxus’ manifesto (Hentschel)—remained ephemeral to the greater story of musicking in Europe. It is questionable whether they had a lasting effect on Europeanizing audiences. Likewise, musicians’ labor migration (Perrenoud, Rempe) and encounters in European venues like the turn-of-the-century Parisian salon (Chimènes), the dance clubs in Ibiza (Nott), or choir and brass competitions hardly gave rise to a European identity, especially when musicians participated in them as representatives of their nation (Nathaus). However and regardless of the lack of references to Europe, these transnational encounters formed a shared experience for many Europeans. They provided opportunities to establish personal relationships across national borders. Perhaps the biggest contribution to the making of Europe happened backstage, through gradual harmonization of institutions. For instance, cultural policies of many countries aligned with each other over time, as Applegate argues. The strong market concentration in the ticket sales sector observed by Frith may be interpreted as a case of hidden (and involuntary) Europeanization, and the harmonization of copyright rules has become so important that the European Union has since attended to it. European by name are a number of international bodies such as the EBU, the European Festival Association, the European Youth Orchestra, or the European Music Council, though they require further historical investigation to determine whether they actually contributed to forging a musical Europe. The following chapters indicate that one should not expect too much in this regard. The fact that the first survey about the economic dimension of music in the European Union dates from 1996, for instance, suggests that its member states began to understand musical life as a common concern quite late.³³ Even in this most explicit area of European institution building, one may then find the relative absence of “Europe” more remarkable than its presence.
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At the end of the day, the minor effects of musicking activities to the making of Europe in the long twentieth century diminish neither the value of this volume nor the greater agenda of the handbook series. On the contrary, the chapters show that a critical, praxeological, and non-normative approach to contemporary European history adds much more to our understanding of the complex developments of Europe’s past (and to grasp its future challenges) than teleological narratives that tend to write Europe into being. We are heavily indebted to our team of authors who with great commitment and patience were ready to engage with this research agenda. We extend our gratitude to the series editors, Corinna Unger and Matthias Middell, for inviting a volume on music history to this handbook series and their encouragement to think about the role of music in contemporary European history.
Notes Heike Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen …: Die Nationalhymne der DDR, 1949 – 1990 (Berlin: Dietz, 1997), 72– 76; Ulrich Ragozat, Die Nationalhymnen der Welt: Ein kulturgeschichtliches Lexikon (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1982), 75. Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, 13 Vols. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1980 – 1995). Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, “Introduction: Contours of a Critical History of Contemporary Europe; A Transnational Agenda,” in Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, ed. id. (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 8; Kiran Klaus Patel and Ulrike von Hirschhausen, “Europeanization in History: An Introduction,” in Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, ed. Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 12. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998); Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914 – 1949 (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). Celia Applegate, “Music among the Historians,” German History 30 (2012): 331. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, ed., Music and International History in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2015). Friedrich Geiger, Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004). Knut Kjeldstadli, “Allsang i arbeiderbevegelsen,” Arbeiderhistorie 22, no. 1 (2018): 109 – 125; Dave Russell, “Abiding Memories: The Community Singing Movement and English Social Life in the 1920s,” Popular Music 27, no. 1 (2008): 117– 133; Guntis Smidchens, The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). Peter Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture,” Past and Present, no. 144 (1994): 138 – 170; Kelly Jakes, Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940 – 1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019); Bodo Mrozek, Jugend, Pop, Kultur: Eine transnationale Geschichte (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
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2019); Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton, eds., Music and Protest in 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Keith Gildart et al., eds., Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Thomas Höpel, Kulturpolitik in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert: Metropolen als Akteure und Orte der Innovation (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017). Matteo Paoletti, A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce: Walter Mocchi and the Italian Musical Theatre Business in South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Michel Abeßer, Den Jazz sowjetisch machen: Kulturelle Leitbilder, Musikmarkt und Distinktion zwischen 1953 und 1970 (Köln: Böhlau, 2018); Antje Dietze and Maren Möhring, eds., “Produktionswelten der Massenkultur,” special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 46, no. 1 (2020). A fine exception is Dorothea Trebesius, Komponieren als Beruf: Frankreich und die DDR im Vergleich, 1950 – 1980 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012); Anna G. Piotrowska, “New and Old Tendencies in Labour Mediation among Early Twentieth Century U.S. and European Composers: An Outline of Applied Attitudes,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 24, no. 1 (2013): 131– 149; most recently Martin Rempe, Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). Christophe Charle, ed., Le temps des capitales culturelles, XVIII–XX siècles (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2009); Sven Oliver Müller, Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Derek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); William Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik, 1860 – 1930,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 1 (2012): 86 – 132; Martin Rempe and Claudius Torp, “Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s,” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 223 – 233. Sabrina Petra Ramet, Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Sergej Ivanovič Žuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960 – 1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Jolanta Pekacz, “Did Rock Smash the Wall? The Role of Rock in Political Transition,” Popular Music 13, no. 1 (1994): 41– 49. Gertrud Pickhahn and Rüdiger Ritter, eds., Meanings of Jazz in State Socialism (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016); Claudius Torp, “Missionary Education and Musical Communities in Sub-Saharan Colonial Africa,” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 235 – 251; Kerstin Lange, Tango in Paris und Berlin: Eine transnationale Geschichte der Metropolenkultur um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014); Christiane Sibille, “The Politics of Music in International Organizations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” New Global Studies 10, no. 3 (2016): 253 – 281. D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Kaspar Maase, Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850 – 1970 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997). See also Frank Hentschel, “Unfeine Unterschiede: Musikkulturen und Musikwissenschaft,” in Historische Musikwissenschaft: Grundlagen und Perspektiven, ed. Michael Calella and Nikolaus Urbanek (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2013), 255 – 266. E. g. Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Helga de la Motte-Haber et al., eds., Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, 14 Vols. (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1999 – 2011).
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Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3. Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, 1978). William G. Roy and Timothy J. Dowd, “What is Sociological about Music?,” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 183 – 203; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9. For music’s “affordances” see also Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), who uses the term throughout her study. See also the most recent account by Harry Liebersohn, Music and the New Global Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914 – 1991 (London: Joseph, 1994); Mazower, Dark Continent. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994). Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 9. Ian Kershaw, Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950 – 2017 (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 555 – 556; such expectations are, e. g., expressed in Albrecht Riethmüller, ed., The Role of Music in European Integration: Conciliating Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). E. g. Christian Michel et al., eds., Planning in Cold War Europe: Competition, Cooperation, Circulations (1950s–1970s) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018); on music see also Simo Mikkonen, Giles Scott-Smith, and Jari Parkkinen, eds., Entangled East and West: Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction During the Cold War (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). “Music in Europe,” European Music Office, Brussels 1996, http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/MIE/General_contents.shtml (accessed 17 August 2020).
Bibliography Amos, Heike. Auferstanden aus Ruinen…: Die Nationalhymne der DDR, 1949 – 1990. Berlin: Dietz, 1997. Applegate, Celia. “Music among the Historians.” German History 30 (2012): 329 – 349. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994. Bailey, Peter. “Conspiracies of Meaning: Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture.” Past and Present, no. 144 (1994): 138 – 170. Barraclough, Geoffrey. An Introduction to Contemporary History. New York: Basic Books, 1964. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
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Buettner, Elizabeth. Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Charle, Christophe, ed. Le temps des capitales culturelles, XVIII–XX siècles. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2009. Cook, Nicholas, and Anthony Pople, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dahlhaus, Carl. Foundations of Music History. Translated by J. B. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Dahlhaus, Carl, ed. Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft. 13 Vols. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1980 – 1995. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dietze, Antje, and Maren Möhring, eds. “Produktionswelten der Massenkultur.” Special issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 46, no. 1 (2020). Frith, Simon. The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable, 1978. Geiger, Friedrich. Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E., ed. Music and International History in the Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Gildart, Keith, et al., eds. Youth Culture and Social Change: Making a Difference by Making a Noise. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hentschel, Frank. “Unfeine Unterschiede: Musikkulturen und Musikwissenschaft.” In Historische Musikwissenschaft: Grundlagen und Perspektiven, edited by Michael Calella and Nikolaus Urbanek, 255 – 266. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2013. Hirschhausen, Ulrike von, and Kiran Klaus Patel. “Europeanization in History: An Introduction.” In Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, edited by Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, 1 – 18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914 – 1991. London: Joseph, 1994. Höpel, Thomas. Kulturpolitik in Europa im 20. Jahrhundert: Metropolen als Akteure und Orte der Innovation. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017. Jakes, Kelly. Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940 – 1945. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019. Jarausch, Konrad H., and Thomas Lindenberger. “Introduction: Contours of a Critical History of Contemporary Europe; A Transnational Agenda.” In Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories, edited by idem, 1 – 20. New York: Berghahn, 2007. Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin, 2005. Kershaw, Ian. Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950 – 2017. London: Allen Lane, 2017. Kershaw, Ian. To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914 – 1949. London: Allen Lane, 2015. Kjeldstadli, Knut. “Allsang i arbeiderbevegelsen.” Arbeiderhistorie 22, no. 1 (2018): 109 – 125. Kutschke, Beate, and Barley Norton, eds. Music and Protest in 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. La Motte-Haber, Helga de, et al., eds. Handbuch der Musik im 20. Jahrhundert. 14 Vols. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1999 – 2011. Lange, Kerstin. Tango in Paris und Berlin: Eine transnationale Geschichte der Metropolenkultur um 1900. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014.
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LeMahieu, D. L. A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Liebersohn, Harry. Music and the New Global Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Maase, Kaspar. Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850 – 1970. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997. Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 1998. Michel, Christian, Ondřej Matějka, and Sandrine Kott, eds. Planning in Cold War Europe: Competition, Cooperation, Circulations (1950s–1970s). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Mikkonen, Simo, Giles Scott-Smith, and Jari Parkkinen, eds. Entangled East and West: Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction During the Cold War. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Mrozek, Bodo. Jugend, Pop, Kultur: Eine transnationale Geschichte. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Müller, Sven Oliver. Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik, 1860 – 1930.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 1 (2012): 86 – 132. Paoletti, Matteo. A Huge Revolution of Theatrical Commerce: Walter Mocchi and the Italian Musical Theatre Business in South America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pekacz, Jolanta. “Did Rock Smash the Wall? The Role of Rock in Political Transition.” Popular Music 13, no. 1 (1994): 41 – 49. Pickhahn, Gertrud, and Rüdiger Ritter, eds. Meanings of Jazz in State Socialism. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016. Piotrowska, Anna G. “New and Old Tendencies in Labour Mediation among Early Twentieth Century U.S. and European Composers: An Outline of Applied Attitudes.” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 24, no. 1 (2013): 131 – 149. Ragozat, Ulrich. Die Nationalhymnen der Welt: Ein kulturgeschichtliches Lexikon. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1982. Ramet, Sabrina Petra. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Rempe, Martin. Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Rempe, Martin, and Claudius Torp. “Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s.” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 223 – 233. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Riethmüller, Albrecht, ed. The Role of Music in European Integration: Conciliating Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Roy, William G., and Timothy J. Dowd. “What Is Sociological About Music?” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 183 – 203. Russell, Dave. “Abiding Memories: The Community Singing Movement and English Social Life in the 1920s.” Popular Music 27, no. 1 (2008): 117 – 133. Scott, Derek B. Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Sibille, Christiane. “The Politics of Music in International Organizations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” New Global Studies 10, no. 3 (2016): 253 – 281.
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Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Smidchens, Guntis. The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Torp, Claudius. “Missionary Education and Musical Communities in Sub-Saharan Colonial Africa.” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 335 – 251. Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna between 1830 and 1848. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Žuk, Sergej Ivanovič. Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960 – 1985. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.
Further Reading Blanning, Tim. The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010. Denning, Michael. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. London: Verso, 2015. Doumanis, Nicholas, ed. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914 – 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Fabbri, Franco, and Goffredo Plastino, general eds. Routledge Popular Music Series. New York: Routledge, 2015—. Mazierska, Ewa, and Zsolt Győri, eds. Eastern European Popular Music in a Transnational Context. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Patel, Kiran Klaus. Project Europe: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Stone, Dan, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Part I: Originating Music
Frank Hentschel
2 Diversifying Composition: Practices of Inventing Music The present handbook is about musicking—not everywhere in the world but in Europe—an endeavor that would not work without this kind of limitation. Yet this focus poses several problems. One of the problems is the question what is Europe? Another problem is if we define Europe one way or another, why should the music care? Take jazz, for instance: no one could deny that jazz played a central role in Europe’s music, starting as early as the 1920s (no matter how we define Europe)—but it is a music that originated in African-American communities (putting it very simply). Or take composers like Heitor Villa-Lobos and Silvestre Revueltas as another example, who were both part of the characteristic trends of so-called art music during the 1920s and 1930s. Although they came from Brazil and Mexico respectively, they essentially composed in a style that had its origins in Europe, however it is defined. They also visited Europe and were received there as composers who had a potential influence on what was going on musically in Europe. As early as the eighteenth century, when Johann Nikolaus Forkel wanted to write a special volume about German music for his general history of music, he realized that it was too closely interwoven with the music of other regions to be dealt with in a separate book.¹ He had detected exactly the same problem that we encounter when trying to write a history of European music: music does not fit the political or ideological borders that humans like to define. Cultural products very often spread uncontrollably. As an answer to Nazi racism, Béla Bartók wrote the article “Race Purity in Music,” arguing that music naturally spreads across borders and regions and is being productively changed by this process.² Additionally, while many musics spread far in a globalized world, they are at the same time much more restricted than a term like “European music” would suggest: new music is a kind of music that is very closely connected to certain sociological milieus—just as punk was. Even musics that have emerged somewhere in Europe can, therefore, be described much better in terms of those specific narrow sociological and cultural contexts. Furthermore, the political, geographical, and ideological concepts of Europe themselves have never been congruent or homogeneous: the geographical shape is not identical to the political idea. The European Union does not cover the areas of European identity. And the Cold War tore apart the imagination of Europe. In short, the claim of a distinct European music history is not convincing.³ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-003
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Some musicologists, like Nicholas Cook, Anthony Pople, and Richard Taruskin, use the term “Western music” to overcome this problem. Since so many Europeans migrated to North America, a strong relationship has always existed between US and European cultures. Although the USA were, to a great extent, initially built on European ideologies, Europe as well was just as much influenced by the USA, increasingly from the turn of the twentieth century. Therefore, the term “Western music” covers a wider range of seemingly related musical practices. The phenomenon of jazz seems to be easily captured with the term “Western music.” However, jazz experienced a global distribution and reception, with its origins being both African and North-American. Moreover, what do we do with the South-American composers: Are they “Western” composers, too? What about the composers of new music from Japan and Korea? The term “Western music” causes as many problems as the term “European music.” At the end of the day, the term “European music” is based on values and ideas that historians have already in mind before they set out to study musical life. It is hard to see how one can avoid such a definition, which is essentially ideological.⁴ The following chapter focuses on Europe (mainly in the geographical sense) but does not lose sight of the fact that Europe is a construction that has always been part of broader (mostly Western, sometimes global) tendencies. This is a pragmatic decision in line with the methodological considerations in the introduction to this handbook. Needless to say, neither the term “Europe” nor the “West” implies superiority over other cultures’ musics (as was often the case in the extant literature until very recently). Not only do the terms “Europe” and the “West” pose a challenge, but also does the concept of composition practices: wherever there is music, there is composition (in its broad sense of consciously putting sounds together, i. e., inventing music, be it via improvisation, via writing notes, or via oral transmission, etc.), and wherever there is composition, there are composition practices. Thus no limitation of the topic can be deduced from the given coordinates: it is virtually about all the musics that ever existed in the twentieth century and the space selected. A reduction to art music in the sense of written music—a concept used by Taruskin in his Oxford History of Western Music—might be legitimate to a certain extent but does not seem to be satisfying if the task is to get an impression of the manifold reality of music history (more satisfying seems to be Cook and Pople’s approach). If I were convinced that there was one main line of development or change in twentieth-century music history, then I would follow that direction and use it for the selection of the material to be discussed. However, I am rather convinced that the key signature of twentieth-century music is a genuine pluralism. This
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is a pluralism resulting not just from decomposition of earlier ideals: many readers might expect a narrative developing from the tradition of autonomy aesthetics (Autonomieästhetik) and bourgeois art music towards musical pluralism, but the pluralism of twentieth-century music was not just the result of a dissolution of that tradition. It is probably a fact that historians more and more discovered the different kinds of music while the ideology of the autonomous artwork declined and when postcolonial convictions prevailed. However, the shift of the historians’ perspective has to be discriminated from the actual existence of practiced music. Twentieth-century music has always been plural; even earlier centuries’ musics were also plural—although probably not to the same degree— due to several factors: the African-American contribution to music history, globalization, the diversification and increasing complexity of European societies, (changing) political systems and political tensions (especially during the Cold War), technological developments, and probably more. Thus I argue that, firstly, composition practices were pluralistic throughout the twentieth century and became ever more diverse in the course of the period. Secondly, I suggest that due to the decline of autonomy aesthetics, historians started to acknowledge and to appreciate this plurality. The task of the following pages is to demonstrate by way of example the pluralism of twentieth-century music history. Strictly speaking, it cannot be demonstrated that pluralism is a key signature of the twentieth century as opposed to the nineteenth century, but it can be demonstrated that at least the twentieth century was pluralistic. Also, examples will be chosen that exhibit features typical of twentieth-century music, meaning that they did not exist or did not play a comparable role in the previous century. Additionally, examples will be chosen where the aspect of composition as practice is easily noticeable as such (the last criterion is admittedly vague; however, its use is justified as this chapter acts as an introductory text to the subject). Strictly following these selection criteria, the chapter almost exclusively presents examples of music by male composers. Put bluntly, it is very hard to find women composers, for example in Italian or Russian futurism, in 1950s rock music, or early serial music. Instead of picking out some women to disguise this imbalance, I prefer to emphasize the unfortunate fact that women composers were still underrepresented in twentieth-century musical life in Europe.
1 New Music and the Intellectuals Many if not most books on the history of twentieth-century music are reduced to a very specific kind of music, especially if it comes to the second half of the cen-
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tury. Such histories place new music in the center of the story they tell. Their narratives suggest that their selection is based on aesthetic reasons or the importance of the music. Instead of following that path, I would argue that this narrative reflects a social-historical ideology: the authors tell the story from a point of view that corresponds with the sociological position of the composers that they favor.⁵ At the same time, such narratives can directly connect with the art and autonomy ideal of the nineteenth century in which the composers concerned understood themselves. For historiography, however, it is important not to adopt the ideologies of those about whom one writes. In his book Bürgerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung, Wolfgang Mommsen describes the change of the social function of the arts in Germany between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. During the nineteenth century, the arts, including music, supported the political and societal goals of the middle classes. They helped to construct an identity, they created opportunities for representation, and they picked up subjects related to the world view of the middle classes. Concert and opera houses were built, and a canon of relevant composers was established. Oratorios with historical and national subjects of interest were composed, and singing and other music festivals allowed gatherings of the middle classes (and beyond). Especially during singing festivals, national songs were often sung in huge choirs. The important role of absolute music like symphony, concerto, and string quartet reflected the idea of autonomy, which was itself a reflection of the ideal of emancipation and independence from other social strata—at least in Germany. Also in line with ethical ideas of the middle classes, music was favored that facilitated a perception that was congruent with the middle-class ideals of education (Bildung). By the end of the nineteenth century, after the erection of the German Reich, German art production was seen, however, as supporting the political status quo, thereby leading to its stagnation. As a reaction, some artists moved away from the broad cultural life and formed groups sharing aesthetic ideals and styles that deviated from the mainstream—the secessionists. As a new phenomenon, an independent cultural subsystem came into being. In the early twentieth century, several artists, including authors and composers, went even further by forming avant-garde circles that were in direct opposition to the public cultural sector—as was the case with symbolism, expressionism, Dadaism, futurism, and surrealism. It makes perfect sense to interpret the foundation of Arnold Schönberg’s Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (1918 – 1921) in that context. Although this association only existed for a short time, it can almost be understood as a metaphor for these developments. The foundation of leading new music festivals, the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1921 and the International Society for Contemporary Music in 1922, can also be seen in this light.
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Avant-garde art was a matter of a small milieu of intellectuals. And indeed, the ideals, self-images, and the jargon of the new music scene clearly reflect this. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, new music continued to emphasize the l’art pour l’art ideal, which became incredibly important in uncoupling a cultural subsystem of art from the bourgeois mainstream. The concurrence of Elvis and Darmstadt, as David Clarke put it—that is to say, the concurrence of a broadly distributed and accepted popular culture, on the one hand, and the emergence of an elitist high culture of music, on the other hand— probably did not happen by incident. Being demarcated and removed from, in a sense, the mainstream is constitutive of new music; in that sense, it remains negatively related to popular music. The style of this music and—to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s term—the intellectual habitus of the composers secure the niche character of the new music scene. Composing new music in the narrow sense of the word implied more and more the normative prohibition of all elements that resembled popular music: tonality, rhythmical periodicity, melody, repetitions, and consonant sounds were deprecated. Theodor W. Adorno coined the expression “canon of prohibitions.”⁶ Social distinction therefore was directly inscribed into the composition practices of the new music scene. In the ideology of the scene itself, and their historiographers, those prohibitions were understood as being necessitated by musical progress—a historico-aesthetic idea that inherited a thought pattern from the Enlightenment. Even though, on the surface, composing within this scene is essentially an intellectual act at the composer’s desk, this practice is, in fact, a complex social practice directly linked to the elitist intellectual habitus of the composers. For one thing, composers of new music also practice theory: they write about music, develop their own aesthetics, and publish articles or even books. In these texts, they show their literacy and education just as they refer to high culture philosophers and poets in their music. In so doing, they prefer particularly demanding, learned, and hermetic poets and thinkers like Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Hölderlin, and the like. Composers of new music also distance themselves from naïve composition practices in that they show knowledge of music history and suggest that they position themselves responsibly in this history. Religious, existentialist, and spiritualistic topics play a central role in the music of that scene. The music is being staged as an important, world-exploring art that is related to the most significant topics of humankind. In the descriptions of their music, they emphasize intellectuality, the unusual, anomalies, otherness, and experimentalism. They use a language that favors tricky, refined, playful, and metaphorical ways of speaking—their texts are not supposed to be read by everyone. Also, while, on the surface, the texts that accompany their compositional practice often suggest an educational function, they stage
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themselves, in fact, as initiates of an impenetrable, highly demanding, and meaningful sphere of knowledge or cultural practice that is not accessible to everyone. The sound and style of new music can almost be seen as sedimentation of the ideology of progress and the social-distinctive habitus of intellectuals that is hidden behind that ideology. By the end of the twentieth century, there existed scenes within jazz and so-called popular music (and that is one reason why this term is unfortunate) that shared many characteristics of the new music scene and its habitus, making it clear that some jazz and popular music have long since also become fields of activity for intellectuals as described by Mommsen. Partly, this led to an at least temporary mixture of these scenes. An example of that development is the German label Mille Plateaux, founded in 1993. Whereas the secessions and avant-garde movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were supported by patronage, in the second half of the twentieth century, the new music scene mainly survived due to state subventions, especially the broadcasting companies, which were obliged to pursue an independent promotion of culture, at least in Germany. In this constellation, new music was leading an existence largely detached from other musical cultures while always remaining negatively related to them. In that sense, its existence depended on popular music. Many music historians themselves who focused on new music as the most important music of the twentieth century belonged to the social sphere of the intellectuals, too. Therefore, they shared their values and selections and made it seem natural that a history of twentieth-century music exclusively dealt with that specific (socially marginal) kind of music.
2 Extending and Redefining the Concept of Music Even though most composers of classical music did not change their idea of what music was, some composers significantly extended and redefined the concept of music and its consequent practices. For these composers, music became more and more open to include all audible material; as Edgard Varèse put it: “As far back as the twenties, I decided to call my music ‘organized sound’ and myself, not a musician, but ‘a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.’ Indeed, to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise. But after all, what is music but organized noises?”⁷
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For this development, futurism was the most radical movement in this regard. In his manifesto L’arte dei rumori, from 1913, Luigi Russolo demanded an almost “angry” demarcation, being removed from nineteenth-century musical practices and aesthetic ideals. Notwithstanding his respect for that music—Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner are names he emphasized—he argued that the busy, energetic, technologically advanced, and industrialized modern age demanded a new kind of music and aesthetics. In music, the roughness of machine sounds needed to be equaled with sounds that were louder, rougher, and stronger. The new feeling of life had to be expressed in a new way. Russolo constructed noise instruments (intonarumori), and he built an airplane motor to create artificial noise music directly related to the new inventions of contemporary technology. Futurism found followers in Russia too and formed a substantial strand in approximately ten years after its launch in Italy. In Russia, the respective music often had a political agenda. As an example, Arseny Avraamov’s Symphony of Sirens, composed in 1922 for the fifth anniversary of the revolution “used the services of a huge cast of choirs (joined by spectators), the foghorns of the entire Soviet Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery guns, a number of full infantry regiments (including a machine-gun division), hydroplanes, and all the factory sirens of Baku.”⁸ Despite the fact that musical futurism was a short-lived small movement that had hardly any direct followers, it either influenced many other composers or represented in a pointed way what was a more or less clear aspect with other composers. Constructing new instruments and experimenting with new kinds of sound, thereby including all sorts of noises, became two elements that are characteristic of many twentieth-century musics. Several composers manipulated instruments, invented new ones, or experimented at least with new ways of playing traditional instruments. In this regard, John Cage’s prepared piano became almost a symbol for these practices, and this is also true for Europe since the New York school became the most present non-European music within the European new music scene. Later, composers like Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki focused on timbre, often using sound masses in their compositions to produce unheard sound effects. It is not surprising that (not just for technical but also for aesthetic, ideological reasons) the twentieth century saw a leap in inventions of electronic instruments, especially between 1920 and the synthesizer era of the 1970s, before the computer took over. Only some of the electronic instruments of the earlier times made their way into the collective memory like the theremin, the Ondes martenot, and the trautonium: the Ondes martenot probably because of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony (1948), and the other two because of their respective inclusion into film music. In the new music scene, electronic music played
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an important role in the 1950s, for instance Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Studio für elektronische Musik (WDR) in Cologne or Luciano Berio at the Studio di Fonologia Musicale in Milan. In 1956, Louis and Bebe Barron, supported by John Cage, composed the first solely electronic film score for Forbidden Planet. Before that, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry had begun to compose music with recorded sound that was manipulated using tape recorders, the so-called musique concrète. Later in Paris, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) was founded, shifting the focus to the computer. The fact that computers, with which recorded sounds can be altered in a variety of ways and synthetic sounds can be produced, became affordable in the course of the 1980s helped to distribute composition practices that used the most diverse forms of noise. At the same time, many composers and improvisers (a difference that is, for our context, of no relevance) started using other materials in order to produce noise music. The Swiss duo Voice Crack, for instance, started in the 1980s to use all kinds of everyday electronics to compose music. Here, composing meant deconstructing, rebuilding, and repurposing machines with new functions—just as in musique concrète, sounds had been deconstructed, rebuilt, and given new meanings. Noise has often been used for high-volume music, very often with the aim of aesthetically or politically shaking the audiences up as well as irritating or provoking them. Starting in the 1970s, industrial music by bands like the British Throbbing Gristle or the Australian SPK used loud noises for this purpose. They combined the use of disturbing sounds with topics that were shocking for many people at the time, such as mental illness, war, violence, death, and sex. In these cases, getting rid of a traditional concept of music was a political act. Although using entirely different instruments and coming from different traditions, the composer Dror Feiler shows the same tendency. Other composers such as Merzbow (alias Masami Akita) from Japan do not associate working with noise with a political intention. No other band can summarize the extension of the concept of music as clearly as the Einstürzende Neubauten from Berlin: they used everyday objects that they found in the scrapyard or elsewhere, built their own instruments, used recorded concrete sounds, even demolished the stage to produce sounds, and used extremely loud sounds. On the back cover of their first album from 1981 (see figure 1), they characteristically portrayed their instruments. Echoing the early avant-garde movements, they principally wanted to criticize and renew the idea of music as well as add a new intensity to it.⁹ In the music video of the song Blume from the 1993 album Tabula Rasa (see figure 2), they quoted self-reflectively the intonarumori of the futurists. During the 1980s, their music had been part of an al-
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Figure 1: Back cover from album Kollaps, 1981. Photograph Peter Gruchot, used with kind permission of the Einstürzende Neubauten.
ternative punk-influenced lifestyle in which altered states of consciousness played a central role. Certainly, the expansion of musical sounds within the new music scene was part of the application of the “canon of prohibitions.” It is therefore difficult to say how much punk and industrial music, which in turn wanted to re-intensify music’s effect and rather to critique mainstream as well as intellectual music cultures, were committed to this earlier new music development. Be that as it may, noises have by now become omnipresent in all kinds of music. Also, music made solely from noises is still alive. Despite this fact, most music listeners still differentiate between musical sounds and noise. Noise music is just one element of a pluralistic music scene.
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Figure 2: Still from the music video Blume (from the album Tabula Rasa, 1993), used with kind the permission of the Einstürzende Neubauten.
3 Devaluation of the Concept of the Artwork In 1969, Sigmar Polke created a famous painting, with the upper right corner painted black. On the canvas, in plain typewriter letters, one reads: “Higher beings commanded: paint the upper right corner black!” This painting presents, in a nutshell, the critique of the traditional cult of genius, which also implies the inviolability and organicity of the artwork. During the twentieth century, the concept of the artwork has again and again been attacked. In the first half of the century, the Dada movement, in particular, realized this critique of the artwork. To be sure, in the field of music, Dada did not play such a big role. However, Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (1917– 1923) has been viewed in the light of Dada. The compositions that share this main title are short pieces that are meant to be repeated for a long time—music that fills the room like decoration. This idea broke with the nineteenth-century listening ideal that requested quiet focusing on the music; instead, Satie wanted the listeners to pursue other activities. At about the same time, in 1919, Erwin Schulhoff composed several Dada compositions. Already the title of his Sonata Erotica is, undoubtedly, an ironical reference to history. The pun not only ironizes one of the most highly esteemed artworks of the era of the cult of genius (Sinfonia Eroica) but also substitutes heroism with eroticism, an especially bodily pleasure that seems far away from the main con-
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tents of the canon of nineteenth-century high culture. Also, it uses traditional terminology and musical instructions in a parodistic way. The last short section of the very short piece is called “finale.” The piece is composed for a non-existing instrument, the Solo-Muttertrompete (solo mother trumpet); it ends with a nine-fold piano, etc. The piece is “for men only” and consists essentially of sounds of a female orgasm. Igor Stravinsky did not compose Dada pieces like those mentioned, but his, also often ironic, commentaries emphasize a point of view that is decidedly opposed to the romantic ideal of the artwork. For instance, Stravinsky wrote: “This is the place to remember that, in the field entrusted to us, if it is true that we are intellectuals, our task is not to think but to work.¹⁰ In 1912, Arnold Schönberg had written about Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: His Ninth is most strange. In it, the author hardly speaks as an individual any longer. It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author who used Mahler merely as his spokesman, as his mouthpiece. […] We shall know as little about what his Tenth (for which, as also in the case of Beethoven, sketches exist) would have said as we know about Beethoven’s or Bruckner’s. It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too near to the hereafter. Perhaps the riddles of this world would be solved, if one of those who knew them were to write a Tenth. And that probably is not to take place.¹¹
This is romantic aesthetics in its purest form. In some sense, it is much more appropriate to ascribe many of Schönberg’s and most of Alban Berg’s works to what one might call atonal late romanticism rather than expressionism. Stravinsky’s position was a radical answer to such traditional views. It is hard to say whether the success story of jazz can to be related to this development. To be sure, jazz was mainly an African-American product. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of the artwork that came from nineteenth-century middle-class ideologies does not correspond to the central role of improvisation in jazz. One could imagine, however, that jazz was spreading throughout Europe so rapidly and across all social classes because the strict romantic ideals of art began to dissolve. Interestingly, composers like Schulhoff and Stravinsky echoed jazz in many of their works. In fact, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt suspected as early as 1927 that “the influence of Jazz, both direct and indirect, is so great that one can say that 90 percent of new music is unthinkable without it.”¹² In 1962, Umberto Eco published his book Opera Aperta (The Open Work). Therein, Eco describes openness as a key feature of modern art. He starts his
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book actually with examples from recent music history: Stockhausen, Berio, Henri Pousseur, and Pierre Boulez—composers who used different kinds of chance operations in some of their compositions or performances (such music is called aleatoric). The openness of the artwork had received new impetus in the late 1950s with this kind of aleatoric music. In contrast to the earlier movements from the Dada context, aleatoric music was placed at the center of interest of the new music scene. In the same year, the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik festival took place in Wiesbaden.¹³ During this event, a concert grand piano was destroyed—a symbolic act aimed at the destruction of the bourgeois art system. The idea, as well as the term, of Fluxus was invented by George Maciunas in New York; however, the movement soon spread over Europe, especially Germany and France. In his manifesto, presented at the Düsseldorf theater Festum Fluxorum Fluxus in 1963 (see figure 3), Maciunas states: Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, “intellectual,” professional & commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art—PURGE THE WORLD OF “EUROPANISM”! […] PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART: Promote living art, anti-art, promote NON-ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.¹⁴
At this time, happenings became important that dissolved the artworks into actions, often involving the spectators. Although these developments or events took place before 1968, it is reasonable to speculate whether they are foreshadowing the mentality of the 1968 era. At first sight, one might read the devaluation of the concept of the artwork as an opening of older concepts coming from the inside of the new music scene. And while, to a certain extent, it was just that (think of Eco, Stockhausen, Berio, Pousseur, Boulez, etc.), it also came as a critique of bourgeois ideals. This criticism was partly from outside of the leading music scenes but still from intellectual circles (Dada and Fluxus) and was partly from countercultures that appeared within popular culture (punk and industrial), taking up the common thread of artistically staged countercultures in the twentieth century. Blixa Bargeld’s manifesto Stimme frißt Feuer, from 1988, resembles in many aspects the futurist, Dada, and Fluxus ideas. And with jazz and its different art concepts, an entirely different tradition swept over Europe. Furthermore, the tendency of disregarding the traditional concept of the artwork was in itself a pluralistic phenomenon. The abandonment of the romantic values that are connected to the concept of the artwork simply opens the historian’s gaze to a much greater plurality of music.
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Figure 3: Manifesto of Georges Maciunas, Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, Düsseldorf, February 1963.
Interestingly, for the dominating popular music culture, the artwork was never an issue—neither in the sense of the supporting ideology nor in the sense of grim criticism. It just did not play any significant role. To be sure, in the sense of a self-contained and completed art product, the studio album became increasingly important in the second half of the twentieth century, but the romanticmetaphysical nimbus of the autonomous work of art did not accompany it.
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4 Collage Since the 1960s, collage techniques became important for many composers. In several cases, composing meant putting together disparate and very often pre-existing materials. Undeniably, all kinds of sophistication make such a statement problematic. One might ask what are the differences between assemblage, montage, and collage. One might ask how many quotations make a composition a collage. And if the claim is made that collage practices are characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century, it is easy to give examples showing that collage always played an important role. How voices have been added to or removed from existing motets in the thirteenth century, the tradition of the parody mass, quodlibets, pasticcios, and potpourris—they all share some features with collage techniques. Still, however, it seems to make sense to uphold that claim. Musical compositions that emphasize stylistic discontinuities, play with the disparity of their material, and highlight the contrasting elements used do not seem to have existed nearly to the same extent in earlier times. Many compositions from the second half of the twentieth century can be recognized as collages without knowledge of the pre-existing materials; some compositions even only suggest pre-existing materials. Thus the idea of mixing the disparate seems to be a core idea. Collage techniques first appeared in the visual arts and literature in the first half of the twentieth century, namely in cubism, Dadaism, and surrealism. In the field of music, such practices seem to have gained comparable importance only in the late 1960s. In 1968, three famous compositions, independent of each other, appeared using collage techniques in a very drastic way: the Beatles’ Revolution 9 (1968), Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968/69), and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu (1966). All three works differ in the way they use collage. Revolution 9 is a tape composition that consists of recorded and manipulated materials just as musique concrète. But in contrast to musique concrète, Revolution 9 highlights the breaks and differences in the materials used. Berio’s Sinfonia uses lots of material from recent classical music, especially the first half of the twentieth century. A special role is played by the scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony (1894), which is being employed as a kind of a material basis upon which other quoted materials and new sounds unfold that are in line with the character of the other movements. Zimmermann’s Musique pour les soupers de Roi Ubu was certainly one of the most radical collage compositions at the time of its publication; this specific work consists almost exclusively of manipulated pre-existing materials from several centuries. It is not
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by chance that the name of this “ballet noir” refers to Alfred Jarry’s play, which was highly appreciated by Dadaists and surrealists. From this time onward, collage techniques became an integral part of composition practices. Even Dmitri Shostakovich quoted in his last symphony (no. 15) from 1971 so many sources and did it in such a blatant way that one can easily see a relation to collage techniques. Alfred Schnittke started composing polystylistic works early in the 1970s. These works do not so much mix preexisting compositions as imitate (and modify) styles of music. Whether one calls them collages or not therefore very much depends on the definition of the term. Anyway, the similarity is obvious. In his Concerto Grosso No. 1 from 1977, Schnittke plays with listeners’ expectations, disappointing tonal climactic processes by leading into atonal clusters or dissolving atonal developments into major triads, confronting baroque idioms with romantic or new music sounds. It is very difficult to determine the reasons for this development, but one might entertain some speculations that also demonstrate how intimately the characteristics discussed are intertwined. For one thing, the devaluation of the artwork might have been a presupposition about the idea to create art from pre-existing works that no longer seemed untouchable. Also, one might almost feel longing for dissolution or rejection of the romantic ideals of the organic and the uniform that came along with postmodernism. Schnittke’s title Moz-Art à la Haydn (1977) playfully illustrates this deconstruction that is undeniably also an homage. Moreover, the collage is made possible by the abolition of an obligatory musical grammar. Blurring the limits of what music is, therefore, certainly helped to enforce such approaches to making music. Postmodernism was also accompanied by criticism of historical meta-narratives (for instance, by Jean-François Lyotard) and the dissolution of the division between high and mass culture—both factors clearly support the idea of mixing the apparently disparate. Parallel to the approaches mentioned, a DJ culture developed as part of the hip-hop culture initiated by African-American youths in New York. Hip-hop music is based on records that were in a more and more virtuosic way being used to compose new music using turntables. Since then, turntablism has become a growing art leaving the framework of hip-hop and spreading internationally. It also included composers that did not stem from DJ cultures, like Christian Marclay. His album More Encores was published in 1989; each of its pieces reworks the music by another musician, demonstrating not only the idea of working with pre-existing materials but also the idea of dissolving the border between high and low music cultures: Johann Strauss, John Zorn, Frédéric Chopin, Louis Armstrong, John Cage, Jimi Hendrix, and so on. In the same year, John Oswald published his album Plunderphonics, a term that Oswald invented that highlights the collage approach to composition that became so important in the second half
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of the twentieth century. In the works found on this album, Oswald also recomposes works by other composers, sometimes more than one. During the 1980s and 1990s, the sampler and then the computer made sampling techniques easily available, and this has certainly driven the emergence and popularization of the mash-up genre. Many of these practices are strictly speaking illegal. It is a very telling fact that collage techniques presuppose or imply discontinuities with romantic ideals and that it led to questions regarding copyright law, which originated exactly at the same time when the ideal of the genius, the autonomous artwork, and the unity of the artwork were developing or flourishing. For John Oswald, plunderphonics has not only an aesthetic but also an ethical and political agenda. By the end of the twentieth century, copyright law had become an aesthetic issue that can prototypically be illustrated by Negativland and the lawsuit by U2 for using excerpts from a U2 song within a highly complex collage, mixing several kinds of materials on a single album that shows the War World II airplane “U2” on its cover (1991). Negativland used this event to make the entire lawsuit another artwork. They published many documents from the lawsuit, a self-reflective collage in another medium, and used this collection also as an aesthetic statement. Hardly any other artifact could better illustrate the importance of collage at the end of the twentieth century. Collage technique is almost like twentieth-century pluralism in a nutshell. And it is even pluralistic on at least two levels: on the one hand, it is pluralistic because it brings together many kinds of music; on the other hand, it is also pluralistic in that it has probably many roots. For it is unlikely that the important role of the collage was simply the result of the devaluation of the artwork. Despite perhaps being true for Berio, Zimmermann, Schnittke, and the like, it certainly is not for hip-hop music stemming from African-American culture. All these ways to use collage techniques are phenomena converging in specific ways because twentieth-century pluralism suggested such composition practices: the growing complexity of society and, at the same time, the acceptance of different lifestyles during the second half of the century made such mixtures possible and likely.
5 Collaboration with the Media Music always interacted with other cultural practices. Very early on, music was part of religious practices. Obviously, therefore, music was often part of intermodal cooperation. In ancient Greece, tragedies were performed with music; opera always implied complex cooperation between librettist and composer, scene
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painter, singer, director, and so on. The same is true of incidental music and ballet. Yet with the rise of film and cinema at the very end of the nineteenth century, a whole new area of cooperation was instigated, which proved to be extremely influential and important in the course of the twentieth century. To be sure, the cooperation of music and film had its forerunners in diverse intermodal art forms in the nineteenth century. Be that as it may, film music is closely linked to the twentieth century and supported by cinema, television, video, and DVD cultures. The cooperative relationship between the composer and the rest of the film team, especially the screenwriter and director, may differ. On the one hand, there were changes in film music practices during the twentieth century, but there are also differences depending on film types or genres like animation film, film musical, and so on. During the silent movie era, improvised or half-improvised practices were very important. Accordingly, they also differed depending on the movie, the cinema, the musicians, and so on. Most composition practices of early cinema were a mixture of improvisation, arrangements, and/or collages of existing music as well as original composing. Often, films were distributed with a so-called cue sheet, a sheet of paper that listed well-known and easily available music that should be played with the film. The cue sheets specified more or less precisely where the music should be used, but they always demanded a high degree of improvising or composing sufficiently coherent film music. Also, film musicians probably completed the lists ad libitum. Out of these practices, the custom of publishing short excerpts with music in the form of anthologies especially designed for use in musical film accompaniment were produced. Very often, these anthologies were organized by keywords referring to types of film scenes, such as a battle, a wedding, and so on, or referring to the musical or emotional character, like a graceful dance, resignation, hurry, etc. Probably the most elaborated anthology of this kind was the Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik by Hans Erdmann and Giuseppe Becce, containing a highly systematic key for different kinds of music fitting for many film scenes; it appeared in 1927 just before the dawn of sound film. Early on, for some films original compositions were produced, for instance Camille Saint-Saëns’ composition for André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy’s film L’assassinat du duc de Guise (1908); some original compositions for films became famous during the reception history of these works, like Edmund Meiselʼs music for Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Gottfried Huppertz’ score for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Often, film scores that were composed for an entirely silent film and were intended to be distributed with the film still reflected the typical mixture of arrangement, collage, and original composition by using lots of pre-existing music, for example Becce’s score for Carl
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Froehlich’s Richard Wagner (1913) and Joseph Carl Breil’s music for David Wark Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). During the sound film era, starting shortly before 1930, the practice of film music certainly changed; however, many aspects remain common today. Very often directors present film composers a so-called temporary track—this is a list of music that is intended to give an impression of how the music should sound like. Normally, the composers then compose an original score that resembles the mood or character of the music of the temporary track. Despite this difference, the similarity between the cue sheet and the temporary track is obvious. Usually, composers have only a very short period of time to compose the music. That is one reason for the widespread practice to split composing and instrumentation. In the post-production process of a film, where the music is being added, the music editor plays another important role in shaping the music because one of the tasks is to synchronize movies and music. After seeing a first screening of the film, the composer watches it step by step to decide where he or she is going to use music and what kind. During this process, the producer, director, composer, and music editor are present, and they delve into a discussion. The more important the sound design of a movie became, the more cooperation between the sound department and composer became relevant. Already for the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (directed by Philip Kaufman in 1978), the composer Denny Zeitlin and the sound designer Ben Burtt collaborated in the post-production process. Thus, although the composer’s contribution to the music is the most important element, the work of the orchestrator and the music editor, the discussions with producer and director, the collaborations with the sound department, and the suggestions of the screenwriter also play an important role. Sometimes, this collaboration leads to famous long-time collaborations, as in the case of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann or Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Sometimes the collaboration manifests itself in earlier stages of the film production. Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, for example, played music even during the shooting. Both directors had or have a special relationship with music. From 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) onward, Kubrick exclusively used pre-existing music that he selected himself; David Lynch used, and still uses, pre-existing music, too, and collaborated intensely with his sound designer Alan Splet, for example in Eraserhead (1977). Quentin Tarantino has concrete music in mind very early on in the process of his filmmaking, and he includes the music in his screenwriting. Compositional practice in the early days of video games very much depended on early computer technology. Even though the earliest video games were silent, already in the 1980s the music by Kōji Kondō, who composed music for the
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Nintendo Entertainment System (originally released in 1985), and a few others became an important element of video games. The technical development was quick, and by the end of the twentieth century, original symphonic music could be integrated into the video game, such as Michael Giacchino’s score for The Lost World (1999). The essential difference between older composition practices and compositions for video games concerns the interactive aspect of games: the players significantly influence the course of the game. Therefore, the music needs to be able to adapt to ever new constellations. The composer has to invent music that is flexible enough to work in a nonlinear way. Film composers have developed compositional strategies that would allow easy extensions or reductions in order to enable the adaptation of the music to the movie. However, video games need much more flexibility while, at the same time, composers have to overcome the problem that the possible duration of a video game must not lead to musical monotony. Since the very beginning, film music has played an important role in Europe. But even less than other kinds of music, film music cannot be reduced to any specific region. Film became a global phenomenon early on. Even though Hollywood played an outstanding role in film history, film music is a global phenomenon. Apart from the fact that India also has a particularly strong film production, many of Hollywood’s successful early film composers were immigrants from Europe, such as Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa, or Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
6 Composition as Teamwork In 1921, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel was composed collectively by composers of the Groupe des Six after a libretto of Jean Cocteau; in 1966, Jüdische Chronik was premiered in the Federal Republic of Germany (in Cologne) as well as in the German Democratic Republic (in Leipzig). This composition was also a collective work, namely by composers from both parts of Germany who were reflecting upon German anti-Semitism. In both cases, the composers were working independently. One finds cases of this kind of collaboration also in earlier times, for example Der Stein der Weisen from the late eighteenth century or the Variations on a Russian Theme from the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, compositions that were created together with more than one composer were seldom before the twentieth century. However, such collaborative music composition became common practice in jazz and rock bands and later “popular music” bands. Such groups created permanent artifacts in the form of records, audio cassettes, CDs, and music videos. Undeniably, bands differ in the way they collaborate. In some cases, the band
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members have defined roles: in some bands, it is mostly one person that composes the songs; in other bands, several members compose, or they actually develop the songs together. Improvising or composing music in a group may result in a specific style, character, or sound that emerges from the collaboration and cannot be explained by the sum of the contributions of the participants. As R. Keith Sawyer writes: “Emergence refers to collective phenomena in which, as it is said, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.’ Recent studies of emergence by complexity scholars suggest that emergent phenomena are unpredictable, contingent and hard to explain in terms of the group’s components.” In this strong sense, it is true that “the creativity of a group cannot be associated with any one person. All members contribute and their interactional dynamics result in the performance” or the recording.¹⁵ With this in mind, it becomes apparent that in the twentieth century, rock bands and their names took on a function analogous to the great composer names of earlier times. Although the first musicians of the emerging popular music culture, such as James Brown and Elvis Presley, were still primarily known as individuals, since the 1960s more and more bands have appeared that have become famous as bands: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Pink Floyd, and so on—most of them coming from England. In jazz, this phenomenon had been foreshadowed by groups like the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, and so on. Interestingly, though, their constellations were flexible, and they were usually called after their leader, which is not the case of the later rock bands. The 2004 movie Metallica: Some Kind of Monster documents the psychotherapy of a band. Since the metal group had not published a new album for three years, group therapy seemed necessary. Hardly could anything better illustrate the importance of collaboration than this look into one of the most successful bands in the world. Very often, the producer and his team have a crucial role in the composition process. Designing the acoustic product by foregrounding or backgrounding single voices and by cutting, mixing, and generally editing the recording is only the most widely spread method of contributing to the band’s work. Depending on the equipment, all kinds of sound effects can be produced in the studio. The producer and his team bring their technical knowledge into the composition process. They use the possibilities of placing the microphones as well as may use the entire apparatus of the studio creatively. Echo effects, multitracking, slower or faster recordings, and backward playing are some techniques they explore to contribute to the songs. George Martin and his team are famous for their contributions to the studio albums of the Beatles. Many ideas of creating unusual
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sounds and sound effects have been invented by this team in collaboration with the band members.
7 Composing in a Globalized World Many composition practices of the twentieth century became influenced by the process of globalization. It is impossible to define when globalization began. In terms of composition practices, globalization manifested itself in multiple intercultural exchanges of musical parameters (single intercultural contacts always existed). In the nineteenth century, such intercultural musical exchanges became more and more widespread; already in 1849, the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium asked in the form of a competition for an article investigating the influence of “Oriental” on “Occidental” music during the crusades, thereby showing an awareness of intercultural influences.¹⁶ Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Saint-Saëns was able to travel to North Africa and process his experiences musically. At the same time, Claude Debussy developed new scales and harmonics from his contact with Javanese Gamelan music. Colonization, imperialism, the development of transport technology, and travel facilities expanded the knowledge of other cultures and their music. Such knowledge began to exert influence on composition practices. Already in 1827, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause had suggested enriching melodies of European music by adapting microtones from Indian music. This demand was taken up by Ferruccio Busoni in the early twentieth century in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1907), and some composers used, and still use today, microtones in their compositions throughout the twentieth century. In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz, which might be considered a globalized genre since its very creation, also spread all over Europe. It is almost customary that intercultural exchanges differ in terms of degree, character, and intention, among other aspects. Saint-Saëns encountered music in Egypt and integrated it in order to give the piece a special character as well as to add a biographical note, and Debussy heard Gamelan music at the 1889 Paris world exhibition, which was itself a reflection of globalization; moreover, whereas Krause explicitly referred to Indian music, it is uncertain whether Busoni’s proposal of using microtones reflects an influence of globalization or it can alone be explained by experimental endeavors. Despite all differences, these examples demonstrate that globalization engendered intercultural exchanges in composition practices, which also reflected the technological, economic, and political conditions that made such borrowings possible. The reason for this is that without easy and quick traveling, sound and video recording, medical support, and international economic relations, such intercultural exchange could not be realized in such embracing measures.
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Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, globalization led to direct cooperation between musicians from different cultures. One of the most famous examples is the Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, who often visited the United States and Europe and collaborated with George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin, Zubin Mehta, and Philip Glass. In the 1960s, Indian music was met with a special resonance partly because it seemed to fit into the flower power movement. The influence of Indian music is mirrored by terms like “raga rock” and “Indo jazz.” Migration also led to all kinds of intercultural exchanges in composition practices. In Germany, for example, the strong Turkish communities developed their own musical style called R‘n’Besk. Under the label of world music, all kinds of mixtures of Western and nonWestern musics were being produced. Music from several regions of the world became available. Specialized record, or later CD, stores were established. Such music was sampled, imitated, and quoted; musicians collaborated. A very famous example is Paul Simon’s album Graceland from 1986, recorded in South Africa together with local musicians. Although Simon is a US musician, his music was widely received all over Europe, illustrating the globalized context in which such music not only originated but also flourished. It goes without saying that the cross-cultural encounters led to very different results not only in terms of the genres involved like jazz, classical music, and rock, among others, but also in the more abstract sense. Sometimes these genres created new musical styles, and sometimes the different styles did not achieve a homogeneous result (and maybe they did not want to). Sometimes the incorporated music added just a color, and sometimes it was deeply hidden in a variety of sampled musical particles. Such practices have led to political and aesthetic critiques that naturally rest on the aesthetic and political positions and premises of their respective authors. There seems to be a dual relation between twentieth-century musical pluralism and globalization. First, globalization opened the eyes to other kinds of music: composers and music historians started to accept the relativity of the Western music tradition, leading to an acceptance of the plurality of aesthetics and composition practices. Second, composers were influenced by those musics further expanding the plurality of available composition practices.
Conclusion The examples illustrate the plurality of composition practices during the twentieth century. A historian who accepts this plurality will realize that the special role devoted to a specific kind of music—usually new music—was the result of an ideologically re-
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stricted perspective. The music history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries consisted of many strands. Some of them were existent throughout the time span covered by this handbook; some of them were added sometime during that period. This plurality reflects the highly differentiated social outlook of European societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its historiographical acceptance. Many factors promoted this plurality: democratization led to equal rights for all social strata; globalization introduced Europeans to more and more different kinds of music; the expansion of the education system created more foundations for cultural activities in all social classes; economic growth made such activities financially possible and produced spare time for them; technological developments made some composition practices available to persons without specialized education. While it is to a certain extent legitimate and reasonable to write the history of some specific kind of music—jazz, film music, musical, and new music, among many others—any general history of music has to consider the complexity of its parallel and intertwined strands. This is all the more apparent when one takes the many interrelations between composition practices into account. For example, collaboration with the media often implied using other sound material than just the sound of traditional instruments. Thus it is related to the extension of the concept of music. Also, it presupposes some kind of devaluation of the artwork. Moreover, the intercultural exchanges probably supported these dissolutions and extensions or redefinitions. Collage techniques were also encouraged by these two tendencies as well as by music’s role in the media. Film and game music more and more demanded cooperation between sound designers and composers and the studio that was doing the final cut, reflecting the teamwork aspect that is also crucial in other composition contexts. After reading the present tour de force through twentieth-century music history, one might ask, where are Sofia Gubaidulina, Edith Piaf, James Last, Nena, and all the others, and where is folk music? To be sure, the composition practices could have been selected differently. Another perspective, such as a quantitative one that accentuated which music was most heard or most widely spread, would have led to an entirely different result. A more sociological perspective would have asked what milieus actually listened to what kind of music. From an economic point of view, the specific relationship of certain composition practices to the market would have been the focus. From a political perspective, phenomena such as the use of compositions for political statements or differences between composition practices in West and East European contexts during the Cold War would have to be emphasized. Since these contexts are going to be addressed in many of the following chapters, it seemed useful here to take a cross-contextual perspective.
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Notes Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik I (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788), III. Benjamin Suchoff, ed., Béla Bartók, Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 29 – 32. Albrecht Riethmüller, ed., The Role of Music in European Integration: Conciliating Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 13 – 15. Jürgen Osterhammel argues that the term “West” is more ideological than the term “Europe”: “Was war und ist ‘der Westen’? Zur Mehrdeutigkeit eines Konfrontationsbegriffs,” in id., Die Flughöhe der Adler: Historische Essays zur globalen Gegenwart (München: C. H. Beck: 2017), 103. His arguments did not convince me; to me, the concept “Europe” is at least just as ideological. Frank Hentschel, “Neue Musik in soziologischer Perspektive: Fragen, Methoden, Probleme,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 5 (2010): 38 – 42. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 40. Edgard Varèse, “The Liberation of Sound,” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 18. Martin John Callanan, Sonification of You, Arseny (Arsenij) Mikhailovich Avraamov, 2016, http://sonification.eu/avraamov (accessed 12 May 2020). Blixa Bargeld, Stimme frißt Feuer (Berlin: Merve-Verlag, 1988), 119. The French original makes this point even clearer: “C’est ici le lieu de nous souvenir que, dans le domaine qui nous est dévolu, s’il est vrai que nous somme intellectuels, notre office n’est pas de cogiter, mais d’opérer.” Igor Strawinsky, Poétique musicale (Dijon: J. B. Janin, 1945), 79 (own translation). Arnold Schönberg, Style and Idea (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 34. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, “Perspektiven und Profile,” Melos 6 (1927): 74. See the photograph by Hartmut Rekort, Fluxus-Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik, 1962, https://www.staatsgalerie.de/g/sammlung/sammlung-digital/einzelansicht/sgs/werk/ein zelansicht/1ACA97606AA24EB8AD8C1848ED319C3C.html (accessed 18 December 2019). “Fluxus Manifesto,” 1963, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fluxus_manifesto.jpg (accessed 13 August 2020). R. Keith Sawyer, “Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration,” Psychology of Music 34, no. 2 (2006): 148. See http://musical-competitions.uni-koeln.de/app/dokumente/ee3c9b5fc20e680849f789a1 ae1af4d4 (accessed 18 December 2019).
Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophie der neuen Musik. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 12. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Bargeld, Blixa. Stimme frißt Feuer. Berlin: Merve-Verlag, 1988. Busoni, Ferruccio. Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1916. Clarke, David. “Elvis and Darmstadt, or: Twentieth-Century Music and the Politics of Cultural Pluralism.” Twentieth-Century Music 4, no. 1 (2007): 3 – 45.
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Cook, Nicholas, and Anthony Pople, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik. 2 Vols. Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788 – 1801. Hentschel, Frank. “Neue Musik in soziologischer Perspektive: Fragen, Methoden, Probleme.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 5 (2010): 38 – 42. Karlin, Fred, and Rayburn Wright. On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis, 2004. McDonald, Kari, and Sarah Hudson Kaufman. “‘Tomorrow never knows’: The Contribution of George Martin and His Production Team to the Beatles’ New Sound.” In Every Sound there Is: The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ and the Transformation of Rock and Roll, edited by Russel Reising, 139 – 157. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Bürgerliche Kultur und politische Ordnung: Künstler, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle in der deutschen Geschichte 1830 – 1933. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2002. Negativland. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. 2nd print. Concord: Seeland, 1996. Riethmüller, Albrecht, ed. The Role of Music in European Integration: Conciliating Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Was war und ist ‘der Westen’? Zur Mehrdeutigkeit eines Konfrontationsbegriffs.” In idem, Die Flughöhe der Adler: Historische Essays zur globalen Gegenwart, 101 – 114. München: C. H. Beck, 2017. Russolo, Luigi. Die Kunst der Geräusche. Translated by Owig DasGupta, edited by Johannes Ullmaier. Mainz: Schott, 2000. Sawyer, R. Keith. “Group Creativity: Musical Performance and Collaboration.” Psychology of Music 34, no. 2 (2006): 148 – 165. Schönberg, Arnold. Style and Idea, edited by Dika Newlin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950. Strawinsky, Igor. Poétique musicale. Dijon: J. B. Janin, 1945. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. “Perspektiven und Profile.” Melos 6 (1927): 72 – 78. Taruskin, Richard. The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Varèse, Edgard. “The Liberation of Sound.” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1 (1966): 11 – 19.
Further Reading Cox, Christoph, and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York: Continuum Press, 2004. Ross, Alex. The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Marc Perrenoud
3 Performing for Pay: The Making and Undoing of the Music Profession Born in 1930 near Tarbes (Hautes-Pyrénées) in the southwest of France, Claude Duscombs worked as an electrician in a small factory of the Bigorre region. He was also a drummer, starting to play as an autodidact in 1952 when a friend who played the accordion in rural festivals in the area proposed forming a duet. At the time, drums were still something new and a bit exotic in the French countryside. It was the symbol of “jass”—the term used by many said to refer to any lively music with drums. A snare drum, a kick drum, and a cymbal were the basic instruments that started to accompany the accordion in playing popular tunes, traditional songs, polkas, tangos, paso doble, waltzes, or javas (threebeat rhythm) in the musette style. During the 1960s, Duscombs added a hi-hat and a pair of toms to his set and played with local orchestras. The Benny Rolls and then the Blue Stars were mixing musette, typique (mambos and chachas), and some pop hits, mainly from the Beatles. The repertoire had to please more or less everyone since there were no specific venues and no specialized audiences. In the mid-1960s, the Blue Stars performed almost every Friday and Saturday and twice on Sundays (afternoon and night gigs), but the fees were too low to imagine making a decent living with music (see figure 1). Duscombs was a husband, about to become a father, and he could not carry on working all day in the factory as well as playing music three or four times each weekend. He had to choose between the music and his steady daytime job, so he stopped playing in 1968. In the rural area where he lived, there was no real labor market that could have permitted some players to earn a living, even though people in the Bigorre in the 1950s and 1960s never had the occasion to hear and see any other live bands than the local ones. This case shows how experiences of musicians could differ from the dominant “professionals” playing in a symphony orchestra or in studio sessions. That makes tackling the issue of “performing for pay” in Europe during the twentieth century quite a challenge. The variety of inferred social realities during the last century on the continent is so vast between “serious” and “popular” music, between national contexts, and between urban and rural areas as well that it could seem impossible to address this variety in a single chapter. To make the task more achievable, I will refer in the following pages to two basic concepts that allow us to better frame our object of study. In this chapter, I will be talking about “ordinary musicians” working in “art worlds.” In the work I https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-004
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conducted in the mid-2000s, I propose the notion of ordinary musicians, mainly in reference to those whom Howard S. Becker used to call “dance musicians” in his early works,¹ but extending the concept to include any musical genre to address any rank-and-file musician, neither rich nor famous. Ordinary musicians are the overwhelming majority of musicians, which is often forgotten in music histories. These musicians are rarely composers, but mostly performers. They can be self-employed or wage earners; they can be instrumentalists or vocalists—making a living playing live music and/or playing for studio recordings. They are Becker’s “outsiders” playing polkas in weddings and bebop in jazz clubs, and they are Patrick Süskind’s protagonist in his play Der Kontrabass (The Double Bass).² They are the elementary music makers, the quintessential “musickers.” From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, we will see how their work has evolved through the various career paths they could take in a place like Europe, with its cultural, economic, and political specificities—particularly compared to the USA, the other part of the Western world.
Figure 1: Claude Duscombs on stage with the Blue Stars in the 1960s.
Those ordinary musicians’ careers take place in diverse “art worlds.”³ This second basic concept, also coined by Becker, has become a hugely influential term in the social sciences. About 40 years ago, the interactionist sociologist developed the idea that artistic production is, in its essence, a collective work—relying on various organizations and practices that are guided by specific conventions—
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and that there are different chains of production for each “world.” This leads to an inductive approach, for instance to see to what extent musical genres or national contexts are forming these various worlds and to ask what are the different social, aesthetic, and economic conventions dictating employment and work relations for ordinary musicians. Following this main conceptual line, considering how the professional activity of ordinary musicians has evolved into more or less distinct worlds with their conventions during the twentieth century across Europe, the following question will be addressed: what was it like to be a performing musician in Europe in the twentieth century? At the intersection of sociology of work, cultural studies, and social history, in a chiefly materialist approach, we will see how economic and technological evolutions are consubstantial to cultural and political changes and how that affected performing musicians’ work and trade. This includes regulatory interventions, changes in the music and entertainment industries, and initiatives among the musicians themselves as part of trade unionism. Studies in the history of serious or popular music are abundantly rich with documents and archives from the “big names,” such as Arthur Honegger or Paul McCartney, whose works are considered to be landmarks in the great history of art. In contrast, one of the difficulties inherent in this chapter’s topic is the lack of sources on ordinary musicians. “Classical” orchestras, like symphonies, have been regulated in their organization in most European countries long before the beginning of the twentieth century, making it possible to find sources that at least partially reveal how musicians employed in those organizations lived and worked. However, in the more popular areas of the musical field, finding such information can be a lot more difficult. In the USA, the history of popular music and ordinary musicians has been researched far more extensively than in Europe, as early jazz, blues, bluegrass, and country music and artists have long been regarded as a part of the nation’s cultural heritage. The best example is probably the famous work of Alan Lomax, the folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and archivist of North American popular music, including books like Folk Song Style and Culture (1968) and The Land where the Blues Began (1970).⁴ In Europe, in addition to the language barrier that still tends to isolate each national field of study, the “highbrow-focused” tradition of musicology and history of art, which developed in the nineteenth century, has long been the only legitimate discourse on arts and music. With a focus on Germany, Martin Rempe notes that “the group of entertaining musicians and their daily work, which in a social history perspective is equally relevant, received far less attention.”⁵ Even though cultural studies opened the door for the serious study of popular music with the well-known work of Simon Frith and his classic The Sociology of Rock,⁶ European sociology only acknowledged at the turn of the twenty-
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first century that it was legitimate to study a much wider scope of music. This facilitated the study of the social history of music, not only in terms of “big” names and dominant genres in regard to stars and leading aesthetic trends, but also with a focus on mundane musical activities, from the philharmonic row player to the street singer. That major change of perspective allowed, for instance, to address the demarcation of labor markets on the grounds of musical hierarchies and professional standards without any preconception of who and what was worthy of being taken into account. Yet, ordinary musicians still remain hard to find, as shown in the methodological work in the contemporary social sciences. They do not appear separately in general employment statistics because they are considered too few to form an occupational group. Apart from the archives of musicians’ unions (which tend to focus on urban, “integrated professionals,” as Becker typifies the ones who have a registered activity [official concert programs, employment contracts, etc.]), ordinary musicians—unlike famous composers, conductors, and pop stars—have left very few traces. This chapter is structured into three parts, following a periodization of the “long twentieth century.” This periodization is, of course, flexible, as not all European countries developed simultaneously and as there are significant differences between urban and rural areas to be found within each country. The first part of the chapter starts from the last decades of the nineteenth century and ends in the 1930s. During that time, commercial musical entertainment was growing to become an important part of urban sociability, resounding in cafés, cabarets, and dance halls. With the entertainment business expanding and the transatlantic exchange intensifying, musicians formed trade unions in most European countries. The gramophone and cinema created new jobs for musicians. The second part of the chapter covers the mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1960s, a time that, despite the horror of the Second World War, can be considered a period when the music business in general and the music profession in particular became consolidated: musical entertainment became an industry; recording studios were multiplying; radio stations offered many gigs and even steady jobs; and “live” music was still in huge demand in clubs, dance venues, and music halls. The third part looks at the last third of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This period was characterized by the rise of pop music, huge audiences, and massive record sales as well as by technological changes that made professional equipment more widely available. From the advent of affordable solid-body guitars and transistor amplifiers to the rise of the home studio and the personal computer, tools for music production were getting into the hands of people without any musical skills and knowledge.
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In each part of the chapter, for each period, we will first see how the general socioeconomic, political, cultural, and technical contexts in Europe had an impact on musical performances, on the ordinary trade, and on the possible ways of being a performing musician. Then I will address the organization of musical activity, intermediate actors, and collective regulations of the work relations of performing musicians. We will see to what extent the “musical world” increasingly separated in several art worlds with their specific conventions.
1 The Early Twentieth Century: The Origins of the Modern Music Profession In the “long” twentieth-century perspective adopted in this handbook, there are many continuities from the last decades of the nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth century in the social, political, and economic context of musical work in Europe. In terms of politics, socialism was obviously the major trend of this period. In its diverse forms, more or less Marxist or anarcho-syndicalist, it framed the discussions on employment, job market regulation, and working conditions for any occupational group, including musicians. At the same time, romantic thought was extremely strong in Europe, whether it was seen as opposed to Marxism or combined with it, as shown, for instance, by Michael Löwy.⁷ Along that “revolutionary” period, the history of art and musicology has described and analyzed the advent of new aesthetics that distinguished themselves from the strictly classical forms in serious music around 1900. On the more popular side, jazz arrived in big European cities during the 1920s, but it took another ten years to be integrated fully into the repertoires of ordinary performing musicians. As a matter of fact, the cabaret style (café concerts in France, for instance) continually dominated performance settings in the early twentieth century. There were fewer and fewer musicians and singers performing in outside public spaces, like popular streets or squares. The familiar figure of the street musician tended to disappear, with the more skillful ones turning into cabaret artists and others into hoboes. Serious music concert halls and cabarets were different venues, but they were still part of the same musical world. In this world, people like Erik Satie or Claude Debussy could meet at the Chat Noir, the famous Parisian café concert, and performers navigated between playing art music and popular songs. This was also the world that Béla Bartók and Igor Stravinsky contributed to by working folk tunes and popular rhythms into their compositions. In this world, con-
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struction workers participated in the Italian bel canto tradition by singing opera tunes on their building sites. Regardless of the overall growth of commercial popular entertainment through cabarets, followed by the appearance of jazz, the labor market and musical worlds of working musicians were not yet separated in Europe. Obviously, there were significant differences between cities and rural areas in the social integration of music labor. In the countryside, music was mostly played by peasants who, having often learned to play an instrument in the army, mastered the fiddle, a horn of some kind, or the drums. In some rural regions, particular popular celebrations like the corrida (bullfight) in Spain and the south of France entailed an important tradition of bandas and peñas. In Belgium, parts of England, and the north of France, the mining industry and its paternalism supported a popular brass-band movement, which is still very much alive today. In those examples, performing musicians were not always paid for their activities, and even when they were, they could definitively not make a living from playing music, in contrast to those in big cities, where veritable labor markets for musicians and a real occupational space were emerging. For lots of urban musicians, the job was seasonal, with a distinct topography at that time: in cities during winter and at spas and at seaside resorts during summer. In the early twentieth century, there were probably more musicians (of all kinds and all skills) than ever because, for music to be listened to, it had to be performed at the same instance. As a strictly amateur activity, making music was part of the bourgeois education, especially for women, and mainly on the piano. By the end of the nineteenth century, the piano had become a musthave in bourgeois homes, played for the pleasure of the family. Its plebeian equivalent was the accordion. Called “le piano à bretelles” (shoulder-strap piano) in French, this instrument had been developed and perfected in Austria, Germany, France, and Italy during the first half of the ninetieth century—becoming the most popular instrument in most European countries at the turn of the twentieth century. So, in many ways, apart from permanent classical orchestras, amateur and professional worlds were blurred at the beginning of the century, making the musical labor market a stomping ground for semiprofessionals and sidelined classical orchestras with permanent players. The latter group of musicians had been a common feature in major European cities since the end of the eighteenth century. Some of these orchestras were firmly established cultural institutions by the first quarter of the twentieth century, but the work and employment conditions of these orchestras were not always clearly regulated. Furthermore, with the expansion of the music profession to cabarets, cafés, and recording or radio sessions, musicking became one of the most unregulated forms of labor. From serious to popular music, the beginning of the twentieth
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century was the time of the rise of musicians’ trade unions and their attempts to professionalize and negotiate pay and conditions. Often exploited by musical placement agencies, ordinary musicians worked in cinemas, restaurants, or cabarets, playing extremely diverse repertoires adapted to the demand of the venue, often twice a night. In order to make a decent living and defend their rights, these musicians joined unions like the Fédération des artistes musiciens de France, which was founded in 1902 and affiliated to the Fédération générale du Spectacle and to the Confédération générale du travail in 1909. Several researchers have done insightful work on that labor movement in France, which had a strong and lasting impact on the musical art world. Many authors have studied musicians’ unions: Martin Cloonan and John Williamson in Great Britain, Mathieu Grégoire in France, Manuel Deniz Silva in Portugal, Martin Rempe in Germany, and Angèle David-Guillou in Britain, France, and the USA.⁸ Those studies highlight common issues that arose in the emerging profession. What and who is a musician? Who may become a member of the union? How should musical work be valued, both intrinsically and economically? What is a good performance; who can decide on that; how much is a musical performance worth? What should be the minimal fee for playing live? Above all, did performing musicians perceive themselves as artists or laborers? Remarkably, these are questions that are still raised in debates on music labor today. On the fundamental question of the value of musical work, two major trends appeared in unionism. On the one hand, the social-romantic ideology, which was very powerful in Europe at the turn of the century, framed artistic activity as essentially different from ordinary labor. According to this ideology, the value of musical activity could not be measured in quantitative terms but solely depended on the talent of the respective musician. On the other hand, a more materialist trend, which has developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, tended to view musical activity as regular work, and sometimes even as alienated labor. The rise of musicians’ trade unions was a consequence of that double trend, expressing both the desire of professional recognition and the need to negotiate favorable working conditions and remuneration. For instance, Silva shows that in the 1910s the Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association hesitated between the recognition of the musicians as skilled service providers who deserved a proper remuneration and a struggle against the commodification of music.⁹ These debates existed in other parts of the world too (the USA, Chile, etc.) but were more directly polarized in Europe, marked both by romantic and materialist European ideological influences. On the issue of union membership, the main question that had to be decided was who was worthy of the title “musician”? While unions had an interest to create “closed shops” and therefore recruited semiprofessionals (as the British Mu-
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sicians’ Union especially did), they were also concerned with the prestige of the profession and thus pushed their members to master their instruments. In the same vein, they also defined standards of moral dignity, chiefly sobriety, to which union members had to abide. This is a convincing demonstration of the occupational uses and culture in the musical world, particularly at a time when the emerging unions tended to organize both members of classical orchestras and musicians working in “lowbrow” entertainment, some of them coming directly from the street. Nevertheless, “amateur” musicians, who were often parttime skilled professionals and used to play below the minimum wage, were at first despised by some unions, which eventually tried to incorporate them in order to control the job market and to negotiate employment conditions successfully. Competition between domestic and foreign musicians was also an issue in early twentieth-century Europe. Many musicians had transnational careers; German and Italian musicians could be found in almost every European country, for instance. While at first an internationalist and socialist rhetoric prevailed in the musicians’ union movement, it was soon supplanted by nationalist exclusion, which started with the First World War and intensified with the economic crisis following the Wall Street crash. In France, foreign union members were suspended in 1930, as pointed out by Grégoire.¹⁰ Finally, in the first years of the twentieth century, competition was also tough between civil musicians trying to professionalize their trade and army bands, which were very popular and in which every player had a military status and received steady pay. To sum up, at the turn to the twentieth century, ordinary musicians struggled on many fronts to get their work economically and socially acknowledged in a highly unregulated work environment, which over all of Europe was far from being differentiated into specialized art worlds.
2 The Mid-Twentieth Century: New Markets, New Jobs, and Increasing Professionalization In the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s, working conditions improved for musicians, but the trade became more exclusive and more sharply demarcated, to the detriment of amateurs and semiprofessionals. The market for domestic record players grew substantially during the 1920s. As the industry suffered from the first “disc crisis” in the following decade, radio arrived in many homes, providing free and varied musical broadcasts. Records and radio were strong competition for live musicians, many of whom could not find new jobs in record companies and radio orchestras. In the 1930s, the musical world as an occupa-
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tional space was taking shape as a pyramidal job market—with a few stable wage earners in classical orchestras and record and radio firms and a huge majority of intermittent employees or independents who rented out their workforce to cabarets and restaurant owners. In this mid-century period, music halls were still operating, offering often a large range of performances (magic, dancing, humor, etc.), always accompanied with live music. This provided job opportunities to versatile musicians who played all kinds of repertoires to accompany every show. This situation changed around 1960 with movies in cinemascope; the expansion of music programs, especially at new private radio stations (Europe 1, Radio Monte-Carlo, and Radio Télévision Luxembourg in France and Belgium, for instance); the growth of the record market; and the takeoff of television. However, change was far from abrupt. During the whole mid-century period, a vibrant live music business coexisted with a recording industry that was expanding due to major technological innovations, such as electrical recording, ribbon microphones, and in time tape recorders. Nevertheless, many of those changes had a huge impact on ordinary performing musicians and their trade. In the 1930s, sound film replaced the usual piano accompaniment or even entire orchestras in many venues, shifting musicians’ work for movies from theater to studios while drastically reducing the number of musicians employed to provide music for film. For example, in Germany, more than 12,000 jobs were lost in this sector, and in Great Britain, cinema accounted for four-fifths of the total paid musical employment. At the same time as radio spread in European homes, broadcasting orchestras multiplied all over the continent. These ensembles were often able to play all kinds of repertoire, from the most classical and serious music to jazz, rumbas, and cha-chas, as well as popular tunes and advertising jingles. They were as versatile as the cinema musicians of the previous period had been. Besides radio, the recording sector developed from the sales slump of the early 1930s to a successful industry by the end of the decade but it was still far from what it became in the last third of the century. Records (material and formats) and players (mechanical and then electric) were not standardized until the end of the 1950s, when 78rpm (revolutions per minute) discs disappeared for good. However, especially after the Second World War, record companies arose in every European country. In this midcentury period, the opportunity for musicians to be hired for sessions or even for steady positions at radio stations and recording studios appear to have become a successful career path, as it was in the USA,¹¹ but the job market was much more restrained to the most integrated professionals, in comparison to the relative openness in the early decades of the century. Technological changes also had a huge impact on the practices and the craft of professionals. Sound systems pairing microphones, amplifiers, and speakers
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were developed before the Second World War. These systems fundamentally affected the work of instrumentalists such as guitarists, who were not limited to a strictly rhythmic role anymore and were now able to alternate between chord strumming and solo playing, even in big bands. Subsequently, the work of whole bands evolved, from arrangements to the way of playing other instruments (especially drums and piano in the rhythmic section). After the war, technical improvements in microphones, amplifiers, and speakers allowed for powerful sound systems. Magnetic microphones were adapted to solid-body guitars, preventing audio feedback and making it possible to play much louder. Electric guitars and basses gained a more prominent place, paving the way for the advent of rock ‘n’ roll. In addition to more powerful voices and louder electric guitars, those developments in recording and amplifying techniques altered the whole musical world. They opened up a myriad of aesthetic possibilities, from serious jazz with fine, precise, and delicate sounds (George Russell, John Lewis, and Bill Evans, some of the most famous artists) to all kinds of experimental serious contemporary music, with Herbert Eimert at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer at Radio France’s Studio d’essai, or Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna in Milan. These pioneers and stars influenced the musical world of the rank-and-file musicians, which this chapter focuses on, setting the tone of what was aesthetically conceivable, suitable, and likable. With the development of the music industry, the regulation of labor relations changed. Although placement agencies have existed since the nineteenth century, they only became a prosperous industry in the first decades of the twentieth century. Musicians’ trade unions have always fought them, accusing them of exploiting musicians. In some instances, unions tried to replace private agents with union agencies; in other cases, unions lobbied governments to regulate these agents and their fees. Sometimes, especially for lesser jobs, there was no intermediate actor involved in the hiring process. Musicians frequented certain sidewalks like at Archer Street in London (see figure 2) or public places like Place Pigalle in Paris, where, since the 1920s, all kinds of musicians used to gather in the middle of the day, waiting for bar and restaurant owners to pick them up for a gig. With the beginning of the Cold War, the regulation of the musicians’ labor market differed markedly between Eastern and Western Europe. In 1950s Eastern Europe, the sector was almost entirely regulated by the state. Following the Soviet Union’s lead, states in Eastern Europe decided who was an “artist” and who was an “entertainer.” In some ways, this system came close to what existed in ancient regimes and modern Europe, when the royal authority decided who was worthy of being appointed and remunerated as an artist, as analyzed by Eliot Freidson.¹² In some countries, notably Yugoslavia, which was politically a
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Figure 2: Musicians gather at Archer Street, Soho, London, 1935 (photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images).
bit more peripheral within the Soviet orbit, it seems that a small private business sector, becoming more important in the last decades of the century, flourished in bars and restaurants, with performances of popular musicians (men) and singers (women). On the Western side of the Iron Curtain, the situation was more complex. In France, the law defined musicians as wage earners and the owners of bars and clubs who hired them as temporary employers. A unique welfare system for intermittent workers of the movie sector had been created in the 1930s, but it did not cover performing artists in the middle period of the twentieth century. The public regulation of unemployment for all wage earners was progressing in France during the 1950s with the creation of a state welfare fund for the unemployed (the Union nationale pour l’emploi dans l’industrie et le commerce, Un-
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édic). In both East and West Germany, a longer tradition of public support for Kultur provided the foundations for a strong public sector in theater, dance, and of course classical music, which is regarded as a part of the national heritage. Both Germanies counted far more permanent classical orchestras than any other country, particularly radio orchestras, which is still the case today. In contrast, freelance musicians received little support from the state until the 1980s, when at least a special social security system for artists was introduced. In the UK, where the state was even less active in the regulation of the job markets for musicians, it seems that the musicians’ union and other trade associations have been predominant in the organization of musical work. Important regulations were achieved in the courts, where judges had to decide upon the public use of recorded music by record companies and venue owners. An offshoot of these legal battles was the Copyright Act (1956), which included the first British performers’ rights. The considerable expansion of the music business and the rise of recorded music in the middle of the twentieth century have been regulated in many different ways across Europe. Due to technological innovations, which significantly tended to universalize the use of recorded music in broadcasting, musicians’ unions were often anxious about the future of the profession, fearing the death of live music. However, the middle period of the twentieth century and especially the years following the Second World War are marked by high employment rates for musicians, following on from a strong demand in all musical styles at all stages of the professional pyramid, and a still limited number of skilled musicians. The consolidation of the music business has unquestionably benefited the relatively small group of the most integrated professionals. Even though the situation may have been different for other kinds of performing musicians due to specific local economic contexts (as in the case opening this chapter), the demand for recorded and live music was very substantial in mid-century Europe. For the ordinary performing musicians of the mid-twentieth century, the ideal career was to progressively climb the stages of the professional pyramid, which often meant not only playing regularly in cabarets and music-hall entertainment bands for popular singers but also occasionally performing the classical repertoire. At that time, serious and popular music were gradually distinguished from one another. Symphony orchestras, in particular, were becoming a more and more autonomous art world in itself, even though some musicians still managed to traverse from one end to the other end of an extended musical world. Among the essential skills were, undoubtedly, excellent sight-reading in order to be efficient on stage or in the studio as well as quite ordinary social aptitudes that are very different from the artistic singularity that musicians could
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wish and dream of. Secondary virtues like punctuality, civility, and reliability were required to get as many (good) jobs as possible. So often, on the one hand, musicians played for commercial gigs (e. g., recording tedious jingles for radio advertisements), but on the other hand, they could sometimes sub in classical, romantic, or contemporary ensembles or do gigs in jazz clubs, where they showed up after a day in a studio or after the evening’s performance at a music hall.
3 From the 1960s to Today: A Slow Deprofessionalization? The first important change affecting musicians’ labor from the early 1960s onward was demographic and cultural. In the 1960s, the postwar baby boomers became teenagers then young adults, and that period is generally regarded as the moment of a “youthquake” and the breakthrough of pop music. An important trait of many of the most popular bands—from early rock ‘n’ roll recordings to punk and new wave of the 1980s to grunge of the 1990s to the entire “easy” pop genre—was a stance against virtuosity that favored the authenticity of the artist over formal musical skills. Pop music is not just simple and direct, but performers were also utterly unapologetic about that fact, unlike musicians who had played “lowbrow” music in the pre-rock ‘n’ roll era. With the explosion of the pop record market and the emergence of new musical styles, the advent of pop music was considered to be the time of the definitive rupture between serious and popular music in terms of markets, audiences, and performers. From this moment on, there were clearly two separate musical careers, two separate art worlds with completely different conventions. Concomitantly, the popular music world turned into a huge cultural and economic empire, in Europe as much as in the rest of the world. This pop music conquest of the world is owed largely to technological changes, which transformed both the consumption and the production of music. In the 1960s, vinyl records and turntables became affordable for the masses in Western European countries (the Dutch company Philips and the French company Teppaz sold millions worldwide) so that most people in the Global North could listen to what they wanted and whenever they wanted. From the early 1980s to the end of the century, recordable cassettes were the most popular music medium. They were cheap, compact, and robust, and they were as easy to play for listening as they were to use for recording. At the same time, music equipment became more affordable, starting with the
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solid-body instruments developed by Leo Fender in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s, which were imitated by European (e. g., the German Framus and Höfner and the Italian Eko) and Japanese (e. g., Aria, Ibanez, Teisco, Tokai, and hundreds others) manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last two decades of the century, the advent of home computers and digital synthesizers opened up the way to home studios, often consisting in the 1990s of an Atari computer, Cubase software, and a DX7 Yamaha keyboard. The end of the twentieth century was characterized politically and economically by a shift away from social-democratic policies and Keynesianism. Before the end of the 1980s and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s had been the vehicle of an “artistic critique” of capitalism. This was central in the politicized youth movements that sprung up at the end of the 1960s in Europe and elsewhere and stood in contrast to the social and political critique formulated by the leftist parties and unions, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argued.¹³ Against an ideological backdrop of “artistic critique,” which promotes individual freedom and charismatic achievements more than collective equality, and in a situation where pop stars became living gods (the famous “more popular than Jesus” of John Lennon), ordinary pop musicians started to think of themselves not so much as craftsmen or workers any longer but as artists and potential celebrities. Consequently, they began to see the risks of self-exploitation as opportunities for self-realization. Meanwhile, the serious music world remained a space of stability, not affected to a great degree by what was going on in pop music. The former kept being ruled by conventions and norms negotiated over decades (sometimes centuries) by professional societies and unions or being governed by local agreements valid for individual orchestras. In fact, the most spectacular change that happened in this music world influenced gender. As women’s emancipation made progress in the last quarter of the century, classical orchestras were among the last institutional strongholds of male domination that started to evolve. Hyacinthe Ravet, for instance, has shown how throughout the second half of the twentieth century women gained legitimacy in classical orchestras all over Europe even if they made up only one-third of the staff in the beginning of the twenty-first century and were very rarely hired for positions of power. Today, while women are now hired to lead orchestras, the number of female conductors is still very small.¹⁴ In Eastern Europe, the situation of classical musicians remained different to that in Western Europe and the USA, though Western influences were increasing until the end of the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Careers in classical music were legitimate and supported by the state; performing musicians were employed as public servants, such as in West Germany. If they were not confined to traditional repertoires, then popular music players, as in the Yugoslavian Ka-
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fanas musicians studied by Ana Hofman, were mostly disregarded as low-status service workers who were made fun of, for example when the audience made them play on their knees for an extra coin.¹⁵ However, some of them could nevertheless become well-known entertainers and sell thousands of records for statecontrolled record companies. In Europe, as elsewhere, while pop stars were among the most admired artists on the planet, popular music was deemed service work performed by craftsmen (at best) or laborers when it served to entertain drunk people in bars or producing background music at restaurants. Though hit by recorded music, playing in bars or for private parties like weddings, for example, remains an important labor market for ordinary musicians to this day. What changed was that this market became more crowded, as more variously skilled young players offered their services while the number of venues shrank. In dance and entertainment venues, guests were more and more likely to listen to one single disk jockey who “replaced” a whole band, playing records and talking into a microphone with a deep reverb, assisted by a fog machine, though even that bit of live performance became increasingly rare. The popular music world has bifurcated. While big stars were actively promoted and made millions, ordinary performing musicians underwent a process of deprofessionalization. Newcomers on the local stages were often less formally trained instrumentalists, prepared to play for very low fees and being content to perform before an audience and to revel in their fantasies. In the eyes of professionals from the previous generation, these working musicians were regarded as nothing more than harbingers of a declining trade. Lots of young musicians of the last quarter of the century were merely trying to play as much as possible with their band, even almost for free, in all the bars of their region, living the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” myth as much as possible, which essentially meant smoking a lot of marijuana, drinking a lot of beer, and wishing to be spotted by a record company and have groupies, which almost never happened. Yet in Western Europe, as in the previous period, the state has often had its part to play in the working lives of performing musicians, especially in countries with social-democratic governments. In France, the minister of culture Jack Lang was the main promoter of popular music, rock, pop, and then rap, with music festivals and musical schools funded by the state. The aforementioned French welfare scheme for intermittent workers of the living arts and the audiovisual sector was opened to performing artists in 1969. In the 1980s, the number of beneficiaries started to increase, before doubling during the 1990s. Meanwhile, the number of hours worked per capita decreased. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, both the average work time and the income for those intermittents du spectacle artists were markedly lower than they had been 30 years earlier.
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Beyond the French case, some of the Northern European countries have state-related institutions funding artistic production through long-term policies and programs. Norway, for instance, operates a system of permanent funding. Even though such schemes concern more often than not “creators” (directors, choreographers, and composers) rather than performers, the latter can benefit from it more or less directly. In other countries, for instance including the Netherlands and Switzerland, public funding for performing musicians is made available on a project basis. Musicians either depend on the leader of a project for which they are hired or are themselves in charge of the project. This requires performing musicians to become “authors” and to show cultural-entrepreneurial skills as well as favorable social dispositions. Finally, for the huge majority of performing musicians who were not inclined or able to enter the public funding system, diversifying into portfolio work was the most common strategy, the most frequent cases being musician/technician or musician/music teacher careers.
4 European Performing Musicians in the Early Twenty-first Century: A New Paradigm, or More of the Same? The first twenty years of the twenty-first century have brought major technological evolutions with the digitization of music. Physical record sales dropped steeply after 2005, marking a crisis for the recording industry and fueling talks about the end of the music industry as we know it. However, empirical research in Europe shows that the record industry crisis changed little for ordinary musicians, who had in fact never earned any significant income from disc sales.¹⁶ Neither did the internet—through platforms like YouTube or through file sharing— turn every musician into an operator of a micro record company, with home studio and distribution platforms at his or her disposal and driven by the entrepreneurial ideology of the “gig economy.” Most ordinary performing musicians do not compose original music, and even more of them do not know how to sell their music. They do not even like to talk about it with nonmusicians. That is what Becker observed when he studied “dance musicians” in Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century and what we see in contemporary Europe too. Given the continued importance of service work, lesser-known platforms like Riffer Music (self-defined as “the Airbnb of live music”) may become more important for performing musicians, since Riffer claims to be “a community marketplace that empowers everyone to explore and book local musicians for any location and occasion.”¹⁷
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Today, classical symphony orchestras remain among the most steadily regulated and organized employment institutions. However, in the popular music world or even in “classical” careers outside the big stable structures, like in many other sectors of the economy, music labor seems to reach the stage of extreme deregulation of the job markets, similar to what it had been a good hundred years ago. As we have seen all through this chapter, the twentieth century has a long history of attempts to regulate musical work, initiated by unions and/ or the state. That trend was challenged in the last decades of the century, and the advent of digitization appears to have sped up this deregulation. What has changed in comparison to the earlier period of nonregulation is the ethos or “spirit” of working musicians: the precarious working poor of the 1910s have become the enthusiastic entrepreneurs who negotiate the so-called gig economy. On the one hand, the major issues for unions in 1910 were more or less the same as in 2000. They concerned the question whether musicians are employees or independent service providers, whether there should be a minimum fee, or whether anyone should be allowed to play anywhere on their own terms. On the other hand, apart from big “classical” structures like symphony orchestras, unions in many European countries seem to have lost a lot of their power and their attractiveness. In similar ways to the cases of Uber or Airbnb, we will probably have to consider new international forms of struggle, involving both public policy measures and workers’ associations. Throughout this chapter, we have seen common trends across the continent despite the variety of socioeconomic models and linguistic areas, often quite different from what we could find in other parts of the world, especially North America. Some common cultural trends are noticeable, for example the importance all during the first half of the century of the accordion and its “relatives” such as the bandoneon, from Italy to Poland through France to Switzerland and Austria. Another common European trend was the greater sociopolitical intervention in the music trade. Not surprisingly, at least in continental Europe, we find more state regulation and intervention than in the USA, exemplified by the welfare “intermittent” scheme in France and numerous publicly funded orchestras in Germany and in Northern Europe. Conversely, the musicians’ trade unions were at first very present in Europe when the musical world still entailed art and popular music; they then tended to focus on negotiations with policymakers in order to achieve good working conditions for state employees and sometimes let aside commercial or popular musicians. In contrast, the American Federation of Musicians tried primarily to improve the situation of the latter group. With both socialism and the romantic idea being powerful ideas in Europe, European unions were more clearly torn between the factum that music is work and the ideal of a special nature of arts and music, which made it diffi-
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cult for them to take into account equally the most “noble” and the more mundane repertoires, markets, and performers. To conclude, with the major COVID-19 crisis experienced in 2020, resulting in the lockdown of all musical venues, it seems that European countries are once again more inclined to providing public support to the cultural sector in general, and music more specifically, than North America. After the aforementioned crash of the record industry, live stage performances have become the main source of income not only for ordinary musicians but also for big stars. It remains to be seen if European governments will continue the tradition to support the music sector and prevent major cultural and economic damage.
Notes I would like to thank the editors of this handbook, Martin Rempe and Klaus Nathaus, for our stimulating exchanges and their precious support. Howard S. Becker, “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience,” American Journal of Sociology 57 (1951): 136 – 144. Id., Outsiders (1963; New York: Free Press, 2018); Patrick Süskind, Der Kontrabass (Zürich: Diogenes, 1981). Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Alan Lomax, The Land where the Blues Began (New York: New Press, 1970); id., Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968). Martin Rempe, “Das Vergnü gen der Anderen: Unterhaltungsmusiker avant la lettre im Kaiserreich,” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 2, no. 2 (2019): 25 – 35. Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, 1978). Michael Löwy, Marxisme et romantisme révolutionnaire: Essais sur Lukács et Rosa Luxembourg (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1979); Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures du romantisme anti-capitaliste,” L’homme et la société 69/70 (1983): 99 – 121. Martin Cloonan and John Williamson, Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893 – 2013 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016); Mathieu Grégoire, “Closing the Market as the Only Protection? Trade Unions and the Labor Market in the French Performing Arts,” Sociologie du travail 52, suppl. 1 (2010): 40 – 63; Manuel Deniz Silva, “Are Musicians ‘Ordinary Workers’? Labor Organization and the Question of ‘Artistic Value’ in the First Years of the Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association: 1909 – 1913,” Popular Music and Society 40, no. 5 (2017): 518 – 538; Rempe, “Das Vergnü gen der Anderen;” Angèle David-Guillou, “Early Musicians’ Unions in Britain, France, and the United States,” Labour History Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 288 – 304. Silva, “‘Ordinary Workers.’” Grégoire, “Closing the Market,” 60. See the famous description of the occupational pyramid in Becker, Outsiders, 99 – 116. Eliot Freidson, “Les professions artistiques comme défi à l’analyse sociologique,” Revue française de sociologie 27, no. 3 (1986): 431– 443. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005).
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Hyacinthe Ravet, “Professionnalisation féminine et féminisation d’une profession: les artistes interprètes de musique,” Travail, Genre et Sociétés 9 (2003): 173 – 195. Ana Hofman, “Music (as) Labour: Professional Musicianship, Affective Labour and Gender in Socialist Yugoslavia,” Ethnomusicology Forum 24, no. 1 (2015): 28 – 50. We can assume that the US disc market is much more homogenous (same country, even if there are huge differences between individual states, and same language) than the European one, where even the biggest national stars are almost unknown outside the borders. Hardly anyone outside Italy knows Adriano Celentano, and few people outside Germany know Herbert Grönemeyer, while Francis Cabrel is famous only in France. https://www.riffermusic.com (accessed 1 August 2020).
Bibliography Becker, Howard S. “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience.” American Journal of Sociology 57 (1951): 136 – 144. Becker, Howard S. Outsiders. New York: Free Press, 2018. First published in 1963. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2005. Cloonan, Martin, and John Williamson. Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893 – 2013. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. David-Guillou, Angèle. “Early Musicians’ Unions in Britain, France, and the United States.” Labour History Review 74, no. 3 (2009): 288 – 304. Silva, Manuel Deniz. “Are Musicians ‘Ordinary Workers’? Labor Organization and the Question of ‘Artistic Value’ in the First Years of the Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association: 1909 – 1913.” Popular Music and Society 40, no. 5 (2017): 518 – 538. Freidson, Eliot. “Les professions artistiques comme défi à l’analyse sociologique.” Revue française de sociologie 27, no. 3 (1986): 431 – 443. Frith, Simon. The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable, 1978. Grégoire, Mathieu. “Closing the Market as the Only Protection? Trade Unions and the Labor Market in the French Performing Arts.” Sociologie du travail 52, suppl. 1 (2010): 40 – 63. Hofman, Ana. “Music (as) Labour: Professional Musicianship, Affective Labour and Gender in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Ethnomusicology Forum 24, no. 1 (2015): 28 – 50. Lomax, Alan. Folk Song Style and Culture. Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1968. Lomax, Alan. The Land where the Blues Began. New York: The New Press, 1970. Löwy, Michael. Marxisme et romantisme révolutionnaire: Essais sur Lukács et Rosa Luxembourg. Paris: Le Sycomore, 1979. Ravet, Hyacinthe. “Professionnalisation féminine et féminisation d’une profession: les artistes interprètes de musique.” Travail, Genre et Sociétés 9 (2003): 173 – 195. Rempe, Martin. “Das Vergnü gen der Anderen: Unterhaltungsmusiker avant la lettre im Kaiserreich.” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 2 (2019): 25 – 35. Sayre, Robert, and Michael Löwy. “Figures du romantisme anti-capitaliste.” L’homme et la société 69/70 (1983): 99 – 121. Süskind, Patrick. Der Kontrabass. Zürich: Diogenes, 1981.
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Further Reading Bataille, Pierre, Marc Perrenoud, and Karen Brändle, “Échantillonner des populations rares: Une expérimentation du Respondent Driven Sampling en milieu musical.” Sociologie 2, no. 9 (2018). http://journals.openedition.org/sociologie/3336 (accessed 8 June 2020). Bureau, Marie-Christine, Marc Perrenoud, and Roberta Shapiro, eds. L’artiste pluriel: Démultiplier l’activité pour vivre de son art. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009. Cardon, Vincent, and Mathieu Grégoire. “Les syndicats du spectacle et le placement dans l’entre-deux-guerres.” Le mouvement social 243 (2013): 19 – 30. David-Guillou, Angèle. “L’organisation des musiciens dans la Grande-Bretagne du XIXe siècle: vers une nouvelle définition de la profession.” Le mouvement social 243 (2013): 9 – 18. Dubois, Vincent, Jean-Matthieu Méon, and Emmanuel Pierru, Les Mondes de l’harmonie: Enquête sur une pratique musicale amateur. Paris: La Dispute, 2009. Fourmaux, Francine. Belles de Paris: une ethnologie du music-hall. Paris: CTHS, 2009. Grégoire, Mathieu. Les intermittents du spectacle: Enjeux d’un siècle de luttes (de 1919 à nos jours). Paris: La Dispute, 2013. Karmy, Eileen. “Musical Mutualism in Valparaiso during the Rise of the Labor Movement (1893 – 1931).” Popular Music and Society 40, no. 5 (2017): 539 – 555. Langeard, Chloé. Les intermittents en scènes: Travail, action collective et engagement individual. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Les intermittents du spectacle: Sociologie du travail flexible. Paris: EHESS, 2011. Osborne, Richard. “Is Equitable Remuneration Equitable? Performers’ Rights in the UK.” Popular Music and Society 40, no. 5 (2017): 573 – 591. Perrenoud, Marc. Les musicos: Enquête sur des musiciens ordinaires. Paris: La Découverte, 2007. Perrenoud, Marc, and Géraldine Bois. “Ordinary Artists: From Paradox to Paradigm?” Biens symboliques/Symbolic Goods 1 (2017), 1 – 36. https://revue.biens-symboliques.net/171 (accessed 8 June 2020). Perrenoud, Marc, and Pierre Bataille. Vivre de la musique? Enquête sur les musicien·ne·s et leurs carrières en Suisse romande (2012 – 2016). Lausanne: Antipodes, 2019. Ravet, Hyacinthe. “Devenir clarinettiste: Carrières féminines en milieu masculin.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 168 (2007): 50 – 67.
Klaus Nathaus
4 Driven by Enthusiasm, Harnessed by Politics: Amateuring in Music On 10 June 1933, the Federation of British Musical Competition Festivals held a conference to discuss the “future of amateur music-making.” The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) provided a hall at Broadcasting House for this event, which the Musical Times regarded as “an acknowledgement of the fact that in the general view broadcasting had been largely the cause of the decline in amateur music-making.”¹ The diagnosis of amateur music’s alleged crisis and the popular anamnesis that this crisis was caused by radio remained unexplored during the meeting. Instead, speakers offered plenty of suggestions for how to address what they considered the key issue, namely the “problem of turning passive into active leisure.” Recommendations ranged from broadcasting musical accompaniment to support singing at home to offering percussion classes for all ages. Pianos should be tuned so that they could be played along with radio music. Choir instructors and conductors should be trained so that they were able to pass musical knowledge on to musicians. Male-voice choirs should be advised to replace too aspirational pieces with a simpler repertoire. To implement these and other proposals, the “huge army of amateur music-makers” should be organized more effectively. The fact that speakers were able to specify the number of amateur societies in Newcastle and choir classes in Cambridgeshire shows that this mobilization had already begun. Furthermore, amateurs should “link up” with local authorities and approach national organizations for support. The BBC should be asked to subsidize musical competitions; the National Council of Social Service and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes were named as potential funding bodies. Politely commending the conference participants for their “pervading enthusiasm,” the Musical Times concluded rather bluntly that “[i]n general, the discussion of the day followed no connected lines and led to the exposition of no definable schemes of action.” After this summary, one might discern a condescending note in the final remark that the “professional ranks” were eager to “give all the assistance in their power to the amateur ranks.” None of the few unspecific contributions from professionals to the conference suggested that that was actually the case. As the present chapter will show, the London conference exemplifies the perception and the role of amateur music in twentieth-century Europe. Throughout the period, the term “amateur musician” denoted people trying to play legitimate music in a legitimate fashion, that is to say to sing in choirs, play in brass bands, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-005
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form orchestras, or play on “classical” instruments like the piano at home. Other forms of musicking—like plucking banjos, playing fiddles, and subsequently performing rock or rap, spinning disks, and sampling sounds—were excluded at first and would only be acknowledged as amateur music after professionals regarded them as “actual” music. The London conference also reiterated the trope that amateurs were threatened by commodified and mediatized music, since that would render them “passive.” In addition, the meeting at the BBC indicates the position of amateurs in the musical hierarchy. On one hand, amateurs were applauded for their enthusiasm and their activities were held up as an ideal against indiscriminate consumption of commercial music. On the other hand, amateurs were unfavorably compared with professional musicians for being “amateurish.” The fact that amateur music was considered aesthetically inferior implies that enthusiasts were not lauded for their musical engagement but for the sociopolitical side effects, real or perceived, of their pursuits. According to this view, the value of amateur activities does not lie in the music but in community cohesion, social integration, moral improvement, and strong mental health, which amateur music is said to contribute to. These political goods explain why amateur music was an object of social and cultural policy and why resources were allocated for it throughout the twentieth century. In turn, the prospect of support from philanthropists and governments provided an incentive for amateurs to get organized in ways that aligned with the bureaucracy of funding. Associations concerned with music like the Federation of British Musical Competition Festivals tried to influence affiliated clubs and debated what kind of musical commitment would be rewarded with grants, tax breaks, and official endorsements. While keeping the organization of amateur music firmly in view, this chapter extends the focus to include the motivation and practices of amateur musicians. Doing so blurs the seemingly straightforward distinction between amateurs and professionals, established and upheld in the policy discourse described above. This is one of the important observations in Ruth Finnegan’s groundbreaking study of music making in the English town of Milton Keynes in the early 1980s. She notices that amateurs became professionals through advancement, professional aspirations permeated amateur activities, professionals performed with amateurs, and that the remuneration of musicians varied and was often regarded as a form of recognition rather than a way to make a living. Encountering a spectrum where everyone worked seriously on their music, Finnegan avoids the problem of unclear boundaries between amateurs and professionals by calling the subjects of her investigation “hidden musicians.” Thinking with Finnegan of amateurs as “hidden” rather than unpaid or unprofessional requires an adequate concept to approach their practice. The chapter finds this in a short ar-
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ticle by musicologist Thomas Regelski, who uses the gerund “amateuring” to describe the practice of amateur music as “doing-for-the-love-of-doing” that amateurs experience as self-actualization. Grounded in the admiration for music, amateurs sustain their enthusiasm by constantly working on their musicking, ultimately finding and exploring themselves in it. This definition of amateur music parallels Tia DeNora’s influential characterization of listening as a technology of the self. For both amateur musicians and serious listeners, music serves as “a resource for the identification work of ‘knowing how one feels’—a building material of ‘subjectivity,’” as DeNora puts it.² Regelski’s understanding of amateur music as a practice not only stresses the importance of enthusiasm as a driving force and acknowledges that amateuring finds many manifestations. It also raises awareness that certain ways of teaching as well as evaluating and organizing deny amateurs legitimacy and thus threaten to quash their enthusiasm. Taking Regelski’s discussion as a cue, the present chapter focuses on the tension between amateuring fueled by music admiration and amateur music organized for nonmusical aims. The chapter goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century as the period when the enthusiasm for music making spread to all classes and the principle of supporting amateurism for political purposes was established. From c. 1850 onward, amateur music, previously a middle-class activity, turned into a popular pastime with the proliferation of choirs, brass bands, and affordable instruments. Concomitantly, commercial music began to shape the musical context in which amateurism took place. The first part of this chapter deals with the local organization of amateur music and highlights the contribution from the music trade to sustain amateurs’ enthusiasm. The second part looks at the national organization of amateur music and follows how amateuring came under state tutelage after the First World War. This development happened all over Europe and led to a number of transnational initiatives on the continent. Starting with jazz and skiffle, the third part questions the claim that professional commercial music discouraged amateurs from actively engaging with music. Throughout the three parts, the chapter covers both domestic and public musicking. The chapter proposes that professional commercial music has sustained rather than weakened amateurs’ enthusiasm. In the twentieth century, it was not the absence of such music that motivated amateurs but the availability of a wide repertoire of music to be admired, emulated, and performed. Highlighting the affordances of commercial music for amateurs, the chapter argues that far more often it was the deployment of amateur music as social policy and the nonmusical strings attached to that policy that dampened amateurs’ enthusiasm. The chapter also suggests that the political concern with amateur music was more prominent in Europe than elsewhere, owing to the widespread belief in
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the beneficial properties of “good” music and the role of voluntary associations in this part of the world. This claim is substantiated by the many similarities in amateur music policies across the continent as well as the trans-European initiatives to foster a particular version of amateur music.
1 Amateuring en masse: Local Networks and Commercial Input A look at amateur music in any European city in the late nineteenth century reveals a steep rise in the number of musical ensembles, most prominently choirs and wind bands, but also mandolin and accordion orchestras, fife and drum corps, string orchestras, zither ensembles, and so on. At about the same time, formal instrumental training and the domestic performance of music from scoresheets expanded greatly too. Organized musicking, both in public and in the home, had become an important part of a middle-class lifestyle in the first half of the nineteenth century and manifested itself in choirs, orchestral societies, and salon music. In the second half of the century, members of the working classes took up these practices and organizational forms, turning music making into popular leisure. To focus on collective amateuring first, the growth of musical organizations and their social reach were part of the expansion of a larger voluntary sector of leisure during the period. This expansion benefited from the synchronization of working time and urbanization. To facilitate collective leisure activities, enthusiasts associated with local supporters to form voluntary organizations. Wealthy and influential figures supported choirs and brass bands with their goodwill to mark their own social standing in the community. The amateur musicians benefited too, as they used the association with the “big wigs” to gain financial and political support. Since the authorities in most European countries observed the self-organization of the working classes with suspicion, backing from community leaders was essential for music groups with workers to get permission for concerts and other forms of public display. Another group that got involved in community organizations were local business people. They contributed financially to the activities of musical organizations to invest in the loyalty of local customers. Associations consisting of community leaders, business people, and musicking members represent the basic organizational model for amateur choirs, bands, and orchestras. This arrangement balanced the political and economic interests with musical enthusiasm. It supplied amateurs with resources, while ob-
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liging them to accommodate their sponsors by contributing to events of local importance such as civic occasions and religious holidays. For instance, big choral events in Germany included by default a public display. Participants paraded the streets of the locality, in uniform and behind a flag, thus symbolizing the connection between singers and the locality. Amateur clubs came to represent the communities that sustained them, as Dutch male-voice choirs and British brass bands exemplify. When these music groups returned from competitions, they were met at train stations and celebrated publicly. Amateur music clubs had their center of gravity at the village, neighborhood, borough, or ward. They were based on a social contract between activists and supporters that also underlay music organizations in local churches, political parties, trade unions, and firms. In the industrial heartlands of Europe, we find choirs, bands, and orchestras financially supported by companies. Employers like Krupp in Essen and Cadbury in Birmingham fostered music making among their employees as a form of “rational recreation.” Company owners saw this as a means to maintain peaceful labor relations, raise the public profile of their company, and “uplift” workers through culture. Church communities provided grounds for similar organizations in which musicians received material support in exchange for community commitment. In Spain, where amateur choirs were first founded in the 1850s and spread to all parts of the country until the 1890s, the Catholic Church was instrumental for the rise of the movement because it was the foremost institution to train conductors. The workers’ movement also established musical associations that mirrored the organizations supported by middle-class patrons. The German social-democratic party started early with this and was more successful than other labor parties in Europe in its attempts to integrate its members “from cradle to grave.” On the eve of the First World War, the German Worker-Singers’ Association (Deutscher Arbeiter-Sängerbund, DAS) counted about 108,000 members in the country. More often though, workers formed musical ensembles in their local milieu without the organizational impulse from national bodies. From miners’ clubs to butchers’ guilds, the members of local labor and trade associations founded choirs and bands within their organization, drawing on the support of that organization and contributing to its sociability. Much of this amateur activity remained modest in scope, but some ensembles gained greater prominence. In early twentieth-century Helsinki, for instance, the brass bands of the postal workers, the fire brigade, and the trade union organization ranked among the leading ensembles in the city. Although community-based amateur bodies received material support from as well as recruited new members in the vicinity, they depended on actors outside the locality for musical inspiration. The military had a particular importance
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for brass bands because it was an important agency for the education of bandleaders and instrumentalists. With their uniforms and discipline, military bands often served as a model for the public presence of amateur ensembles. Military bands also influenced repertoires and lineups, not least because they handed down instruments to amateurs. The strongest impulse for local bands and choirs came from music publishers and instrument makers, for whom the growing amateur market opened up opportunities. A case in point is the British publishing house Novello, which dominated the popular market with affordable scores and teaching materials. Technological improvements like typesetting, stereotyping, and steam‑powered presses brought down the costs of sheet music and music books. Concurrently, the simplified notation system of tonic sol-fa, promoted by the English Congregationalist minister and later music publisher John Curwen, made music more easily accessible for the amateur. Curwen’s method was also applied in schools as a way of teaching children singing, helping them “graduate” to adult choirs. Some publishers who targeted the amateur market branched out into manufacturing musical instruments. British publisher Boosey & Company took that step in the 1850s, in time to profit from the growth of the brass band movement. The trade in musical instruments underwent similar changes as music printing. Mass production made instruments cheaper, and many manufacturers targeted amateurs with affordable instruments. Music publishers and instrument makers catered to domestic musicians as well. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, mass production brought pianos, which in middle-class households were already as commonplace as the sofa, into the economic reach of working-class households. This was helped further by innovations in retail, such as hire-purchase schemes in Britain. Overall, music retailing took a huge upswing during the period, reaching the European borderlands. In the industrial town of Perm in Russia, for instance, there were eight traders of musical items in 1910, offering their goods to a population of 50,000. The purveyors of music found new ways to cater to their customers. Russian music publishers targeted women’s journals to advertise their wares in association with articles on good housekeeping. Musicking at home was considered a feminine domain, and so a lot of music for the amateur pianist embraced the values of domesticity. However, it would be wrong to assume that domestic music was one-sidedly wholesome and sentimental. Excerpts from Italian operas as well as American cakewalks, “Gypsy romances,” and Ukrainian folk songs were sold to Russian piano amateurs too, making for a global, up-to-date repertoire. A young middle-class woman who attended finishing school in the Norwegian countryside in the 1890s collected in her music albums not only pastoral works by Norwegian composers but also “exotic” songs
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about Spanish bullfighters and the American South, some of them known from musical comedies. Such examples show that commercial popular music found its way from the professional stages into the sheet music folders of amateur pianists. They also illustrate that the musical horizon of turn-of-the-century amateurs was hardly limited to European art and folk music. The influence of the music trade on amateur music can hardly be overestimated. At times, single entrepreneurs brought about national movements. A case in point is William Farre, who in the early 1900s instigated the formation of marching bands in Norwegian schools. With the support of the authorities, the former conductor and band musician initiated the foundation of music corps in about 20 schools in the capital while supplying these bands with sheet music from his publishing company. By 1914, when the first countrywide band meeting was held, the “skolekorps” movement had a national reach. Throughout the twentieth century, it would serve as a pool for adult bands. Alexei Apostol played a similar role in the brass band movement in Finland. Having set up his music business at the same time Farre had started his first school band, Apostol supplied Finnish bands with sheet music, established a score library, and soon manufactured his own line of instruments. He also conducted one of the leading bands in the capital, the Helsingin Torvisoittokunta, which illustrates the very active role that music entrepreneurs took in developing the amateur scene as their customer base. Apostol’s example is instructive for the way he not only facilitated amateur activities but also personified the unity of art and popular music. Trained in music theory, choral singing, French horn, and piano in Finland, Germany, and Austria, Apostol taught at the Helsinki Music Institute while running his business in brass band supplies. During the First World War, he managed the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. In turn-of-the-century amateur music, art and popular music were intertwined. This becomes most obvious when we see that famous composers as a rule also wrote music for amateurs. When necessary, publishers reminded composers that music for amateurs was the bread and butter of their occupation. Popular songs might not be the most artistically rewarding pieces to write, conceded publisher Boris Petrovich Jurgenson in a letter to composer Milii Balakirev in 1908, before adding that “you know that some of these [Gypsy] romansy sell 10 times as much in one or two years as works by you, Chaikovskii and our other great composers do in decades” (original insertion).³
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2 Amateuring as Social Policy: The Role of the State in the Support of Amateur Music The organizational center of gravity of musical amateuring was local. However, many local choirs, bands, and ensembles were affiliated with regional or national associations. The first bodies of this kind were founded in the middle of the nineteenth century and were committed to unifying and standardizing amateur music. As they regarded music as a vehicle for national mobilization or the moral reform of the working classes, fostering musical enthusiasm was hardly an end in itself for them. Rather than simply assisting amateurs in making music, they served elites or those who aspired to leadership as instruments for political mobilization and social control. Although they mostly started outside the state, many of these national associations in music came to be trusted by governments to act as intermediaries between state policies and local amateuring. This trend began in the interwar period and continued after the Second World War. An early example of a national association to promote music making among the working classes is the Orphéon movement in France. It was started in the 1830s by Guillaume Louis Bocquillon Wilhem, who offered singing classes to members of the working and artisan classes with the aim of harmonizing class relations through music. In the subsequent decades, Orphéon societies were set up all over the country. At its peak in the early 1860s, the movement encompassed some 3,000 choirs with about 140,000 singers and had grown to include brass bands as well. It found followers in Spain, where it proved to be an inspiration for a nascent choral movement, and created ties with British choirs. In 1860, a delegation of 3,000 French Orphéon singers traveled to London to attend a choir event at the Crystal Palace. With the support of the authorities and in collaboration with composers, the Orphéon leadership sought to standardize repertoires and instrumentation throughout France. In the late 1850s, it appointed commissions to define the ideal brass band lineup and set an official pitch for wind instruments. Some national bodies sought to raise the musical standards of amateurs through competitions. In Finland in 1888, the National Society for Education (Kansanvalistusseura) invited composers to participate in a competition in order to improve the repertoire of wind bands and to press for the septet as the standard lineup. There were also competitions for amateur ensembles, though these could turn into partisan affairs that conflicted with the interest of those who saw amateur music as a means to create national unity and class harmony. In Britain, we find two different forms of musical competitions.
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On one hand, the aforementioned Federation of British Musical Competition Festivals, founded in 1921 as a national body to represent the many amateur festivals that had emerged in the preceding 50 years, stood for meetings where competition was harnessed for education. This strand of festivals had prominent support from members of the British elite and the musical establishment. On the other hand, brass band contests, the first major one being held in Manchester’s Belle Vue amusement park in 1863, developed into highly competitive tournaments with a considerable working-class following and commercial investment. Bands competed for cash prizes, which was necessary given that members lived on working-class wages; however, such competitions were condemned by those who thought that commerce tainted disinterested amateurism. Similar tensions can be observed in the realm of male-voice choirs, pitting enthusiastic local amateurs against national associations that eventually had the ear of politicians and bureaucrats who were willing to intervene. The history of choir contests goes back at least to the 1830s, when choirs from East Flanders invited singers from nearby cities like Aachen and Cologne to compete with them, and choirs from Switzerland and the southwest of Germany met for contests. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, male-voice choir contests had become immensely popular. Choirs crossed national borders to participate in competitions and sometimes formed regional associations expressly designed to facilitate musical tournaments by defining rules and providing adjudicators. Choir competitions sustained singers’ enthusiasm while mobilizing support from local communities that regarded them with pride. Competing choirs found little reason to affiliate to national bodies that prioritized political purposes and tried to interfere with their musicking. The German Singers’ Association (Deutscher Sängerbund, DSB) in particular campaigned against choral contests, opposing competitions by claiming them to be detrimental to national unity, which was its primary aim. Its social-democratic rival, the DAS, shared this negative attitude towards music contests. Both associations criticized competitive singing as vacuous virtuosity and condemned choirs competing for money prizes, which they saw at odds with amateur idealism. The conflict between local choirs and national associations escalated in the 1920s. In the Prussian Ministry of Culture, the head of the musical department and former organizer in social-democratic cultural associations, Leo Kestenberg devised a musical policy to raise the musical standard of amateur ensembles and to open them up for women and minors. His reform also encompassed music education in school, which was often an entry point for longer-term amateuring. To achieve Kestenberg’s goals in the choral movement, the Prussian ministry offered financial incentives to compliant choirs and channeled its subsidies through national associations. The prospect of mediating material support
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and becoming attractive to potential members motivated the national choir associations to propagate the ministry’s policies among affiliated choirs. That required considerable changes in the nationalist-conservative DSB, which had not concerned itself much with female, mixed, or youth choirs before. Hit by the war and the subsequent inflation, many local choirs decided to affiliate with national associations; thus membership figures at DSB and DAS rose. However, the choirs most keenly engaged in choir competitions retained their independence. They had little time for community singing events, which were primarily designed by the associations to demonstrate that the choir movement was serving the common good but were far less rewarding than contests. Contest choirs thought of the musical policy as an undue imposition and feared that the DSB would, as one singer put it, “one day dictate how many glasses of beer every man is allowed to drink at his choir’s annual celebration.”⁴ Contest enthusiasts continued to compete and even founded a new regional association to govern contests. Ultimately, however, the DSB gained the upper hand. Its campaign associated choral competitions with drunkenness, brawls, and cheating, which drove away nonsinging supporters. Just as the financial crisis of 1929 hit the choirs, the DSB’s campaign eroded their local support networks. The struggle between local choirs and national associations in the Weimar Republic exemplifies how easily efforts to make amateurs conform to cultural policy could be frustrating for musicians. Trying to make choral singing socially inclusive and offering incentives in exchange for compliance, the republican policymakers managed to bring a nationalist association in line but ultimately destroyed local enthusiasm, the key resource of amateuring. Initiatives where state authorities employed national associations as intermediaries to educate amateurs can be found elsewhere in Europe too, albeit with local variations. In Soviet Russia, the authorities promoted the active engagement of amateurs in state-approved music even more forcefully than in Weimar Germany. The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) was established in 1923 to encourage composers to write music for amateurs, to facilitate music education, and to liaise with amateur music organizations in trade unions and the army. It formed local branches in major Russian cities and founded sections in radio stations, conservatories, and theaters. Its aesthetic guidelines positioned amateur music against bourgeois and sacred music as well as against “fake” folk music that was “contaminated” by jazz and commercial “Gypsy” songs. Even though that music allegedly sedated workers and drained their revolutionary energy, the RAPM’s ideal was the mass song that came out of the proletarian experience and, somehow, also educated workers. To create such music, composer members wrote songs with the immediate feedback from factory workers. The RAPM also founded the Workers’ Faculty and the Sun-
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day Workers’ Conservatoire to recruit musically gifted members of the working class and train them to be instructors for amateur groups. In Gorky Park in 1931, hundreds of RAPM supporters engaged park visitors in communal singing and gave lessons in composition, choral singing, accordion playing, and politics. In the words of Georgii Khubov, a student at the Moscow Conservatory and a RAPM member, those initiatives represented “an unyielding campaign for proletarian music and healthy mass song, and […] against hack gypsy music and lightgenre vulgarity.”⁵ In a very different political context, a very similar form of amateur music thrived in England. Aside from the active role of the popular press and its commercial interest, there are clear parallels between English “community singing” and Soviet “mass music.” As in Russia, the English movement was started by a group of musical activists who had supporters in high places and access to the media. In 1925, these activists formed, like their Russian counterparts, a national nongovernmental organization, the Community Singers’ Association. In both countries, the proponents of mass singing connected themselves to public occasions—May Day celebrations in Moscow or football cup finals at Wembley—to create events where the audience became its own performer. English community singing featured, as did Russian mass singing, a repertoire that was expressly devoid of the commercial popular music of the day, including instead nostalgic tunes that were variously described as “folk” or “national,” associated with the First World War, or familiar hymns. Community singing was meant—and understood—as an antidote against “passive” radio listening. A Times article from 13 August 1927 thought it therefore “an extremely good thing in an age which encourages Everyman, by machinery and propaganda, to turn listener, that Everyman should insist on taking some part, if only a limited one, in doing something.”⁶ Being happy that the problem of propaganda-induced passive leisure was being tackled, the Times overlooked that “community singing” did not result from the insistence of “Everyman,” but from the insistence of well-heeled people to make the lower orders perform music approved for them. Interwar “community” and “mass singing” reiterated ideas of unity and progress through legitimate music that originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. A look at post-1945 initiatives shows that these ideas were very resilient indeed. In Germany, for instance, the Day of Domestic Music (Tag der Hausmusik) first took place in 1932 and was held continually until today. In democracy and dictatorship, music bureaucrats promoted “domestic music” as a vehicle for nonmusical purposes. Much of this promotion was rhetorical and led to “very little alteration in the actual practices of home music-making,” as Celia Applegate argues for the period between 1933 and 1945.⁷ Nevertheless, at no point in time
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did the Day of Domestic Music simply serve the encouragement of musicking as an end in itself. As a means to implement social policies, amateur music was promoted across the political spectrum. It was supported by the communist party in Russia, endorsed by the British king, and furthered by German bureaucracy in democracy and dictatorship. After the Second World War, initiatives that had been started in the 1920s or earlier were taken up again and sometimes intensified. “Music festivals exploded in size and number across Central Europe in the decade after 1945,” writes David Tompkins in his account of national and local initiatives in Poland and East Germany that aimed to engage “the masses” in valuable, noncommercial music.⁸ In May 1949, the Festival of Folk Music (Festiwal Muzyki Ludowej) involved some 3,000 ensembles in 500 concerts across Poland, and music associations and the authorities in Norway held the annual Song and Music Day (Sangens og Musikkens dag), a day (later extended to a week) that showcased amateur music with choir and brass band concerts all over the country. A more recent initiative is the Fête de la Musique (Music Day), a festival that aimed at obliterating hierarchies between music genres as well as between amateurs, professionals (who play without pay), and audiences. The French Ministry of Culture launched the festival in 1982; in 1985 it was exported to the then European “Capital of Culture,” Athens. From Europe, the format found adopters globally and came to be celebrated as World Music Day in over a hundred countries. The political expectations of amateur music may have been gradually lowered after 1945; hardly anyone has since claimed that “mass singing” is going to establish social harmony or spark revolutions. However, the rhetoric of social utility has still remained common. The German Music Council, for instance, in a report on musical life in Germany from 2011, praised amateur music making to be “one of Germany’s largest areas of civic engagement,” which is in turn “the third institutional pillar of democratic societies” and “the cultural counterweight in the process of globalization.”⁹ It goes on to distinguish “active” amateurs from “passive” music consumption, associating the latter with commercial, “mainstream” music. Amateur musicians were addressed by governments to maintain the status quo, but they were also targeted by critics who wanted to challenge it. An early example of the latter is the Youth Music Movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) in Germany, which aimed to revive folk singing among the musically untrained. The national romantic grassroots movement was started by middle-class pupils and students around 1900 and had gained state support in the Weimar Republic before it was incorporated in the National Socialist culture institutions after 1933. A later case is the community music movement, which gained mo-
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mentum in Europe, especially in Britain and Scandinavia, in the 1960s. Advocating “cultural democracy,” this movement turned against the idea that ordinary people should only be exposed to “excellent” culture, calling instead for making music accessible to everyone to participate on their own terms. Pioneered in the United States around 1940 as an alternative to policies of ethnic assimilation, the principle found followers in Europe, especially in the wake of late 1960s “counterculture.” By the start of the 1980s, the Council of Europe acknowledged cultural democracy as “a basic value of cultural policy.”¹⁰ Even though the practitioners of community arts and its substrand, community music, regarded themselves as facilitators rather than instructors, its organization showed the same bureaucratic tendencies like the DSB mentioned earlier. Having started out to challenge established visions of culture, community music aligned its activities with funding streams and showed signs of “grant addiction,” as community artist Owen Kelly described it in 1984.¹¹ Apparently, and echoing the experience of the Youth Music Movement, community music found it difficult to activate amateurs while avoiding being drawn into the orbit of state bureaucracy and professionalization. Most importantly, and again similar to the German movement, community music maintained the familiar stance against commercial popular music. According to a team of authors who are both scholars and practitioners of community music, its very distinctive “music leading” role [where the music making takes place as an intervention under the guidance of a music facilitator; KN] has developed in response to cultural environments in which the ever-increasing commercialization and commodification of music practices has resulted in people’s widespread disengagement from music making itself.¹²
Irrespective of changing policy aims, the condemnation of commercial popular music is the red thread that runs through the history of organized amateur music since the mid-nineteenth century. The conviction that commercial music renders its listeners passive and that this needs to be reversed by activating people with approved music remained strong throughout the period and across political systems in Europe. It was shared among activists and policymakers and most certainly helped transnational collaborations as well as the transfer of policy ideas and organizational models. Some organizations like the West European Union of Singers (founded 1954 in St. Gallen) and the European Federation of Young Choirs (formed 1963 in Bonn) had a Western European scope, as did brass band associations, which held their first European Championship in 1978 with participants from Britain and Ireland, Denmark and Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, and the Netherlands and Belgium. However, other initiatives
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crossed the Iron Curtain apparently without problems. Concertino Praga, a music competition for young instrumentalists from all over Europe, exemplifies this. Established in 1966, the event was hosted by the youth department of Czechoslovakian Radio and organized in collaboration with the broadcasting unions in Eastern and Western Europe, the International Radio and Television Organization (OIRT) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) respectively. Those who found their musicking sustained by movements that combined music with politics had in the post-1945 decades increasing opportunities to encounter fellow enthusiasts from all over Europe. These meetings were prepared by 100 years of initiatives to promote a particular form of amateur music, which had resulted in remarkable similarities in the organization and principles of amateur music in a politically divided Europe. Given these similarities, it seems that the strongest boundary in amateur music ran not between amateurs under different political regimes but between those who musicked within the framework of cultural and social policy and those who amateured outside of it. The last part of this chapter is going to look at this difference more closely.
3 Amateuring and Professional Commercial Music: A Symbiotic Relationship The policymakers’ vision of amateur music in twentieth-century Europe, described in the previous section, distinguishes sharply between amateurs and professionals and contrasts “active” musicianship with “passive” listening. These distinctions were established in the nineteenth century and have since become so entrenched that it has become common to think of amateur music as a separate sphere beyond professional excellence and commercial pop. However, these conceptual boundaries are historically contingent and do not include all forms of amateuring in the twentieth century. Part one of this chapter has already pointed to impulses of the music trade on amateur music making and explored interrelations between amateurs and professionals before 1914. In the course of the twentieth century, we find further evidence for a symbiotic rather than antagonist relationship between professional commercial music and amateuring. To begin with, the admiration of jazz motivated many amateurs and their activities. While it is safe to say with Eric Hobsbawm that “[t]he jazz fan is […] rarely a musician himself,”¹³ jazz aficionados from the 1930s to the 1950s founded “rhythm clubs” and “hot clubs” where they listened to records and discussed them, organized concerts, and urged record companies to release particular re-
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cordings. In other words, jazz fans acted as amateur critics, amateur impresarios, and amateur artists and repertoire (A&R) managers. In some instances, such activities served as a training ground and launchpad for professional careers. Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, to pick just one example, had founded a jazz club in Königsberg in 1934 before he worked as an A&R manager for record firms and became a leading jazz expert in West German radio after the war. Curatorial amateuring, as we may call it, occurred as well in the orbit of other genres than jazz. Toward the end of the twentieth century, popular music scholars have observed an increase in do-it-yourself (DIY) institutions like fan museums and online archives, that is to say self-organized and self-authorized initiatives to preserve (un)popular music by recording, researching, documenting, and collecting it. A few years earlier, in the 1970s, music fanzines had flourished, making previously hidden ideas and practitioners visible. All these DIY institutions were helped by technology, from the Xerox machine to the internet, that put recording, storage, and reproduction into the hands of passionate amateurs. All of them were entangled with professional commercial music, which kindled enthusiasm, allowed for positive identification, and sometimes demarcated the destination of careers. Commercial popular music has not only nourished curatorial amateurism, but also motivated enthusiasts to take up an instrument to immerse themselves in “their” music. A decisive moment in this history was the breakthrough of skiffle, even though it would be more precise in this case to put the word “instrument” in quotation marks, since players made do with washboards, tea chests, and broomsticks. The size of the skiffle movement is difficult to gauge. In Britain, where it is studied the most, dozens of overwhelmingly male bands felt confident enough to enter the many band competitions, often held in cinemas, all over the country in the late 1950s, representing the tip of an iceberg. Part of the explanation for the skiffle movement seems to lie in the music that it was engaging with. Records like Lonnie Donegan’s Rock Island Line could make listeners think that they could actually reproduce what they heard on record. According to John Steel, member of the 1960s rock group The Animals, it was “[w]hen Lonnie Donegan recorded ‘Rock Island Line’ […] everybody realized that ‘I can do that.’”¹⁴ Indeed, the instrumentation on that record is reduced, the sound is simple. At the same time, however, one should not overstate the importance of simplicity: easy-to-play music does not guarantee that it will be performed by amateurs. Moreover, simplicity can be deceptive. Donegan’s version of Rock Island Line is played at a much faster pace than any beginner could hope to emulate. What may have been decisive in making records like Rock Island Line a spark plug for amateur instrumentalists was their framing as exciting music, addressed at an audience that was invited to strongly identify with it. A convincing delivery
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of style was key; mastery of instrumental technique was secondary. The folk and novelty tunes that inspired skiffle were often perceived as music for young people, which is irrespective of the fact that many skifflers were actually older, established musicians. With singles and jukeboxes, young men and women had gotten “their” media, and with decaying dance halls and abandoned variety theaters and cinemas, they had “their” spaces to engage with music from the mid1950s. Skiffle enthusiasts founded local clubs that informed each other about their activities through news bulletins. The fact that they were part of an imagined community of like-minded people lowered the threshold of embarrassment that might have otherwise kept many skifflers from performing. Learning to play was also facilitated by skifflers using records as tutorials as well as backing tracks to play alongside until they became confident in their playing. The skiffle movement’s breakthrough coincided with the rise of pop stars who were marketed as the “boy” or “girl next door.” Record companies hosted talent contests and made much of the fact that winners were not formally trained musicians. Like the deceptively simple folk music that fueled skiffle, stories about newcomers like British rock ‘n’ roller Tommy Steele or West German Schlager singer Manuela (born Doris Inge Wegener) rising from obscurity to fame suggested that the world of professional musicians was accessible for hidden musicians. The belief in the permeability of this boundary became a central tenet in the ethos of amateuring in rock and pop. As Sara Cohen observed in her ethnographic study of rock musicians in Liverpool in the second half of the 1980s, the talk of “making it” in the music business was a common coin among amateur bands. In practice, however, very few bands came close to being offered a recording contract. What is more, most bands were remarkably ignorant about what such a contract entailed, and they often lacked the strategic thinking necessary to advance to professionalism. Although they constantly talked about “getting signed,” they did surprisingly little to make that happen and seemed quite content if they were not offered a contract.¹⁵ The case of rock music illustrates the complexity of amateuring in contemporary music. On one hand, Cohen’s rock amateurs were inspired by commercial music. They looked up to the economically successful practitioners in their genre and accepted a professional career as criteria for success. On the other hand, they dismissed most commercially produced music as “mainstream” and prided themselves that they did not compromise to be commercially successful, taking the fact that they were not offered a recording contract as evidence for their principled stand. Amateur rock bands’ energy was obviously not drained by the commercial industry; nor did the so-called “independent” rock scene subvert or operate outside the music industry. Amateur rock performers were hidden
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musicians in a field where those who moved from obscurity into the limelight represented the central values of the genre while at the same time becoming vulnerable to the accusation of “selling out.” In this musical world, “doing-for-thelove-of-doing” redeemed those who engaged in a commercial genre without commercial success. The narrative that commercial music is a corrupting influence on musicking is prominent not only in the policy discourse of amateur music but also among practitioners and historians of popular music. The latter put skiffle, rock ‘n’ roll, rock, and punk, but also hip-hop and rave, into a trajectory of “independent” or DIY music that emerges as an “authentic” expression of a subculture before it is “sold out” in a watered-down version to indiscriminate consumers. This narrative not only ignores how deeply intertwined so-called “independent” music is with commercial music but also reserves DIY to (predominantly male) aficionados of “serious” music from rock to rap. These genres are said to inspire creativity, whereas so-called “mainstream” pop renders its (predominantly female) listeners passive. However, and as Finnegan shows, for example, DIY also took place outside self-confident subcultures, among amateur operatics, in carol-writing competitions, in Milton Keynes’ country and western club, and in many other settings. A much wider circle of people than the young men who played in rock bands practiced DIY, though rarely with the same ideological fervor. For rock amateurs especially, “challenging the industry” through DIY was central to the way they constituted genre boundaries. Like the promoters of amateurism, they used the (rhetorical) opposition to commercial music mainly as a means to mobilize followers and resources. For both of them, professional commercial music is the air that they breathe. Amateuring continued to happen at home, catered to by music publishers and instrument manufacturers. Instruments were becoming cheaper, especially around 1980. Publishers targeted the amateur market with teaching manuals and transcriptions of records. Tablature as an alternative to standard notation gave the growing number of guitar players an easy start, just as tonic sol-fa had facilitated popular singing a hundred years earlier. In addition, new media made self-learning much easier. From the late 1970s, the tape cassette allowed amateurs to figure out how to play certain parts, pressing “rewind” and “play” as often as necessary. In the new millennium, countless YouTube videos of singing, guitar-strumming, ivory-tickling, knob-twiddling amateurs performing at all levels of proficiency allow insights into domestic amateuring, evidencing the scope and diversity of an enthusiasm kindled by professional commercial music. They confirm sociologist Antoine Hennion’s argument that “the exponential development in the record market and in media audiences since the sixties has been matched by an intensification of amateur practices.”¹⁶
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Meanwhile, older forms of amateuring like choirs and brass bands have not vanished. In France, a survey in 1995 found that 15 percent of those born after 1960 had attended a music school, compared to eight percent of the people born before that period. In Spain, the “official” number of choirs actually almost doubled between 1991 and 2016 to 2,516, with another 30 percent of singing groups in existence that are not included in this number. Such figures need to be interpreted with care though. To begin with, they say less about actual amateurs than about the expansion of formal music education and the effectiveness of associations in keeping count of their members. As these figures mirror the bureaucracy of state funding, they primarily illustrate the extent to which certain areas of amateur music have aligned with social and cultural policies. What they do not document is enthusiasm, the driving force of amateuring. In that regard, the balance sheet of organized amateuring may be less positive because the promotion of amateur music as a means to political ends separated amateuring from professional commercial music. Identifying commercial music as a cause for people’s musical passivity, the self-declared advocates of amateurs effectively made amateuring become out of touch with popular music. For instance, it took rock music until the 1980s—almost 20 years after the emergence of that genre—to be acknowledged as worthy of support as amateur music and material help from states and local councils in the form of rehearsal rooms and sponsored festivals. At the same time, many of the practices that have been fostered as amateur music for a century, including choir and brass music, have largely disappeared from broadcasting programs and recorded repertoires. When the (West) German Singers’ Association in the early 1960s issued a series of recordings with choir music, it sold no more than on average 4,500 of them. Apparently, not even the 1.5 million DSB members could be interested in professional recordings of the kind of music that choirs supposedly sang, week in and week out.¹⁷ In a similar way, brass bands gained the image of being “amateurish” and out of touch. With few exceptions, composers of art music in the first half of the twentieth century turned their backs on amateur bands, and the producers of commercial popular music have also largely ignored this music scene. Consequently, band players have, as a study of wind bands in France illustrates, internalized the negative view that others “play chamber music, we play chamber-pot music!”¹⁸ Such a statement shows defiance but not necessarily pride in one’s own musicking. If Thomas Regelski’s claim is correct that “nurturing and sustaining admiration is the foundation for promoting amateuring,”¹⁹ the bandsmen’s statement raises serious concerns about amateurs’ enthusiasm. How may amateurs’ admiration for music arise in the first place when the music in question is met with indifference or derision even among those who perform it? An answer may lie in the pos-
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itive response among the interviewed French wind players to the film Brassed Off! (1996), a major cinema release that tells the story of a brass band rising like a phoenix from apathy to championship triumph ten years after the British miners’ strike of 1984/85. Apparently, this brush with commercial popular culture attracted new admirers and rekindled old enthusiasm. The point is not to claim that amateur music that received state support was devoid of enthusiasts. Providing an infrastructure for singing, blowing, or bowing; setting up music schools; making instruments accessible; and giving opportunities to perform allowed many amateurs to pursue a musical practice that could in itself become self-sustainable. Moreover, practicing enthusiasts most certainly ignored the political rhetoric of policymakers and their intermediaries. However, that enthusiasm required an initial push by insisting parents or demanding friends before it could get momentum and nourish itself, because it was not rooted in professional commercial music, that is to say the sound that had become ubiquitous in the course of the twentieth century. In turn, this dependency on nonmusical motivation or even force, however gentle it is, may account for problems of recruitment, overaging, and lack of commitment that choirs, brass bands, and accordion orchestras suffer from unless their music is featured favorably in professional commercial culture like the Brassed Off! movie. As part two of this chapter has shown, amateur music as social policy shared similarities and established transnational connections across Europe. Commercially inspired amateuring evades this geographical horizon. The large majority of rock enthusiasts, hobby archivists, and semiprofessional disc jockeys have generally not formed nor become members in European—or national, for that matter—associations. Their practice was local, and their orientation was as global as the reach of professional commercial music. Non-European amateuring formats like karaoke or TikTok videos, where people lip-synch to pop tunes, were adopted in Europe without much thought about regional specificity.
Conclusion Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, a particular vision of amateur music was established in Europe. This vision valued the performance of legitimate music for its assumed social and political effects. It drew sharp conceptual boundaries around amateur music, distinguishing it from professional excellence and the allegedly sedative effects of commercial music. The vision was pursued in voluntary organizations as well as in music education. Both institutions served as instruments of social control and political mobilization and
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became intermediaries of social and cultural policies after the First World War. Organizations and the respective arrangements between them and the state can be found all over Europe, revealing remarkable similarities irrespective of political differences that divided the continent. From communist Russia to liberal Britain, elites and their challengers subscribed to this vision of amateur music. European similarities allowed for policy transfers and encounters of amateurs across national borders and at times through the Iron Curtain. Strong continuities from the middle of the nineteenth century and notable European similarities suggest that this contemporary vision of amateur music was shaped by two central tenets of European musical life, namely hierarchy and institutionalization. Throughout the period, amateur music was positioned below artistic excellence—from which it had to learn but could never quite reach—and above music for profit—which would turn active musicians into passive listeners. This hierarchy was institutionalized in organizations, policies, research, and musical practices and aesthetics. As this European vision of amateur music aligned with state bureaucracies, the practice and motivation of amateuring shifted out of view. Community building, social integration, mental health, and other positive effects of amateur music have come to be valued by policymakers. However, these policy goals were not the reason for most people to engage in music in the first place. For them to invest time and effort, they needed sustained enthusiasm for music. The pivotal importance of enthusiasm made the conceptual distinction of amateur music from both professional excellence and commercial pop deeply problematic, since it cut the umbilical cord between amateuring and ubiquitous music. Irrespective of the actual enthusiasm to be found in choirs and brass bands, we also see amateurs producing music that they themselves accepted to be “inferior.” This made them less and less attractive to new recruits and more dependent on nonmusical incentives to get people involved. Following researchers like Finnegan, Hennion, and Regelski, the third part of this chapter has made the case for studying amateur music with a wider perspective that acknowledges the multiple connections between amateur and professional music. It has featured different forms of amateuring and, above all, has highlighted the importance of professional commercial music as a source for musical enthusiasm. It has also suggested that the discourse of the amateur who is threatened by apathetic consumption and the DIY ethos of rock musicians are related ideologies. Both seem equally incongruent with amateuring in a musical world shaped by professional commercial music.
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Notes “The Future of Amateur Music-Making: Conference at Broadcasting House,” Musical Times 74 (1933): 647– 649. Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37. Quoted in Julia Mannherz, “Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial Amateur Music-Making,” Slavonic and East European Review 95, no. 2 (2017): 319. Klaus Nathaus, Organisierte Geselligkeit: Deutsche und britische Vereine im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 175. Quoted in Neil Edmunds, “Music and Politics: The Case of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians,” Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 1 (2000): 86. Quoted in Dave Russell, “Abiding Memories: The Community Singing Movement and English Social Life in the 1920s,” Popular Music 27, no. 1 (2008): 128. Celia Applegate, “The Past and Present of Hausmusik in the Third Reich,” in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933 – 1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2003), 145. David G. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 167. Astrid Reimers, “Amateur Music-Making,” in Musical Life in Germany: Structure, Facts and Figures, ed. Deutscher Musikrat (Bonn: ConBrio, 2011), 93. Quoted in Lee Higgins, Community Music: In Theory and in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 33. Ibid., 27. Gillian Howell, Lee Higgins, and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, “Community Music Practice: Intervention through Facilitation,” in Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, ed. Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 603. Eric Hobsbawm, The Jazz Scene (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), 200. Mats Greiff, “Skiffle—hemmagjord Musik med Kraft att förändra Världen,” in Musikens Makt, ed. Jenny Björkman and Arne Jarrick (Göteborg: Makadam Förlag, 2018), 183. Sara Cohen, Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) ch. 5. Antoine Hennion, “Music Industry and Music Lovers, after Benjamin: The Return of the Amateur,” Soundscapes 2 (1999): n. p., http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/MIE/ Part2_chapter06.shtml (accessed 2 June 2020). Nathaus, Organisierte Geselligkeit, 274. Quoted in Vincent Dubois, Jean-Matthieu Méon, and Emmanuel Pierru, The Sociology of Wind Bands: Amateur Music Between Cultural Domination and Autonomy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 23. Thomas A. Regelski, “Amateuring in Music and Its Rivals,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 29.
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Bibliography Applegate, Celia. “The Past and Present of Hausmusik in the Third Reich.” In Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933 – 1945, edited by Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller, 136 – 149. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2003. Cohen, Sara. Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dubois, Vincent, Jean-Matthieu Méon, and Emmanuel Pierru. The Sociology of Wind Bands: Amateur Music between Cultural Domination and Autonomy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Edmunds, Neil. “Music and Politics: The Case of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians.” Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 1 (2000): 66 – 89. Finnegan, Ruth. The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Greiff, Mats. “Skiffle—hemmagjord Musik med Kraft att förändra Världen.” In Musikens Makt, edited by Jenny Björkman and Arne Jarrick, 181 – 197. Göteborg: Makadam Förlag, 2018. Hennion, Antoine. “Music Industry and Music Lovers, after Benjamin: The Return of the Amateur.” Soundscapes 2 (1999), http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/ MIE/Part2_chapter06.shtml (accessed 2 June 2020). Higgins, Lee. Community Music: In Theory and in Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Jazz Scene. London: Faber & Faber, 2014. Howell, Gillian, Lee Higgins, and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, “Community Music Practice: Intervention through Facilitation.” In Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, edited by Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith, 601 – 618. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Mannherz, Julia. “Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial Amateur Music-Making.” Slavonic and East European Review 95, no. 2 (2017): 293 – 319. Nathaus, Klaus. Organisierte Geselligkeit: Deutsche und britische Vereine im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Regelski, Thomas A. “Amateuring in Music and Its Rivals.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 22 – 50. Reimers, Astrid. “Amateur Music-Making.” In Musical Life in Germany: Structure, Facts and Figures, edited by Deutscher Musikrat, 93 – 110. Bonn: ConBrio, 2011. Russell, Dave. “Abiding Memories: The Community Singing Movement and English Social Life in the 1920s.” Popular Music 27, no. 1 (2008): 117 – 133. Tompkins, David G. Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013.
Further Reading Baker, Sarah. Community Custodians of Popular Music’s Past: A DIY Approach to Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
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Fernández-Herranz, Nuria Sofía. “Los orígines del movimiento coral en España.” Musicología 23 (2019): 148 – 169. Fulcher, Jane. “The Orphéon Societies: ‘Music for the Workers’ in Second-Empire France.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 10, no. 1 (1979): 47 – 56. Karjalainen, Kauko. “The Brass Band Tradition in Finland.” Historic Brass Society Journal 9 (1997): 83 – 96. Lajosi, Krisztina, and Andreas Stynen, eds. Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Mitsui, Toru, and Shuhei Hosokawa, eds. Karaoke around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing. London: Routledge, 1998. Rambarran, Shara. “‘DJ Hit That Button’: Amateur Laptop Musicians in Contemporary Music and Society.” In Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, edited by Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith, 585 – 600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Puckett Sasser, Patricia. “‘To Think and Judge Independently’: The Birgit Krohn Albums and Amateur Music Making in Late-Nineteenth-Century Norway.” Notes 74, no. 3 (2018): 372 – 393. Vos, Jozef. “Nationale kunst en lokale Sociabiliteit: de Nederlandse Mannenzangverenigingen in de negentiende Eeuw.” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 112 (1997): 364 – 381. Wright, D. C. H. “Novello, John Stainer and Commercial Opportunities in the Nineteenth-Century British Amateur Music Market.” In The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800 – 1930, edited by Christina Bashford and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, 60 – 84. Woodbrigde: Boydell Press, 2016.
Part II: Managing Music
Celia Applegate
5 Prestige, Profit, and the Right to Culture: Funding Music Through the State In 1964, Frederick Dorian, a professor of music at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, published a lengthy book called Commitment to Culture: Art Patronage in Europe, Its Significance for America. Dorian was an Austrian-Jewish émigré to the United States, born Friederich Deutsch in Vienna in 1902. His upbringing was saturated with musical training in one of the great musical capitals of Europe. He and his brother, the composer Max Deutsch, both studied under Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern. His brother ultimately settled in Paris, composed modernist works, and taught the Schönbergian principles of composition to music students at the Sorbonne. Dorian earned a PhD in music history under Guido Adler in 1924, worked as a music critic, and ultimately emigrated to the United States, where he made it his life’s work to bring European high‑art music to the Americans. His book was a cri de cœur, addressed to his new American compatriots. Noting that American art institutions had grown in size, gained more international respect, and experienced a “cultural explosion,” he lamented that the performing arts were still insecure. The United States was “the only large progressive nation in Western civilization without a systematic subsidy of the performing arts,” in “stark contrast” to those of Europe. Dorian regarded the state of arts funding in Europe to be stable on both sides of the Iron Curtain. His explanation for this relative security rested on “ancient tradition” and a “cultural legacy” that “creates simultaneously the enjoyment of and the need for a full art life and the means for its continuous fulfillment.” “European patronage is perpetual,” he wrote; it has been present in times of war and peace, extending to new arts as well as the “heritage of a thousand years.”¹ This chapter will consider the reasons why European states have supported music over the course of the long twentieth century. No European government, whether national or multinational, gives unconditional support for musical arts, or any other arts, and the offered organizational solutions for supporting music are varied. Procedures and policies have reflected different ideologies of governance and, in most cases, conformed to the historical patterns of how each government organized the administration of state functions. The existence of dedicated ministries of culture that oversee cultural policy is mostly a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. France has had its Ministry of Culture since 1959; the first minister was André Malraux. Most modern governments provide financial and administrative support for the arts—music included—through https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-006
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agencies or subdepartments of the ministries of education. The Netherlands established the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences in 1918. Nevertheless, as Dorian asserted, centuries of intertwined cultural development have resulted in strong family resemblances and sibling rivalry as well as mutual aid among the individual European states in their support of artistic production. Whether being centralized or regional, paternalistic, or entrepreneurial, the administrative structures supporting music are not the main focus of this chapter. It is instead organized around three major justifications for state engagement with musical life, rooted in the long European tradition of “commitment to culture.” The first justification is to enhance the prestige of the state, an amorphous but powerful motivation for states for as long as they have existed. Close in its etymology to illusion and enchantment, prestige must be projected and promoted. It cannot be measured but needs to be acknowledged, which makes it a matter of concern for every European state. In founding France’s Ministry of Culture, Charles de Gaulle invoked not only the “right to culture,” which had been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), but also the grandeur of France. The prestige of the arts has also been central to the broader postwar “European project” in its many stages and institutional forms. The second justification is to educate the population—a motivation that has its roots in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and that involves notions of moral improvement and social welfare through musical practices, whether by singing in a chorus or contemplating past musical achievements. Here, too, in the postwar period, the “right to culture” has resonated. The third justification is to strengthen the economies of European states, both individually and collectively. In the last half of the twentieth century, this third motivation has become more dominant than ever before. The rise of the music industry, especially the multibillion-dollar popular music industry, has accounted for much of state interest in the economic benefits of a thriving musical scene; the situation is similar for musical tourism. In a policy document on culture from 2005, Medy van der Laan, the state secretary for education, culture, and science in the Netherlands, makes a statement that encompassed all three reasons: “A flourishing cultural life contributes to the creative and innovative capacity of a society, to the esteem in which a country is held and to the fostering of social integration. The policy is therefore geared towards strengthening cultural awareness, cultivating a realization that culture matters.”² Within each category, this chapter proceeds chronologically, from the status quo before 1914, through war, interwar, during dictatorships, in war again, and through the long postwar period and European integration.
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1 Prestige The first avenue to explore stretches back to the furthest point in the past, when states tried to impress their presence on the lands they ruled and on other states with which they competed. Music did not just announce the presence of power; it also dramatized it and made it beautiful. The music of the court of Louis XIV domesticated and dominated the nobles by directing their energies into unending court rituals, aptly named divertissements. Operas, especially those of the Italianturned Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lully, stood at the center of this operation as a total work of political art, thereby enacting authority through theatricality. Less powerful states across Europe imitated France, making musical ceremonials—a feature of sovereignty and governments—more legible to diplomats and visitors. This in turn promoted negotiated coexistence among rulers. By the end of the eighteenth century, Catholic and Protestant courts shared a common cultural capital of ceremonial, dramatic, chamber, and even religious music. The “birth of the modern world” in the nineteenth century altered the context and means of state-enhancing music but not its message. As Christopher Bayly has shown, political and social changes in the nineteenth century created a world in which global uniformities (in states, political ideologies, and economic life) developed, but the very fact of interconnected dependencies heightened people’s consciousness of cultural difference and conflict.³ In Europe, the cultural leaders of established and emerging nation-states emphasized the nation-ness of their musical past, present, and future, but the forms of state investment in music remained very similar and the flow of musical influence among them was palpable, despite much talk about “national” music. One ubiquitous aspect of every modern state’s support for music was its military bands, which performed in the cities and towns of the nation, played at international fairs and congresses, competed in international competitions, and accompanied European powers to Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The explosion of the transcription industry added the operatic and symphonic repertoire of the nineteenth century to the abundant marches and fanfares played in bandstands across Europe. With their distinctive uniforms and disciplined showmanship, these bands were embodiments of national pride and prestige—playing a common European repertoire and gathering at European (and sometimes North American) military band competitions. States paid the musicians, in times of peace and war, and the tax-paying citizens showed their approval by flocking to weekly (or in some places daily) band performances in public spaces. State occasions relied on their presence to lend gravitas, power, and excitement to their ceremonials, up to the present day.
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European states supported music for the purpose of expressing or heightening their profiles in many other ways. Festivals were one way and buildings another. France set the pace for state engagement in musical life from the beginning of the nineteenth into the twenty-first century, sponsoring large musical festivals and supporting operas (such as The Glory of France) through, among other things, building projects. The Paris Opera House, better known as the Palais Garnier, began in the Second Empire and formally opened in the Third Republic in 1875. Being more opulent than any other opera house then in existence, this opera house proclaimed that Paris was not just the capital of France but of Europe itself, at least in cultural preeminence. After a period of commercial management that was sustained by state subsidies, the government created in 1939 the Réunion des Opéras de France, entirely subsidized by public funds. It survived a national defeat, German occupation, and postwar turmoil. In 1978, after the dissolution of the Opéra-Comique, it simply became the National Opera Theater, with two houses: the Palais Garnier and the Opéra Bastille. The latter arrived during the presidency of François Mitterand, whose “Grand Projects” (Grands Travaux or Grands Projets Culturel) encompassed a “city of music,” including a new building housing the Paris Conservatory (designed by Christian de Portzamparc), a music museum, and a symphony hall as well as the building of the striking, technologically advanced Opéra Bastille. In Europe, throughout the twentieth century, few other countries have pursued so centralized of an approach to prestige-seeking musical projects, except perhaps the dictatorships of that century. Whether or not we consider these regimes exceptional or all too common in Europe’s long history, they did not stray far from the ways that the ambitious, prideful states of Europe (and elsewhere) have long tried to project their preeminence. In the Soviet Union, musicians, music institutions, performances, and compositions were integrated into the great experiment of “socialism in one country” under Joseph Stalin. All musical activities were state activities, and all financing came from the state. Artistic production also paid lip service at least to socialist realism. The search for prestige may not seem to have been in the foreground of Soviet cultural policy. Nevertheless, the cultural policy proceeded there too with the expectation that the world was watching and must be impressed if not convinced. Soviet art and music must tell the same triumphal story of the Soviet working classes as did its large industrial and infrastructural achievements. The grandeur and genius of the country were explicit in the interregnums of the Fascist state in Italy and the National Socialist state in Germany. Beginning in the 1920s, Benito Mussolini’s government channeled musical life into corporations and their subgroups—the National Fascist Union of Musicians; the National Group of Operatic, Prose, and Operetta Impresarios; and so on. Govern-
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ment-sponsored festivals and civic spectacles were frequent and were organized from the center. Operating at the local level of fascist cultural work was the sprawling state organization, Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), designed to replace socialist or trade union organizations with other kinds of activities, including musical ones. It encouraged musical mobilization at the local level of choral societies, wind bands, and local theater productions, flooding them with torrents of rhetoric about the greatness of Italian music and musicians. Thousands of new performing groups and hundreds of thousands of public concerts in the decades before the war highlighted the musicality of amateurs and professionals alike. Most prestigious were the opera houses, which the government subsidized through various “autonomous organizations,” the first of which was Milan’s La Scala, established at the behest of Arturo Toscanini in 1921—a year before Mussolini’s coming to power. During the fascist period, these opera houses became, ipso facto, part of the state’s cultural apparatus but, with some funds from the central government, still determined their own repertoire and personnel. The autonomous organizations carried over into the postwar years when the 12 most important opera houses in Italy were still designated enti lirica, or public opera corporations, sustained almost entirely from the public purse. In the last decade of the twentieth century, they were made public-private corporations. This move had dire consequences for many of the bigger theaters with large payrolls. It also encapsulated the problem of the prestige argument as the centerpiece of government funding. In the era of austerity and/or free-market orthodoxy, which became widespread in European countries in the last forty years, prestige unmoored itself from European cultures as such and attached to its moneymakers, whose patronage became essential. National Socialist Germany achieved more control over government management of music. In the process, it arrogantly separated German musical prestige from that of Europe as a whole. Constant pronouncements about German musical genius accompanied the centralization of administration. The Reich Chamber of Culture and its music division, the Reich Music Chamber, regulated the employment of musicians and the repertoire they performed. There was some state-funded alleviation for the thousands of unemployed musicians who had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, but as Martin Rempe has shown, their salaries never recovered in the Nazi era to those levels achieved before 1930.⁴ Even the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra earned significantly less than before despite the pride the new regime took in the orchestra’s eminence, which is evidenced by the government even rescuing it from bankruptcy. Other prestigious institutions, such as the Bayreuth Festival, received help from the government. Adolf Hitler promised substantial subsidies and directed the Na-
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tionalist Socialist party and government to buy large blocks of tickets, thus saving it too from bankruptcy. Göttingen’s once-pathbreaking Händel Festival had fallen on hard times as well before it was re-established in 1934 with the help from the government and Nazi party officials. There was, then, some alleviation of the problems working musicians had faced in the past. Local and regional governments staged large musical events and encouraged musical organizations. At the same time, they required proof of the “Aryan” status from performers and, without complete success, attempted to eliminate atonal, modernist—that is to say, “Jewish-influenced”—music from concert halls, recitals, entertainment venues, and film scores. They were more successful in purging the Jewish musicians themselves from German musical life and German-ruled Europe. What all these measures had in common was the determination to establish the unassailable superiority of German music once and for all. The prestige policies of the Nazi rulers in the Third Reich did have something in common with Louis XIV’s staging of his magnificence, especially in the implicit claim to be the preeminent nation of Europe, but theirs was prestige gone sour and murderous. As for Vienna, a recognized musical capital of Europe, it came close to the French model of centralization before the Anschluss, first as the imperial seat of a multiethnic empire and then after 1918 as the oversized capital city of a small nation. The government of the German-Austrian Republic in the 1920s supported the musical arts, which were so central to Austria’s image in the world. The prewar Court Opera, completed in 1869, had been a classic example of royal prestige patronage, and in the new republic, it became the largest line item in the arts budget. The Anschluss changed little in the state support of Austria’s world-famous musical institutions (now in the larger German orbit); the Reich Music Chamber simply absorbed Austrian cultural activities. After 1945, the Austrian government reverted to the interwar prestige game. The Salzburg Festival, a private initiative begun in 1920, now needed hefty state subventions. In Vienna and the provincial cities, musical institutions defined the very meaning of Austria as a European nation and, as such, held a secure place in those state and city budgets. One could multiply examples of prestige-seeking through government spending in the post-1945 era, taking in the cultural initiatives of cities (the notoriously stingy Hamburg city government spending millions on the spectacular Elbphilharmonie) and of multinational European entities like the European Union (EU). Take just one aspect of the EU’s financial support for musical life in Europe: the search engine called festivalfinder.eu. As the website proclaims, the idea to create a means to discover “all arts festivals, from music to theatre, street arts to dance, etc.” in “45 countries in Europe near and far” came from the
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Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE) initiative. Founded in 2014, this entity was the brainchild of the European Festivals Association (EFA), formed in 1952. The child is the father of the man, and in the deep origins of festivalfinder.eu, we find evidence of an appeal to the prestige of European music. Denis de Rougemont, the prolific Swiss-French promoter of European values, and Igor Markevitch, the Ukrainian modernist composer and conductor, protégé of Sergei Diaghilev, student of Nadia Boulanger, and naturalized citizen of Italy and France, were the cofounders of the EFA. If their founding members are an indication of their intentions, the idea was to bring together the most prestigious musical forces in Europe (and possibly the world). They gathered 15 existing festivals, all of them musical, to be the association’s founding members. These included the Bayreuth Festival, reopened only in the previous year; the Munich Opera Festival, dating back to 1875; the International Festival of Contemporary Music at the Venice Biennale, the first of which had been held in 1930 in the context of the most prestigious of all art exhibitions; and several new entrants, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Holland Festival, both founded in 1947 and both having already been important events on the cultural calendar of Europe. The vast number of festivals now searchable on the website ranges from the exclusive, expensive festivals in Bayreuth and Venice to the “street arts.” The enormous scope of the website’s embrace has made an implicit claim for European prestige as the most vibrant, most artistically fecund region in the world—even while subjecting all this creativity, and spontaneity in the case of street arts, to the subtle discipline of state bureaucracy and subvention.
2 Music as Education, Cultivation, and Improvement Prestige may have been the oldest reason for state support of the musical arts in Europe; however, by the twentieth century, music’s claim on the public purse had shifted to its improving, life-enhancing role in public and private lives. Invoking the common European heritage of the Enlightenment, rhetorical justifications for state support blended references to cultural values with paeans to individual development. Since the eighteenth century, state art patronage and concern for education have repeatedly been linked. Joseph II of Austria established and managed his new Nationaltheater, opening the doors to the people, who were supposed to listen carefully and improve themselves. Music, for many European figures of the Enlightenment, allowed human beings to develop not just their aesthetic but also their moral and intellectual capacities. These defenses
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of music’s importance still echo faintly in the offices of European government bureaucracies. Public provisions for cultural activities express the postwar determination to build social welfare into every aspect of life. Cultural experience and expression should be a universal right for all, not just the privilege of the wealthy, and European states should secure this right. The statement on the website of the Swedish Arts Council puts this plainly: “Culture is to be a dynamic, challenging and independent force based on the freedom of expression. Everyone is to have the opportunity to participate in cultural life. Creativity, diversity, and artistic quality are to be integral parts of society’s development.” To a remarkable degree, the language of the Enlightenment has framed the policy documents of European countries and the EU. Since the 1970s, the jargon of economists has seeped in with references to “market failure,” suggesting that a significant part of European music could not survive were it subject to market forces. Even in that discourse, the “merit goods” that create “positive externalities” when consumed hearken back to a common Enlightenment tradition. A policy analysis paper from 2009 concludes that the “public sector still dominates the funding picture” of live classical music organizations (LCMOs, as they are now referred to in policy circles) and “politicians—at all levels of government—remain the most important group of external stakeholders.”⁵ But from another perspective, as Mark Hogan has argued, these “merit goods” will always be on the list for the chopping block, even in Sweden.⁶ Everywhere in Europe, defining those positive externalities and making decisions about how to support them have resided in conglomerate ministries. Led by their educational wing, they often distribute funds according to the arm’slength principle, devolving decision-making to art councils and other intermediate bodies (funds, foundations, or nonprofit corporations). The robust funding of music, as well as other creative and performing arts, resulted from its inclusion in the larger postwar project of educational expansion. Fueled by the baby boom, European governments sustained cultural subventions because they believed culture was an essential part of a fully rounded education and life. Those who built the governmental infrastructure for disseminating culture saw it as a crucial part of the re-moralization of society after the demoralization of war, occupation, and collaboration. Take the case of the Netherlands, a small country that—like the EU itself— has chosen to focus on the culture of knowledge to serve and define its citizenry. The enormous hydraulic projects undertaken over the past 70 years themselves testify to this emphasis, and one could argue that they aim to save not only the land and the economy but also the cultural heritage. Civic patronage, which is independent of church and court, has characterized Dutch life for centuries, and local festivals and concerts have been the main focus of public spending,
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with city coffers rather than state ones being the main source of funding. Since 1918, both local funding and national public funding have supported musical arts. Even during German occupation, national funding continued. Propaganda and the arts were added as well, to “Germanize” the Netherlands, musically and otherwise. In the postwar decades, funding cultural activities was not a divisive issue, neither in the Netherlands nor in most European states. The widespread practice of devolving decisions about the exact distribution of national funding to intermediary entities, such as local governments and nonprofit, quasi-governmental agencies, insured the participation of a broader citizenry. Initially, there was also an unspoken consensus in Europe on the purpose of government funding. Most funding in most countries made its way into established musical institutions, revealing the continuity of policies from the prewar period. Even the nineteenthcentury esteem for the edification of high arts over the mere pleasures and the moral risk of popular culture (e. g., Americanization) lived on after 1945. In the Netherlands, a protracted parliamentary debate in 1950 settled on the guidelines for cultural policy. They included preserving the artistic heritage of the nation and narrowing the gap between high and popular arts by improving the quality of the latter. The goal of “cultural equality” emphasized the dissemination of culture more than the improvement in the job security for practicing musicians or support for their professional training. Local governments helped to maintain theaters and concert halls, and the central government contributed to the expansion of symphony orchestras from three to eleven, and also used subsidies to keep ticket prices low. Over the following decades, the role of the state began slowly to tilt away from the past in an effort to encourage creativity in the present. A Report on Art and Arts Policy (1976) emphasized “social relevance,” and the government signaled its awareness of the younger generations of art consumers. A series of four-year cultural policy documents followed. The central government would directly support “institutions of national and international significance” (e. g., the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) as part of the country’s “basic infrastructure for culture,” as it is called; municipalities would receive money from the municipalities fund for local institutions, and the regional governments were to “promote the diversity and spread of cultural amenities” evenly over their territories. Lest anyone think this structure favored the old over the new, they also included national cultural funds, earmarked for “promoting dynamism, innovation, and experimentation.”⁷ Only in 2010, in the wake of the global financial crisis, did support from the central government decrease. Still, the consistency of commitment to funding cultural life remains one of the defining characteristics of the Netherlands today.
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Great Britain, for its part, had never made the arts a matter for the government to support, organize, or encourage, and, in that sense (as in many others), it maintained its distance from the common practice of the continental European states. It began subsidizing the arts only as part of the massive effort to maintain national morale during the Second World War by establishing the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts under the Ministry of Information. In 1945, with the name changed to the Arts Council, John Maynard Keynes became its first chairman. This seemed like an auspicious start to a robust commitment to subsidizing the arts. However, the Arts Council was never meant to be a policy-making institution. Since its earliest days, tensions have existed between the claims made by London compared to county and town. There was little money to disperse until 1965, when Prime Minister Harold Wilson moved cultural subsidies from the treasury department to the education department, bringing Great Britain more in line with European practices. In the same year, a modest study by the British think tank Political and Economic Planning illuminated how little the British public was accustomed to state subsidies compared to their continental counterparts. The study recommended more pump-priming activities. Nevertheless, this benign suggestion met with skepticism from the very people the researchers polled. Many thought expenditure on the arts was an unnecessary luxury. The report concluded that improving musical education with the help of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), its orchestras, and its broadcasts would best stimulate musical activities in smaller cities and towns. That the BBC played such a prominent role in the imaginary of public provision for culture was no accident. Since its establishment in 1927 as a public, noncommercial, Crown-chartered corporation, it has provided the exposure to art music that other European states sought to ensure through other means (such as financial subventions to music institutions). The BBC currently supports five orchestras, three groups of singers, one big band; 15 additional musical ensembles have disbanded or were integrated into larger entities over the years. From its beginnings, the BBC saw its mission in similar terms to the high-minded pronouncements of ministers of education and culture on the continent. Its first director-general was J. C. W. Reith, the son of a Scottish minister as well as a moralist who regarded broadcasting as “a Public Service, with definite standards [and] not to be used for entertainment purposes alone.” Reith decided on the BBC-wide directive to “inform, educate, and entertain,” with the latter very much in third place. He articulated its purpose as bringing “into the greatest possible number of homes […] all that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavor, and achievement” while preserving “a high moral tone.”⁸ It was funded initially through a tax on radio receiving sets, later replaced by an annual television license fee. Compared to the work of the Arts Council, the BBC has al-
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ways reached many more people than the local and national venues holding live performances. Nevertheless, the government has continued to provide subventions to music performances through the Arts Councils (of England, Scotland, and Wales), all non-departmental public bodies, loosely under the Department of Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. Since 1994, the National Lottery has been the major source for money, which has allowed cultural funding to recover from the consequences of the budget-slashing Thatcher years. Today, some 30 years on, both local entities and renowned institutions, such as Wigmore Hall, receive support from the Arts Council via the National Lottery. Most goes to the living arts, musical ones among them, leaving the preservation of cultural heritage to other institutions and quasi-governmental organizations. National governments come and go, with various views about the importance of state support for cultural life. But it is still the case, as the Political and Economic Planning’s report in 1965 suggested, that the factors “most conducive to expenditure on the performing arts and music in particular” are “the presence of local enthusiasts” and “the existence or creation of a local tradition of musical activity.”⁹ In regard to the expectations of state support for music, the German situation could not be more different. Germans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to their political past, except perhaps in their expectation that governments have a role to play in fostering musical life. German states, from cities to regions to nations, have been consistent in their attention to music and its institutions. Music has been one of the central points of German pride, projected at home and abroad as a totemic sign of German cultural achievement. State involvement in the musical life of the twentieth century followed the traditions of centuries. It built institutions, supported music education and musicians, and subsidized the costs of performances throughout the landscape of civic life. By the same token, the dispersed nature of state support was not so much a policy decision as the default position. Not merely love for music or civic tradition has sustained state interest in its institutions and performances. Since the eighteenth century, this support expressed the state’s duty to encourage moral rectitude in its subjects and citizens. Both Catholics and Protestants have long regarded music as an essential part of religious practice. This was overt in Protestantism, given Martin Luther’s positive remarks about music as evangelism and the Augsburg Confession’s central role for congregational hymns. Catholic rulers in the Holy Roman Empire also saw its uses for worship and knowledge. In the nineteenth century, the Prussian state reformers regarded theater, including opera, as part of the state’s support for public education. Over time, this basic attitude contributed to the continuation and expansion of public funds dedicated to theaters and their orchestras, sustaining them and keeping ticket prices affordable for the middle classes.
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Fast forward to the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democratic government. In Berlin, Munich, and other former seats of monarchy, state support of prominent musical undertakings continued with slight changes to the names of the institutions; for example, Hofoper became State Operas, or in the case of Berlin, the Oper Unter den Linden. The latter opera became a state institution supported by taxes, under the aegis of the Prussian Ministry for Scholarship, Art, and Public Education. The larger cities continued to sustain their orchestras and theaters, as far as their shrinking budgets could afford. The most dramatic change in state policy concerning musical life was the transformation of music education. The key figure in this development was Leo Kestenberg (1882– 1962), one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century in shaping the future of Germany’s musical life. In 1918, this lifelong Social Democrat, concert pianist, conservatory teacher, and then music consultant for the Prussian government began a complete overhaul of music education policy in Prussia. The goal of the Kestenberg Reform was to make the understanding and appreciation of music—musikalische Volksbildung (musical education for the general public)—more pervasive in Germany, especially for those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. It began with every child, from kindergarten to postsecondary education, and it required considerable investment in professional training for music teachers and curriculum development for the schools. Kestenberg was convinced that musicality had a “home” in all people and that “education for humankind with and through music” would allow each person “to attain a higher sense of oneness within.”¹⁰ In other respects, neither the central government nor the various states contributed much to help musical institutions or musicians navigate the turbulent economic waters of the interwar period, with the partial exception of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which provided some funds for organizations, national festivals, and commemorations. As for the Third Reich, it may seem like a stretch to argue that its investments in musical matters could be attributed to a desire to educate and edify their citizens. But attitudes concerning the importance of music in shaping the minds of young and old continued to characterize the governmental attitude toward the arts in general. The Reich Music Chamber, dedicated to the promotion of German culture for the German Volk, was part of Joseph Goebbels’s new Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, the quintessential expression of how the Enlightenment’s ideal of Bildung (education) had become distorted in the service of other idols. In a reaction to forced centralization during the National Socialist regime, Article 30 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, ratified in 1949 in the western zones, established the “exercise of governmental powers and the discharge of governmental function” in the states (Länder) except
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where “otherwise provided for or permitted” by the Basic Law. The term Kulturhoheit der Länder (cultural prerogatives—literally, majesty—of the state governments) became a slogan, signifying the return to a more democratic form of government patronage and celebrating Germany’s music institutions and talent, distributed across the landscape of towns and cities. The Kulturstaat had returned in the form of cultural citizenship, built from the ground up. By the end of the century, Richard Jakoby (1929 – 2017), the president of the German Music Council (Deutscher Musikrat) from 1976 – 1988, marveled at a music scene “so vast that it can hardly be defined”: more than eight million people engaging actively in amateur music making, another 80,000 professional musicians, a further 300,000 people working in the music industry, 92 publicly subsidized theater orchestras, 50 publicly subsidized symphony orchestras, 70 chamber orchestras, 34 nationally ranked (and state-supported) music conservatories, and 1,000 local public music schools for children and adult students.¹¹ Jakoby’s enthusiasm was warranted, and as his list reveals, much of the “vastness” came from a dense web of musical institutions (local, regional, and national) and the administrative infrastructure, both public and nonprofit, that supported them. Generalizations about the primary role of the individual Länder in sustaining this infrastructure turn out to be, as Andreas Wiesand has argued, problematic. More accurate in describing public support for musical culture—and culture more generally—would be to acknowledge the constant boundary disputes, joint planning, and reorganization efforts among federal, regional, and municipal authorities. “Cooperative federalism” is the term Wiesand prefers. It acknowledges the vigorous engagement of cities in supporting music making and recognizes the networks of intermediaries in financing musical life.¹² The German Music Council is the most important of these, an umbrella organization supported by local, regional, and federal governments as well as patrons. It began in 1953 as the German section of the International Music Council, itself part of UNESCO. It remains (as do the efforts of state subsidies at all levels) part of the grand postwar project of culture, science, and education for all. Meanwhile, in central European countries of the Eastern Bloc, the rhetorical commitment to making culture widely available for workers resulted in substantial investments in musical life. Emulating the Soviet Union, officials regarded all the arts as necessary to building their new societies because they could teach people how to look at the world differently, to understand class relations, and to instill enthusiasm, optimism, and commitment to new states. In Poland, the composer Włodzimierz Sokorski, the vice-minister of the Ministry of Culture and Art, articulated the party line in 1951 when he wrote that “music is one of the few forces that […] on a large scale and with nearly unlimited possibilities seizes and influences all people”; thus it was “a powerful element in the formation of
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the political and ideological aspects of the nation.”¹³ In the German Democratic Republic, the already-abundant institutions of musical life received extensive state support—and pressure—to help legitimate a state that was a radical departure from the past. Socialist realist works, never dogmatically defined or enforced, shared auditory space with the European, especially German, canonical works. The celebrations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s life and legacy, in the nowEast German towns where he had lived and worked (Eisenach and Leipzig, chief among them), existed alongside folksong festivals and the cantata Fritz der Traktorist (Fritz the Tractor Driver, 1952).
3 The Promotional State Over the last thirty years or so, the commercial potential of music and cultural activities, in general, has become ever more overt in discussions of state policy across Europe, including Great Britain. There are many reasons for this rhetorical and financial shift. The rise of neoliberalism and its austerity politics has subordinated artistic innovation under economic performance categories and generated growth fantasies around the “creative industries.” Désétatisation, the term for state retreat and the growing diversification of patronage for musical organizations, has been continuing apace. The share of the people’s cultural spending going into the pockets of the popular music industry has continued to grow, making state promotion of this industry ever more attractive to policymakers in the hopes of generating tax revenue for the state, drawing paying visitors, and adding its export value to the national economy. At the same time (wishful thinking or not), cities and regions, seeking to attract businesses employing highly skilled workers, bought into the notion that the presence of cultural amenities, including performance venues, provided them with a competitive advantage. And then there is cultural tourism. The vast increase of local, regional, and global travel since the end of the Second World War has created enormous potential for ticket sales for concerts, operas, chamber music, master classes, and music festivals of all kinds. European-wide organizations, with the EU at the forefront, have recognized the win-win nature of governmental promotion of the cultural riches that the diverse, dense cultural landscape of Europe provides. The contest winner of the European Cultural Capital can look forward to attracting the sought-after cultural tourist at least for a year and maybe long into the future. The most prominent musical activity supported by state subsidies for purely economic reasons is popular music. Calculations of the economic advantages of subsidizing profitable private enterprises began to play a major role in cultural
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policy in the 1990s and involved partnerships of private and state funding to promote music making under the collective moniker of the “music industry.” The term “promotional state” was coined by Martin Cloonan in his study Popular Music and the State in the UK (2007). It referred to the moment when the British government turned from a politics of suspicion and regulation of pop music to the enthusiastic advocacy of its entrepreneurship and the economic promise of what was increasingly called the “creative industries.” Tony Blair’s New Labour ethos brought music industry leaders to Downing Street, and the government announced the “New Deal for Musicians” with great fanfare. Cloonan’s larger model posited a three-way division of how states interacted with popular music: authoritarian, benign, and promotional. European states had long practiced some combination of the authoritarian and the benign in regard to many genres of music, but by the end of the twentieth century, the promotional state had arguably become the most common mode of state interaction with musical life.¹⁴ Export policies epitomize this shift. From Finland to Greece, nation-states set up offices to help homegrown rock bands make it in the larger world. In Finland, as Janne Mäkelä has shown, the state subsidized some of the costs of music recording, video making, touring, and appearing in international showcases.¹⁵ These states helped musicians to market and promote their work and encouraged networking not just on the part of popular music artists. Sweden’s popular music industry, a giant among lesser of its kind, loomed over all these efforts. In Finland, its eastern neighbor, the notion that there was something distinctive about Finnish music—Sounds Like Helsinki is the title of a promotional brochure—justified state involvement. Postwar Austria has long made a similar case for its own (more famous) musical sounds. Modern Austria, leaving behind the Hollywood Sound of Music clichés, now has a well-oiled infrastructure of offices, initiatives, and websites to promote its entire range of musical offerings. The central office, or “professional partner,” for musical entrepreneurs is the state entity Music Austria (musicaustria.at). It has a slick digital avatar, “mica” with no caps, and a slogan with all caps: “WIR LIEBEN MUSIK / WE LOVE MUSIC.” Music Austria is an independent, nonprofit association founded by the Austrian government, and its funding comes from the Federal Chancellery, the City of Vienna, and the Austrian trade organization for writers, composers, and music publishers (AKM). One of the most important nonprofit, quasi-governmental organizations that fall under the wide umbrella of Music Austria is Austrian Music Export, a joint initiative of Music Austria and Österreichischer Musikfonds, the latter of which is funded by the Federal Chancellery, AKM, and other music-related corporations and nonprofit entities. Austrian Music Export describes itself on its website as a “service and resource center for exporters of con-
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temporary Austrian music in all genres and aspects (recordings, live, sync, etc.).” As in the case of Finland, it promotes Austrian music through information, travel support, representation at trade shows, and the somewhat mysterious “measures to strengthen international exploitation of Austrian repertoire by acting as a catalyst for export-oriented Austrian labels, agencies, and artists.”
Conclusion Festivals have become a ubiquitous feature of the European music scene. In capital cities, medium-sized cities, and countryside, thousands of festivals take place every year with the plurality featuring musical events, from classical to popular to fringes of all sorts. They represent one of the most important showcases for public and private support for musical life. At the same time, they manage to embody in one package all the reasons for which governments have ever supported music. The rhetoric accompanying these public-private partnerships includes the language about burnishing the image of the city or country, fostering artistic expression, encouraging music appreciation and education, and adding to the economic vitality of the community and region. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, international exhibitions, also known as world’s fairs, vied to be the biggest and most dazzling, and many had music integrated into them in the form of entertainment, edification, and new technology. Festival culture resembles that bygone experience through the scope and the combination of public and commercial interests involved. The number of festivals has grown enormously over the past decades. Two researchers, Dorota Ilczuk and Magdalena Kulikowska, have found that most state funding has been ad hoc, especially in the smaller and less affluent festivals, and has been distributed on a case-by-case basis and cobbled together one year at a time.¹⁶ Festival organizers often cite their goal of increasing the international prestige of their places, but they also throw every possible reason for supporting an endeavor into the mix. Take, for instance, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Founded in 1986, it has become—as its own website proclaims—one of the biggest and most renowned international cultural events. Each summer, music escapes from concert halls and opera houses into “beautiful castles and manors, in barns and stalls” and “even in […] shipyards and industrial halls.” Musical picnics and music lessons for all ages are featured as well. All of them are supported by a number of foundations and patronage clubs, but the regional government of Schleswig-Holstein constitutes its financial basis.
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The Dubrovnik Summer Festival is another case in point. It has existed since the early 1950s, presenting both drama and music, staged inside and outside in the “renaissance and baroque atmosphere of Dubrovnik,” harmonizing the “living spirit of drama and music.” It is a strikingly attractive festival from many perspectives, and the city government of Dubrovnik, the regional government of Dubrovnik-Neretva, the Croatian Ministry of Culture, and the Croatian National Tourist Board all provide a significant amount of funding along with a host of corporations and nongovernmental, nonprofit entities. Its artistic and educational goals could not be clearer when considering the long history of the programs it has offered, the performances it has staged, and the directors, actors, conductors, and musicians who have performed in this setting. In 2019, it brought 60,000 visitors to its programs, who bought tickets, stayed in hotels, ate in restaurants, and explored the environs. Yet prestige remains a goal seemingly not yet fully achieved, even at the local level. With a European festival stage of literally thousands of actors competing for attention, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, according to its website vision statement, seeks to be “recognized as the major producer of top-quality events in Dubrovnik, as Croatia’s leading cultural institution, and as one of Europe’s five most distinguished cultural festivals.”¹⁷ Reviewing the state support for music across Europe, one is struck not only by the continuities in forms and purposes over hundreds of years but also by the ongoing vitality despite the strong headwinds slowing it down. By the end of the twentieth century, the prestige that musical arts once lent to the state had been eroded by shrinking audience numbers and populist politics. In the digital age, when everyone is one’s own teacher and choices are infinite, the notion of an educative, improving, morally uplifting role for music in any given community seems merely quaint. Likewise, the myriad ways that people consume music, especially recorded music, can make the economic payoff of subsidies to the music industry so small so as not to be worth the trouble of devising the policies to produce them. In the global age of pandemics, travel restrictions, and climate change, even cultural tourism becomes a riskier, more dubious undertaking than in the past. Perhaps, the vital interests of the state have never been those of music, and what the state wants is not what music does. But despite all, state subsidies for music in all its diversity have persisted—especially in Europe—with considerable benevolent effects.
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Notes Frederick Dorian, Commitment to Culture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 1– 5. Frank Huysmans, Andries van den Bruck, and Jos de Haan, Culture-lovers and Culture-leavers: Trends in Interest in the Arts & Cultural Heritage in the Netherlands (The Hague: Social and Cultural Planning Office, 2005), 1. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 – 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004). Martin Rempe, Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 245 – 252. Marcello Mariani, Live Classical Music Organizations in Europe: An International Comparison of Funding Trends, Government Mechanisms, and Organizational Structures (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 2009), 8. Mark Hogan, “How Countries around the World Fund Music, and Why it Matters,” Pitchfork, 26 June 2017, https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-countries-around-the-world-fund-musi cand-why-it-matters/ (accessed 22 February 2020). Netherlands Ministry of Culture, Education, and Science, Culture at a First Glance 2016, https://www.government.nl/topics/international-cultural-cooperation/documents/publications/ 2017/04/21/culture-at-a-first-glance (accessed 29 February 2020). Charles Loch Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918 – 1940 (London: Methuen, 1955), 242. P.E.P., Sponsorship of Music: The Role of Local Authorities (London: Political and Economic Planning, 1966), 3. Leo Kestenberg, “Musikorganisation: Aus dem Vorwort zum Jahrbuch der deutschen Musikorganisation,” Die Musik 23, no. 7 (1931): 482– 483. Richard Jakoby, “Introduction: A Land of Music,” in Musical Life in Germany: Structure, Development, Figures, ed. id., trans. Eileen Martin (Bonn: Music Information Council, 1997), 6 – 8. Andreas Joh. Wiesand, “The German Cultural Governance System—Dreams and Realities,” Economia Della Cultura 26, no. 2 (2010): 2, 8. David Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafeyette: Purdue University Press, 2013), 2. Martin Cloonan, Popular Music and the State in the UK: Culture, Trade, or Industry? (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2007). Janne Mäkelä, “The State of Rock: A History of Finland’s Cultural Policy and Musical Export,” Popular Music 27, no. 2 (May 2008): 257– 269. Dorata Ilczuk and Magdalena Kulikowska, Festival Jungle, Policy Desert? Festival Policies of Public Authorities in Europe (Budapest: Pro Cultura, 2008), http://www.budobs.org/ (accessed 26 January 2020). “Dubrovnik Summer Festival: Vision and Mission,” http://www.dubrovnDuik-festival.hr/en/ vision-mission (accessed 28 February 2020).
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Bibliography Bayly, Christopher. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 – 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Cloonan, Martin. Popular Music and the State in the UK: Culture, Trade, or Industry? Abingdon: Ashgate, 2007. Dorian, Frederick. Commitment to Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964. Hogan, Mark. “How Countries around the World Fund Music, and Why it Matters.” Pitchfork, 26 June 2017. https://pitchfork.com/features/article/how-countries-around-theworld-fund-musicand-why-it-matters/ (accessed 22 February 2020). Huysmans, Frank, Andries van den Bruck, and Jos de Haan. Culture-lovers and Culture-leavers: Trends in Interest in the Arts & Cultural Heritage in the Netherlands. The Hague: Social and Cultural Planning Office, 2005. Ilczuk, Dorota, and Magdalena Kulikowska. Festival Jungle, Policy Desert? Festival Policies of Public Authorities in Europe. Budapest: Pro Cultura, 2008. http://www.budobs.org/ (accessed 26 January 2020). Jakoby, Richard, ed. Musical Life in Germany: Structure, Development, Figures. Translated by Eileen Martin. Bonn: Music Information Council, 1997. Mäkelä, Janne. “The State of Rock: A History of Finland’s Cultural Policy and Musical Export.” Popular Music 27, no. 2 (May 2008): 257 – 269. Mariani, Marcello. Live Classical Music Organizations in Europe: An International Comparison of Funding Trends, Government Mechanisms, and Organizational Structures. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 2009. Mowat, Charles Loch. Britain Between the Wars, 1918 – 1940. London: Methuen, 1955. Rempe, Martin. Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Tompkins, David. Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013. Wiesand, Andreas Joh. “The German Cultural Governance System—Dreams and Realities.” Economia Della Cultura 26, no. 2 (2010): 1 – 16.
Further Reading Besharov, Gregory. “The Outbreak of the Cost Disease: Baumol and Bowen’s Founding of Cultural Economics.” History of Political Economy 37, no. 3 (2005): 413 – 420. Cummings, Milton C., and Richard S. Katz, eds. The Patron State: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. De Grazia, Victoria. The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Falck, Michael Fritsch, Stephan Heblich, and Anne Otto. “Music in the Air: Estimating the Social Return to Cultural Amenities.” Journal of Cultural Economics 42 (2018): 365 – 391. Grant, M. J. Review of Wege zum musikalischen Strukturalismus: René Leibowitz, Pierre Boulez, John Cage und die Webern-Rezeption in Paris um 1950 by Inge Kovács, and Die
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soziale Isolation der neuen Musik: Zum Kölner Musikleben nach 1945, by Michael Custodis. Music and Letters 87, no. 2 (May 2006): 346 – 352. Hillman-Chartrand, Harry, and Claire McCaughey. “The Arm’s Length Principle and the Arts: An International Perspective—Past, Present, and Future.” In Who’s to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Support, edited by Milton C. Cummings, Jr. and J. Mark Davidson Schuster, 43 – 80. New York: American Council for the Arts Books, 1989. Imhoof, David. Becoming a Nazi Town: Culture and Politics in Göttingen Between the World Wars. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Pasler, Jann. Composing the Citizen: Music and Public Utility in Third Republic France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (December 2005): 740 – 770. Potter, Pamela. Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Richards, Greg. “Cultural Capital or Cultural Capitals?” In City and Culture: Cultural Processes and Urban Sustainability, edited by Louise Nystrom, 403 – 414. Stockholm: Swedish Urban Environment Council, 1999. Rizzo, Ilde, and Anna Mignosa, eds. Handbook on the Economics of Cultural Heritage. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Press, 2013. Sachs, Harvey. Music in Fascist Italy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Smith, Melanie, and Greg Richards, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Tourism. London: Routledge, 2013. Steinweis, Alan. Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Strachwitz, Rupert Graf, and Stefan Toepler, eds. Kulturförderung: Mehr als Sponsoring. Wiesbaden: Gabler Verlag, 1993.
Myriam Chimènes
6 Cultures of Donating: Musical Patronage
In the twentieth century, private patronage continued to play a significant role in musical life. The origins of this practice date back to antiquity, as indicated by the history of the French term for patron—mécène—which derives from Gaius Maecenas, the political and cultural advisor to the Roman emperor Augustus. Patronage exists solely in the arts. It is distinct from philanthropy, which consists mainly of charitable deeds and expresses generosity that is completely disinterested. In contrast, donating does not preclude symbolic or financial rewards. With regard to creation, there is a major difference between music, on the one hand, and painting and sculpture, on the other. Visual artworks have a market value that is likely to give rise to speculation, disguised as love of art. The acquisition of an artwork constitutes an investment, whether intentional or not. Reintroduced into the art market, the artwork may yield spectacular profits for the patron who sells it. Furthermore, it can be passed on to the patron’s inheritors, who are then able to benefit financially from any added value. Speculative interest therefore attaches itself to the love of art and may even eclipse it. In the field of music, the patron’s attitude is intrinsically different, as Pierre Boulez notes: “Visual arts show us, even more than music, the correlation between commission, patronage, and the market. Music is, in a way, protected against such commercial overbidding because commissioned work is twofold: the writing of the work and then its execution, and the consequences that follow, that is the distribution in print, by any means of reproduction.”¹ In the case of music, the generosity of patrons does not derive from their material concerns. Their behavior is akin to that of their Renaissance counterparts, who invested in the future and wished to associate their names with that of the artist. Their motives probably lay elsewhere. Patrons take pride in their aesthetic judgment and intend to share—consciously or not—the fame of the musician they sponsor. Eager to borrow from the artist a means to achieve posterity, they ascribe importance to memory and aim to share—if not inherit—the future success of their protégés. However, the methods of musical patronage were diverse; support benefited not only the creation but also the promotion and dissemination of works, with the performer as the mediator. Explaining and describing musical patronage require us to look at the personality of those who practiced it and to ask why and how they did it. The study of musical patronage also requires us to look at the public policy in the same field. The example of France is particularly illustrative in this regard. While patrons played a greater role in French musical life than public initiatives during the Third Republic (1870 – 1940), roles were gradually https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-007
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reversed in the second half of the twentieth century. After 1945, the state got involved in musical life like never before. The 1980s saw a new era of corporate sponsorship, which strengthened the action of the public sector. The present chapter focuses on classical music and occasionally glances at jazz, while excluding chanson and popular music.
1 Who? The results of several combined research projects enable us to explore the functioning of patronage in France during the Third Republic. In the seventeenth century, musical life was almost exclusively supported and facilitated by the monarchy,² as exemplified most prominently by the relationship between composer Jean-Baptiste Lully and King Louis XIV. The French Revolution did not end state patronage. Once the Third Republic was firmly established, republican authorities did not devise a new music policy that contrasted with that of the Second Empire (1852– 1870). The small budget allocated to music is an indicator of the negligible involvement of a state that had no real music policy. Moreover, a closer look at the budget also reveals that state initiatives were not only rudimentary but also extremely centralized. This warrants a study dedicated to musical life in Paris. The main beneficiaries of government funding were Parisian institutions, and money went almost exclusively to opera and education. The concentration of resources on the Paris Opera and the Conservatory of Paris shows an obvious lack of interest in any form or performance of music other than those considered operatic. Symphony concerts, for instance, received only meager subsidies. On the contrary, the concerts of the Société Nationale de Musique (National Society of Music), the groupe Jeune France (Young France Group), and even the Ballets Russes and Concerts Wiéner (Wiéner Concerts), which were milestones in music history, owed their survival and sometimes their very existence to the support from wealthy social classes. As for musical creation, the state more or less ignored it until 1938, when, by a decision of the Front Populaire government (1936 – 1938), the first regular state commissions on music composers were established. After the Second World War, we see profound changes in the organization of musical life and a reversal of the respective involvement of public authorities and private patrons. Before that and throughout the Third Republic, however, aristocratic and bourgeois elites played a considerable role in Parisian musical life, compensating for the absence of the state in this field. As a component of sociability, music fit appropriately in a society in which society events were pivotal. The fact that these events were so important explains why social elites be-
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came invested in the promotion, dissemination, and creation of music. Wealthy elites and leaders of social life belonged to the aristocracy, finance, industry, or the independent professions. This “aristocracy of birth and wealth”³ made up the core audience for opera and concerts. For their pleasure, music occupied the private sphere of the salons in luxurious townhouses and bourgeois apartments. Taste also motivated the privileged classes to attend public concerts.
2 Why? Amateurism occupies a central place in the history of music as a social practice. The art world distinguished between the connoisseur and the expert, that is to say the professional art historian. The music world, however, did not use the term “connoisseur” but distinguished between the amateur, who likes to practice music, and the music lover (mélomane), who enjoys listening to music. The amateur is also a music lover but not the other way around. At a time when recording technology did not yet make it possible to repeat the listening experience after the concert and to deepen the musical knowledge, especially of new works, amateur practice remained very prominent. The invention of the gramophone challenged this but did not discourage amateurs and concertgoers right away. As a matter of fact, the love of art went hand in hand with practicing it, and many patrons were themselves amateur musicians. As a noble remedy against idleness, a means to shine in society without having to perform in public, and a way to display close relationships with professional musicians, amateurism explains in part the success of music in private homes. Amateurism was also well suited to the position women were given in society. Learning to play music was considered to have educational value. It provided a gratifying outlet that compensated women’s exclusion from professional life that was imposed on them by their social environment. Knowing how to befriend artists and writers was regarded as a skill of the female socialite since she was confined to her salon. And how can one explain the self-assuredness of members of the nobility in matters of taste and their sometimes audacious aesthetic judgments? Deprived of its political power, the nobility turned its efforts to a field that allowed it to maintain prestige, acquire new legitimacy, even afford posterity, and cultivate difference. Snobbism represents an additional factor of no lesser importance and needs to be taken into consideration. No matter how mediocre, the practice of amateurs legitimized their aspiration to pose as trendsetters. Snobbism was a key ingredient of these practices; it was displayed openly in public and private settings. It clearly shaped the behavior of many members of this elite who were seeking so-
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cial and intellectual distinction. The infatuation with Richard Wagner and the “pilgrimage” to Bayreuth was fashionable, as was attending the Ballets Russes. When Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe (1860 – 1952) and then the Count Étienne de Beaumont (1883 – 1953) managed to drag the Paris smart set to attend shows outside the center of Paris, it stirred up the snobbism of the capital’s high society. In the 1930s, Nadia Boulanger attracted an upper-class clientele to her famous Wednesday salons. In the 1950s, the Concerts du Domaine Musical (Musical Domain’s Concerts) also drew a snobbish audience in search of novelty. As Francis Poulenc puts it, “[s]nobbism was always a vital agent of propaganda. It grew the fame of great men, from Haydn to Wagner, from Chopin to Stravinsky.”⁴ The alliance between artistic avant-garde and snobbism was certainly fruitful for both sides.
3 How? Promoting: The Role of the Salons’ Hosts France may be considered a model for music in salons, and the practice is often associated with the Ancien Regime. However, salons continued to host concerts in the late nineteenth century, after the Third Republic was firmly established. Salons were places of sociability of which music was one of the components; they were still workplaces for musicians, while providing a setting for intimate musical enjoyment. They constituted a springboard for musicians who wished to start a career. That is the reason why salon concerts were as important as public concerts for professional musicians. In providing composers and audiences with a concert setting and an audience, some salon hosts combined, in a way, the functions of a producer and of what we would today call a press relations agent. After all, the presentation of a musician eventually enticed concertgoers to visit concert halls. The salons served as a barometer for artists to predict their success on public stages. For a performer, playing in a salon meant a break-in period for the concert program. It gave them an opportunity to build a selected audience likely to bring an even wider audience to their public concerts. For composers, salons were venues where they could test their latest works, which had sometimes been given as a first private performance, and thus initiate their dissemination. In the early twentieth century, impresarios took advantage of this situation and acted as intermediaries, organizing concerts in the salons of the French capital’s high society. When foreign performers and composers came to study in Paris, looking for recognition or testing their reputation, they underwent this rite of passage as well. Pablo Casals, who moved
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there in 1900, did not hesitate to call Paris “the capital of the cultural world” and “the Mecca of creators.”⁵ Like him, many foreign musicians stayed in Paris or performed in Parisian salons, among them Ricardo Viñes, George Enescu, Arthur Rubinstein, Wanda Landowska, Geraldine Farrar, Lina Cavalieri, Mary Garden, Jan Kubelik, Igor Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, Vladimir Horowitz, Marya Freund, Clara Haskil, and Dinu Lipatti. By entertaining themselves, private concert organizers became promoters, eventually influencing the career of performers and the dissemination of their works. As true “organs of launch and resonance,”⁶ salons played the role that radio, television, and social media assume today. Thanks to hosts who were both informed music lovers and good “communicators” (before the term was coined), musicians found it to their advantage to perform in salons. The example of Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux (1850 – 1930) illustrates the importance of salon concerts. Born into the high bourgeoisie, she received near professional musical training. She sang and played the piano well enough to be able to accompany professional musicians. De Saint-Marceaux was a larger-than-life character. Famous composers dedicated major works to her, including Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel, who, together with Claude Debussy and Giacomo Puccini, played the piano to accompany her singing their melodies. From 1875 to 1930, de Saint-Marceaux hosted a famed salon where she brought together composers, musicians, artists, and writers once a week. Famous writer Colette, who frequented her salon, confirmed its renown: “Two salons of mediocre dimensions, united into one, were for a long time the place that made composers’ and virtuosos’ reputations, under the aegis of a good musician.”⁷ De Saint-Marceaux’s salon premiered works regardless of aesthetic divisions, including pieces by André Messager, Vincent d’Indy, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, Paul Dukas, de Falla, and Isaac Albéniz. More often than not, these concerts took place in the presence of their authors who were actively involved in the execution. In addition to proving de Saint-Marceaux’s assured taste and her ability to discover promising talent, the case of Debussy underlines the importance of her salon, since the composer accepted her invitation even though he was not keen on society events. He made sure she was the first one to hear his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) and revealed fragments of his Pelléas et Mélisande to her while he was still working on the music because he was aware that this connection could be useful for his career. The benefit for Debussy was exposure. Likewise, it surely was for the sake of publicity that Puccini accepted de Saint-Marceaux’s invitation a few days prior to the opening of La Bohème at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, even though the composer was already world famous at that time. De Saint-Marceaux’s reputation also explains why Fauré, one of the pillars of her salon society, introduced
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young students from his composition class to her, among them Ravel. The celebrity that Ravel then quickly gained in Parisian salons stands in sharp contrast to his repeated failures to be awarded the Prix de Rome, a French scholarship initially given to painters and sculptors and subsequently to musicians as well. While still unknown, a young Isadora Duncan laid the foundations of her career in de Saint-Marceaux’s salon in 1901, accompanied at the piano by Ravel. This engagement was enough to activate networks and to draw the attention of the hosts of other salons where Duncan was then hired to dance. The snowball effect built up public interest and furthered Duncan’s early career. De Saint-Marceaux’s legitimacy was obvious, and her efficiency to promote the artists, performers, and composers who performed at her place was undeniable. Highly regarded as an authority in the musical field, she was able to bring listeners to concert halls that she herself visited assiduously. For performers, publicity was not the only incentive to play at salons. The artist fee was often a deciding factor, for stars like Farrar as well as for newcomers like the young Viñes. Viñes was twelve years old when he graduated from the Municipal Conservatory of Barcelona and came to Paris with his mother and his brother in 1887. During the time he studied at the Conservatory of Paris, the Catalan pianist also performed in salons, which allowed him to support his family while learning his trade. For about ten years, until he gained public recognition, and before he asserted himself as one of the main proponents of contemporary composers, in particular Ravel and Debussy, Viñes built a network that would be instrumental for his career. He tirelessly enlarged the circle of his potential audience. He had already played in countless Parisian salons, both bourgeois and aristocratic, when he was awarded the first prize in the piano category at the Conservatory in 1894 and gave his first and successful public concert at the Salle Pleyel in 1895. The social capital Viñes amassed certainly generated a return on investment: 700 people attended this recital. As for Farrar, the money to be earned from performances in salons was considerable. She received 3,000 French francs⁸ for a recital given in May 1907 in the society salon of financier Maurice Ephrussi, whose wife Béatrice was born to the Rothschild family. However, musicians were not always paid when they performed in salons. Their improvised, friendly participation in the Fridays of Marguerite de SaintMarceaux and the Sundays of Godebskis, Paul Clemenceau, and Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac was compensated not with money payments but with interpersonal dividends. Musical salons blossomed and thrived, especially during the Belle Époque. Though they did not disappear after the First World War, their number decreased significantly from the Roaring Twenties onward. In the interwar years, the growth of the record industry and the emergence of radio probably contributed
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to this development, which coincided perhaps with a decline in amateur musicking. From then on, private patrons donated differently to music, giving instrumental support to public events.
Disseminating: Patrons’ Help in Organizing Public Concerts In a situation where musical policies by the republican authorities were still rudimentary, wealthy concertgoers and frequent opera visitors spontaneously supported initiatives started by musicians who were often forced to organize themselves. Musicians aspired to play, to be listened to and recognized, and thus to make a living through their art. They answered requests from their most appreciative listeners. By attending concerts, the public made a first step towards supporting musicians. The example of the National Society of Music is enlightening in this regard. The association was established in 1871 by César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, Jules Massenet, Fauré, and others with the aim to have music of its members listened to, irrespective whether the work was published or not. Representing a group of French composers, the association played a major role in musical creation. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was the primary platform to present important works by Édouard Lalo, d’Indy, Ernest Chausson, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Debussy, Ravel, and others. Evidencing the cooperation between musicians and patrons, it invited the latter in by offering opportunities for members who “wished to give their sympathies and support” from the start.⁹ The society welcomed amateurs and music lovers as members, encompassing musicians and their audience. In exchange for a financial contribution, not only did these audience members get access to concerts, but also some of them were granted the privilege to mingle with famous musicians. In this way, the society turned privileged audience members into benefactors. For musicians who organized public concerts, it made sense to turn to private patrons for support. In 1885, for instance, when Jules Pasdeloup’s Concerts Populaires (Popular Concerts) went bankrupt, the Pereire brothers, who were bankers, contributed to clear some of his debts.¹⁰ In 1894, the countess of Béarn financed an additional concert of the Lamoureux Orchestra dedicated to Wagner. Princess Edmond de Polignac contributed financially to the Schola Cantorum since its early days. Patrons most certainly favored innovation. Support from members of Parisian high society to the Ballets Russes was instrumental to make the ensemble fashionable. The same holds true for Wagner, who was supported by some of the same patrons in the same way as the ballet. Serge Diaghilev, who was associated with impresario Gabriel Astruc, understood that it was useful (if not necessary) to appeal to the part of his audience that was
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most privileged. Banking on snobbism, he called on wealthy supporters to achieve success. The three first Russian seasons (exhibitions, Russian concerts, shows of Boris Godounov) thus represent a period of preparation that allowed Diaghilev to organize one full season of operas and ballets with the backing of a core of protectors. His first season of Ballets Russes in 1909 was made possible by the Greffulhes’ endorsement of his work in the banking and diplomatic milieus and by the financial guarantees from financiers who were passionate about art, namely Baron Henri de Rothschild, Isaac de Camondo, Otto Hermann Kahn, and Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe.¹¹ In 1920, Count Étienne de Beaumont, who welcomed jazz musicians in his salon as early as 1917, facilitated the first “spectacle concert” organized by Jean Cocteau at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. This concert led to the show Le Bœuf sur le toit (The Ox on the Roof) by Darius Milhaud. In the interwar years, the constitution of patronage committees within newly created concert societies evidences that the method was suited to support contemporary creation. This was how the Concerts Wiéner worked, the first public concerts to welcome jazz music with the American orchestra of Billy Arnold and the platform for the first French rehearsal of Pierrot Lunaire by Arnold Schoenberg. It was also the principle on which the Orchestre symphonique de Paris (Symphonic Orchestra of Paris) was organized, the orchestra that performed works by composers as diverse as Alban Berg, Kurt Weill, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Prokofiev as well as Edgard Varèse and Florent Schmitt in France. It was the method of the Concerts de la Sérénade (Sérénade Concerts), where numerous works by composers from the Groupe des Six (Group of Six), Igor Markevitch, Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Luigi Dallapiccola were performed, and it formed the organizational base of the Young France Group, which included, among others, Olivier Messiaen and André Jolivet. The imposing lists of benefactor members of these concert series allow us to analyze how networks worked and thus understand the social relations that underpinned this sector of the music industry. At that time, the link between salons and concert halls persisted. Works commissioned by the Viscount Charles and Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles were given at a first private performance in the sole presence of their guests before they were then performed for the wider public in the Sérénade Concerts, of which they were patrons. Likewise, the Partita by Markevitch was commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac and performed in the concert series that she supported as patron. Two more personalities, both from an aristocratic background, made their name by engaging in the organization of public performances of music. In the 1890s, Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe established the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales de France (Society of Great Musical Auditions of France) and pre-
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sided it. The society declared that it promoted the common good. Its purpose was to stage works of composers who were forced to go abroad to execute their works, which implied a clear critique of authorities in the composers’ home countries. In this way, the society facilitated the premiere of Hector Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict in France, a comic opera that Berlioz wrote in Germany. Furthermore, the society made possible the first French audition of works as diverse as Les Troyens (The Trojans) by Berlioz, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) by Wagner, the Weihnachtsoratorium (The Christmas Oratorio) by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the excerpts of Gurre-Lieder (Gurre Songs) by Schoenberg. In the 1920s, Count Étienne de Beaumont instigated an ephemeral season of ballets. Blending dance, painting, music, and poetry, Count Étienne de Beaumont intended to cater to “the best and most faithful” part of the public. In very different creative and artistic spirit, with 30 years between them, Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe and Count Étienne de Beaumont exemplify the common approach by which noblemen and noblewomen who were excluded from political power strove for a new form of legitimacy. The Soirées de Paris (Paris Evenings) were the occasions of commissions of ballet music by Erik Satie (Mercure, with decors by Pablo Picasso), Milhaud (Salade, with decors by Georges Braque), and Henri Sauguet (Les Roses).
Creating: Patrons’ Support The lack of interest of the state in music also explains, at least partially, the engagement of a few wealthy amateurs and music lovers to support musical creation. This support manifested itself in two ways. To begin with, plenty of patrons would invite composers in their home and maintain them during their stay. The idea was that composers, freed from material concerns, could devote themselves exclusively to their creativity and pursue their inspirations. Those who commissioned works were fewer in numbers, and not all patrons were easy to collaborate with. Condemning certain practices, Stravinsky clearly indicated that patrons’ demand needed to be limited: I have had my own experience with commissioners, too, a brush with Antimaecenas himself—a scion of grocery stores and sciolist of “modern art”—who would have commissioned The Rake’s Progress from me, had I agreed to his condition that he should sit in judgment while I played my music to him at the piano. Do you remember Sigismondo Malatesta’s letter to Giovanni di Medici asking for an artist to beautify the newly plastered walls of Tempio Malatesta with frescoes? In Pound’s version, Sigismondo wishes to promise the painter, whoever he may be, that he “… can work as he likes, or waste his time as he likes,
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never lacking provision.” That should be read by anyone who intends to commission an artist.¹²
Some composers, however, benefited from the hospitality of rich music-loving friends. Examples include Fauré, who stayed at Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe’s and Princess Edmond de Polignac’s; Ravel, who lived at Misia Edwards’s; and Poulenc, who was supported in this way by Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles and Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac. These composers were not subjected to any constraints from their patrons, who in turn found the proximity to “their” artists gratifying since they could pride themselves of having facilitated the creation of a work of music. Whether patronage generated immediate results or not, the patron associated his or her name with that of the musician, and visits often cemented sincere friendships between artists and their backers. Dedications continued to bear witness of the links between musicians and amateurs as well as music lovers who fostered their music while making the manuscripts offered to benefactors tokens of recognition.¹³ In France, among the few patrons who commissioned musical works was Winnaretta Singer, the future Princess Edmond de Polignac (1865 – 1943). Works dedicated to her include Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Deceased Infanta). Singer distinguished herself from other patrons of the time. Her contribution was exceptional, and her name remains associated with the composers whom she commissioned. Born near New York City, she was very young when her father, the inventor of the sewing machine, Isaac Singer died and left her a fortune. Her mother remarried and moved to Paris, where she held a musical salon. Growing up in this environment and learning to play the piano and the organ, Singer immersed herself in music. She did not become a patron right away. For about 20 years, she refined her taste by attending concerts. Hosting sessions in her own salon, she kept the company of musicians to whom she became both a backer and a friend. Married to the composer Prince Edmond de Polignac, Singer hosted one of the most renowned Parisian musical salons under her new name, inviting Reynaldo Hahn, Milhaud, Ravel, Markevitch, Landowska, and Lipatti. The music performed in the salon of her grand townhouse was very eclectic, ranging from Josquin des Prez to Stravinsky, Rameau, Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, and Fauré to Cole Porter, who played jazz in her salon in November 1917. Displaying the princess’s interest in contemporary music, her salon functioned as a workshop. Among the music created there were works she did not initiate herself. The princess commissioned her first works during the First World War. Her first three protégés were Stravinsky, Satie, and de Falla. The commission to the latter was more specific, since she asked de Falla to compose works for a small orchestra of about 20 musicians
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so that they could be played in her salon. The commissions resulted in Stravinsky’s Renard (The Fox), Satie’s Socrate, and de Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show). Between 1920 and 1940, the princess ordered more works from Jean Wiéner, Germaine Tailleferre, Milhaud, Poulenc, Sauguet, Markevitch, Jean Françaix, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Lennox Berkeley, Weill, Nicolas Nabokov, and others. The fees she paid were significant. For instance, in 1917 Stravinsky received 10,000 Swiss francs to compose Renard (26,000 euros today). Due to the economic crisis, Poulenc was in 1931 paid 20,000 French francs (12,000 euros today) for his Concerto pour deux pianos et orchestre (Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra). Each commission entailed strictly defined clauses: the patron wished to be the owner of the work and reserved the exclusive right to perform it for a period to up to five years. The first performance was to be held at her home. The work had to be dedicated to her, and the manuscript had to be sent to her to enrich her “collection.” Tellingly, the princess used this term, which was common in the world of visual arts, when she spoke of her musical manuscripts. If the work was performed in public, it had to be mentioned that it had been commissioned by and was dedicated to Princess Edmond de Polignac. Occasionally, reality did not follow the precisely defined conditions of a contract. Certain works, many of them very prestigious, had their first performance on public stages rather than in her salon. For example, the aforementioned Concerto pour deux pianos et orchestre by Poulenc was first rehearsed at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Venice in 1932. Appointed as its honorable president, the princess was proud to grant the festival this privilege. Nevertheless, the fact remains that when Princess Edmond de Polignac ordered works from composers, her main concern was to supply music to the festivities that she organized in her salon. In the interwar years, the Viscount Charles and Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles strongly supported the artistic avant-garde in all its expressions. They welcomed famous painters and artists to stay at their Parisian townhouse, including Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, and Balthus. In Hyères on the French Riviera, the Noailles commissioned a young Robert Mallet-Stevens, who was then an unknown architect, to build a villa that was a statement for the modern times. The interior was decorated with paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Georges Masson, and Max Ernst, while the cubist garden was adorned with sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Giacometti, and Constantin Brâncuşi. The Noailles had artists and writers stay at their townhouse, their estate at Fontainebleau, and their villa at Saint-Bernard in Hyères. Although they primarily supported works in visual arts and film, they also included music. In 1929, they commissioned L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age) by Buñuel, a film that caused a scandal and made the
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Noailles outcasts in their own social circles,¹⁴ as well as Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) by Cocteau, with music by Georges Auric. The few works they commissioned to musicians were meant to be performed at their private parties in Paris and Hyères. The Noailles’ support of the avant-garde was driven by snobbism that was primarily aimed at high-society peers. The first musicians with whom the Noailles got in touch were Poulenc and Auric, whom they probably met through Cocteau. From Poulenc, they ordered almost a year in advance a work to be played at Le Bal des matières (The Ball of Materials),¹⁵ a party they organized in June 1929 at their Parisian residency. Aubade, a choreographic concerto for piano and 18 other instruments, was created on 18 June 1929 and performed in front of an upper-class audience with the composer at the piano. The original choreography was created by Bronislava Nijinska. Poulenc earned 25,000 French francs (about 16,000 euros today). In the fall of 1931, the Noailles planned a “spectacle concert” at the Theatre of Hyères for which they ordered works from Buñuel, Giacometti, decorator Christian Bérard, as well as Poulenc, Auric, Sauguet, Markevitch, and Nabokov. Poulenc composed Le Bal masqué (The Masked Ball), a secular cantata based on poems by Max Jacob; Auric wrote Bibliophilie, a work for two pianos; Sauguet composed La Voyante (The Fortune Teller), based on a text of predictions by Nostradamus; Nabokov created Collectionneur d’échos (Collector of Echoes), a cantata based on a poem especially written by Jacob; and Markevitch contributed the orchestra piece Galop (Gallop). A private reception was held on 30 April 1932 at the Theatre of Hyères under the direction of Roger Désormière; among the audience were Cocteau, Dalí, and Aldous Huxley. In the same year, marked by G. W. Pabst’s film Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), the Noailles facilitated the staging of Weill’s Mahagonny-Songspiel and Der Jasager (He Said Yes) with a concert at the Serenade, following a private performance at their townhouse at the Place des États-Unis in Paris. When the composer fled the Nazis in 1933, the couple offered him refuge in France. The Noailles supported musicians discreetly, yet efficiently. Charles de Noailles’s generosity, expressed in a cheque, enabled Sauguet to finish his opera La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma).¹⁶ Another example is Markevitch, who was commissioned to compose an oratorio, Le Paradis Perdu (Paradise Lost), and received monthly allowances until he completed his work.¹⁷
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4 The Development in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Even when they did not promote musicians directly, patrons could lend them support and help them get recognition. While entertaining themselves, patrons were in a position and had the contacts necessary for artists to obtain valuable recommendation letters or influence leaders of institutions, even politicians, to facilitate musicians’ appointments or make the performance of their works on national stages possible. Sometimes patrons exerted power over the press. They also joined forces to allow for the organization of major public events. When successful, such efforts were also gratifying for the intermediaries who devised powerful strategies. In this way, patrons acquired coveted legitimacy without deliberately drawing attention to it. Both the context and the mentalities that shaped this form of patronage evolved between 1870 and 1940. However, musicians and members of the wealthy elites maintained close ties beyond this period, and the impact of patronage on composers’ and performers’ careers was still evident. There were numerous patrons who won fame by supporting musicians morally and materially in their own way: hosts of salons that provided a stage for rehearsing new works, sometimes performed at prepremiere concerts; commissioners and dedicatees of new sheet music; or organizers of public events. Some of their names now rank among the renowned musicians in music history. Their examples evidence the proximity of musicians and what was then called Parisian “society,” that is to say the aristocratic and bourgeois elites.¹⁸ For a musician, nurturing harmonious relations with these elites could have three major consequences. It could be a way to create an audience, mobilize financial support, and gain backing that was necessary to be hired for coveted positions. After 1940, the role of private patronage changed. Under the Third Republic, patrons had mitigated the lack of state engagement in music. However, the impetus of the Front Populaire led to the formulation of a cultural policy that, in the field of music and among other things, acknowledged the importance of creation for the first time. The Vichy government continued this with a policy of public commissions, which was developed further after the Second World War. The Countess Lily Pastré, who had invited writers and artists like Vittorio Rieti, Youra Guller, Haskil, and cellist Casals to stay at her Montredon estate near Marseilles during the war, supported Gabriel Dussurget to establish the Festival International d’art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, the first opera festival in France. The countess was the main financial backer of the first installment of this festival in 1948. In a similar way, Suzanne Tézenas played a central role in the history of the Concerts du Domaine Musical. In the 1950s, the daughter
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and wife of industrialists funded the concert society that was established by Boulez. Her initiative was partially grounded in society life, a fact she herself acknowledged: “Initially, to get support, it was necessary to flatter people through snobbism. Snobs, one must admit, were the ones who looked for novelty. […] There were meetings at my place to launch concerts; that helped a lot. Many people signed up to come here.”¹⁹ As Pierre-Michel Menger noted, the involvement of private patrons had a positive impact on public action: Ultimately, one needs to acknowledge that these artistic-social circles, united in the 1950s and 1960s in the cult of the new in music, played a decisive and sometimes direct role in the official recognition of this music by the cultural administration of the state. Patrons were instrumental in gaining artistic and sociocultural legitimacy for these musical developments, which broke completely with the dominant tradition, a tradition whose main representatives held almost all positions of power in important institutions and administrative offices until the late 1960s.²⁰
Gradually, a musical policy worthy of the name was implemented, marked by in particular the democratization of musical education, and crowned by the establishment of the musical directorate in the French Ministry of Culture in 1970. After a rapid increase in the public authorities’ power in the field of culture in general and music in particular, accompanied by a growing attention to creation, the 1980s mark the beginning of the era of corporate sponsorship.²¹ In 1979, the Association pour le développement du mécénat industriel et commercial (ADMICAL: Association for the Development of Industrial and Commercial Sponsorship) was established “in order to promote enterprises in favor of culture.” In 1987, the French minister of culture founded a Conseil supérieur du mécénat (Higher Council of Sponsorship). This body was responsible for issuing “official recommendations for allocating public funding to cultural projects partly financed by private funds, emanating either from companies or from private individuals.”²² In the same year, parliament passed a new law whose purpose was to grant tax advantages to sponsors,²³ mirroring existing practices in the United States. Today, the programs of the Opéra National de Paris, the Orchestre de Paris (the prestigious successor of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire), and other institutions contain impressive lists of sponsors whose support complements funding by the state. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the large musical institutions in Paris began to openly appeal to an “audience of sponsors,” consisting of the private individuals whose names were published in concert programs. A case in point is the Orchestre de Paris, which established a circle of sponsors in the early 1980s. The orchestra used the opening of the Philharmonie de Paris as an occasion to launch its sponsorship appeal under the title “Music lovers, we need
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you!” Among the privileges granted to sponsors of the Orchestre de Paris were the invitation to attend dress rehearsals and meetings with musicians. Irrespective of the question of whether or not such sponsorship appeals are successful, they are reminiscent of Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe’s patronage more than a century earlier. Above all, they confirm the continuing necessity to call on private donations, be it from individuals or businesses, to compensate minuscule state funding.
5 Convergences between Europe and the United States There are no similar studies of private musical patronage in other Western European countries comparable to the work we have produced on France over the years. It is therefore feasible to presume that in Eastern Europe the topic is unlikely to have been extensively researched there either; given that before the fall of the Iron Curtain, musical patronage—a product of liberal societies—was little, if at all practiced there. However, we can refer to a handful of prominent patrons in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Switzerland to make the point that the developments described in this chapter were not exclusively French. At the same time, we can easily spot some common features with North-American personalities, thanks to extensive research on sponsorship in the United States.²⁴ John Christie (1882– 1962) was a music lover and owner of the organ factory Hill, Norman and Beard. In 1920, he inherited a large neo-Elizabethan abode in Sussex, in the middle of the English countryside, and began to host amateur operatic shows in his music room. Eager to create in England a festival like those of Salzburg and Bayreuth, he built a small theater adjacent to his residency and gave its artistic direction in the hands of the conductor Fritz Busch and the director Carl Ebert. In 1934, Christie inaugurated the first Glyndebourne Opera Festival, which he fully funded. After the festival was interrupted during the Second World War, it resumed with the backing of additional sponsors. In Italy, the example of Count Guido Chigi Saracini (1880 – 1965) illustrates the model of aristocratic patronage described in this chapter. Count Saracini was born into an illustrious family. He was an amateur composer, trained at the Conservatory of Florence, and a dedicatee of works by Ottorino Respighi. In 1906, he inherited a considerable fortune that he used to promote music, particularly in his hometown Sienna. Count Saracini renovated the family palace and equipped it with a concert hall, which was inaugurated in 1923 with a concert season titled Micat in Vertice, the Chigi family’s motto. In 1932, the patron
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founded the Accademia Musicale Chigiana (Chigiana Musical Academy) in Sienna, where famed musicians gave classes open to international students. This world-renowned academy, where Alfred Cortot, Casals, Dallapiccola, Salvatore Accardo, Maurizio Pollini, Luciano Berio, and others were taught, is still one of the most prestigious Italian musical institutions. Another Italian patron worth mentioning here is Countess Pecci-Blunt (1885 – 1971), born Anna Laetitia Pecci, who was a grandniece of Pope Leo XIII and married to a rich American banker, Cecil Blumenthal. Countess Pecci-Blunt invited musicians to her townhouse in Paris as well as her palace at the Piazza d’Aracoeli in Rome. With the help of Rieti and Mario Labroca, she organized the Concerti di Primavera (Spring Concerts) from 1931. These concerts mirrored the series at the Sérénade that was devoted to promoting French composers’ works in Italy. In Switzerland, Werner Reinhart (1884 – 1951) and Paul Sacher (1906 – 1999) distinguished themselves by using their wealth to support music and musicians. Born into a very wealthy family of industrialists from Winterthur, the amateur clarinetist Reinhart supported numerous painters, writers, and musicians, including Reiner Maria Rilke, Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, Othmar Schoeck, Frank Martin, Markevitch, Ernest Ansermet, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Haskil, and Lipatti. In 1918, Reinhart’s support enabled Stravinsky to realize his theatrical project L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale), based on a text by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Influenced by Hermann Scherchen, Reinhart primarily contributed to funding the Collegium Musicum at Winterthur. Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and others composed works for this orchestra. Reinhart collected the manuscripts of these works, which are preserved by the Rychenberg Stiftung. The patron bequeathed his Rychenberg mansion to the Collegium Musicum so it could be turned into a music school. Sacher was a unique figure among his fellow patrons due to the fact that he had a past as a professional musician. The conductor founded the Basel Chamber Orchestra in 1926 before he established the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel in 1932, an institution devoted to teaching and researching ancient music that Sacher led as headmaster. The wealth of his wife Maja, heiress to the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche, allowed Sacher to act as a patron, which he did from 1934. Sacher funded both the dissemination and creation of music. In 1941, he founded the Collegium Musicum in Zurich and headed it as artistic director. To support creators, he commissioned works to Béla Bartók, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Honegger, Martinů, Carter, Hans Werner Henze, Rihm, Dutilleux, Boulez, Dallapiccola, and Berio. He also welcomed many composers as guests in his residence in Schönenberg, where some of them, like Honegger, sometimes stayed for longer periods. Finally, Sacher fostered musicological research. The manuscripts of most of the works he commissioned form the core
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of a rich collection that was the basis for the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, a unique research center dedicated to the study of music in the twentieth century, established in 1973.
Conclusion This brief overview of musical patronage in twentieth-century Europe confirms that, during the first half of the period, some initiatives derived from comparable individual contexts. We can thus draw parallels between the respective behaviors of Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, as well as of the The Viscount Charles and Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles and Mildred and Robert Wood Bliss. Unsatisfied with her condition, unhappy at home, Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe established a company of concerts that she presided over, and thus acquired in the music world the legitimacy that was off-limits to her as a high-society woman. Losing both her parents and husband in a short period of time, and then seeing her son and her grow apart after he got married, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864 – 1953) suddenly found herself confronted with loneliness: while administering the fortune she inherited, she branched out in patronage, which constituted a form of refuge.²⁵ These two women exemplifiy the alliance between wealth and particular personal situations as well as the activity of patronage. The Viscount Charles and Viscountess Marie-Laure de Noailles commissioned Poulenc and Auric to create pieces especially for a social reception organized at their Parisian townhouse. Similarly, the Blisses ordered one from Stravinsky to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary, during a social party given at their Washington estate. Dumbarton Oaks, the name of the estate, has become firmly associated with the concerto composed by the musician. In Europe, the names of a few patrons who have initiated and financed the creation of music have remained connected to some works that thus became emblematic: to name but three, Princess Edmond de Polignac and El retablo de maese Pedro by de Falla; Reinhart and Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat; and Sacher and Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta by Bartók. All these patrons had a pronounced taste for music; most of them were amateur musicians. In the course of the twentieth century, we notice a shift in their activities from the private space of their lavish homes to the public space of concert halls. In this way, patrons greatly increased both their influence and their own celebrity. In postwar France, the state developed its cultural policy to a considerable extent, which caused patrons’ involvement to decline. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, corporate sponsorship added itself to that of the
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state, until in the early twenty-first century, individual patrons lent their support visibly again to musical institutions.
Notes Pierre Boulez, “L’art et le mécénat/La musique et le mécénat,” in id., Points de repère, Vol. 2, Regards sur autrui (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005), 644– 645. “Since Francis I [of France], French monarchs have come to realize the importance of a wellorganized ensemble, consisting of the best musicians, to promote their personal glory.” Catherine Massip, “Le mécénat musical de Gaston d’Orléans,” in L’âge d’or du mécénat (1598 – 1661), ed. Roland Mousnier and Jean Mesnard (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1985), 383. Charles Joly, “Parsifal au Nouveau Théâtre,” Musica, no. 8 (May 1903), 123. Francis Poulenc, “Le printemps musical à Rome,” Vogue (Paris), June 1934, included in id., J’écris ce qui me chante, ed. Nicolas Southon (Paris: Fayard, 2011), 270. Pablo Casals, Ma vie racontée à Albert Kahn (Paris: Stock Musique, 1970), 70. Emilien Carassus, Le snobisme et les lettres françaises, de Paul Bourget à Marcel Proust, 1884 – 1914 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1966), 75. Colette, “Un salon de musique en 1900,” in id. et al., Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers (Paris: Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1939), 115 – 116. Today, this amounts to 12,000 euros. See Michael Creasman Strasser, “Ars Gallica: The Société Nationale de Musique and its Role in French Musical Life 1871– 1891” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1998). See Élisabeth Bernard, “Le concert symphonique à Paris entre 1861 et 1914: Pasdeloup, Colonne, Lamoureux” (PhD thesis, Université de Paris I, 1976), 62. See Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 278. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 94– 95. By way of example, Fauré dedicated his works among others to Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Countess Élisabeth Greffulhe, Princess Edmond de Polignac, Countess Potocka, and Robert de Montesquiou; Ravel to Marguerite de Saint-Marceaux, Princess Edmond de Polignac, Misia Sert, and Paul Clémenceau; Satie to Misia Sert, Princess Edmond de Polignac, and Count Etienne de Beaumont; Poulenc to Princess Edmond de Polignac, Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac, and Viscountess Marie-Laure and Viscount Charles de Noailles. As for the list of manuscripts gifted to Princess Edmond de Polignac and her niece Countess Marie-Blanche de Polignac, it was particularly imposing and telling. Charles de Noailles was forced to resign from the Jockey Club. See Jean-Louis de FaucignyLucinge, Un gentilhomme cosmopolite: Mémoires (Paris: Perrin, 1990), 133 – 134. Ball “where one could only use cardboard, paper, cellophane, and all sorts of unusual materials.” Idem, Fêtes mémorables et bals costumés (Paris: Herscher, 1986), 70. See Henri Sauguet, La musique, ma vie (Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1990), 310. See Igor Markevitch, Être et avoir été: mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 303. See Maurice Agulhon, Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810 – 1848: étude d’une mutation de sociabilité (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1977), 24.
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Interview with Suzanne Tézenas, 1978, in Pierre-Michel Menger, Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 222– 223. Ibid., 224. As early as 1966, André Malraux assigned Michel Pomey, a member of the Council of State, to work on patronage. Emmanuel de Roux, “Quand le mécénat a le vent en poupe,” Le Monde, 25 – 26 May 1986. “Installation du Conseil supérieur du mécénat par le ministre de la culture,” in ibid., 28 March 1987. Law of 23 July 1987, the so-called Loi Balladur. See Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, ed. Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See Cyrilla Barr, “A Style of Her Own: The Patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,” in Locke and Barr, Cultivating Music in America, 185 – 199.
Bibliography Agulhon, Maurice. Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise 1810 – 1848: étude d’une mutation de sociabilité. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1977. Barr, Cyrilla. “A Style of Her Own: The Patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.” In Cultivating Music in America since 1860, edited by idem and Ralph P. Locke, 185 – 199. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Bernard, Élisabeth. “Le concert symphonique à Paris entre 1861 et 1914: Pasdeloup, Colonne, Lamoureux.” PhD diss., Université de Paris I, 1976. Boulez, Pierre. “L’art et le mécénat/La musique et le mécénat.” In idem, Points de repère. Vol. 2, Regards sur autrui, 644 – 647. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005. Carassus, Emilien. Le snobisme et les lettres françaises, de Paul Bourget à Marcel Proust, 1884 – 1914. Paris: Armand Colin, 1966. Casals, Pablo. Ma vie racontée à Albert Kahn. Paris: Stock Musique, 1970. Colette et al. Maurice Ravel par quelques-uns de ses familiers. Paris: Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1939. Locke, Ralph P., and Cyrilla Barr, eds. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Faucigny-Lucinge, Jean-Louis de. Un gentilhomme cosmopolite: Mémoires. Paris: Perrin, 1990. Faucigny-Lucinge, Jean-Louis de. Fêtes mémorables et bals costumés. Paris: Herscher, 1986. Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Markevitch, Igor. Être et avoir été: mémoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. Massip, Catherine. “Le Mécénat musical de Gaston d’Orléans.” In L’âge d’or du mécénat (1598 – 1661), edited by Roland Mousnier and Jean Mesnard, 383 – 391. Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1985. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Le paradoxe du musicien: le compositeur, le mélomane et l’État dans la société contemporaine. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. Poulenc, Francis. J’écris ce qui me chante, edited by Nicolas Southon. Paris: Fayard, 2011. Sauguet, Henri. La musique, ma vie. Paris: Librairie Séguier, 1990.
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Strasser, Michael Creasman. “Ars Gallica: The Société Nationale de Musique and its Role in French Musical Life 1871 – 1891.” PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1998. Stravinsky, Igor, and Robert Craft. Memories and Commentaries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.
Further Reading Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction: critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Chimènes, Myriam. Mécènes et musiciens: du salon au concert à Paris sous la IIIe République. Paris: Fayard, 2004. Chimènes, Myriam. “Le budget de la musique sous la IIIe République.” In La Musique: du théorique au politique, edited by Hugues Dufourt and Joël-Marie Fauquet, 261 – 312. Paris: Klincksieck, 1991. Chimènes, Myriam. “Les salons parisiens et la promotion des musiciens étrangers (1870 – 1914).” In Capitales culturelles—capitales symboliques (XVIIIe–XXe siècles): Paris et les expériences européennes, edited by Christophe Charle and Daniel Roche, 369 – 380. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002. Chimènes, Myriam. “Ricardo Viñes dans les salons parisiens: de la promotion d’un jeune pianiste à la reconnaissance d’un musicien consacré.” In Ricardo Viñes, le pianiste des avant-gardes, edited by the Museu d’Art Jaume Morera, Lleida, 126 – 130, 315 – 317, and 424 – 427. Barcelona: Fundacio Caixa Catalunya, 2007. Chimènes, Myriam. “Pieds nus dans les salons de la Belle Époque: les débuts parisiens d’Isadora Duncan.” In Isadora Duncan: une sculpture vivante, edited by Musée Bourdelle, 23 – 35. Paris: Paris Musées, 2009. Chimènes, Myriam. “‘Public-mécène’ et diffusion de la musique contemporaine à Paris sous la Troisième République.” In Déchiffrer les publics de la Musique classique: perspectives comparatives, historiques et sociologiques, edited by Stéphane Dorin, 115 – 129. Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines, 2018. Epstein, Louis, “Impresario Interrupted: Comte Etienne de Beaumont and the Soirées de Paris.” Revue de musicologie 102, no. 1 (2016): 91 – 130. Kahan, Sylvia. Winnaretta Singer-Polignac: Princesse, mécène et musicienne. Translated by Charles Mouton. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2018. Patureau, Frédérique. Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne 1875 – 1914. Liège: Mardaga, 1991. Saint-Marceaux, Marguerite de. Journal 1894 – 1927, edited by Myriam Chimènes. Paris: Fayard, 2007.
Simon Frith
7 Commodifying Music: Tickets, Copies, and Licenses
This chapter addresses a simple question—How do people make money from music? The answer is not straightforward. It is complicated by the elusive meaning of its central term, music, and in particular by the problems involved in giving music a commodity form. Consider a familiar scenario. A group of musicians arrive in a rehearsal room. The bandleader asks the ritual opening question: “Has everyone got the music?” The musicians nod and the leader says, “Right then. Let’s play!” The musicians run through a number. Now it’s the leader who nods, “Okay, play it again but this time give the music more urgency.” The word music is being used here to describe both a thing (the written score) and a process (the playthrough). The point here is that while people can and do talk perfectly intelligibly about owning music and selling music, about reading music and writing music, and about arranging music and performing music, all such turns of phrase take for granted that, in the end, the essence of music is sound, a temporal experience rather than a material object. We value music as something that we listen to. In terms of the political economy of music, it is the things that make a musical experience possible (rather than the musical experiences themselves) that can be commodified, and this chapter is therefore organized around the ways in which music is stored and accessed. The underlying dynamic of the music economy is the money people are prepared to pay for the means of musical access, and the history of the music economy has therefore been determined by changes in technology (the history of musical instruments and equipment), social relations (the history of markets, consumers, and capitalism), political ideology (the emergence of property rights and regulations), and demography (urbanization, migration, and changing population profiles). Such changes determine not just what kind of music is made and how but also for what purpose music is made and why it is valued—as high culture, for example, or as popular entertainment. In broad chronological terms, musical storage has moved through three stages: music stored in musicians and their instruments; music stored in sheet music and scores (written, copied, and printed); and music stored by electrical, analog, and digital recording, accessed by playback on the necessary machines. The defining musical commodities are tickets, scores, recordings, and digital data; their market value is determined by what https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-008
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one might call virtual property rights, by licensed access. But it is important to stress that the evolution of the musical economy is not simply the story of one way of making money replacing another. Instead, we see a continuity of established models in ever more complex relationships with emerging ones. Before discussing the issues here in detail, I need to add a caveat. In this chapter, I discuss the history of music in Europe in the context of the history of capitalism. This means that I treat “Europe” both more narrowly and more broadly than its geography might suggest. On the one hand, I do not cover the history of the music economy in communist Europe, though it should be noted that after the collapse of their communist regimes, most Eastern European countries quickly adapted their music business to the logic of commodity production, if sometimes with unhappy effects. After German reunification, for example, East German musicians found themselves doubly disadvantaged by West German copyright rules: under the communist system, they were obliged to assign their copyrights to the state if they wanted to make music publicly at all; under the capitalist system, they therefore had no property rights in their old songs at all. At the precise moment when their music could be treated as a commodity, it turned out not to be theirs.¹ On the other hand, such is the globalizing dynamic of capitalism, “Europe” has to be considered from a music industry perspective in an international context and, in particular, with reference to what was labeled from early in the twentieth century as “Americanization.” The influence of the United States on European music commerce is apparent not just in terms of technology and corporate expansion (from Thomas Edison and Hollywood to Facebook and Live Nation) but also in terms of the music made. The twentieth-century history of popular music, in particular, centrally involved the development of local adaptations of US music, from jazz and rock ‘n’ roll to punk and rap—developments as significant in Eastern as in Western Europe, in Southern as in Northern Europe. It would make no more sense to write a history of music commerce in Europe without reference to American musical institutions and practices than to write the history of art music in the United States without reference to European musical institutions and practices. From the consumer’s point of view—for people whose primary interest in music is as listeners—there’s no doubt that the changes in the musical economy over the last two centuries have involved a vast expansion of access to musical experience. We now take it for granted that we can listen to whatever music we like in spaces and at times entirely of our own choosing. From a musician’s point of view—for people whose primary interest in music is as players—there has been a steady process of alienation, a vast growth in the number of people who make money out of what musicians do, whether by manufacturing their in-
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struments; writing the music they perform; determining when, where, and to whom they play; engineering how their music sounds; or subjecting their expressive identities to the market needs of star-making and musical branding. And it is the economic position of musicians that I will first discuss.
1 Musicians Music is a universal human practice. Music making is an essential social activity in all known societies, and even in our commodified world everyone can and does make music. We sing to our children; we learn and play instruments for fun; and we make music together in playgrounds and as sports fans. Music is a congregational activity in most religions; it is a significant part of both everyday domestic rituals—birthdays, weddings and funerals, and public celebrations —fairs, festivals, and jubilees. Its use marks off leisure from work and the holidays from daily routine; it necessarily accompanies another universal human activity, dancing. The emergence of “musician” as a distinct social role reflected, then, both a public need for people to provide musical services and an understanding that some people—whether because of inherent talent or as a result of social assignment (being born into in a particular family, for example)—were particularly adept at music making and at storing the right sounds in brain and body. Musicians were the source of particular kinds of musical experience—repetitive, intense, and useful. The starting point for the economics of music is therefore straightforward: live musical performance is both cause and effect of an economic transaction, an exchange between performer and listener. There are two models here. On the one hand, musicians perform, and as a result of their performance, listeners give them money (or some other form of payment). This is the busking model. On the other hand, musicians are contracted (for a fee) by listeners to play for them. This is the service model. Both models contain the seeds of more elaborate exchanges. In the case of busking, the next step is for the performer/busker to employ (or be employed by) someone whose task is to attract an audience and to talk up the value of the musician’s performance. This is the traditional role of the huckster (as played in mid-nineteenth-century America, for example by P. T. Barnum for the Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind). This involves, in practice, staging or framing the musician’s performances in various ways. The huckster becomes the promoter, putting together an audience and shaping the experience it gets. Meanwhile, the service model develops from the direct hiring of a musician by clients to the
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use of intermediaries who have access to a number of musicians and can assess their particular capabilities. Hence, the agent and the fixer emerged, the people who provide appropriate performers for particular clients and occasions and appropriate employment for particular musicians. The historian Cyril Ehrlich has documented the sevenfold increase in the number of professional musicians in Britain between 1870 and 1930.² Such statistics reflect the rising demand for entertainment in fast-expanding urban areas, a rising demand experienced by musicians in all European countries, even if playing conventions varied from city to city: in Paris musicians worked in cabarets and café concerts, in Vienna for couples waltzing and ballroom dancing, and in London in musical halls and variety shows. In Britain itself, as James Nott has shown, the number of licensed live music venues grew from 4,000 in 1919 to 41,000 in 1938.³ In the world of commercial entertainment, musical performances are events taking place in specific spaces at specific times for which audiences are prepared to pay. Promoting such events involves various costs: contracting the musicians, of course, but also hiring and preparing a venue and advertising the show. Box office income has to cover the costs, and while performers themselves can make the relevant arrangements (as they often do when starting out), if their popularity is to grow, then the investment needed to stage and market a concert gets bigger and more complex and thus tends to be taken on by specialist promoters. Moreover, following the usual cost/benefit logic of a market economy, there is an impetus for promoters to take control of performing spaces for themselves and to become venue owners too. From this perspective, the systematic acquisition of European venues and promotional companies by the American leisure corporations Live Nation and the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) in the last couple of decades follows the same economic logic as the earlier turn-of-the-century formation in Britain of venue chains such as Moss Empires from 1899 or Mecca dance halls from 1933. By 2010, AEG owned major venues in London, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris, Stockholm, and Rotterdam, while Live Nation had steadily accumulated a European venue chain (42 premises in Britain, for example) by taking over local promoters. In August 2015, Live Nation Concerts Germany became that country’s dominant promoter by taking over Marek Lieberberg’s concert agency, MLK. Venue and festival ownership expand the sources of income from live performance to sales of food and drink, parking spaces, and various kinds of merchandise, sponsorship, and branding. Indeed, for Live Nation and AEG (with their US origins in commercial radio and property development) the primary purpose of a concert is not to sell a musical performance to an audience but to deliver an audience to advertisers and retailers.
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In this economic model, musicians are hired because they attract audiences willing to pay not for just the music but also for the other goods on offer. This is most obvious in the hospitality business, in the use of music in cafés, bars, hotels, and restaurants, which was why in 1847, Les Ambassadeurs’ Café Brasserie in Paris employed a band that played, among other things, works composed by Ernest Bourget. His refusal to pay his bill on the grounds that the café was profiting from his work without paying for it led to the development of performing rights societies to which I will return in the next section. Sticking to the musician’s point of view for the moment, the live music economy can still be said to be organized around the supply and demand for musical services. Musicians are craft workers; their income is dependent on a series of contracts. Even today, the majority of British orchestral players are employed as freelancers while the job security and higher pay rates enjoyed by orchestral musicians in other European countries are dependent on the generous level of state subsidies. The musicians’ world is therefore rife with contractual disputes, and people who can handle contract negotiation and enforcement are in demand. This is the reason why bands need managers and musicians form craft unions that, over the years, have advocated such protectionist measures as closed shops (in broadcasting, recording, and film studios, for example) and bans on the commercial employment of foreigners, women, military musicians, amateurs, and anyone offering “unfair” competition in the music job market. From all points of view, the live music economy is a high risk business. Audience members have to shell out money before they’ve had the experience for which they are paying; musicians have to trust promoters to meet the terms of the contract, and promoters have to invest in events before they know how many seats they will actually fill. Among the many factors that can wipe out their investments are bad weather, transport strikes and traffic accidents, flooding, fire, crowd trouble, and, these days, terrorism. Promotion business strategies can be understood therefore in terms of risk reduction. Ticket sales in the nineteenth century were often stabilized by subscription concerts; audiences are encouraged to buy tickets for a series of performances (this is commonplace in the classical music world in which a venue’s resident orchestras and chamber groups offer annual programs of events). Popular music promoters put on long runs of a single act in a single venue (as historically in holiday resorts like Blackpool) or put on many acts in a few days in a single venue (as in the music festival business that now dominates the European live music economy). And these days musicians’ “productivity” can be increased too by live video streaming, a way of expanding the opera audience, for example, which was pioneered by New York’s Metropolitan Opera and was quickly taken up by the opera houses in London, Paris, and Vienna. In 2008, the Berlin
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Philharmonic launched its Digital Concert Hall, a subscription service that allows users to experience all of the orchestra’s performances live from its resident concert hall through a website, TV, or mobile phone. In the same year, Tomorrowland, Europe’s biggest electronic dance music (EDM) festival, staged annually in Belgium, created a digital extension of the event. The use of multiple camera angles and the “flow of footage of stages, backstage areas, tents, parties, travelling, and much more” provided “instant participation for audiences not physically present.”⁴ Throughout the last century, then, promoters have been both enterprising and ingenious in their use of new technology, but in terms of both productivity and the economies of scale, their strategies are inevitably limited by the nature of live music: it is performed at a particular time in particular spaces (real and digital) by a particular number of musicians. There is therefore a continuing need of other economic investors: record companies, broadcasters, advertisers, and the state have all played a key role in the financing of live musical events over the last hundred years, using performances to promote record and merchandise sales, to increase radio and television audience figures, and to support music that is judged valuable in terms of cultural policy. The market for live music extends well beyond the immediate audience, the people who are there.
2 Tickets For members of the immediate audience, the musical commodity is the ticket. The ticket is the thing they pay for, the thing they own. Indeed, the history of live music as a business can be written as a history of ticketing. The commerce of a concert is that people who want to enjoy it have to pay money to attend. This may just involve turning up on the night and handing cash over on the door (as at pub gigs or club nights), but once a concert audience is seated or there are likely to be more people demanding entry than can be accommodated then tickets are essential. They can be used to attach a person to a seat, to guarantee customers admission, and to help promoters maximize the crowd. From their origins in the eighteenth century, concert halls, like theater, were built with box offices. Initially, music venues handled their own ticket sales. To get a ticket meant visiting the box office: all-night queuing for tickets was still a routine part of the pop and rock fan experience in the 1960s and 1970s. But both venues and the promoters using those venues soon realized they needed additional methods of ticket distribution. One strand in the development of ticketing can therefore be traced through the history of communications systems, from the postal ser-
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vice and mail order through the telephone network and the credit card to the various online services in use today. The earliest way of distributing tickets was through ticket agencies. In 1786, under the headline “The New System of Ticket Agents,” the London Morning Chronicle ran an article about Theatre Ticket Messengers, a company that used messenger boys to go to theater to hold seats or to collect seat tokens for favored clients. In 1830, this company was acquired by musical instrument dealers Robert Keith and William Prowse, who renamed it Keith Prowse and advertised that they could now “book and hold the best theatre seats for their clients who could thus have the best experience with the least trouble,” and 150 years later, Keith Prowse was still a significant ticket agency, its street-side and hotel lobby sales booths a familiar sight for tourists in London. This model of ticketing—tickets available at the box office, from brokers, or via the post or a telephone call—remained dominant in the live entertainment economy for much of the twentieth century, but from a promoter’s point of view, this way of marketing shows became increasingly inefficient as a way of managing “the inventory” (the industry term for the ticket stock). On the one hand, it was difficult to control the resale of tickets by touts and scalpers; on the other hand, it was difficult to have a continuously accurate picture of how sales were going. These problems were exacerbated in the rock era by the growing mismatch between the demand for concert tickets and a supply limited by the size of the available venues. In the United States, such ticketing problems led to the emergence of a variety of entrepreneurs who believed that these problems could be solved by computers. The profits from their ticketing services would, on paper, come from a combination of a service charge (paid by the ticket buyer), an “inside” charge (paid by the client), and an equipment rental fee (paid by the ticket purchase outlets). In developing an effective business model, however, these companies faced various snags. They were only given part of the inventory; their systems were most likely to fail when ticket demand was at its highest; ticket buyers often doubted that the outlets (usually in department stores) really had the best seats. This was the context in which the American company Ticketmaster became the dominant player in the global ticket market. Launched in 1988, Ticketmaster distinguished itself from its competitors by being “a ticket service that makes use of computers rather than a computer company that sells tickets.” What this meant in practice was a new business model. If earlier companies had been paid by a venue to sell and distribute (some of) its tickets, Ticketmaster paid a venue for exclusive rights to handle all its ticketing services. Ticketing became a profit-making activity in itself (and Ticketmaster offered venues and promoters
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a share of the service fee it added to ticket prices). The calculation here was that, in market terms, concert tickets were significantly underpriced (for the big shows, at least, demand was far greater than supply), and in as far as Ticketmaster was taking a risk here, this was not with the price elasticity of the live music market but with the robustness of the company’s computer systems. Further, this was a way of doing ticket business that could profitably be used by European venues and promoters too. By 1994, Ticketmaster had exclusive contracts with more than 60 percent of halls and arenas in the United States; in 1995, it launched its first website (as an events database); and in 1996, it made the website “transactional” (a place to buy tickets). By 2005, 41 percent of the company’s ticket sales were online. The most significant aspect of the e-ticket was that it changed Ticketmaster’s client base: its customers had been venues and promoters; now they were the people who used their website, and the company was gathering data on people’s ticket-buying habits that it could customize. In 2010, Ticketmaster launched LiveAnalytics to sell such customized data not only to artists, venues, and promoters but also to potential sponsors and brand partners. By then, Ticketmaster dominated the European ticket sales market too, particularly after its 2010 merger with Live Nation to form Live Nation Entertainment. Its only significant European competition came from Eventim’s Bremenbased Computer Ticketing Service (CTS), which also provided ticketing services to events and venues all across Europe. Like Live Nation Entertainment, CTS Eventim combined its ticket and promotion services with venue ownership. In 2012, for example, the company joined forces with AEG to take over London’s Hammersmith Apollo, operating alongside its Lanxess arena in Cologne (supposedly the biggest in Europe) and Waldbühne in Berlin. The effect of the development of digital ticketing, in short, was to further enable the consolidation (and Americanization) of the various players in the live music economy—venue owners, promoters, agents, and ticket brokers. Online ticket exchange sites also made possible a new scale of secondary ticketing. Again the United States was the pioneer here with LiquidSeats, established in 2001 to manage the ticket resale market for sports teams before evolving in 2003 into the consumer-focused StubHub. In January 2007, StubHub was taken over by eBay, but by then, cofounder Eric Baker had already moved to Switzerland to start a new secondary ticketing site, Viagogo, the rapid success of which triggered controversy in the live music business and raised interesting—and so far unresolved—political questions about the conflicting property rights of the people who sell tickets and the people who buy them.
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3 Compositions If the first stage of music storage involves musicians and their instruments, the second stage involves notation: heard sounds represented as written marks. The emergence of musical notation in Europe had a number of consequences. To begin with, a musical work—as written—could now be distinguished from the musical work of its performance. At the same time, access to music by reading meant defining “music” as those sounds that could be notated (and depended on composers and players agreeing on the notation conventions). The result was the development of two music worlds—the world of the musically educated (the people who could read music) and a vernacular world of the musically uneducated. In terms of the political economy of music, a new kind of music trade was developed around the craft of producing written scores, the work of scribes and printers. Music now became a publishing business. The musical commodity was a written work, available to buy or to hire, and composers came to be treated legally like the authors of other kinds of written work, as the owners of intellectual property (IP), property with a number of distinct characteristics. An intellectual property right is established by its owner’s activity in creating an original work, something that would not otherwise exist; the work is the result of individual intellectual investment, and its ownership is ascribed to individuals: we talk about a Bach chorale, a Mozart opera, a Beethoven symphony, and a Dylan song. To “consume” such a musical work is not to use it up; consuming music is not like consuming a sandwich. A musical work can be played again and again without losing its value; more problematically, a score can be copied, and the copies have exactly the same use value as the original. At the same time, intellectual property has a public use value. It contributes to knowledge; it is a necessary factor in the development of ideas and new means of cultural expression. It is therefore important to protect public access to intellectual property and to offset the anticompetitive effects of an author’s natural monopoly. Musical works, that is to say, are not straightforwardly competitive with each other. Musicians, whether amateur or professional, are unlikely to buy sheet music by the Bee Gees rather than a score by Johann Sebastian Bach simply because the former commodity is cheaper. The use value of intellectual property is measured culturally as well as financially. Music is a symbolic good. This was the conceptual context for the development of the legal concept of copyright, the right subsisting in intellectual property that both enables an IP owner to control and to benefit from its use through a licensing system and re-
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stricts the licensing period to a particular number of years (its “term”), after which the work enters the public domain and no longer needs to be licensed to be used. Copyright was established as a legal concept in Britain by a 1710 statute during the reign of Queen Anne; musical works were subsequently added to the list of copyrightable works. Copyright law gave authors and composers the exclusive right to copy or adapt their works, to issue copies of their work to the public, and to perform their works in public. Anyone else wanting to do these things to the work had to be licensed to do so, which usually meant paying a license fee. The emergence of copyright-based commerce depended on two further developments. First, for a musical work to have market value, it had to be brought to market, to be distributed and promoted, as well as to be copied, activities for which composers lacked the skills and resources. Under copyright law, however, authors did have exclusive rights to permit other people to do the restricted activities; in particular, composers could sell or license their rights to issue copies of their work to the public. Hence music publishers arose: in the standard publishing contract, authors give publishers the rights to produce and to market their works in exchange for royalties—an agreed percentage of the return on each sale going to the author. Second, as copyright gave authors the right to limit the performances of their work, licensing such performances was a potential source of income. However, because such income might come from a great variety of performers and venues, it made economic sense for music writers and publishers to set up a system of collective licensing: a composer’s performing rights could then be assigned to a single agency that dealt with all performing licenses. The French collecting agency, the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM), was the pioneer here, established in 1851 after Bourget’s successful legal case against the Les Ambassadeurs’ Café Brasserie, but in other countries, publishers’ commercial calculations here were sometimes more complex. As Dave Laing explains, there were different attitudes within the music industry towards the importance of receiving payment for the performance of music. While SACEM regarded this of equal significance to the sale of printed copies of songs, in Britain, music publishers for many years refrained from charging singers or music hall owners because they believed the main purpose of public performance was to publicise songs in order to generate sales of music. This argument was later to be echoed in debates over the airplay of pop records, the televising of music videos and even the downloading of tracks from the Internet through unlicensed “peerto-peer” networks.⁵
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In the United Kingdom, the Performing Right Society was not established until 1914, later than not just France’s SACEM but also Italy’s Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE, 1887), Spain’s Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE, 1889), Austria’s Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger (AKM, 1897), Germany’s Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonsetzer (GDT, 1903), and the Netherland’s Bureau voor Muziek-Auteursrechten (BUMA, 1913), and underlying the United Kingdom’s tardiness here was the philosophical distinction between the British (and American) understanding of copyright as a property right (and therefore alienable) and the French (and German) understanding of copyright as giving legal form to creative self-expression: the droit d’auteur reflected the belief that a creative work was an essential part of someone’s being—copyright was thus a moral right and so unalienable. One effect of this approach was to embed an aesthetic (or moral) evaluation of a musical work into copyright commerce. The German collecting agency, the Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte (GEMA, 1933), thus still makes a distinction between “serious” music (ernste Musik), “entertaining” music (Unterhaltungsmusik), and “functional” music (Funktionsmusik) in its licensing fees and payments structure. The contrasting moral and property rights bases of copyright in Europe were harmonized after the United Kingdom joined the European Union; the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act acknowledged an author’s moral rights in British law for the first time, but the importance of the international trade in musical works had long meant agreements between countries to protect each other’s copyrights despite the different legal definitions involved, as first marked by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886) and proceeding through legal responses to the next technology of music storage: recording.
4 Records Thomas Edison introduced the phonograph to the world in 1877. For much of the twentieth century, the record was the most significant commodity, and record companies were the dominant players in the music market. There is not the space here to document the evolution of sound recording technology, and I will focus, rather, on its effects on music business. To begin with, access to music now meant access to a record and a record player. A gramophone was, in effect, a new kind of musical instrument, a musical instrument that could be “played” by people who did not read music and indeed by people who had no musical skills whatsoever. At the same time, while
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one did not actually need sheet music to play a guitar, clarinet, or piano, a record player without a record had no musical value whatsoever. Persuading people to buy a record player meant ensuring the availability of the records they would want to play on it. Fred Gaisberg, the first great record industry figure (an American citizen, son of German immigrant parents, he was employed by London-based Gramophone Company as its recording engineer) thus traveled the world in the early 1900s, researching local musical tastes and recording local performing stars as a necessary step in selling the Edison phonogram in local markets. The record industry was global from the start. It was also shaped by both the existing music publishing business and new electrical goods manufacturers. The publishers owned the rights to the songs the record companies needed, and record companies were necessarily involved in the manufacture and marketing of electrical appliances. During the first half of the twentieth century, gramophones took their place in the home alongside the electric light, radios, sewing machines, irons, fridges, hoovers, heaters, and cookers. The link between record company and music publisher output is obvious enough. In the classical music world, a score and a record were different ways of storing the same composition; in the popular music world, records and record tracks were initially thought of as “numbers,” as the same songs and tunes that were on sale as sheet music. In fact, though, a record offered a rather different account of “music” than a script. To record music was to store a performance and the sound of performers. This was particularly significant for the development of the popular music business. Vernacular, un-notated music and “illiterate” musicians were now marketable. Selling records, to put this another way, meant marketing recording stars: singers, instrumentalists, and bands whose popularity reflected their distinct voices. This had always been the appeal of live musical performers and of traveling nineteenth-century virtuosi like Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt, for example, but an early recording star like Enrico Caruso could reach a far bigger audience with one record than a previous singing star like Jenny Lind had reached through extensive touring. If, to begin with, and until the early 1960s, record companies competed by each issuing their own versions of new songs, they were soon competing to sign exclusive deals with particular artists. One reason why record companies that concentrated on rock music achieved such impressive returns from the genre in the 1960s and 1970s was that rock involved a particularly intense ideological identification of a performer with a song. From early on—as a key part of the sales pitch for both new recordings and new record players—record companies also emphasized the importance of sound quality and its relation to technological progress. This became particularly strik-
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ing from the late 1940s to the late 1960s with the development of vinyl records, the long-playing album, stereo sound, multitrack tape recording, headphones, mobile record players, and so forth. The sales argument was always that new recording technology gave the listener a better, clearer, and more authentic sound than a live performance, even in a domestic space. But recording companies were equally concerned to offer consumers ever easier and more mobile ways of reproducing and listening to music. The key company here was the Dutchbased corporation Philips, which brought to market the compact cassette tape in 1963 and the compact disc in 1982. Developments in sound technology were as significant for music makers as for music listeners. With the development of electrical recording in the 1920s, for example, it became increasingly clear that a studio performance was not really the same kind of thing as a concert performance. More care could be taken with sound quality in a studio space, whether in a recording or radio studio; the development of microphone technology, amplification, and public address systems meant the employment of sound specialists, of record producers and acoustic engineers whose skills were soon used for live performances too. These developments gathered momentum in the mid-1960s. If recording started as the capture of music in performance, it ended up affecting the sound people expected from live music. Even in the classical world, venue acoustics had to be considered with reference to the clarity and balance of sounds that classical audiences now took for granted on their records. The record industry was a sound industry, and in the twentieth century, its development was symbiotic with the development of other technologically driven sound media: radio, cinema, and television. The value of mechanical rights, the “neighboring” rights that subsisted in the recording itself rather than in the underlying musical work, grew rapidly as music became the basis of radio programming, film soundtracks, TV entertainment, and advertising. The original German collecting agency, the GDT, had established the Anstalt für mechanisch-musikalische Rechte GmbH to deal with mechanical rights as early as in 1909. However in Britain, these rights were not assigned to a new collecting agency, Phonographic Performance Limited (set up by Decca and EMI), until 1934, following the creation of the record industry lobbying body, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), in 1933. In 1961, the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers and Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations formally extended international legal copyright protection from the author of a work to the creators and owners of particular “physical manifestations” of intellectual property, in other words, all technological kinds of recording. By the end of the century, such rights were built into broader regulations of the international intellectual property market, such as
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the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), negotiated by the member states of the World Trade Organization and becoming effective from 1995 onwards. For successful musicians, especially if they wrote their own material, the development of twentieth-century recording technology meant unprecedented wealth. For most musicians, however, a living still had to be made from selling their services as performers even in the recording age. Recording was a threat to their livelihood, a technology that was continually, if unsuccessfully, resisted by musicians’ unions, which were founded in the late nineteenth century. Performing musicians found themselves systematically replaced by recorded musicians, most dramatically in the 1930s (in cinemas, with the arrival of talkies) and in the 1960s/1970s (in dance halls, with the arrival of deejays and discos). Their work prospects were equally threatened by the increasing use of recorded music on radio and television as well as in cafés, hotels, and other places of public entertainment, with the spread of jukeboxes, in-store broadcasts, and canned background music. There can be no doubt, then, that recording technology transformed both the ways in which people listened to music and the ways people made money from it, but the continuities with previous ways of doing music business were also important, not just for musicians but also for the business. The record industry was still essentially a music publishing industry. It was organized around rights deals and contracts. For example, IFPI’s legal and political lobbying continued to be focused on rights protection and the prevention of copying, whether the systematic production of fake Madonna records for market stalls in Asia, the home taping of Smiths records in teenage bedrooms in Britain, or file sharing around the world on Napster. As a music publishing business, the record industry had a number of defining characteristics. It supplied an irrational market, in the sense that decisions to buy records were not usually based on price but on taste and fashion. The costs of the original recording “master” (contracting the artists as well as paying for production and manufacturing) were relatively high; the costs of copying were relatively low. A good selling record was exponentially more profitable as its sales rose; a poor selling record did not cover its production costs. A record company’s economic strategy thus involved internal cross-subsidy. The losses on the majority of a label’s releases were more than offset by the profits from the label’s hits. Such a strategy was financially easier for big than small companies (their profits were much bigger), and the dynamic of the record industry was inherently oligopolistic, with small companies being absorbed by bigger ones. In day-to-day terms, the record business was primarily concerned with risk management, maximizing the returns on hits and minimizing the losses on
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flops. The majors thus systematically invested in publishing, promotion, and marketing. From at least the mid-1960s, record companies acquired important publishing catalogs and were major players in the concert business (in the development of the promotional tour, which helped keep ticket prices down) while their advertising spend was essential to the economics of the music press. In the twentieth century, then, the record industry came to shape the music market, and yet there was always something unreal about it. The musical commodities in which it dealt were essential legal fictions, depending on an account of music making that existed only as an ideal. The law, as we have seen, treats music as a work, something that can be owned and exploited. It assumes, that is to say, that music is authored, that it is created by named individuals, that it is original, and that it is continually new. For many musicians and listeners, however, there’s something askew about this. They experience music as an essentially collective process and relate “new” works to existing works, whether in their conformity or deliberate nonconformity with musical conventions. Similarly, while the law treats music as a necessarily finished product, for performers and audiences, the essence of music is always as a work in progress. I should also note here that one of the effects of record industry law and practice is a taken-for-granted hierarchy in descriptions of the roles of composer, arranger, conductor, and performer; named artist, music worker, and session player; record producer and sound engineer; and record company, music publisher, and so forth. Musical actors are defined in terms of status differences that are, in fact, the effect of contractual negotiations (and contractual power) rather than reflecting who actually does what in the studio or on the stage, who makes more or less of a contribution to the sounds made and heard on record or in live performance, and who really had what responsibility for the “music” played and heard. Popular music historians have long been familiar with song-writing credits assigned legally to all sorts of people who had little to do with the musical (as against commercial) process through which the songs were made and performed. My point is that when musical practices do not fit into the legal fictions (as in folk or traditional music) rather than the law becoming more realistic, the economics of music making tends to be made subject to an ever more complicated legal framework. Digital technology, which I discuss in the next section, is often described as undermining the economic logic of the recording industry, but that is not necessarily how the law sees it. Its task, rather, has been to try to protect the industry’s historical rights within a new technological framework.
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5 Data For the moment, the final stage in musical storage is as digital data, data that can, among other things, be manipulated, shared, downloaded, and streamed in ways for which the essential means of access is no longer a musical instrument or playback device as such but a computer or a smartphone. Music in this context is a virtual commodity, and record companies’ sales figures have suffered consequently. In 2008, widely reported market research by Mintel found that, in Britain, “spending on live concerts and festivals has overtaken recorded music for the first time since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.” Mintel estimated that in 2007, Britons had spent GBP 1.9 billion on live music and GBP 1.5 billion on CDs and downloads; it concluded that the music industry was undergoing a profound redistribution of power as the internet drove down both the price and sales of records: The traditional relationship was one in which the LP or CD was the focus, with concerts primarily there to sell more records. In today’s downloadable world, where the price of music has tumbled, CDs and downloads have been demoted to the status of promotional tools for selling tickets and merchandise. Album sales are in meltdown. Much of the action is moving to the live arena. Live music has become a key route to profitability.⁶
The arrival of digital technology had initially restored the fortunes of the record industry following the 1970s recession. Introduced into the UK market in 1983, initially for classical releases, CD sales took off in 1985 with the release of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and overtook vinyl sales in 1989. Digital technology did not become a sales threat until the end of the 1990s, with the development of MP3 files and file-sharing services like Napster, which operated between 1999 and 2001, the year iTunes and the iPod were launched. By 2018, record companies were, globally, getting more than half their income from music-streaming services. Spotify, the most successful streaming business, founded in Sweden in 2006, had 100 million subscribers by 2019. As the Spotify story reveals, however, while consumers might have moved from buying tracks to streaming them, the rights regime is still in place. The remaining major labels, Universal, Sony, and Warner, control the rights to most of Spotify’s tracks (as well as between them owning around 16 percent of Spotify’s shares); in 2018, more than half of the revenues Spotify raised through subscription or ads was paid out in royalties to the tracks’ rights owners. From this perspective, the so-called “collapse of the record industry” is a misreading of music business history. The manufacture and sale of records may be in decline but the majors’ ownership of the rights to digitally stored
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music remains central to the global music economy—which is why political lobbying to protect rights and extend copyright terms continues. It could be argued that a more striking effect of digital technology is on a different aspect of record company investment The economist Alan B. Krueger suggests persuasively that the reason for the decline in the record industry’s dominance of the music market became clear in 1997 when the price of concert tickets took off. In the past, when greater concert attendance translated into greater artists’ record sales, artists had an incentive to price their tickets below the profit-maximising price for concerts alone. New technology that allows many potential customers to obtain recorded music without purchasing a record has severed the link between the two products. As a result, concerts are being priced more like single-market monopoly products.⁷
CD and concert tickets, to put this another way, were no longer seen as pricecompetitive goods—promoters had previously been wary about making tickets for a concert much more expensive than the record it was promoting. Now artists and their managers adopted a new economic model: a CD was released to promote a tour (rather than vice versa). Established stars realized that, as “heritage” or “legacy” acts, they no longer needed to keep their ticket prices below their market value in order to “buy” the loyalty of fans for future records or appearances. Fans were loyal, rather, to the sonic brand established by an act’s previous record sales. Agent John Giddings remembers the change in the music business power structure this way: They [record labels] were the powerful people, they controlled all the money, they controlled all the tools. They could make groups successful by spending lots of money marketing them. And so we used to listen to what they had to say. But I remember one classic moment when Virgin Records said to me, “You’re doing the Iggy Pop tour before the album’s released,” and I said, “Who cares about a new Iggy Pop album? They’re playing to people who want to hear The Passenger.” And the swing in power between record companies and live music has been incredible.⁸
Conclusion In terms of the broad sweep of business history, the development of the music economy over the last 150 years can be seen to be driven by the formation of oligopolies and by globalization, dynamics in which US companies have been the most energetic. The European record business is thus now dominated by just three global entertainment corporations, Universal, Sony, and Warner. The live music sector is led by AEG and Live Nation Entertainment, and digital data transfer is monopolized by
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Apple, Facebook, and Google (with its subsidiary YouTube). Even in the world of classical music publishing, which has been in a way impervious to technological change (in the early twenty-first century, classical musicians are as dependent on printed scores as they were in the early twentieth century), most of the big names of the European classical music economy have become subsidiaries of global music publishers. Music Sales owns Alphonse Leduc and Chant du Monde of France, Unión Musical Ediciones of Spain, Edition Wilhelm Hansen of Copenhagen, and Bosworth Music of Berlin. In 2018, Music Sales’ sheet music business was sold to the world’s biggest music publishing company, the US-based company Hal Leonard. Universal Music Group acquired the German company Bertelsmann Music Group in 2006 and thus took ownership of Casa Ricordi of Milan, the French company Durand Salabert Eschig, and Editio Musica Budapest. In 2017, Concord Music Publishing took over Dutch music publishers Imagem and thus acquired Britain’s premier classical music publisher since 1930, Boosey and Hawkes. The bestknown classical music houses in Germany, Schott, Bärenreiter, and Edition Peters, have only survived independently (so far) by entering into “strategic partnerships” with these massive global competitors.⁹ There have been, of course, countermovements to these processes, significant bursts of do-it-yourself music enterprise: punk, pirate radio, and the organization of raves, for example. Further, “independent” record companies have played key roles in developing such disparate new musical genres as Early Music, hip-hop, and electronica. But business mavericks have always been easily enough absorbed (or bought) by the corporate establishment, and I want to conclude this chapter by drawing attention to a more fundamental contradiction in the marketing of music as a commodity. In a 2015 study of female classical players, sociologist Christina Scharff discovered that, “reflecting the entrepreneurial ethos of the cultural industries, many musicians described themselves as products that had to be sold. At the same time, they disliked the practice of selling themselves.” Women musicians were particularly reluctant to engage in aggressive self-promotion, which conflicted with the norms of both femininity (and feminism) and with being a serious artist.¹⁰ The issues here do not just affect classical musicians (or, indeed, women).While the digital possibilities of establishing a direct relationship between performer and fan have made record company mediation of that relationship unnecessary, for the musicians involved, the pressure now is to internalize the process of turning music into a product, something that is ideologically uncomfortable even for male pop and rock musicians.¹¹ I began this chapter by suggesting that the challenge of music for a market economy is how to give it a commodity form. I end the chapter with the suggestion that the challenge of the market economy to music is how to resist commodification.
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The tension here has long been a defining feature of music commerce. In the nineteenth century, the European music business sold classical music as a sphere of pleasure and uplift that lay outside everyday capitalist concerns. Classical musical institutions protected “serious” music from the corruption of commerce, even as its canon was established by commercial music publishers like Boosey and Hawkes and Schott and commercial record companies like Decca and Deutsche Grammophon. This critical trope—commerce provides a musical experience that is valuable because it transcends commerce—can be found across the musical landscape. It could be argued, then, that the success of twentieth-century music business lay in its ability to sell music as a commodity that was not a commodity. It was precisely because of the difficulty of commodifying the musical experience that audiences and listeners (who had bought their concert tickets or records and invested in a smartphone or Spotify) could enjoy music as if it had nothing to do with commerce at all.
Notes Simon Frith, “Copyright in Germany,” in Music and Copyright, ed. id. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 166. Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 51. James Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116. Fabian Holt, “New Media, New Festival Worlds,” in Music and the Broadcast Experience, ed. Christina J. Baade and James Deaville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 277. Dave Laing, “Copyright, Politics and the International Music Industry,” in Music and Copyright, ed. Simon Frith and Lee Marshall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 20042), 72. Quote taken from the London Evening Standard, 10 September 2008, 21. Alan B. Krueger, “The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World,” Journal of Labour Economics 23, no. 1 (2005): 25 – 26. Quote taken from an interview by Matt Brennan, 4 May 2010. Sarah Osborn, “‘Growing a Forest’: The Changing Business of Classical Music Publishing,” in The Classical Music Industry, ed. Chris Dromey and Julia Haferkorn (New York: Routledge, 2018), 38 – 39. Christina Scharff, “Blowing Your Own Trumpet: Exploring the Gendered Dynamics of SelfPromotion in the Classical Music Profession,” Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (2015): 106. See Jo Haynes and Lee Marshall, “Reluctant Entrepreneurs: Musicians and Entrepreneurship in the ‘New’ Music Industry,” British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 2 (2018): 459 – 482.
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Bibliography Dromey, Chris, and Julia Haferkorn, eds. The Classical Music Industry. New York: Routledge, 2018. Ehrlich, Cyril. The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Frith, Simon. “Copyright in Germany.” In Music and Copyright, edited by idem, 164 – 166. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Haynes, Jo, and Lee Marshall. “Reluctant Entrepreneurs: Musicians and Entrepreneurship in the ‘New Music Industry.’” British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 2 (2018): 459 – 482. Holt, Fabian. “New Media, New Festival Worlds”. In Music and the Broadcast Experience, edited by Christina J. Baade and James Deaville, 275–292. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Kavanagh, Brian. “Reimagining Classical Music Performing Organisations for the Digital Age.” In Dromey and Haferkorn. The Classical Music Industry, 126 – 138. Krueger, Alan B. “The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World.” Journal of Labour Economics 23, no. 1 (2005): 1 – 30. Laing, Dave. “Copyright, Politics and the International Music Industry.” In Music and Copyright, edited by Simon Frith and Lee Marshall, 70 – 85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Nott, James. Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Osborn, Sarah. “‘Growing a Forest’: The Changing Business of Classical Music Publishing.” In Dromey and Haferkorn. The Classical Music Industry, 32 – 43. Scharff, Christina. “Blowing Your Own Trumpet: Exploring the Gendered Dynamics of Self-Promotion in the Classical Music Profession.” Sociological Review 63, no. 1 (2015): 97–112.
Further Reading Brennan, Matt. “Live Music History.” In The Sage Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman, 207 – 222. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2014. Budnick, Dean, and Josh Baron. Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped. Toronto: ECW Press, 2011. Frith, Simon. “The Making of the British Record Industry 1920 – 64.” In Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media in the Twentieth Century, edited by James Curran, Anthony Smith, and Paula Wingate, 278 – 290. London: Methuen, 1987. Frith, Simon, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain. Volume 1, 1950 – 1967; Volume 2, 1968 – 1984; Volume 3, 1985 – 2015. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, 2019, 2021. Inglis, Brian. “Classical Music, Copyright, and Collecting Societies.” In The Classical Music Industry, edited by Chris Dromey and Julia Haferkorn, 7 – 31. New York: Routledge, 2018. Symes, Colin. Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
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Williamson, John, and Martin Cloonan. Players’ Work Time: A History of the British Musicians’ Union, 1893 – 2013. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Part III: Mediating Music
Hans Weisethaunet
8 Creating Maps, Generating Meanings: Music Criticism When Elvis Presley’s 45rpm single Hound Dog was released in 1956, music critic Steve Race wrote in Melody Maker that this was among “the most terrifying things ever to have happened in popular music.” “Hound Dog,” he claimed, “hit a new low in my experience.”¹ In a similar vein, in 1965, critic Bob Dawbarn dismissed in Melody Maker Bob Dylan’s latest single Like a Rolling Stone, exclaiming in capital letters: “THANK GOODNESS WE WON’T GET THIS SIX-MINUTE BOB DYLAN SINGLE IN BRITAIN.”² Interestingly, the emergence of early rock ’n’ roll was initially explained by European critics as an act of “Americanization” for which in essence the American music industry was to be blamed. Race even claimed that this was a “monstrous threat” for which the “American music industry” would, in the end, “find itself answerable to St. Peter.”³ These quotes serve well to illustrate a number of things. First, they show how music critics may indeed be wrong, especially when seen in the rearview mirror of history. Secondly, they illustrate that the cross-fertilization and entanglement of American and European musical forms in the twentieth century make it difficult to uphold the idea of what is in principle European versus American. Thirdly, and as the influential Melody Maker critic Chris Welch pointed out, in the 1960s new music was emerging in Britain at such a speed that it took the critics some time to “catch up.” The critics were, in a sense, lagging behind in search of new criteria and a suitable vocabulary that catered to the new music. In other words, they were struggling to find metaphors suitable to describe the musical characteristics as well as the cultural significance of the British beat and Mod culture—represented by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, the Kinks, and the Small Faces, among others, as well as the burgeoning progressive (prog) rock scene, with bands such as Pink Floyd and Soft Machine. In this period, British music correspondingly made a significant impact on American audiences. Furthermore, it sparked a boom of music criticism in the USA, where magazines like Crawdaddy! (1966 – 1979), Creem (1969 – 1989), and Rolling Stone (since 1967) established rock journalism as a form of cultural critique where rock music, at least for a couple of decades, was taken to be as significant as politics. Such views of music propagated by a new “clergy” of writers even resonated in communist Eastern Europe, where, for instance, the American avant-garde rock musician Frank Zappa—not exactly embraced by the American https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-009
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political establishment—found considerable underground popularity in countries like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland. It might be argued that most musics in the twentieth century emerged as amalgamations and cross-fertilizations of so-called Western and non-Western elements in conjunction with the Atlantic crossing of people, ideas, and consumer goods (think of blues, tango, rumba, calypso, jazz, bossa nova, rock, pop, reggae, or hip hop as examples). In this era, critics and audiences found themselves in a situation where the circulation of music—as technologically mediated auditory objects—traveled to a far greater extent than the musicians themselves. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, we see a dramatic increase in music criticism, with the urge to make sense of musical objects and performances beyond “good” or “bad.” Taking music as a cultural and social form of expression and a source of social and cultural meanings, this criticism addresses questions about who we are. Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, Prince, or Kendrick Lamar as well as The Who, The Pet Shop Boys, Björk, and U2 became evaluated according not only to certain musical criteria but also to their significance and relevance to the experiences of everyday life. In many respects, the view of the significance of music in everyday life, in the influential work of scholars like Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, or Tia DeNora, was anticipated in the journalistic writing of Nik Cohn, in the UK, and Greil Marcus, in the USA. With that in mind, it may be asserted that writing about music contributes to enhancing the social significance of music and that writers ascribe value to music. Hence, writing about music is an act of making visible and audible what music is and therefore an integral aspect to what Christopher Small terms “musicking”: “the present participle of the regrettably non-existent verb ‘to music’.”⁴ Music criticism is not simply about making judgments in relation to canonization—that is to say, lifting some works or artists above others—or instigating critical comments on aesthetic, expressive, or formal qualities. It is a listening and writing process fundamental to making musical expressions known, heard, and discussed. Like any other form of criticism (from Greek krinein: to distinguish; to judge) in art, literature, or philosophical inquiry, music criticism is expressed in language. One of the fundamental myths about music is that it cannot be “spoken about.” On the contrary, we know that musicians, as well as audiences in fact talk a lot about music, even though there is no exact way of translating a musical experience, or a piece of music, into verbal prose. That is why Simon Frith, in his classic The Sociology of Rock (1978), was right in claiming that “one of the most extraordinary things about rock […] is the amount of words it generates.”⁵ Through writing, critics create discourse as well as a map of what music is. However, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out, a map is never entirely fixed. It is open for assault, influx, and transformations: “it is detachable, rever-
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sible, susceptible to constant modification.”⁶ Old maps might be guarded, though current maps may pinpoint new and hitherto unheard connections, where assemblages might be unforeseen and multiple, that is, no longer follow national or continental borders. Such maps, additionally may be read in different ways according to the perspectives of different locales—as witnessed in the wake of postcolonial readings. Certain events in music history, for instance the punk movement in the mid-1970s, spearheaded new ways of looking at its “own” history—nonetheless, it also generated a massive spread of new writings on music. Whereas music criticism in the nineteenth century guarded the nation, criticism in the twentieth century contributed to dislocating the canon of Western classical music. Just as digitization is about to change the ways people relate to music as a commodified form, professional music criticism is currently also experiencing a decline, especially in the dailies and in terms of the number of specialized music magazines. One may follow the diaspora of people and certain musics—however, the criteria of how music is valued and judged might still be up for constant reevaluation. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to take a renewed look at the historical map of music criticism in the twentieth century, with the main focus on its development in Europe.
1 Nineteenth-Century Foundations of Music Criticism In order to comprehend the impact and development of music criticism in the twentieth century, there is a need to go back to its foundation, primarily in the 1800s. During this period, music criticism emerged in Europe and coupled with aesthetic reasoning as well as the geopolitics of its time, in particular that of the nation. Nationalism and ideas related to ethnicity, including racism, impinged on this foundation. Consequently, this section will deal with this, somewhat complex, foundational history in some detail. Most likely, humans have reflected on auditory experiences from the moment they started to make sounds. In order to develop musical notation, there probably had to be also some arguments, concerning both melodic and rhythmic contours: on how to organize the audible into a written form as well as on how music should be performed. Prevalent concepts like music—musique (in French) or mousikē (as in Greek mythology)—art, the work, composer, and genre emerged gradually and at different times in history. Such notions, however, represent approaches to conceptualizing and categorizing the audible in ways that impact on listeners’ expectations and experiences. The same could be said of Aristotle’s,
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Plato’s, and Augustine’s early musical musings; Augustine’s De musica clearly influenced premodern concepts of music in Europe. Moreover, there are manifold examples of commentary on music, for instance in France and Italy in the Renaissance period, which included reflections on what makes a good performance. Still, it is only in the latter part of the eighteenth century that music criticism emerged into the form as it is known today. As Ulf Lindberg et al. point out, as a social institution criticism is a product of what is commonly termed the bourgeois public sphere. Its origins lie in eighteenth-century notions of public conversation between equals and is connected to the emergence of a free press. Periodicals specializing in music originated in this early modern period. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1798 – 1865), founded by Friedrich Rochlitz in Leipzig, and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (since 1834), co-founded by composer and critic Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) also in Leipzig, are generally reckoned among the most important periodicals in the development of European music criticism. Schumann, perhaps the most influential critic of his time, was considerably influenced by writers such as Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Jean Paul. The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik set a standard for music criticism, and in particular, Schumann’s professionalism (in terms of standard of writing and musical knowledge) was imperative for the foundation of the institution of music criticism as a field. It should be mentioned, however, that Johann Mattheson (1681– 1764) originated music criticism in Germany already in the 1700s. Between 1713 and 1740, he launched several periodicals in Hamburg, including Critica Musica (1722– 1725), and, for instance, questioned the polyphonic style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Adolph Scheibe founded Der Critische Musicus (1737– 1740) and published around 100 issues. In the latter part of the 1700s, several London papers featured concert reviews, and there were review sections in monthly magazines like the European Magazine (1782– 1826), the Analytical Review (1788 – 1798), the Monthly Magazine (1796 – 1843), and the British Critic (1793 – 1826). Also in France, in the period between the outbreak of the revolution in 1789 and the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, there was a considerable expansion of public discourse, including music criticism. Writings on music was found in La Correspondance des amateurs musiciens (1802– 1805) and La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (1834– 1880), and, for instance, the French composer Hector Berlioz wrote music criticism for several papers. Spurring German Romanticism, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744– 1803) had a persuasive influence on most writers in the formative period of music criticism, comparable only to the impact of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778). Among other things, Herder underlined the view that
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music should be considered as an independent form of art, not a reflection of something else. E.T. A. Hoffmann (1776 – 1822) and Eduard Hanslick (1825 – 1904) stood out among the most influential European critics in this inaugural period, establishing a form of criticism that dealt notably with understanding music’s unique characteristics as well as claiming its autonomy as an art form. Hoffmann, in particular, was commended for his critical standards, illustrated by his praise of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in July 1810. This review has commonly been reckoned among the most influential in the history of music criticism—a fact demonstrating how criticism contributes to canon formation. Hanslick’s book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful), published in Prague in 1854 (then a part of the Austrian Empire), is very likely among the most quoted books in the history of music criticism, including in the twentieth century (Hanslick became a professor at the University of Vienna in 1870); subsequently, the book influenced critics as well as musicologists and music historians. Hanslick’s views have often been classified as conservative, yet a closer reading may reveal that his insights are more complex and adept than often claimed in music history books. He is especially remembered for his attack on Richard Wagner’s nationalism and the programmatic ideas on music. Most influential was perhaps his piercing critique of ideas of musical aesthetics as founded on “feelings,” claiming instead that emotional responses related to musical works are wholly dependent on “the meanings we ourselves attach to them.” Often, his writing was linked, albeit somewhat redundantly, to the discussions on “absolute music.”
2 “Expert Listening” and Nationalisms In the early twentieth century, there were numerous music journals all over Europe, and music was regularly covered in dailies: The Times, The Sunday Times, The Observer, and the Daily Telegraph in Britain, as well in newspapers in other European countries, including Russia. A prominent critic in Britain around the turn of the century was the Irish writer George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), writing for The Star and commenting explicitly on the quality of musical performances. In Britain, the first journal fully devoted to music literature and criticism, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, was established in 1818. By the end of that century, numerous music journals appeared; among them the Musical Times (since 1844), the Musical Standard, the Monthly Musical Record, and the Musical Opinion. The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals (1800 – 1900) lists more than 200 music titles for Britain alone. From that example, it makes little sense to try and list all magazines that existed, especially if
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considering all of Europe. At this point in time there was as well a large number of music periodicals in existence in the USA. In its formative period, writing about music developed steadfastly alongside musical and compositional innovation, and certain standards of musical judgment, guided by “expert knowledge,” became fairly well established. In hindsight, certain problems also appear due to the fact that music criticism was, albeit, with variations, based on the idea that music somehow represented its nations or people. Consequentially, there are paradoxes at stake in the ways that Western music as art was generally taken as a universal expression, while, at the same time, considered as representative of its nations, including its nationalisms. Such notions were often rendered more or less explicit in critics’ evaluations, for instance German versus Italian, British versus French, Russian versus German music, and so on. In this sense, music might even be understood to have geopolitical significance: one that reaches far beyond the mere innocent notions of musical style, individual or national. A troubling aspect of much music criticism in this period became apparent when the proclaimed “greatness” of music and the “genius” of its composers appeared in unison with ideas of the “greatness” of the nation—especially when coupled with terms like Volk (folk/people), national character, and race. Adolf Bernhard Marx (1795 – 1866), a very influential critic in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (since 1824), conceived of Italian opera, for instance the works of Gioachino Rossini, as the antithesis of all great German art; by and large, Italian opera was described as music that invaded their land. Wagner’s infamous essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850, unquestionably epitomized antiSemitism. And, as music historians have pointed out, Alfred Heuss (1877– 1934) transformed in the 1920s the once critically innovative Neue Zeitschrift für Musik into a tool for anti-Semitic propagation. At the same time, one should be wary of generalizing the impact music critics had on the emergence of nationalism in Germany; music critics usually wrote from quite different positions, also in relation to the states they were residing in, for example in the Kingdom of Prussia (1701– 1918) or the Weimar Republic (1918 – 1933). Musical modernism is commonly read as a reaction against European nationalist movements. The Frankfurt School’s impact on criticism is a significant, and already well-known part of the history of music criticism, not least through the overall impact of the works of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and other representatives. The term Neue Musik (new music) was coined by Paul Bekker (1882– 1937) and embraced by many critics. Bekker wrote for the Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung and was the chief critic of the Frankfurter Zeitung between 1911 and 1925, until he fled from Germany in 1933. He advo-
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cated a concept of internationalist music that would later also influence Adorno. As Björn Heile points out, for Bekker, “music was truly new if it reflected its own time,” and “the antithesis of the new was romanticism.”⁷ In the first half of the twentieth century, it was still common that composers would engage in criticism. In France, for instance, Olivier Messiaen wrote for several publications, including La Revue musicale (1920 – 1940) and Le Monde musical (1889 – 1940). He commented on music by Wagner, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, and Igor Stravinsky, and discussed the principles of his own compositions. In his case, though, we may see a return to an older paradigm: for Messiaen, “true music” was music that “touches all subjects without ever ceasing to touch God.”⁸ More radical in her approach was Nadia Boulanger (1887– 1979), writing for Le Monde musical from 1917 to 1927, a critic and composer who would greatly influence a number of American composers, including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Virgil Thompson. As Kimberly Francis observes, female critics were few in this period as authors were “mostly middle-class men, who had control of the press, sat in parliament, and dominated the literary world.”⁹ Major French periodicals were Comœdia (1907– 1937), Le Temps, and La Revue musicale. Another composer that notably contributed to music criticism in France in this period was Arthur Honegger, who wrote for the weekly journal Comœdia and other outlets, including Le Courrier musical, La Revue musicale, Le Journal des jeunesses musicales, and Le Journal musical français. During the twentieth century, classical music criticism gradually shifted its focus from the compositional works themselves and the performances of these works to recordings. The concert performance might have been of decisive interest, say when new works were premiered at the Donaueschinger Musiktage (Donaueschingen Festival for New Music, since 1921) or other prestigious events. Often the dailies would be the main outlet for such coverage. However, magazines like Gramophone (since 1923), Diapason (since 1956), Harmonie (1964– 1980), Le Monde de la musique (1978 – 2009), Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (1945 – 2010), or BBC Music Magazine (since 1992) changed to a focus on recorded music—the prevalent media of twentieth-century musical listening, alongside radio, at least from the 1930s onward. Such reviews commonly considered the technical qualities of records as objects as well as the aesthetic qualities of recorded performances, in part functioning as consumer guides. The competition between internationally renowned orchestras, featuring a stable of celebrated star conductors in order to realize the classical works “in performance,” was a pivotal concern. Additionally, radio became an essential medium for transmitting and, to some degree, reviewing music. Simultaneously, as new genres of popular music steadfastly emerged, the classical world seemed split between
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the “classical” (meaning new performances of canonical works) and the contemporary avant-garde. Certainly, in the latter part of the century, there were also paradoxes at stake in terms of how contemporary music, as well as its critics, operated within the constraints of their respective institutions in terms of aesthetics, technology, and cultural politics. As Georgina Born points out in her study of Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris, classifications appear historically “so that by the intervention of critics, ‘against art’ comes eventually to be understood as ‘part of art.’”¹⁰ Again, in the latter part of the century, one may see a development where music criticism often appeared in books as collections, in major journals, and also on blogs. Moreover, there was a transgression of divisions between jazz, contemporary avant-garde music, and different kinds of electronic music, and, as well, a move towards cultural interpretation—a form of writing that commonly traversed the continents. A good example is found in The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s interpretive approach to understanding Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s standing in the contemporary music field. Indeed, in the chic, brainy world of postwar avant-garde music, Xenakis was the odd man out. […] To understand fully how his pieces are put together, you need a good working knowledge of probability theory and combinatorial mathematics, among other disciplines. […] Milan Kundera, who listened obsessively to recordings of Xenakis’s works in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, heard in them a “noise of the world, a ‘sonorous mass,’ which, instead of gushing from the heart, comes to us from the outside, like the steps of the rain or the voice of the wind.” A composer of such fierce originality will always compel attention. In fact, Xenakis has become almost a pop classic on New York’s new-music scene, his music drawing healthy crowds.¹¹
In this sense, what may have once been a narrow field is no longer that. At the turn of the millennium, Xenakis was “chic” and catering to “hipness,” illustrating that music had become a part of identity politics, and in the process of writing, it is never simply what it was. A similar approach to the avant-garde—read as a cultural expression across genres and continents, whether its name is Ornette Coleman or Terry Riley—was fronted by the British magazine The Wire (since 1982).
3 Making Sense of Jazz from a Distance Jazz criticism in Europe emerged at a firm geographical and cultural distance from the music’s cradle. Its perspective from afar included a view of “otherness”
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and cultural difference. It could be argued that this distance and the transatlantic traffic of musicians and records as well as of the written word shaped jazz discourse. In the 1930s, jazz was considered a threat to the anti-Semitic, racist propaganda of Nazi Germany and was denounced as entartete Musik (degenerate music). In a more general sense, jazz challenged dogmatic nationalisms in favor of a more cosmopolitan musical listening. The influence of critics and criticism on jazz was considerable. Some of the most influential jazz record producers and music industry executives actually started out as critics. Leonard Feather (1914– 1994) began writing on jazz in British outlets like Melody Maker, Gramophone, Tune Times, and Swing Music before he set sail for the US in 1935, becoming an influential critic in Esquire, Metronome, and Down Beat. Similarly, the American record producer John Hammond (1910 – 1987) started his career as a writer, contributing to the same British publications in the early 1930s. The expansion of jazz criticism went hand in hand with the development and marketing of the music as respected critics were commonly engaged to comment on and interpret the music at the time of its release, in the form of liner notes. In the first half of the twentieth century, jazz was received as one of the most substantial innovations of popular music. After bebop, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the modernist language of jazz could no longer be written off primarily as “entertainment” or dance music. Initially, jazz was even embraced by the establishment of European composers, conspicuously illustrated by the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet’s panegyric review of Will Marion Cookʼs Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the Lausanne-based La Revue Romande from a concert in London in 1919. Ansermet wrote: “The first thing that strikes one about the Southern Syncopated Orchestra is the astonishing perfection, the superb taste, and the fervor of its playing.”¹² He in particular observed that they played “without notes” and that their “manifestation in the field of rhythm” represented “the genius of the race.” Such statements might, in hindsight, be written off as racist; however, they must also be viewed in relation to the use of language and the discourse of their time. In 1919, jazz represented a novel approach to musicking to European ears. Ansermet prophetically concluded that this “new” music might very well be “the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow.” In the same piece, Ansermet also observed that “Debussy has already written a cake-walk, and I well believe Ravel will lose no time in giving us a fox-trot.” In other words, this was no one-way street, where American jazz combined European and African elements. Maurice Ravel was influenced by jazz (so were Stravinsky, Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others), and in 1928 Ravel set out an American tour, visiting the American South, including New Orleans, alongside his friend, the American composer George Gershwin. Still, it was the French writ-
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er Hugues Panassié (1912– 1974) who most famously introduced the distinction between what he considered “hot” versus the commercial jazz of its day. Panassié’s claims in Le Jazz hot (1934) that African-American jazz seemed “authentic” compared to the music of white jazz performers (the book was translated into English two years after the original publication) and his writing for the French magazine Jazz Hot (since 1934) have been widely criticized. However, it might be argued that his perspective was significant (coming from a European angle) at a time when American society was altogether racially segregated, including its music industry. It was the white orchestra leader Paul Whiteman who was considered “King of Jazz” in the 1920s and early 1930s. Panassié’s book moreover influenced American critic Winthrop Sargeant’s book Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (1938) —who was music editor for Time magazine in the 1930s and 1940s and later a critic for the New Yorker—and all things considered made an impact also on jazz historiography. Similar views were apparent when the Melody Maker critic Bill Elliott summed up “20 years of recorded jazz” in 1946 and singled out “hot” releases by Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson. In all, Melody Maker stood out as one of the most significant institutions in the history of European music criticism. From the mid-1960s, it also became a pillar of a new form of rock criticism. Among the influential jazz critics at Melody Maker were Max Jones (1917– 1993) and, somewhat later, Richard Williams (b. 1947). Before Panassié’s book, the Belgian writer Robert Goffin had published his Aux frontières du Jazz (1932), and, in 1942, he taught a jazz history course (with Feather) at The New School for Social Research in New York. An incomplete list of influential jazz publications in Europe includes André Hodeir’s Le Jazz, cet inconnu (1945), which further substantiated jazz criticism in France, and the monthly Jazz Magazine (since 1950), which became a sustainable channel for jazz criticism in Paris. Along with Copenhagen and Amsterdam, the French capital became the second home for a number of expatriate American musicians. One should be wary of generalizations, but a key motivation for moving to and settling in Europe was that African-American musicians felt they experienced less racism and that jazz as a musical form was more fully appreciated in Europe. In most European countries during the 1930s and 1940s, jazz was perhaps the most popular form of dance music. The term jazz had appeared in 1919 with a vague meaning, often connoting the recent fad on the dance floor. As Johan Fornäs observes in relation to the reception of jazz in Sweden in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the music was regarded as primitive, feminine, and frivolous and was perceived as a threat against civilized society. In turn, “ideas about the black culture’s closeness to nature could be formulated as a critique of modern Western civilization.”¹³ In Norway, in 1921, the visiting orchestra The Five Jazzing
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Devils (which included one of the musicians from Cookʼs Southern Syncopated Orchestra) was met with acclaim, yet as one critic claimed, in the daily Verdens Gang, their music introduced “all hell of disharmony.” Surely numerous debates flourished, especially in terms of the racial characteristics offered by some of the early jazz advocates. Apart from being white, male, middle-class (European or American), the jazz critics were, without question, living very much inside of their record collections. Still, Feather wrote, in the French magazine Jazz Hot, in 1950: “The most intolerant racists are those Americans from the south who believe that the Negro is a simple, infantile, and happy person who was born singing and dancing. Although he doesn’t realize it, this attitude corresponds somewhat to that of the European jazz fan.”¹⁴ What was missing from this debate was an understanding more in line with contemporary cultural studies. In general, one might say that the early jazz writers conflated race with culture. The American scholar and musician George Lewis later claimed that there are opposite ontologies in existence in terms of improvisation as an approach to musicking, what he terms “Afrological” and “Eurological” perspectives.¹⁵ In short, it is possible to think of jazz as a cultural form of expression that comes out of a milieu—a community—as opposed to the widely propagated idea among critics who perceived jazz as being primarily individual. The individual “soloist” was the focus of the narrative of the individual genius in most European-based constructions of jazz history, showing that this narrative was influenced by the founding fathers of European classical music criticism and the topos of the genius-composer individual. This fuels the question of different approaches to improvisation that connect with the debates in the late 1960s and 1970s on the significance of “free jazz” in Europe, described in some detail in Lewis’s account of the reception of The Art Ensemble of Chicago in France and Germany. As much as free jazz was read as a musical declaration against formal conventions, the post-Coltrane expressions of the late 1960s were, incontestably, received as a quest for African-American sociopolitical freedom. In Europe, free jazz came to be embraced from a performance perspective as a Fluxus-influenced art event, where performers like Peter Brötzmann and Alexander von Schlippenbach, and in line with the youth protest movements in the 1960s, invested in jazz performance as a statement against European conformity—in the jazz historian Ekkehard Jost’s words, “Europa spielt sich frei” (Europe plays itself free). Yet, as John Gennari reminds us, “[f]or jazz musicians and the music’s ardent followers, jazz history has always been their personal history: their experience of playing, listening, dancing, debating, collecting, [and] reminiscing.”¹⁶ In the twentieth century, it was through records (more than anything else) that jazz was heard and written about. Though jazz continued to be a “live”
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form of music, it was the dissemination of records that made it truly “popular,” also in Europe. Moreover, the radio broadcasts of the Voice of America’s Jazz Hour, hosted by Willis Conover on shortwave radio, considerably expanded the attraction to jazz in communist Eastern Europe, spurring the jazz interest in Poland and other Eastern European countries. One of the most interesting jazz magazines, Jazz Forum, was established in Warsaw in 1964, with correspondents from many European countries. It became the main outlet for the European Jazz Federation. For several years, Jazz Forum was published both in Polish and in English as well as (for a period) in German. Similarly, the written word, especially the Jewish-American Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s book Really The Blues (written with Bernhard Wolfe and first published in 1946), also had an influence on musicians in Europe. Chris Barber, who alongside Ken Colyer and Alexis Korner spearheaded both the Dixieland and the R&B revival movement in the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s (including the skiffle scene), claimed that his interest in jazz and blues had started by accidentally finding a copy of this book outside an American military camp after World War II.¹⁷ This book also motivated the Finnish free jazz player Juhani Aaltonen to take up the saxophone. Moreover, most European countries had their various jazz magazines, including the Swedish Orkesterjournalen (since 1933), the Italian Musica Jazz (since 1945), the French Jazz Magazine (since 1950), the German Jazz Podium (since 1952), the British Jazz Journal (established in 1946) and Jazzwise (since 1997), and numerous others. The most influential postwar ambassador for jazz in Germany and Europe as a whole was Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922– 2000). Promoting jazz at the Südwestfunk broadcasting station in Baden-Baden from 1945 to 1987, Berendt instigated connections between jazz and the contemporary avant-garde as well as world music. In addition, he worked as a record producer and concert arranger for more than 50 years. Berendt’s The Jazz Book, first published in 1952, is probably the most sold jazz history book in the world. Such connections between music criticism, production, and music promotion, however, illustrate the fact that jazz criticism was never fully independent from its industries and that male Euro-centric middle-class perspectives came to dominate jazz criticism for most of the twentieth century, including in America. To this day, there is also an overarching tendency in jazz criticism to pit European jazz against American jazz, again reinforcing the nationalist perspectives on a musical form that was indeed a product of what Paul Gilroy terms the Black Atlantic; as Gilroy has claimed, jazz was perhaps the first postcolonial, modern music. The national perspective is also pertinent to discourses on “Nordic jazz,” which, since the 1970s, has been pigeonholed in concepts like the “Nordic tone,” “Nordic sound,” and so on, often ascribed to the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s music on the ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music) record label. Concomitant
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writing strategies tend to reaffirm folkloric characterizations as well as landscape imagery.
4 Rockin’ All Over the World One of the first pop/rock history books, Nik Cohn’s Pop from the Beginning (1969), was published with unalike titles: with the term pop in the UK and rock in the USA. This illustrates that these terms were up for constant negotiation. Writing for The Observer and Queen magazine in the 1960s, Cohn (b. 1946) had the idea that the writing somehow had to reflect the music. In his view, rock criticism needed “guts, and flash, and energy, and speed” rather than accuracy.¹⁸ With a background from Derry, Northern Ireland, Cohn became the first British music writer to capture the hipness of the 1960s “Swinging London” and the British Mod culture. He also penned the novel Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night for New York magazine, which in turn became the script for the movie Saturday Night Fever, the epitome of the 1970s disco culture. Cohn’s style was direct, he did not care who he offended. He called John Lennon “big-mouthed” and a “hard-nut” and wrote off Bill Haley as faded, “chubby,” and “baby-faced,” making personal interpretations that bordered on fiction. In this sense, he instigated a form of writing about pop/rock more in accordance with New Journalism or the “gonzo” style of Hunter S. Thompson. In Europe, Melody Maker (1926 – 2000) and the New Musical Express (since 1952) became the most important institutions for rock criticism, being widely read also outside the UK. Sounds (1970 – 1991) made an impact, especially in embracing punk, and the metal magazine Kerrang! (since 1981) gained substantial distribution, especially in the 1990s. Initially, Melody Maker was a music industry paper that started to cover jazz as well as include reviews of blues records. From 1964 onward, a new generation of writers at Melody Maker, Chris Welch (b. 1941) and Ray Coleman (1937– 1996) in particular, took the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones seriously and reported in a language that established new metaphors. The Rolling Stones, for instance, “don’t swing much”; they “drive” and “generate,” Coleman observed in 1964.¹⁹ Underpinning this new form of rock criticism was the already well-established jazz criticism at Melody Maker, in which the critics paid close attention to what musicians were playing rather than what they were wearing. Already in this period, there were discussions on “authenticity,” for instance what was implied by the idea of “real” R&B and whether it made sense to sing blues in a “cockney accent.” The different ideas of “authenticity” brought forth in much rock criticism are indeed highly problematic, as Weisethaunet and Lindberg argue. At a closer
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look, the term appears to be rather slippery. In one sense, it recasts the romantic notion of the author genius; however, it may also be taken to convey a number of quite contradictory ideas, especially the idea of anti-commercialism—of being in opposition to something you are indeed already deep into (namely, the music industry). It is important to note that rock, as a musical form of expression in Britain, to a large extent came out of art school ideology. As Simon Frith and Howard Horne observe, a number of British pop musicians were educated and started to perform in art schools. That added a certain attitude in terms of style and selfconsciousness, regarding both the music and its performance. Gestur Guðmundsson et al. argue that there were four main turning points in British rock criticism, in which the years 1964– 1969 are identified as the formative period, whereas the beginning of the 1970s marked a more full-fledged criticism, including renewed social awareness as well as an impact from rock criticism in the US, especially in Rolling Stone. The advent of punk not only changed the music but also spurred a renewed interest in writing about music. The 1980s celebration of New Pop instigated a diversification of the journalistic field as well as a flourishing of consumer guides.²⁰ From 1980, The Face magazine (1980 – 2004) functioned almost like a style bible. In the 1970s and 1980s, critics like Charles Shaar Murray (b. 1951) and Nick Kent (b. 1951) fashioned a style of writing that seemed more self-assured also in terms of its prose. Most significantly, rock criticism emerged as a discourse that contributed to legitimating rock music as a form of art, instigating value to a music genre that hitherto had mainly been considered as commercial culture, that is to say as “mere” entertainment or “low” or “mass” culture. What rock was taken to signify was simultaneously the product of that discourse. As Frith notes, rock became what rock critics legitimated as rock: “that is because, when it comes to it, ‘rock’ can only be defined as ‘the music that rock critics write about’. After all, any form of popular music can be of intellectual interest.”²¹ In the end, that clearly implies that certain aspects of popular music were looked down upon and excluded from the canon. That generally included acts that were considered too mainstream or too popular, say Elton John or Queen. Rock criticism was unquestionably male-dominated; pop and disco—dance-oriented forms of popular culture—were often expressly disliked if not ostracized. Rock criticism was a predominantly Anglo-American discourse, although it blossomed in most European countries, in particular from the mid-1970s onward. Simone Varriale, for instance, maintains that especially from 1969 to 1977 popular music criticism contributed to shuffling the hierarchies between “high” and “low” culture in Italy, with the appearance of specialized music publications such as the weekly Ciao 1001 and the monthlies Muzak and Gong. This seems analogous to the situation in most European countries in the 1970s: music criti-
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cism, to some extent, advocated local music scenes while English-language expressions still seemed to dominate in terms of artistic publicity, sales figures, as well as journalistic appraisal. Moreover, British papers were commonly read in other European countries while British readers did not commonly read music outlets from other parts of Europe. This merely reflected the center-periphery situation of the pop music industry for most of the twentieth century, with the English-speaking areas as the dominating center. In Germany, the print media landscape was divided until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In East Germany, Melodie und Rhythmus (since 1957) covered all kinds of popular music. In West Germany, Musikexpress (since 1969) was the most widely read magazine for rock and pop, but there were many others, including Sounds (1966 – 1983), Rock Hard (since 1983), and Spex (1980 – 2018), particularly covering the musical underground, whereas Rolling Stone got a German edition (as late as) in 1994. Though as Klaus Nathaus has noted, German rock was generally not considered worthy of attention by German writers, who reserved “authenticity” for AngloAmerican originals and considered German bands as mere copies. Ironically, “Krautrock” became a term applied from abroad and much so in retrospect, carrying with it a fascination with something taken to be both futuristic and somewhat exotic. Yet, myth-making was never unfamiliar to the procedure of writing about rock from its inception. There are also examples of quite influential female critics, among them were Penny Valentine (1943 – 2003), writing for the British Disc since 1964 and later for Sounds and Melody Maker. Julie Burchill (b. 1959) started at the New Musical Express in the 1970s, advocated a feminist perspective, and did not, as a rule, steer away from controversy. Significantly, rock criticism, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, went hand in hand with certain ideas of political revolt—that counted for several European countries. On the other hand, the music’s political potential was at times considerably exaggerated. Whereas independent magazines were often associated with underground or alternative ideas, other outlets worked more in alliance with the music industries. The cultural critique offered was more often concerned with the symbolic domains of everyday life than with direct politics. Only from the 1980s onward, rock criticism gained a more prominent position in the daily newspapers and also influenced new forms of feature journalism. The British Songlines magazine (since 1999) has made serious attempts at covering world music; still, the premises for accommodating all musics according to certain universal criteria seem risky as well as complicated. With the advent of new digital media—and in particular the way hip hop established itself in the 1990s in Europe as a more multiethnic form of musical expression, drawing from local language idiosyncrasies and diasporic experiences—established ideas
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of music criticism are less prominent. Whether the carnival of words of social media represents a democratization process or not is open for debate. In any case, it goes along with a general decline in music magazines as print media. Unquestionably, the blog format represents a change in hierarchy, as the idea of “expert critics” and the power of their respective institutions decline. Recommendation algorithms may also remove national or continental concerns from their equation. At the same time, existing print media, like Mojo (since 1993), Uncut (since 1997), or Q magazine (1986 – 2020), seem to be affected by what the former Melody Maker critic Simon Reynolds (b. 1963) terms “retromania,” and primarily catering to a middle-aged readership. Contrarily, it could be argued that upholding an interest in music history—the constant rediscovery of the past—is perfectly legitimate in the classical music world. In this sense, much popular music of the twentieth century has been rendered “classic.” At the turn of the millennium, the production of new popular music to a considerable degree appears in the light of the intertextual relations with its own past, both as music history and in terms of the digital recirculation of musical resources.
Conclusion Summing up, there is little doubt that the music criticism of the twentieth century made a strong impact on making sense of what music is. By and large, it also came to impact popular music studies as a new field of academic interest, initially taken to be the study of youth culture. As formulated by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson in 1975, it was conceived of as a “resistance through rituals.” Subsequently, research on popular music became more fully institutionalized with the establishment of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 1981. However, as Frith also points out, rock criticism preceded academia in “taking popular music seriously.” Later on, new forms of rock criticism appeared, which seemed unreservedly influenced by academic jargon. No other artist has been more vigorously written about than Bob Dylan, a fact that cannot be taken to be completely unrelated to the event of Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” From the perspective of historical cartography, it becomes apparent that music criticism developed from continuous exchanges between American and European writings. Even though British rock was clearly based on African-American musical forms, it was in part perceived as a completely new expression in the USA. None has more fully endorsed the idea of rock as American music than Greil Marcus, perhaps the most prolific of all rock music writers in the twentieth
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century. In a book-length essay on the ubiquitous impact of Dylan’s single Like a Rolling Stone, he recounts what Paul Rothschild, once producer of The Doors and other US rock acts, had told Bob Dylan biographer Bob Spitz: What I realized while I was sitting there was that one of US—one of the so-called Village hipsters—was making music that could compete with THEM—the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark Five—without sacrificing any of the integrity of folk music or the power of rock ’n’ roll.²²
In this sense, the impact of the circulation of music and its interpretation have come full circle. One may also conclude that writing on music led to the current situation where most genres are considered legitimate. Historically, certain centers are, in this chapter, located, in particular Britain, Germany, and France—possibly in opposition to New York or San Francisco. As outlined, the map of music criticism is a complicated geography. Yet, what all critics mentioned above would agree on is that music matters: in the twentieth-century history of music criticism that counted for aesthetic as well as social reasons—across generations, genres, and styles. In conclusion, the development of music criticism in its early period in Europe laid a foundation for how we understand music today. Even though music critics have often been wrong, the processes of listening, writing, and reading—in short, the active reflection on music—challenged dogmatic assumptions of what music is, or can be, as much as the music itself changed.
Notes Steve Race, Melody Maker, 5 May 1956, 8, and 10 October 1956. Bob Dawbarn, “Thank Goodness We Won’t Get This Six-Minute Bob Dylan Single in Britain,” Melody Maker, 7 August 1965, 7. Race, Melody Maker, 5 May 1956, 8. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 13. Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, 1978), 139. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004 [1980]), 13. Björn Heile, “Introduction: New Music and the Modernist Legacy,” in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. id. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 6. Stephen Broad, Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935 – 1939 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 137. Quoted from Marie Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917 – 1927 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 16. See also Kimberly Francis, “A Woman’s Critical Voice: Nadia Boulanger and Le Monde musical, 1919 – 1923,” in Music Criti-
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cism in France, 1918 – 1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy, ed. Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 169 – 192. Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 21. Alex Ross, “Xenakis in New York: ‘Waveforms,’” The New Yorker, 1 March 2010, https://www. therestisnoise.com/2010/03/xenakis-.html (accessed 1 August 2020). Ernest Ansermet, “Sur un orchestre nègre,” La Revue Romande, no. 10 (1919): 10 – 13. Reprinted and translated in Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 742. Johan Fornäs, Moderna människor: Folkhemmet och jazzen (Stockholm: Nordstedts, 2004), 227 (own translation). “Prejuges,” (trans. J. J. Finsterwald) Jazz Hot, June 1950, p. 11. Quoted from Strauss, 1965. George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996). John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 118. Personal interview with Hans Weisethaunet, 18 December 2004. Nik Cohn, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 4. Ray Coleman, “Hands Off Says Ray Coleman,” Melody Maker, 23 May 1964, 9. Gestur Guðmundsson et al., “Brit Crit: Turning Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960 – 1990,” in Pop Music and the Press, ed. Steve Jones (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 41– 64. Simon Frith, “Writing about Popular Music,” in Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 517. Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York: Perseus Books, 2005), 145.
Bibliography Ansermet, Ernest. “Sur un orchestre nègre.” In Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now, edited by Robert Gottlieb, 741 – 746. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Originally published in La Revue Romande, no. 10, 15 October 1919, 10 – 13. Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Broad, Stephen. Olivier Messiaen: Journalism 1935 – 1939. New York: Routledge, 2016. Cohn, Nik. Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Originally published as Mille Plateaux 1980 by Les Editions de Minuit. Fornäs, Johan. Moderna människor: Folkhemmet och jazzen. Stockholm: Nordstedts, 2004. Francis, Kimberley. “A Woman’s Critical Voice: Nadia Boulanger and Le Monde musical, 1919 – 1923.” In Music Criticism in France, 1918 – 1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy,
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edited by Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore, 169 – 192. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018. Frith, Simon. “Writing about Popular Music.” In The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, edited by Christopher Dingle, 502 – 526. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Frith, Simon. The Sociology of Rock. London: Constable, 1978. Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Guðmundsson, Gestur, Ulf Lindberg, Morten Michelsen, and Hans Weisethaunet. “Brit Crit: Turning Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960 – 1990.” In Pop Music and the Press, edited by Steve Jones, 41 – 64. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Heile, Björn. “Introduction: New Music and the Modernist Legacy.” In The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, edited by idem, 1 – 10. New York: Routledge, 2016. Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 91 – 122. Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York: Perseus Books, 2005. Roberts, Marie Louise. Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917 – 1927. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Strauss, David. “French Critics and American Jazz.” American Quarterly 17, no. 3 (1965): 582 – 587. Weisethaunet, Hans, and Ulf Lindberg. “Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing Real.” Popular Music and Society 33, no. 4 (2010): 465 – 485.
Further Reading Dingle, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge History of Music Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art into Pop. London: Routledge, 1987. Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993. Gottlieb, Robert. Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Jones, Steve, ed. Pop Music and the Press. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Lewis, George. A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Lindberg, Ulf, Gestur Guðmundsson, Morten Michelsen, and Hans Weisethaunet. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Martinelli, Francesco, ed. The History of European Jazz: The Music, Musicians and Audience in Context. London: Equinox, 2018.
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Regev, Motti. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Varriale, Simone. Globalization, Music and Cultures of Distinction: The Rise of Pop Music Criticism in Italy. London: Palgrave, 2016.
Michel Abesser
9 Sounds, Tracks, and Signals: Recording Music
In April 1902, the recording engineer and producer Fred Gaisberg recorded a selection of songs with the tenor Enrico Caruso in a hotel room in Milan. The session would revolutionize the emerging recording industry just as it made the opera singer one of the first international stars of the twentieth century. The fate of the Italian soloist and that of the new medium of gramophone were linked in an unprecedented way. “He made the gramophone,” Gaisberg later announced, but as the founder of the journal Gramophone proclaimed in the 1930s, “the gramophone made him.” In 2019, 117 years later, US pop star Billie Eilish released her much-anticipated debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? She had recorded this with her brother Finneas O’Connell at home, in their small bedroom studio in Los Angeles, using mostly Logic Pro recording software on a laptop, an audio interface, and a condenser microphone. Several international awards and numberone positions in national charts testify to the tremendous success of the album and the seventeen-year-old artist, whose celebrated eccentricity combined with the circumstances of the album’s production were interpreted by some as emancipation from the music industry. The history of sound recording unfolding between Caruso and Eilish can roughly be divided into three eras. The age of mechanical recording between 1877 and the early 1920s is characterized by the principle of fixing sounds mechanically onto a surface, first realized by Thomas Edison’s phonograph on wax cylinders and later by Emile Berliner’s gramophone on discs. As the properties of the latter allowed for mass production of records, this age witnessed the birth and expansion of an international recording industry that not only realized recording projects but also distributed matrices of these recordings through their global networks. The invention of the microphone and its application to the recording process in the 1920s drastically improved recording quality and the range of musical genres to be recorded. Combined with the transformative innovation of tape recording and the vinyl record in the postwar period, it makes sense to extend this second age of electrical recording up until the 1970s. This epoch was followed by the digital era in which we still live. Digitization of the sound recording process did not just fundamentally alter the way music was recorded, edited, and distributed. Beyond the musical realm, the sinking cost of computer and recording hardware and the increased internet bandwidth led to https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-010
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a fundamental reevaluation of expertise, hierarchies, and agency in the recording process, with seemingly more people than ever before taking part in the production of music. This chapter puts forward the premise that we need to consider technology, expertise, and the greater context of musical culture in order to approach the history of sound recording that unfolded between the recording sessions of Gaisberg in 1902 and O’Connell in 2019. Such perspectives on technology, expertise, and musical culture will also reveal the role Europe played in the international history of sound recording in the course of the twentieth century, though it remains an open question to what extent Europe should be viewed as, in some way, being different from global trends. Within the confinements of the chapter, Europe is approached through the lens of the United Kingdom, Germany, and France—as the most influential countries formulating European sound recording through technical advancements and cultural discourse—as well as their significant interactions with socialist Eastern Europe, the United States, and Asia. The term “sound recording” refers primarily to stored acoustical information on a particular medium that allows for its reproduction. This definition as an aural artifact encompasses various forms of both analogue and digital storage systems, ranging from wax cylinders to mp3 (it can also be hybrid as, for example, with piano rolls). Although both record pressing and sound recording constituted major sources of revenue for recording companies in the twentieth century, they should be considered separately. Looking at sound recording as the practice of capturing and processing a musical piece or album illuminates not only technical aspects—their practical application—but also the division of labor among musicians, producers, and engineers. An approach that allows sound recording to be embedded into wider cultural, social, and political contexts was proposed by David Morton. He uses the term “recording culture,” a concept that “encompasses the motivations for and outcomes of the act of recording; the relationships between the creators, promoters, and users of recording technology; and the interactions between people, recording machines, and recordings themselves.”¹ This emphasis on the practical dimension of sound recording resonates well with the musicking approach of this handbook, since it facilitates the analysis of various complex social and cultural relations that might otherwise be hidden in the seemingly simple act of recording a piece of music. A broader understanding of recording culture permits us to study recording as an act that encompasses a variety of productive practices related to the performance of music. We often operate under the illusion that the music in our speakers is only the naïve reproduction of a performance that has already happened in the past. In order to comprehend recordings
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as specifically transmitted performances, however, we have to comprehend better the recording and editing process that preceded our aural experience.² A genuine European dimension of sound recording is far from obvious (and mostly absent from research literature), given that the recording industry was global since its emergence at the dawn of the twentieth century. Up until the 1970s, we can argue that this global industry had a transatlantic core whose members set the pace of its technological development. Most of the major American labels, such as RCA Victor and Columbia Records, held shares in various European companies, while British companies, such as Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) and Decca, strove for presence on the US market. New technology, recording knowledge, and experts proliferated and moved within both transnational and continental contexts. Competition in such an environment made swift adoption of a uniform, modernized recording technology more likely. The political division of Europe further complicates the matter as it widened the technological gap between the Socialist bloc and the West, limiting the exchange of musicians and experts for decades and prioritizing different musical genres and hierarchies. Distinguishing between a European and respective national perspectives is equally problematic. Europe itself constituted a fragmented market for the recording industry throughout most of the twentieth century. Whereas before the Second World War most of the smaller countries were home to one national recording firm or had none at all, the three main countries for the recording industry, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, dominated the European market. The major companies, including Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Pathé, were involved in the international recording business by recording and promoting not only the music of their own country but also the national music of smaller European neighbors. German labels, like Lindström, realized recording projects of various European national cultures that lacked independent production facilities, such as Finland. Furthermore, some companies also became involved through imperial connections; for example, already before the First World War, representatives of British recording companies traveled to China and India not only to sell gramophones to local consumers but also to record what they considered to be local music for prospective regional markets. Any discussion on recording music in Europe needs to take such imperial and global connections into account. The devices the aforementioned Caruso and Eilish recorded their respective music with are to be found on opposite ends of a line of remarkable technological development that took shape during the twentieth century. This chapter highlights the main stages and reasons for technical development and investigates specifically European contributions to these processes.
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Both the wax cylinder in a Milan hotel in 1902 and the digital recording station in a two-bedroom house in Los Angeles in 2019 allowed for a recording that could be replayed immediately. In these two recording situations, professional recording engineers as the bridge between musicians and consumers were absent. However, for most of the twentieth century, the recording studio was the common meeting ground for artists, producers, and sound engineers. As sound recording, its practices, and innovations remain a highly personalized craft, this chapter explores the changing role and influence of recording engineers. They are considered central actors for adapting, enhancing, and experimenting with existing technologies and even with inventing new ones. While Eilish and O’Connell’s recordings differ from Gaisberg’s in acoustic terms, it keeps to the three-minute length that was defined in these early days of recording. Sound recording, despite all claims, very much resonated with musical culture and its conventions at large. Thus, the chapter addresses the question of how recording practices affected different musical genres, inherent hierarchies, and concepts of musical authenticity.
1 Technology: The Material Dimension of Sound Recording Sound recording’s history unfolds within larger trajectories of technological progress: the second industrialization at the turn to the twentieth century, represented by the rise of chemical and electrical industries, the emergence of electronics after the Second World War, and finally the development of plastics, miniaturization, and digitalization since the mid-1980s. Embedded in one of the earliest truly transnational business networks, the technological perspective of sound recording compels us to trace innovations and patents as well as their implication and modification throughout the twentieth century. The two dominant recording technologies, Edison’s phonograph—invented in 1877 and using wax cylinders—and Berliner’s gramophone from 1887, were based on the principle of capturing sound through a horn and etching the mechanical impulses, transferred through a diaphragm, onto a surface. The recording process, prone to mistakes, left only a few parameters that needed to be adapted, such as the size of the recording horn, the volume musicians played, and their distance to the horn. Most importantly, all of the commercially available gramophone records were limited in their respective recording time until the establishment of the vinyl record in the postwar era. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the standard 10-inch record with 78rpm (revolutions per minute) could capture no more than
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three minutes, while the 12-inch record provided space for four to five minutes. The larger disc provided an insignificant space for classical recordings, which required the willingness to turn and change a series of records; the first complete recording of an opera—in 1903 of Giuseppe Verdi’s Ernani—resulted in 40 singlesided discs. Yet, despite its acoustic limitations, the necessary equipment permitted recording personnel a degree of mobility that would only return with the portable tape recorder half a century later. Impulses for the innovation and transfer of recording technology between Europe and the USA in the first half of the twentieth century can be traced back to individuals, the circulation of established and patented technology through recording companies, and adjacent realms of cultural technologies like radio and cinema. Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville developed the phonoautograph in 1857, and Charles Cros in 1877 handed in a description of a recording device to the French Academy of Science. Without the foundational research of such French inventors on capturing and reproducing sound, the invention of Edison’s and Berliner’s devices seems improbable, yet only the latter managed to finally overcome the technical difficulties of their early attempts. The main (and in the end successful) competitor to Edison’s phonographic wax cylinders was the gramophone record, invented by the German-Jewish migrant Emile Berliner. The inventor brought the product to market maturity and sustained economic ties to Germany, leading to the foundation of the German Gramophone Company with production and recording facilities in Berlin and Hanover. Germany’s tradition of precision mechanics, such as manufacturing instruments and clocks, facilitated the emergence of the recording industry after 1900 when the basic patents for the gramophone and recording expired in Europe. Soon after that, countless smaller companies sprang up that offered gramophone equipment as well as complete recording and pressing facilities. Producers like Gaisberg traveled through Europe and Asia to record prestigious opera singers as well as performers of folklore and popular tunes, using hotel rooms as impromptu recording studios. Stationary recording studios had emerged in the musical centers of Europe since the beginning of the twentieth century, often in proximity to venues of popular music. The first recording studio in Europe was founded by the Gramophone Company in 1898 at Covent Garden in London, close to the music halls of the West End. The first studio on German soil followed two years later, in Berlin. Their number and importance increased with the shift of the record companies’ strategy—from recording popular stage musicians to producing assembly line recordings by relatively anonymous studio artists. The First World War ended Europe’s leading position in sound recording technology. While the United States overtook Europe as the dominant center,
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the economic recovery of Britain and Germany in the 1920s, advances in the chemical and electrical industries, and the subsequent concentration of the recording and film industries in these two countries created a climate for innovation in Europe. The British engineer Alan Blumlein, active in different fields such as telecommunication and electronics, invented a moving-coil disc-cutting head. The new device not only saved his employer—the Columbia Graphophone Company—costly royalties to be paid for an American patent but also increased the sound quality substantially. In the early 1930s, he pioneered the creation of stereophonic sound. In the 1920s, the German engineer and entrepreneur Georg Neumann started his groundbreaking work in the creation of condenser microphones, which were distributed globally in cooperation with Telefunken. Tape recording as a feasible technology originated in 1927 with the invention of magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer. On many occasions, recording technologies benefited from technological impulses from other sectors, which, at times, spurred private or state financial investment, namely the radio and the cinema. The economic potential of interwar German cinema made the successful development of the optical sound process possible, invented by the engineers Joseph Engl, Joseph Massolle, and Hans Vogt in 1919 and bought by the American company FOX Film in 1927. Preparing a product for the market remained costly and risky. Due to the size of its domestic market, US companies were more capable of achieving this, whereas smaller record companies in Europe often struggled and failed to implement new technologies. Electric microphones and amplifications proved their acoustic value in radio broadcasting in the first half of the 1920s before being applied in sound studios on a larger scale. The process of recording directly on disc used in radio productions in the 1930s enabled sound engineers to store music recordings longer than the 3-minute pieces made for 78rpm discs (yet without any opportunities to alter the sound of individual instruments after the recording). The case of the electrical recording process exemplifies the importance of transnational company structures for technology transfer. After being developed in the USA by Western Electric’s laboratories, the process was quickly adopted in Europe when, in 1926, British Columbia Records bought the German Lindström corporation, which in turn obtained the license to use the revolutionary process for its recordings. Electrical recording drastically increased the frequency range and dynamic of recordings. In this way, it expanded both the variety of music to be recorded and, through the possibility of controlling volume and tone, the physical spaces where the recordings could be played. Until the Second World War, both Berlin and London provided concentrated technological ingenuity,
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production facilities, capital, cultural density, and a sufficiently large test audience for innovation. As in other cases of civilian technology, the military served as a catalyst for technological development in sound recording. British engineer Arthur Haddy of Decca developed a high frequency recording system for the British navy that was able to detect sonic differences between propeller sounds of German and British submarines. After the war, Decca’s engineers applied this technology as “full frequency range recording” to their production and thus secured their position in supreme classical recordings for decades. In National Socialist Germany, the potential for recording propaganda speeches and music spurred centralized investment and furthered the development of tape recording, such as the concept of alternating current (AC) tape bias that eliminated most of background hiss and paved the way for recording culture after the war. Again, the postwar American market proved to be a vital catalyst for the rapid development of practical applications for the recording industry. John Mullin, a United States Army Signal Corps member, brought two tape recorders built by the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft back home. In the USA, the Ampex company started producing tape recorders for radio stations and studios, soon to be enhanced to multitrack recording based on the experiments of guitarist and composer Les Paul. Innovation was not limited to the USA though. Already in the early 1950s, with the economic recovery in Europe from the war, European companies such as the German Telefunken and the Swiss Revox/Studer advanced the technology further and became global providers of professional recording equipment for the increasing number of recording facilities worldwide. The Cold War divided Europe into two different camps with seemingly incompatible political, economic, and cultural systems. This significantly affected the development and transfer of recording technology. German audio technology brought to Russia after the war benefited the aims of Soviet cultural politics. Tape technology allowed for re-recording on tapes produced by the chemical company Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik (BASF). Most of the iconic radio announcements of Yuri Levitan, the “voice of Stalin” during the “Great Patriotic War” in the late 1940s, were recorded on these tapes, announcements that could not be recorded at the time of the war and that, with the growing glorification of the war since the 1960s, would become acoustic markers of late Soviet and Russian identity. As culture became a crucial field of global competition, modern recording technology became a necessary asset for the Soviet Union. While the musical tours of its classical orchestras and soloists within the cultural exchange programs with the West proved to be very successful, its lack of modern recording studios and production facilities for vinyl records made it difficult to cater to
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growing Western demand for Soviet music as well as to gain reputation and money on the global market. Given the priorities of its planned economy since the late 1920s and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance’s embargo limiting technological transfer, the Soviet Union increasingly depended on its Western satellite states such as Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic.³ These countries, with more developed electrical and chemical industries, had closer (often informal) links with leading European countries in recording, allowing them to produce recording machines, microphones, and pressing facilities as well as to purchase technologies from the West, thereby eluding economic embargos. While the recording studio landscape of the USA and Western Europe experienced a growth and diversification between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, the recording industries of the Eastern Bloc followed the opposite path towards centralization. This resulted in each country having one national recording company, controlled by the respective ministries of culture that oversaw the recording, production, and distribution of records. The centrally planned modernization of the Soviet recording industries, integrated into the newly founded state-controlled company Melodiya in 1964, could not close the increasing gap between the state of microelectronics in the East and the West, which resulted in clear limits to technical development in socialist economies. Apart from that, the aesthetic conventions of socialist musical culture often directly affected the very outlook and structure of the recording studios themselves. Places like the Recording House of the Ukrainian Radio in Kiev or the former St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow provided extensive space and acoustics for recording large orchestras and choirs that should represent Soviet cultural superiority. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the frequency of technological improvement in sound recording increased significantly. Moreover, while popular music—with its growing revenues for the industry—became an obvious driving force for technological change, the challenges of recording classical music remained a powerful motivation for producers and recording engineers wanting to improve technical equipment. Tape recording had such a transformative effect on music recording, processing, distribution, and creation that the period between 1945 and 1975 is commonly referred to as the “magnetic era.” The total length of a studio recording increased considerably in comparison to the prior on-disc recording, and the ability to cut and edit the tape not only ended the one-take policy but also provided the new phase of postproduction with seemingly endless possibilities. Compositions could be reedited and electronic effects such as reverb, equalizing, and compressing could be added to the sound mix. The technology further helped uncoupling the economic ties be-
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tween record companies and studios, which now had the tools to specialize in particular (and innovative) music genres. The “third expansion” of the recording industry, beginning in the 1960s, led to significant growth in the total number of recording studios in the USA and Europe.⁴ UK recording studios, famous for having been laboratories for innovative pop music, were also hotbeds of technological innovation in studio equipment. The pioneering work done in the Abbey Road Studios set the development of multitrack recording in motion. This eventually led to 24-track recording capabilities in the 1970s and benefited specialized companies, such as Rupert Neve and its mixing consoles that would equip professional studios all over the world. Despite being not as commercially important, classical music remained a focal point for improving the sound through technological improvement. Already in 1950/51, British Decca made use of the improved duration provided by the new long-playing (LP) record for classical music. Furthermore, beginning in the mid-1950s, the company has pioneered the production of stereo records. The economic and structural transition of the recording industry and the market since the mid-1970s affected technological innovation and, even more so, was accelerated by it. The introduction of digital technology in the 1980s jeopardized the business model of record companies that had selected artists to finance, manage, and promote the reputation of these companies, a model that had prevailed from 1900 to the 1970s. In Europe, the economic decline after the oil crisis of the 1970s most severely affected the UK due to its high density of studios, forcing several of them to close. The caesura of the 1970s and 1980s shows that sound recording must be understood as a history of technology and society in as far as social, political, and cultural constraints can all affect technological development. In contrast to the recording culture of the 1970s, with its expensive studio productions, an increasing number of amateurs engaged in creating small recording facilities that would allow for less expensive recording of alternative music outside the domain of large record companies. This independent recording movement, very much resonating with the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture of the 1970s, created demand for inexpensive and easy-to-use recording equipment and advertised the concept of a “project studio” or “home studio” as a viable alternative. Products such as the Japanese four-track TEAC (Tokyo Electro-Acoustic Company) 3340 tape recorder, various combinations of mixing consoles with cassette technology in the 1970s, as well as affordable MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)-based drum machines and synthesizers catered to that demand and provided an important push for the establishment of new music genres. Since the advent of transistor production and the printed circuit, production costs for consumer technology as well as professional recording equipment de-
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creased significantly, resulting in the growing number of stereo sets in households and the success of the compact cassette as one of the major music mediums since the 1970s. The compact cassette, developed by the Dutch company Philips, largely owed its success to, while competing with systems from the German companies Grundig and Telefunken, the fact that Philips licensed the format to Sony free of charge, which points to the increased importance of Asian companies for technical modernization. Philips and Sony subsequently collaborated in the development of the compact disc, which dominated the market for recorded music from the late 1980s to the early 2010s. This extension of technical innovation from Europe and the United States to Japan necessitated global agreements on new technical standards. In 1983, Japanese and American companies agreed to the MIDI specifications, which created a universal standard of synchronizing electronic instruments built by different manufacturers. Among Asian companies, the Japanese firms Denon and Sony evolved into major proponents of the upcoming digital recording technology that was introduced at the 1977 Audio Engineering Society convention, held in New York. Many of the remaining big studios faced high costs for changing from analogue to digital technology, their budgets having already been strained by considerable investment into analogue equipment in the 1970s. The possibilities opened up by the new technology for the recording process, however, made for a strong argument: the nonphysical and nondestructive editing process of individual tracks with far more precision than in the age of tape improved sound quality and offered theoretically unlimited transformation of sounds after recording, thereby altering the work process itself. Combined with the decrease of cost for hardware storage since the early 1990s and increasing opportunities for data transfer via the internet, digital technology led to a “delocalization of the recording studio.”⁵
2 Agency, Expertise, and the Reciprocity of Sound Recording and Culture The evolution of sound recording can only be understood when considering the emergence and transformation of the sound-engineering profession and then placing this development as well as technological changes into the context of musical culture at large. As recorded music gradually supplanted the “live” concert as the main interface between music and various audiences, its evolution was accompanied by discussions of how it affected musical hierarchies and practices and whether records were beneficial or harmful for their listeners.
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These topics were reflected in debates about the question of what constitutes a “good” recording and how it ranks in comparison to a “live” performance. Recording technology and sound media further affected the evolution of music and its properties as they influenced musicians’ and sound engineers’ self-understanding and musical practices. One continuity throughout the long twentieth-century history of sound recording is the highly personalized character of the craft. Both the recording engineer responsible for technical decisions and the producer accountable for all aesthetic matters are key figures for our understanding of sound recording’s evolution as a technical process, as a cultural factor, and at times as a political one as well. Yet given the proximity of technical and aesthetic decisions in the recording process, the distinction between the two remains difficult. During the long twentieth century, every epoch of sound recording brought forward a specific type of engineer or producer because technological sophistication increased demands for qualification, education, and collaboration. Technological developments also affected engineers’ self-understanding as professionals and intermediaries between musicians, the music industry, and listeners. The specialized recording studios for music, radio, and movies that emerged in the 1960s highly depended on the precise division of labor between professional sound engineers with different skills. Only digitization and the emergence of the DIY studio opened up this form of cultural production to a broader range of people because it required less technological sophistication than before. Advances in recording technology brought about the division of sound studio labor in many instances, yet the distinctions between engineer, producer, and musician could blur in such settings as well if these actors decided to experiment. In the initial stage, the technical options for modifying the sound of a mechanical recording were limited to choosing between different recording horns and positioning singers and instrumentalists in small recording rooms. And yet the creative use of manipulation techniques speaks to the creative and innovative qualities required for successful operators. Electrical recording permitted greater flexibility but also required the skills to handle complex electronic systems. With the increased sensitivity of microphones and, in turn, the increasing importance of spatial acoustics, recording engineers needed to be more attuned to the aesthetic relevance of the recording process. Engineers had to acquire creative, organizational, and entrepreneurial skills to control the changing studio environment, while their role as occasional inventors and adaptors of recording equipment took shape as well. The record company remained the hub for recording knowledge long into the second half of the twentieth century. Instead of structured training programs, older studios would often teach new engineers by involving them in the practice.
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This form of training resulted in specific in-house sounds, which recording companies regarded as their trademark and whose ingredients they kept secret. Economic expansion could lead individual companies in other directions though. The first recording studios in early twentieth-century Germany relied on temporarily hiring British sound engineers for the training of local engineers. While industrial recorders were mostly committed to one company over the course of their career, the technical simplicity of the early equipment and the global expansion of the industry rendered their activities highly mobile and transnational. After recording famous singers and musicians all over Europe, the aforementioned Gaisberg transgressed the Western cultural canon by recording popular traditional folklore music in the Russian Empire and India. These activities mirror the subsequent importance of sound recordings for providing local and national music to national markets and of acoustically documenting the European colonies. Sound engineers employed by the French company Pathé traveled through France’s colonies in North Africa. Agents of Columbia Records and RCA Victor recorded tunes of various ethnic groups around the globe to be later sold to the respective migrant community in the United States as typical sounds, (re)inventing their national music in the process. Recording colonial subjects helped the global expansion of the gramophone industry and served as a central technological catalyst for the development of anthropology whose proponents would gather sound recordings as empirical evidence for their research. The increasing variety of recorded sounds was accompanied by more fundamental debates on what might be considered a “good” recording. These discourses were embedded in philosophical concepts and can be read as a cultural marker within different societies and groups of listeners. Already at the advent of gramophone technology, two conflicting understandings became apparent, understandings that resemble those of other media such as photography. One position regarded recording as something that aimed at truthfully capturing the original sound. The other position, doubting it possible to produce this truthful sound due to technical limitations (and later on due to the technical modification of sound), aimed at creating symbolic representations of the original sound.⁶ The obvious limits of the acoustic quality of records prior to the First World War supported the latter view. However, every technical improvement in sound recording that brought frequencies closer to the capacity of human ears reanimated this debate. “Every age,” communication scholar Jonathan Sterne argued, “has its own perfect fidelity.”⁷ Early on, musicologists, philosophers, and sociologists as well as members of the public discussed recordings and records as the music’s material equivalent. The loss of the “aura” of a work of art caused by mechanical reproduction, an effect that concerned Walter Benjamin in 1936, was (and continues to be)
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much debated. Theodor W. Adorno claimed that recordings changed the status of a performance’s acoustic event, as they made the fact apparent that the event could not be repeated. However, all the critique that considered music to be devalued by its recording and reproduction was, in Adorno’s view, outweighed by sound recordings’ ability to truthfully store the musical material, thus overcoming the limitations of previous notation systems. Concerns about the devaluation of the musical art through recording remained a continuity throughout the twentieth century. In 1985, Jacques Attali argued that the reproduction of sound results in “the death of the original, the triumph of the copy, and the forgetting of the represented foundation.”⁸ This tension between performance and mechanical repetition, decoupling the music from its spatial and temporal contexts, affected musical practices to an increasing extent. Recorded sound undoubtedly challenged nineteenth-century bourgeois practices of domestic music making and offered an alternative to “live” music that rendered it less ubiquitous while extending the size of audiences dramatically. This social shift in music consumption must be kept in mind when engaging with the intellectual cultural criticism of the 1920s and 1930s. Recordings, however, gradually became a focus for musicians that rivaled or surpassed musical notation. A recording not only exceeded notation by capturing central elements of performance, such as improvisational idioms, more accurately. The expansion of jazz music, with its roots in African-American musical culture in interwar Europe, was related to this ability. Furthermore, recording could store particular musical elements alien to the nineteenth-century European musical canon, such as traditional Indian scales or the quarter-tone melodies of Eastern European folklore, which Hungarian composer Béla Bartók had enthusiastically collected with his phonograph prior to the First World War. However, a key medium for musical practice, the reproduced recording of a certain interpretation is in itself a restriction to one particular performance. In combination with the shift in playing styles adopted in most of the great orchestras (for example the increase of vibrato in playing the violin), a homogenization of sound became noticeable in the 1920s and accelerated further after the Second World War. Radio broadcasting and the LP record made the postwar decades a promising age for transferring the musical culture of classical music to broader audiences. This created demand for educated experts with combined knowledge of the inherent traditions, genres, and acoustic architecture of classical musical culture as well as the technological means to disseminate them. In 1949, the German engineer and musicologist Erich Thienhaus established the first formal education for the new profession of “Tonmeister” at the Detmold University of Music, Germany, a specialized education that is offered in a variety of institutions today.
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The increasingly complex work of engineers and a more distinct division of labor between them and producers in the second half of the twentieth century led to a shift in power relations towards musicians. It also contributed to a growing self-awareness and self-organization by engineers. In 1948, a group of US audio professionals founded the Audio Engineering Society in New York, which evolved into an international organization with national subsidiaries, among them a British and a French section. The respective German professional association—Verband der Deutschen Tonmeister—fulfilled similar functions to that of the Audio Engineering Society, and both organizations were closely associated through double membership. Congruent with the international structure of the recording industry, the main aim of the society from its outset was the exchange of increasingly complex technical knowledge and applications. Its growing reputation as a unique network of expertise gradually translated into the power to guide the next step in technological innovation. The organization’s annual conference in 1977 defined parameters for the introduction of digital technology that set the industry standard. Increased professionalism and organization did not diminish the importance of the individual musician in realizing recording projects. John Culshaw, Decca’s main producer from 1946 to 1953, received no formal training but climbed the ladder as an autodidact and accomplished some of the most courageous classical recording projects of the twentieth century, among them the entire collection of Wagner operas. Within the context of the growing LP market for classical music, Culshaw not only made effective use of stereophonic recording for capturing the theatrical moments and actors’ movements on stage for the first time, but also subjected the recording to an extensive editing process, thereby breaking with the tradition of live recording of classical music. In the age of electrical recording, electric signals superseded the idea of sound as an acoustic event. By way of contrast, tape technology led producers and engineers to think of music as an assemblage of tracks, demanding procedural and compositional thinking as means of achieving order and harmony.⁹ In Culshaw’s mind, tape technology offered the chance for correcting “mistakes” and thus for compensating for the listener’s lack of visual experience. Culshaw recordings of Wagner’s operas, regarded as a milestone of European classical music, bolstered Decca’s claim of acoustic superiority and boosted Culshaw’s prestige. Such increased symbolic gratification is corroborated by the growing number of producer names printed on Decca record sleeves from the early 1960s onward. EMI Records producer George Martin and his collaboration with the Beatles epitomize this new paradigm. Studio work was changing in significant ways, offering more room for experimentation with pop groups that were a promising
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link between innovation and financial profit for their respective labels. Martin encouraged the transcending of barriers between pop and classical music, and he allowed sound engineers, like Geoffrey E. Emerick, to experiment with microphones and tape manipulation to an unprecedented extent. The fact that the Beatles eventually abandoned live performances in favor of studio recordings brought Martin’s approach to its logical conclusion. The barriers between collaborating professions became increasingly penetrable in the 1960s, a process Edward Kealy describes in his influential article as “reciprocal transformation.”¹⁰ While some musicians actively engaged in recording and editing their own music for the sake of greater artistic autonomy (Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys is a case in point), some sound engineers expanded their self-understanding from that of “mere” technicians to that of artistic collaborators with the musicians. Not unlike the Beatles, pianist Glenn Gould retired from performing on stage in the mid-1960s and concentrated on editing his own recordings. The effects of track recording for the practice and identity of the musician, however, must be regarded in their respective contexts. The liberating effect of a potentially unlimited number of repetitions went hand in hand with a suppression of risk taking and even creativity as well as an increased level of self-criticism directed at one’s own performance. Adapting musical works to the available recording technology was a means to signal the composer’s modernity, such as Igor Stravinsky’s Serenade in A (1925), which was tailored for the average playing time of a record. The technological properties of the respective recording technology favored certain types of music over others and thus affected the hierarchies between and within genres. Early phonograph and gramophone recordings allowed for the best rendition of soloists and singers, for instance the opera star Enrico Caruso, who, in the trajectory of the nineteenth century, proved classical music to be a commercially successful enterprise. The dramatic improvement of recordable frequencies since the 1920s and the extended playing time of the LP in the 1950s gave new prominence to instrumentalists and conductors such as Mstislav Rostropovich or Herbert von Karajan as new symbols of artistic perfection. The tape recording studio of the 1950s created conditions that would permit a rediscovery of older and the creation of new genres. The fragmented knowledge about sound, structure, and styles of playing of particular pieces of medieval and Renaissance music could at times be compensated by intense studio work. Only the growing availability of this early music on records led, in turn, to an increasing popularity and presence in concert halls.¹¹ Projects such as Deutsche Grammophon’s “Archiv Produktion des musikhistorischen Studios” and Telefunken’s label “Das Alte Werk” exemplify the influence records had on live performances.
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Tape technology not only facilitated the rediscovering of parts of European musical heritage but also served as a means of musical postwar modernism. For the musique concrète school of French avant-garde composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry as well as for German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, recorded sounds became the raw material to be modified in electronic sound experiments. The Studio für elektronische Musik, in Cologne (1951), and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris (1977), became centers for the advancement of electronic music and acoustic research. Tape technology and its implications altered both ends of the professional spectrum in music: the replacement of scores with recordings as the focal point for professional musical creation and the establishment of the track paradigm of tape recording since the 1950s. Together, these alterations in music recording led to an explosion of “nonprofessional” composition.¹² With the increasing availability of electronic effects and electric instruments in popular music since the 1960s, this explosion contributed to the emergence of a new sonic ideal: instead of an imitation of live music, engineers, producers, and musicians strove for the creation of new soundscapes in the studio, which musicians later tried to re-create on stage.¹³ The conflicted understanding of “authenticity” was further complicated in the 1960s: the term could be used to refer to sound rendition equivalent to that of a concert experience, to a particular constellation of unique instruments and effects in studio work, or to a celebration of technological imperfections. The third understanding achieved dominance in lo-fi cultures such as industrial music or punk rock, which originated in the UK as a radical departure from mid-1970s classic recording studios musical complexities. This radical departure went hand in hand with fundamental alterations of studio organization, recording work, and its underlying ethics. The American and European professional recording studios of the 1970s accommodated an increasingly intricate hierarchy of recording personnel able to cope with the complex technology. With the rise of the DIY culture in the 1970s, home and self-recording studios allowed amateur recorders to produce alternative music. Often lateral recruits to the job, these engineers were responsible for studio recording and mixing on tours, interacted within flat hierarchies, and cultivated a selfimage of being in touch with “authentic” music and of working in opposition to the recording industry and its big studios. The term “amateur” certainly applies to recorders behind the Iron Curtain, who played a crucial role in documenting and developing musical cultures outside the official socialist canon. As the state asserted its claim to monopoly control over culture, sound recording itself became a political act. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the limited cultural opening towards the West led to a greater ex-
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posure to Western music and an increasing demand for records. The decentralized production of records as well as the ingenuity of young engineers, who developed copied records on used x-ray films from hospitals, created a black market for recorded music. To a certain extent, in the Soviet Union, this compensated for the state’s inability and the Communist Party’s unwillingness to liberalize the music market.¹⁴ Both the Soviet state company Melodiya and the increased production of tape recorders for Soviet citizens aimed at regaining control over this sphere. However, the increased availability of tape recorders led to the abandonment of the state’s monopoly over the acoustic means of production and enabled the cultural phenomenon of magnitizdat (published on tape) and the circulation of uncensored tape recordings. These recordings contained a variety of genres, ranging from guitar poetry, with its political criticism, and Western styles of rock and jazz to the nostalgic melancholy of tangos from the prerevolutionary era, which the authorities had considered decadent. As many recorders would build their own technical equipment, scout for talent, recruit and record musicians (in their private flats), distribute recordings on the black market, and at times even organize small tours, their incorporation into wider cultural and political networks proved a crucial asset. In many instances, amateur sound recorders bridged the gap between official and unofficial culture in late socialism. The satiric and critical songs of guitar poet Vladimir Vysotsky were known and admired by janitors, intellectuals, as well as party officials, all who eagerly tried to acquire tickets for his official concerts. These appearances had become famous through unofficial magnitizdat. The activities of amateur recorders thus provide an answer to the question of the political implications of private tape recording technology. In diverging from the official cultural canon, these recordings subverted the cultural monopoly of the late socialist state. While one could argue that these practices contributed to the erosion of socialist legitimacy, they hardly affected the stability of the Eastern Bloc’s regimes. Not only did the tolerance of individual mood management and the exchange of nonsanctioned music help to channel dissatisfaction into a nonpolitical realm, but also music in general became depoliticized due to its exposure to Western culture and due to the economic prospects of light music for financing symbolically important classical music and folk culture. This pattern emerged in all socialist musical markets, with state concert agencies involved in organizing tours of both serious and light music. Officially sanctioned pop music devoid of direct political messages, at most evoking a patriotic love for the socialist motherland, triumphed since the 1960s throughout the Eastern Bloc, a triumph that was happening just as much in the West.
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Conclusion: A History of European Sound Recording? When, in 1978, representatives of the Dutch company Philips and Japanese company Sony met for final discussions on the properties of the coming compact disc, they agreed to a total length of 74 minutes for the new medium. Sony vice president Norio Ōga had pointed out that this running time would exactly cover Wilhelm Furtwängler’s recording in 1951 of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Ōga, who later played a crucial role in transforming the company into a global media empire, was trained as an opera singer in Germany and entertained a lifelong friendship with composer Herbert von Karajan. The story, whether true or invented, linked a technological milestone far away from Europe with a musical icon, making use of this cultural capital to promote the digital technology that Sony claimed to spearhead. As the Council of Europe had declared Beethoven’s composition its hymn in 1972, no other classical composition could, in the eyes of an international public, better represent the continent and its cultural essence. This episode stands at a crossroads of developments addressed in this chapter. With the rise of digital recording and media technology, the power centers of technical innovation shifted to other world regions, mainly in Asia. From the late nineteenth century to the 1970s, there is ample evidence for the existence of a transatlantic core to this global recording industry, a core that served as a pacemaker for technological development. While many inventions originated in Great Britain, Germany, or France, the lion’s share of critical technological developments and practical application of the new technology took place in the USA, which constituted the biggest market for records, thus rendering the costly and risky introduction of new technology more feasible. A closer look compels us to understand the increasing importance of US companies within this larger timeframe. Bigger domestic markets and easier access to capital, as well as a constant inflow of European migrants/experts, led to what might be called a gradual provincialization of Europe as a center for technical innovations. The two world wars in particular widened the gap between the USA and Europe with regard to market development and innovation. The UK, however, a country less affected by the devastation of the war than continental Europe remained, both through its recording studio landscape and its experimenting sound engineers, peculiarly innovative. The subsequent shift of innovation in the field of digital sound processing in the 1970 can be understood as a second movement towards provincializing Europe.
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The logic of the Cold War could serve as a catalyst for the transfer and development of technology and musical culture. In order to harvest the fruits of successful cultural competition in the realm of music, technological modernization was essential, while the technological gradient between more advanced socialist nations such as the German Democratic Republic or Czechoslovakia inverted power relations in the Eastern Bloc and made the Soviet Union more dependent on their smaller Western neighbors. The increasing interaction between orchestras and record companies in East and West gradually led to a convergence of orchestra sounds. Apart from the geographical shift of centers of technological innovation, the case of Sony’s peculiar disc length testifies to the continuous importance of the European art music tradition to mark quality recordings. Europe’s heritage of classical music provided a strong impulse to recording projects of the first half of the twentieth century. It was the sales argument for companies such as Pathé and Lindström when they marketed their catalogs in the US market. The concert life of St. Petersburg, London, Berlin, Milan, and Vienna attracted recording projects from both sides of the Atlantic, while European classical composition remained central to American philharmonic orchestras’ repertoires throughout the twentieth century (whose recordings often sold better on the European market). At the same time, the axiom for the “new” in popular music went hand in hand with a privilege of nineteenth-century art music composers, thus serving as primary vessels of instrumentalists, singers, and conductors. The nineteenth-century trajectory of European music criticism and cultural hierarchy lend gravitas to public debates about the cultural and social effects of recording on music, which were conducted with far greater seriousness than American discussions on the topic. Sound recording over the course of the century became one vehicle for globalizing this European cultural hierarchy, not only by the distribution of particular recordings framed within this hierarchy and its adjacent criticism, but also through the convergence of the sound and musical performance of these compositions. This convergence, focusing on the transatlantic world of the first half of the twentieth century, has been described as a “mixed blessing” because it raised up the technical standards of musicians and orchestras—an important claim of European cultural hierarchy—while at the same time limited innovation in performance and driving out local musical traditions.¹⁵ Classical music, internationally accepted as the apex of this European hierarchy of music, remained the yardstick for technological improvement of recording and playing devices long after Europe had been marginalized by the United States and Japan as a center for innovation. The US companies in the first half of
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the twentieth century, the Eastern Bloc states in the Cold War, and later the international companies such as Sony referred to this classical heritage for very different cultural, economic, and political reasons. Sound recordings provided the channels for these references and exchanges, fostering the convergence of sounds across borders.
Notes David Morton, Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 5 – 6. George Brock-Nannestad, “The Development of Recording Technology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, ed. Nicholas Cook et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 149. Michel Abesser, “Verflechtung wider Willen? Sowjetische Politik und westlicher Musikmarkt im Kalten Krieg, 1956– 1962,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 67 (2019): 290. Pekka Gronow, “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium,” Popular Music 3 (1983): 72. Amandine Pras, Catherine Guastavino, and Maryse Lavoie, “The Impact of Technological Advances on Recording Studio Practices,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64 (2013): 616. Stefan Gauß, “Listening to the Horn: On the Cultural History of the Phonograph and the Gramophone,” in Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, ed. Daniel Morat (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 87. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 222– 223. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 89. Paul Théberge, “The End of the World as We Know It: The Changing Role of the Studio in the Age of the Internet,” in The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, ed. Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas (London: Ashgate, 2012), 81. Edward R. Kealy, “From Craft to Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular Music,” Sociology of Work and Occupations 6 (1979): 4. Terence William Curran, “Recording Classical Music in Britain: The Long 1950s” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2015), 34. John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of its Electronic Reproducibility,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge 2012), 215. Pekka Gronow and Ilpo Saunio, An International History of the Recording Industry (London: Cassell, 1999), 153. Stephen Coates, “Roentgenizdat—An Introduction,” in X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone, ed. Stephen Coates (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2015), 12. Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 245.
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Bibliography Abesser, Michel. “Verflechtung wider Willen? Sowjetische Politik und westlicher Musikmarkt im Kalten Krieg, 1956 – 1962.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 67 (2019): 269 – 297. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Brock-Nannestad, George. “The Development of Recording Technology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music, edited by Nicholas Cook, Eric F. Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink, 149 – 176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Coates, Stephen. “Roentgenizdat—An Introduction.” In X-Ray Audio: The Strange Story of Soviet Music on the Bone, edited by Stephen Coates, 9 – 13. London: Strange Attractor Press, 2015. Curran, Terence William. “Recording Classical Music in Britain: The Long 1950s.” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2015). Gauß, Stefan. “Listening to the Horn: On the Cultural History of the Phonograph and the Gramophone.” In Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th- and 20th-Century Europe, edited by Daniel Morat, 71 – 100. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Gronow, Pekka. “The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium.” Popular Music 3 (1983): 53 – 75. Gronow, Pekka, and Ilpo Saunio. An International History of the Recording Industry. London: Cassell, 1999. Kealy, Edward R. “From Craft to Art: The Case of Sound Mixers and Popular Music.” Sociology of Work and Occupations 6 (1979): 3 – 29. Morton, David. Off the Record: The Technology and Culture of Sound Recording in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Mowitt, John. “The Sound of Music in the Era of its Electronic Reproducibility.” In The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, 213 – 224. London: Routledge, 2012. Philip, Robert. Performing Music in the Age of Recording. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pras, Amandine, Catherine Guastavino, and Maryse Lavoie. “The Impact of Technological Advances on Recording Studio Practices.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64 (2013): 612 – 626. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Théberge, Paul. “The End of the World as We Know It: The Changing Role of the Studio in the Age of the Internet.” In The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, edited by Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, 77 – 96. London: Ashgate, 2012.
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Further Reading Burgess, Richard James. The History of Music Production. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cook, Nicholas, Eric F. Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink eds. The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gauß, Stefan. Nadel, Rille, Trichter: Kulturgeschichte des Phonographen und des Grammophons in Deutschland 1900 – 1940. Köln: Böhlau, 2009. Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press 2010. Milner, Greg. Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. Volkov-Lanit, L. F. Iskusstvo Zapečatlennogo Zvuka: Očerki po istorij grammofona. Moskau: Iskusstvo, 1964.
Morten Michelsen
10 Sounds on Air: Musicalizing Radio— Radiofying Music In their social history of early British radio from 1991, Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff argue that early radio reconfigured the relations between the distinct musical cultures of the time by turning them into a single sociomusical field regulated by a common notion of music. The juxtaposition of quite different genres— by framing them within the same sort of “objective” discourse and by using the same radiophonic technology for all music—established new relations and connections between, otherwise, separate musical practices.¹ Musics became music. Producing such relations meant not only making music as such similar but also developing pointed contrasts. Negotiating on how to manage this dilemma between musical similarities and contrasts became one of the greatest tasks of the European public service radio—and it still is today. Radio’s influence on the otherwise independent sociocultural field of music in virtually every European country demonstrates that the new medium emerged as a strong and separate social institution in its own right because of its immense economic growth and its increasing cultural and political importance. Music and radio remained separate sociocultural fields but still intertwined closely because radio (and other electronic media) became a basic condition for music in the twentieth century. At the same time, radio could have been something entirely different if a huge repertoire of music had not been readily available. It is analytically meaningful to distinguish between the two “logics” or, maybe better, practices as they meet in the specific practices of music radio. Music’s practices—musicking—suggest the many ways of how to make music, how to manage it, and how to enjoy it, while radio’s practices—broadcasting—suggest how the radio institution works and how to produce programs (among many other things). In live music broadcasts, musicking meets broadcasting. Here, broadcasting must be understood as a parallel to musicking: a complex set of relations among all of those who contribute to broadcasting. The interdependence of the two different “logics”, or practices, of the two fields—without those fields becoming one—is important for the following analysis. In recent decades, mediatization theories have highlighted the discussions of how the media has influenced other social institutions. Such theories tend to unfold at macrosocial or theoretically abstract levels, for example by pointing to the development of the media as an independent social institution and at the same time to the media becoming part of other social institutions like politics, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-011
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religion, and family life. To capture this, this chapter follows the Swedish musicologists Alf Björnberg, Tobias Pontara, and Ulrik Volgsten, who suggest the terms “radiofication” and “musicalization” in order to produce analyses at a mesosocial level.² The intention with the term radiofication is to differentiate and to address the specific processes of mediatization produced by radio; the purpose of the term musicalization is to counter the general tendency in media studies to investigate mainly what media does to other fields and less what other fields do to media. These concepts add a dynamic and historical dimension to the practices of musicking and broadcasting. Apart from the radiogenic and musicogenic impact on the practices of music radio, the distinction between “high” culture and “low” culture also contributed to structuring music radio. This cultural hierarchy was well established before radio, and as mentioned, it forced many different genres together, highlighting the sharp difference between high and low. They had to exist together within the same medium, and negotiations had to distribute at least some of the cultural (and economic) power related to the high position. Such negotiations have been important to how radio was conceived of and to the vicissitudes of hierarchical culture in general during the previous century. Another aspect of radiofication was the appearance of notions of liveness. As Philip Auslander points out, the principles of recording and reproduction marked an early mediatization process, and as it developed, the new technology pointed towards music outside of recordings as “live.” The gramophone made the distinction possible, but as Auslander explains, only radio made it into a problem because listeners could not tell whether the sound source on the radio was a live band or a recording. Tellingly, the earliest examples found in Oxford English Dictionary of the term “live” are related to radio. The distinction between “live” and “recorded” turned into a historically contingent, binary opposition,³ which has been important to music radio and radio in general ever since. The distinction is related to what I would claim to be music radio’s two basic principles of music program production: the concert broadcast (ideally a real-time transmission from a place where an audience listens to a group of musicians playing) and the phonogram-based program (ideally with a DJ talking between [and about] phonograms). The first category was challenged following the spread of the tape recorder after the Second World War, for example by the wonderful oxymoron “prerecorded live concerts.” In the early years, radio turned to live music because that was the common way music was performed. Only during the 1930s did records become something that in practice could replace live music. From then on, the ideology of liveness began to be built around radio ensembles and any broadcast that included presenters (news, DJs, sports, etc.).
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Liveness has been a part of radio ever since, and even today, it is regarded as an ideal in most program genres. Institutional growth and musical mediation were common to radio all over the Western hemisphere and the colonial empires, but the sustained effort to develop broadcast media as a service or even an obligation to the general public came from Europe. The United Kingdom and Germany were pioneers, closely followed by most other European countries, and even today, the public service principle is relevant to those countries. This makes a case for considering European radio as a distinct set of practices and a relevant topic for inclusion in this book, even though various versions of public service practices have been and are at work all over the world. Music became a primary expression of the balance between enlightenment and entertainment: one consequence being the mainly European phenomenon of radio symphony orchestras, and another being the support of the new genres—not as pioneers but as guarantors of musical diversity. The present chapter sketches out the development of music broadcasting on European public service radio from the 1920s until today in three parts: the first discusses music’s role in the public service radio’s quick rise before World War II, the second investigates the consolidation of music radio after the war, and the third takes up the consequences for music radio of setting up a “free” media market in Europe in the 1980s. Through the narrative, the European perspective will become less and less distinct as global and market-based organizations and the intensifying media convergence become the modus operandi. This chapter will focus on the changing status of live music in general and the role of radio in traversing the relations between high and low culture, using the repositioning of radio symphony orchestras as a case and including questions of programming policies and transnational cooperation. Such a case will also slightly change the perspective on radio in Europe as many German broadcasting corporations will share center stage with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
1 Early Radio and the Rise of Radio Orchestras As the First World War toppled the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian, and the German empires, a host of new countries appeared and entered an intense phase of nation-building. Both young nations and older countries adopted—at least for some time—democratic political systems. Radio was important to these processes, and establishing a national broadcasting corporation became in itself a mark of modern nationhood. The new medium was an effective channel, through which the state in question gave the population a sense of affective and discursive belonging through the form of news, lectures, cultural debates, and presen-
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tations of music, theater, and literature. Radio as a nation-building and democratizing medium was particularly prominent in Northern and Western Europe. In Southern Europe, the sale of receivers was so low and the populace was so scattered that broadcasting did not have much of an effect until later. Its role as a “continent builder” was less obvious, even though European program schedules were printed in most countries’ radio magazines. Nearly all European countries, including the Soviet Union, and several countries in Asia and South America established national broadcasting systems between 1922 and 1926, and in the early 1930s international shortwave broadcasting, reaching around the globe, became prominent due to channels like Radio Moscow and BBC World Service—the first producing communist, the second imperialist propaganda. During the 1930s, state-concessioned and independent corporations became the organizational template for European corporations except where fascist parties chose a state-controlled model (also favored by the Eastern Bloc countries after the war). The sale of receivers and licenses grew quickly, and soon the national corporations gained the economic means to establish national and international distribution networks. They built impressive headquarters, complete with concert halls, and employed large numbers of staff for producing programs, for playing music, and for running the day-today administration. By the mid-1930s, national radio corporations had become by far the largest cultural institutions in their respective countries or regions, affecting most aspects of cultural life. In the field of music, they did so by employing musicians and paying fees to composers and performers through the quickly developing copyright organizations. Broadcast audiences grew immensely in number as the radio distributed mainly middlebrow and high culture to listeners, who would otherwise never have encountered so much of their preferred music and, in addition, that of others. Mass‑mediated culture meant that listeners could experience the intimacy of sounding culture in their own living room— a completely new experience to most. Early listeners tended to be men with an interest in electronics. They built their own receivers and were busy retaining the signals on the volatile equipment. Radio technology developed quickly as loudspeakers replaced headphones and as receivers came prebuilt from a burgeoning industry. In the early 1930s, radios became domesticated as a piece of living room furniture that was easy to operate. The technology became accessible to the rest of the family, as can be deduced from the daily program schedules; for example, a program for the afternoons that presented light music as a background for household chores or programs for housewives’ problems (e. g., cooking, cleaning, and childcare). Childrens’ programs often followed them. Around 6 or 7 p.m.
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came news, debates, and lectures—presumably aimed at the returning man of the house. No one asked the question if music was necessary for radio. Instead, everyone asked what kind of music should be broadcast. It has continued to this day, with hundreds of different music policies having been being implemented in each European country, all of them variations on the basic public service triad of information, education, and entertainment. Europe’s early public service radio has often been criticized for its educational zeal within a paternalistic framework—and rightly so. Education was indeed a central point in radio’s contributions to early mediatization, and art music was central to this strategy, but the fact that national corporations had to attain legitimacy from the general population necessitated that cultural uplift was not the only guideline for music programming. Education through art music was an official policy, but on a more pragmatic level, the renewed negotiations of the balance between high and low culture resulted in most of the music actually broadcast being light music and dance music. In fact, most corporation managers, including John Reith of the BBC, accepted publicly that popular music was necessary as a sort of relaxant. Already in the 1920s, radio magazines published questionnaires asking for their readers’ preferences, and slowly the corporations took up the challenge and began doing intermittent audience research. They kept to themselves how that information was used, but from the program schedules it might be deduced that opera transmissions (the least liked genre in many countries) became less frequent in the early 1930s. The BBC was probably the first corporation to set up a separate department for audience research in 1936 in the interest of dealing with its lack of popular legitimacy. Looking at specific programming around Europe, old and new dance music normally took up 60 – 90 percent of the hours allotted to music programs. But as detailed studies on scheduling reveal, most musical genres were actually allowed in the mixed daily schedules. Program planners took cues from the existing musical landscape and invited numerous genres inside, the most welcome being those related to bourgeois entertainment (at salons, cafés, dance restaurants, spas) and edification (opera, symphonic concerts). By the 1930s, most corporations broadcast up to 18 hours per day, and about half of the amount of time was for music. With seven to nine hours of music each day, radio ensembles needed an enormous repertoire in order to produce varied programs—much larger than similar non-radio ensembles. The planners managed to present music for most tastes, including music played on mandolin and accordion, instruments mainly associated with the lower classes. Local folk music was considered a minority interest and it surfaced in more or less “mainstreamed” versions in a few
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programs. Exceptions to this were regions like the Balkans and countries like Finland and Ireland, where folk music was more present in the musical milieus. An important institutionalization of the high/low distinction was the gradual division of music departments into separate sections for “music” and “variety”—in some languages called “entertainment”—(for example, the BBC in 1933 and the Austrian Radio Verkehrs AG [RAVAG] in 1937) as administrations grew and the schedules were extended. On one side, the new music departments came to take care of symphony orchestras, mixed choirs, live chamber music, and music education. On the other side, the new departments for variety, light music, and entertainment in general were responsible for radio orchestras (in contrast to radio symphony orchestras), dance bands, and even educational programs on jazz, which by the mid-1930s had become somewhat acceptable as a specialist genre. As the steady growth of program schedules necessitated still more planning and control, cooperation with external musical institutions became less dominant. Radio ensembles and studio concerts were easier to include in plans made from a radiogenic perspective, that is to say a change from the very early, continuous radio to the conception of a schedule consisting of a complex pattern of identifiable and clearly demarcated programs. National and international transmissions still filled some of the gaps, partly because no corporation had enough ensemble musicians, partly because a part of radio’s “logic” was journalistic, which meant that transmissions documented something extraordinary in real time about what was going on in specific places. In addition, international transmissions became in themselves the celebrations of both the complex, expensive technology of the network and the idea of international collaboration. In such ways, the processes of radiofication and musicalization were intertwined. Before the First World War, outside Germany, only a few European cities like Vienna and Amsterdam could boast of full-time orchestras devoted to the symphonic repertoire. Normally, local orchestras were established for an occasion or for a season, while the full-time opera orchestras could take on symphonic duties. In the beginning, corporations transmitted many concert performances by the external orchestras, but they needed their own musicians and ensembles in the interest of better controlling the ensembles. The beginnings were humble: a trio of piano, violin, and cello playing the light music of the day known from cafés, countryside spas, or city dance restaurants. Early on, musicians obtained full-time employment contracts, and radio ensembles grew from trios to salon orchestras, which might include flute, clarinet, trumpet, and trombone in addition to strings and piano. Saxophones and percussion could be added for dance music broadcasts. From then on, ensembles just grew and grew in number and
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size. The development in Denmark is a good example of the symphonic development in smaller corporations: the trio in April 1925 expanded until October into a band of 12 full-time musicians. By April 1926, the number of musicians was 24, and by 1931 the band had become an orchestra of 55. Only in 1948 did it include 92 musicians, a size considered necessary when playing romantic and modern symphonic music. As the contours of separate radio symphony orchestras playing a specific repertoire became clear in the 1930s, the traditional hierarchy among the ensembles stood out clearly. The rarity of high-quality symphony orchestras elevated the corporations that hosted them within the cultural hierarchy. Before television, a symphony orchestra was among the most expensive posts in a corporation’s budget, apart from buildings and technology, demonstrating the value attached to these prestigious flagships. Radio symphony orchestras came to represent the national corporations—and by implication the people, the nation, and the state—in their public concerts, in their international tours, and via transmissions in the supranational ether. One example is l’Orchestre National (later l’Orchestre National de France), which was established all at once in 1934 when 81 musicians were hired by a decree from the minister of posts to become the first full-time symphony orchestra in France. The orchestra’s very name underlines that radio made it possible to imagine symphonic music and its orchestras in relation to nation-building. According to the corporations themselves, most had what they considered a symphony orchestra by the mid-1930s (I have registered 33 orchestras in 20 European countries). Countries as politically and culturally varied as Spain, Norway, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, and Albania were among those not yet having established one before the war. It is hard to gauge the size of an orchestra from its historical accounts as presented in books or on websites, but having somewhere between 40 and 60 full-time musicians was probably the norm. The exceptions were l’Orchestre National and the BBC; the latter in 1930 hired 114 musicians for a symphony orchestra (with the possibility of splitting the orchestra into two bodies when necessary). Besides salaries for musicians, conductors, and soloists, the corporations had to establish broadcasting studios large enough to contain an orchestra and soon after also to contain an audience. Most corporations wanted to control their own orchestra, but some preferred at least for some time to hire a full, symphonic orchestra when necessary, for example as the Swedish, the Austrian, and the Königsberg stations did. Establishing such orchestras had many consequences for the musical field in general. First, good pay and secure employment made some of the best musicians join the new ensembles, thus making them strong competitors in the field of music and arousing envy among less prosperous circles. Second, playing
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so much together, having time to rehearse for prestigious concerts, and having to practice on only one instrument instead of two or three as most all-round musicians of the day had to soon turned these groups of newly recruited musicians into greatly respected orchestras, demonstrating a discipline previously unknown unless you lived in cities like Vienna or Leipzig. Third, in the 1930s, apart from studio concerts without audiences most radio symphony orchestras performed in their own public concert series (sometimes up to 20 or 30 concerts per season), sometimes also on national or international tours, thus having a direct impact on musical life by competing with other orchestras’ activities. Fourth, for some, making phonograms became part of the job. Fifth, several corporations defined themselves as having a special obligation to contemporary music and commissioned new works in order to have their orchestras play such music. Via broadcasting, this practice of creating and performing avant-garde music reached far larger audiences than would have been imaginable earlier on. A few of these new works belonged to the genre “radio music,” music composed especially for the radio by, for example, Kurt Weill (from Germany) and Emil Reesen (from Denmark) and which took the frequency range and textural density into consideration. However, as the sound quality got better, the genre quickly became superfluous. Program producers were acutely aware of the tensions between musicking and broadcasting. An interesting example of how to go about it is a postwar book from 1948 on the aesthetics of music radio by the later head of music in Danmarks Radio, Vagn Kappel. His general manager had already written about the artistic-radiophonic rendering of the programs based on detailed knowledge about both radio and music. His point was that producing radio was essentially a new art form. Kappel worked out the argument in more detail and described the radio apparatus as a complex instrument that the radio producer mastered. He was like a conductor organizing the collaboration of everyone involved in the production of live music programs. By comparing program planning to the writing of symphonies, Kappel almost managed to fuse music and radio practices into one, making the triad of composer, conductor, and producer a band of equals.⁴ This conceptualization was yet another step towards the cultural legitimation of the by then not-so-new mass medium. Radio was a national project for regulators, broadcasters, and audiences. At the same time, however, the discourse on radio was global. First, since the early amateur days, radio aficionados had been “traversing” the skies listening for radio signals from faraway places. This adventurer spirit survived into the broadcasting age. Second, for technical reasons (the distribution of frequencies within the medium-wave band), collaborations among nations were necessary for clear transmissions. Third, everybody tried to figure out what this new medium was all
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about and what it could do apart from aping the already well-known cultural forms like concerts, theater, readings, and soirees. The International Broadcasting Union (IBU) was founded in 1925, mainly comprising European countries. The organization was inspired by the recently founded League of Nations (the precursor to the United Nations). Apart from regulating frequencies and planning pan-European transmission networks, the IBU gathered information about programming and worked to categorize, for example, music programs. Another IBU activity was to get member states to collaborate across borders. The drive towards international understanding was quite strong, as for instance the widespread language programs in Esperanto on radio demonstrate. Music was an ideal medium for communicating across borders. One project to use music for international understanding was the establishment of European concerts. From 1926 to 1931, the IBU organized the Nuits Nationales, a series of concerts where a list of works was sent to participating corporations, and a local orchestra would then perform them. By 1931, a new, cable-based transmission network had been set up that made a new concept possible for an alternative series, the Concerts Européens. Between 1931 and 1939, the IBU facilitated about 50 direct concert transmissions, mainly symphonic concerts, from 22 European cities, including many corporations from Eastern Europe. Most of these concerts were treated as very special events, documenting (as the name promised) the “Concert of Europe.” This series was supplemented by a wealth of transmissions across borders, be it transcontinental or just bilateral, some of them prestigious and others common occurrences. In general, international collaborations at both European and global levels were considered important and prestigious by the corporations, which did not hesitate to promote those collaborations in local radio magazines, though it remains unclear how important it was to the ordinary listener. While developments in the different parts of Europe were quite similar, the European trajectory of broadcasting is often contrasted with the American way. The reason is that public service broadcasting was largely developed in Europe, and the BBC—as an institution and as a set of programming practices—is often considered the quintessence of this principle, while US radio became the epitome of commercial radio. Critics of that time would argue that European radio would try to uplift listeners culturally and morally while US radio would like to foist unnecessary products on them. This is certainly exaggerated, but from our present perspective, it is important that music—popular as well as classical—has been used in both contexts. As mentioned, Europe has always had a few commercial stations to contrast the many public corporations; meanwhile, the public service principle was well known in US debates before 1934 when the US Congress decided on a commercial model and again, from the 1970s,
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when the National Public Radio (NPR) network became a reality. Via the British and other colonial empires, public service radio became part of the media system of many of the former colonies and thus a worldwide model for organizing media (excluding the totalitarian states of diverse ideologies). The model was not extended to include symphony orchestras though. For example, the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) contracted external orchestras, and the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) financed a few small orchestras. The New Yorkbased National Broadcasting Company (NBC) symphony orchestra was maybe the only non-European prewar radio symphony orchestra. First and foremost, prewar radio gave an enormous boost to musical life in most parts of Europe. Never before had so many people had access to so much music; never before were so many people engaged in debates concerning musical aesthetics, value, and meanings; and never before was so much money available to the actors within the field of music. Early radio made social hierarchies represented in music clearer, and it demonstrated solutions to the democratic problems of such hierarchies—solutions that caused new debates in the spirit of public service.
2 After the War: Broadcasting Pop, Broadcasting the Avant-Garde During the war, music programing practices changed in order to keep up morale among the troops, the many factory workers, and the population in general. Even before the war, German state radio had shown that a program profile based solely on popular music was possible. Throughout the war, British broadcasting demonstrated that different channel profiling—related to war efforts or not—could work well: for example, the “Home Service” and the “Forces Programme” respectively. Most Britons listened to the latter as it developed a distinct, US-tinged popular music profile using phonograms and even edited US radio shows. After the war, most corporations planned for a new world order, either adjusting to democratic or communist ideals or remaining authoritarian, as in Spain and Portugal. The BBC developed a three-tiered channel structure: the “Home Service” (mainly speech based), the “Light Programme” (devoted to light entertainment and music), and the “Third Programme” (disseminating the arts). Instead of having the public service triad of information, education, and entertainment mixed on one channel, each part was presented on a separate channel (more or less). This model became the standard for most Western radio
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corporations. Educational “France Culture” came about already in 1946 and “France Musique” eight years later, while the parts of Germany occupied by the British took over the BBC model. The other West German regional stations slowly followed suit, partly to make radio distinct from the quickly developing television that took over radio’s role as the main evening home entertainment from the early 1960s. In the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet model of a state- or party-controlled organization of media became mandatory. Programming had to follow the party’s musical policy, thus restricting avant-garde music and Anglo-American pop while supporting classical and various genres of popular music. Structurally, East Germany organized the same differentiation between channels as in West Germany. A major difference between the two German radio systems was the amount of music played. According to the German media scholar Konrad Dussel, East German radio used 68 percent of its broadcasting time for music in the mid-1950s.⁵ This number was extremely high compared to that of Western European corporations, where the percentage was around 50. As the ideal of having one channel for the entire population lost traction, the distinction between high and not so high (i. e., middlebrow) culture became the “natural” way of establishing differences among the channels. The BBC designed the “Third Programme” for the discerning listener and brought under its roof classical and contemporary music, even though listeners would occasionally find classical music on other channels as well. The “Third Programme” and parallel programs in other countries became semi-secluded spaces for musical connoisseurs—and, in effect, among the important articulations of the antagonistic postwar divide between high and low. The “Light Programme” and its European equivalents turned away from the wartime music politics of the “Forces Programme” and appealed once again to established middlebrow tastes. Listeners could still find US radio presentation styles and US popular music in stations run by the British and the US armies. Such sounds also emanated from commercial stations, especially the ones known in France as les radios périphériques (peripheral radios), reappearing after 1945 at the country’s borders, including the powerful Radio Luxembourg. The British and the US armed forces networks broadcast from Germany, and their main obligation was to entertain the young male soldiers stationed in Germany. This meant that the new low of youth music—simple tunes, often “badly” played and sung, with “silly” lyrics, according to the arbiters of taste—was available in specific slots in large parts of Central Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, a series of high-sea commercial broadcasters (the so-called pirates) appeared, first in 1958 in the narrow strait between Denmark and Sweden and then off the Dutch coast, near Stockholm, and then to the south of the English
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coast. They received much publicity because their combination of popular music and advertisements challenged broadcasting laws. The reactions by parliaments was to establish, more or less promptly, dedicated popular music channels at national corporations. This happened in Sweden in 1961, in Denmark in 1963, in the Netherlands in 1965, and in the United Kingdom in 1967. In terms of actual programming, however, it was a more long-winded transition toward new music genres and presentation styles. In the United Kingdom, this change had been underway already during the war, but the restrictions on the number of records played were hindering the process somewhat. The restrictions on records (the needle time) were rooted in an agreement between the musicians’ union and the BBC, which sets the maximum number of hours per week used for recordings. The reason for this was that mechanical music was thought to make musicians superfluous. The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (Österreichischer Rundfunk, ORF) set up a popular music channel in 1967 (obviously not because of pirates), while the two Germanys only very slowly followed suit in the 1970s and 1980s, partly because commercial stations already covered the area and because the live aesthetic was very strongly supported in both their music and entertainment departments. In France, the opening up towards Anglo-American popular music took until the 1980s, when commercial stations were allowed. The most important aspect of these changes was that so-called lowbrow music became sanctioned by each country’s most important cultural institution, so much that even youth-oriented pop became part of “music.” In Scandinavian countries, these new channels also tipped the balance between live music and phonograms in favor of the latter, amounting to more than 50 percent of the music broadcasting hours. The new channels contributed to developing new radiogenic formats, a process started in the 1950s. One of these formats, the chart show, has since played a central role in the discourse of popular music as a competition. These changes were also related to the quickly developing, scientifically based audience research. As mentioned, the BBC began to formalize the research in 1936, and the commercial US media market depended on survey results to set prices on advertisements. While highbrow European channels continued to exist without considering the number of listeners, research demonstrated that pirates and other commercial stations attracted a considerable amount of listeners, and a majority of politicians wanted the public service radio to regain those listeners by offering programs more to their liking. Research became more important to the overall planning as radio became the secondary medium (television being the primary) and as many channels slowly moved towards becoming service channels for information and entertainment (the development of traffic an-
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nouncements-cum-music programs being a central example). Thus, the partial segmentation of the channels both did and did not depend on research results. The Allies prioritized the European corporations’ adjustment to new circumstances to remind the populations at home and abroad of democratic ideals. Implicitly, the idea of having live ensembles remained an important part of these ideals. After the war, radio music was still predominantly live music even though record programs slowly gained ground. The number and size of broadcasting ensembles grew throughout the 1950s. In ten years, the eleven West German radio symphony orchestras grew in size, reaching between 90 and 110 musicians. Furthermore, most regional stations financed radio orchestras, dance orchestras, choirs, and, slowly, big bands to take care of all non-symphonic music. Every European country aspired to this manifestation of musical diversity, once again inspired by the BBC, and many corporations succeeded. The Danish radio symphony orchestra, for example, was complemented by a light music orchestra and choir, a mixed choir, boys’ and girls’ choirs, a dance band, and, from the 1960s, an experimental jazz group and a big band. Eastern European regions and countries—such as Belarus (then part of the Soviet Union), Albania, Bulgaria, and Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia)—established their first radio symphony orchestras after the war as did Western countries like Spain, the Netherlands, and Austria (as the last in 1969). This demonstrates that music was highly prioritized by broadcasting managements in the East and the West despite the high costs. They kept art music firmly at the top of the music-cultural hierarchy, with star conductors, soloists, and a huge orchestra devoted solely to symphonic music and administered by a specialized music department. With regard to cultural prestige, musicians’ aspirations, and actual repertoire, the borders towards the other corporate ensembles were clearly defined and remained unchallenged. (Re)education for democracy was high on the agenda of the time, and politicians and intellectuals saw contemporary art as being integral to such an endeavor. US government officials also considered art to be integral and therefore secured funding for many modern art projects around Europe. Most corporations expected their orchestras to fulfil special obligations towards contemporary music. Their music departments took up the challenge in different ways at different tempi, very often depending on individuals in central positions, like for example in the 1960s when William Glock was hired as the BBC controller of music, Herbert Kegel as the chief conductor in Leipzig, and Mogens Andersen as the head of the music department in Danmarks Radio. It was left to the music departments to decide what contemporary music was, and in most cases, they chose avant-garde music—looking for more radical solutions and “sounds unheard of” (to borrow Karlheinz Stockhausen’s famous phrase). These experiments suited the young, intellectual program producers in the
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music departments, who—apart from a clear international outlook—had close professional (and sometimes friendly) ties to composers and musicians. In Germany, regional state corporations collaborated with contemporary music festivals like Donaueschingen and Darmstadt by having their symphony orchestras play new music at the festivals and by transmitting these and other festival concerts. In Poland, the radio symphony orchestras from Warsaw and Katowice played at the state-financed Warsaw Autumn, the most important contemporary music festival of Eastern Europe since 1956. Performances throughout the season of the new works commissioned by the corporations were another important activity. Commission and transmission fees constituted an important part of the economic basis for new music milieus all over Western Europe, and the broadcasts provided such music exposure far beyond the devoted listeners. A few corporations even installed equipment for experimenting with electronic music, such as Radiodiffusion Française in the late 1940s, Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln in 1952, Radio Milano in 1955, Polskiego Radia in 1957, and several others in the 1960s. Young composers like Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Krzysztof Penderecki were involved in the development of these electronic music studios and used them extensively. Later in life, composers and conductors like Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, and Hans Zender took up posts as chief conductors for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra Sinfonica of RAI in Milan, and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken. The three decades after the war may be considered a very fruitful period for classical and contemporary music. The number of radio symphony orchestras and other radio ensembles reached an all-time high, and both in Eastern and Western Europe did state, region, and local authorities contribute to the development of classical live music, including the financing of symphony orchestras outside of broadcasting corporations. Beyond Europe, the symphonic tradition flourished, but only Japan and South Korea established dedicated radio symphony orchestras. If musical diversity can be considered the yardstick for public service radio, then it was a fertile period as well in most countries because several varieties of popular music became part of what was understood as “radio music,” that is to say as legitimate music. Some countries went ahead and established whole channels on separate frequencies while others in different tempi established one- or two-hour programs for the youth within their weekly schedules, for example the East German youth program “DT 64” (Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend 1964). So in addition to the middlebrow musical culture, radio mediated the radical high and the youthful low—always contesting, always negotiating, and always challenging the distribution of the high/low markers. Collaboration among the Western European corporations took place in the European Broadcasting Union (EBU, 1950), while the Eastern Bloc used the Or-
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ganisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision (OIRT, 1946). As before, the corporations found such work extremely valuable and prestigious, while the ordinary listener probably did not care about where the music came from. The two organizations merged in 1993. At the program level, the collaboration has resulted in several broadcast (and televised) music competitions through the years; among them are the OIRT’s Intervision Song Contest (1977– 1980) and EBU’s Eurovision Song Contest (since 1956). The latter has probably become the worldwide premier symbol of a common European musical culture, even though the symbolism pertains to the event rather than to the actual musical or music-cultural characteristics and even though countries like Morocco, Israel, and Australia take part in the competition.
3 Music Radio in Times of Neoliberalism In Western Europe, the so-called “deregulation” of the 1980s changed the general idea of public service as the many new commercial stations—heavily inspired by US music radio practices and financed by advertisements—challenged the corporations by attracting quite large numbers of listeners. The coexistence between public service and commercially driven media is often called the “dual system,” and it quickly extended to Eastern Europe after the wall came down. The challenge mainly concerned popular music channels, even though classical channels faced some competition from stations like classic.fm. Slowly, and prompted by politicians, thinking based on competition and audience research became integral to the corporations, including the music departments. New rationales were needed for arguing for the upkeep of classical music programming and live ensembles, even though the commercial format did not allow live music for economic reasons. To support this, the methods of audience research became more refined and the departments grew bigger. Through mapping daily listening practices, researchers aimed at detailed segmentation and created a narrow list of ideal listeners, not least based on musical taste, for specific channels. In Denmark, this list included “Birthe” from Vejle (a provincial town) and “René” from the north of Copenhagen. After the turn to the new millennium, detailed segmentation resulted in 20 to 25 digital audio broadcasting (DAB) music channels, which were replaced later by a few channels planned in much detail to reach “Birthe,” “René,” and a few other ideal listeners. The last effort was relatively successful in quantitative terms as Danmarks Radio managed to stabilize their market share. Such hegemonic aspirations are always challenged as listeners’ behaviors and tastes change all the time, and research will invariably lag behind. With regard to content, several European governments have established quotas
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for national music. France demands 40 percent to be sung in French (1994), Ukraine 35 percent in Ukrainian (2017). Denmark requires that 48 percent should be composed or performed by Danes (2019) while Portugal (2006) requires 25 to 40 percent. The corporations took up competition in earnest with the commercial stations after the mid‑1980s. They embraced the gradual digitization and global homogenization of most aspects of program production with much inspiration from the US music radio aesthetics and practices. This changed the nature of public service popular music radio: the digital music management systems that were programmed by small groups of staff members regulated the flow of music in playlists. Flow radio, that is, program content arranged in order to hold on to the listener and to lead seamlessly from, say, the afternoon to the early evening program segments, has changed from having the music to having the comradeship of the host team as its raison d’etre. Alf Björnberg advances the argument saying that musical principles of repetition and variation—that is to say, forming time musically—are relevant to understanding this format. These musical principles appear in the interplay between, on the one hand, the repetition of the daily, weekly, and monthly schedules expressed by the programming algorithms and, on the other hand, the variation in the contrast between individual tracks. This interplay between repetition and variation is, according to Björnberg, what makes listening to radio enjoyable in a very musical way, and it is one of the most fundamental examples of the musicalization of popular music radio. Digitization has influenced radio listening deeply as well. The DAB system, which was a European Union initiative from the 1980s, has spread unevenly over Europe. It has made broadcasting a wealth of channels possible, most of them being defined by music. In general, the internet has loosened radio from its moorings in time and space (and thus also from a sense of “Europeanness”) by making faraway internet radio stations and millions of podcasts available. The commercialization of radio was in line with the European Union because it published recommendations on how to develop the radio and media market. As to content, the European Union was more cautious, mainly recommending mild cultural protectionism. The European Commision and the European Parliament had their radio lobbyists, one being the Association of European Radios, which represent the commercial broadcasters. A visit to their website (May 2020) revealed that music was only mentioned in passing, although it was most members’ primary means of gathering listener segments to sell to advertisers. The other lobby organization is the EBU, which despite the name has several member organizations from the Maghreb and many associates from all continents. Apart from lobbying, the EBU is a forum for collaboration, not least concerning music. Since 1967, the organization has organized the ex-
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change of live recordings in all genres, in the last few decades under the name of Euroradio, and distributed through the Euroradio satellite network. Especially classical music has benefited from this as EBU members and associates are offered thousands of recorded live concerts each year for broadcasting, which, in effect, together provide a huge and cost-effective music exchange mechanism. The status of classical and contemporary music has changed as well because the place in the hierarchy is less pronounced: mixed programming using commercial phonograms has become more common, presentation has become less formal, hosts have become more overtly subjective, and several formats have been copied from formats related to popular music, sometimes via the commercial classical stations. Live concerts, be it in-house, direct transmission, or prerecorded, remain the high point of classical programming and fill the primetime slot. The number of live ensembles in Europe have been somewhat reduced as some big bands (e. g., the BBC big band and the RIAS big band) and radio orchestras have been disbanded (e. g., in the Netherlands and in Denmark) while others have been merged with the symphony orchestras (e. g., in Hessen, Germany). Nearly all radio symphony orchestras have remained (the RAI orchestras in Rome and Milan being the exceptions), but they are economically challenged. Salaries constitute the main part of the expenses and have gone up, especially for star soloists and conductors. Expenses for housing and administration have risen, and while touring has become de rigueur, income from concert ticket sales and phonograms has not increased proportionately. Thus, sponsorship has become common since the mid-1990s. Some orchestras have even been cut loose from corporations and exist as separate legal bodies delivering their services to radio corporations (for example the orchestras in Berlin). In this way, the radio symphony orchestras’ situations become more and more like that of private and regionally funded orchestras. Despite the many cuts, mergers, and restructurings during the last couple of decades in both the East and the West, public broadcasters still have reasons to maintain radio symphony orchestras. Nearly all European corporations employ the large orchestras with a special obligation to play symphonic music. Today, orchestras take up much less time in the actual radio program schedule. Instead, they work as musical and cultural ambassadors in many ways. Different kinds of outreach are important activities for maintaining and gaining legitimacy both in relation to locals (that is to say, in the end, live audiences and remote listeners) and at national and international levels through the expensive activity of touring (that is to say, in the end, political goodwill). Differences between radio- and non-radio based orchestras have become less pronounced, but radio symphony orchestras are still the music-cultural flagships for the corporation, the region, and the nation flying the flag for the classic ideals of public service and high cul-
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ture. Additionally, the Europe-wide circulation of recordings of the orchestras’ concerts within the EBU network is probably the clearest manifestation of “Europeanness” in contemporary music radio as it underscores a mainly European tradition of composers and works and a Europe-wide milieu for classical music performances on classical channels all over the continent. Most other genres have either more local or more global frames of reference. The radio symphony orchestras’ response to the present cultural climate is much like that of non-radio orchestras: concerts become special events like galas, anniversaries, award concerts, competition finals, or opening concerts in promotion and discourse; star soloists and conductors rather than composers are displayed at the top of the bill; and a more intense ritualization of the events (having the whole orchestra entering the stage in the often newly built concert halls). In addition, radio presentations of concerts include live or prerecorded statements of performers’ views of the works that they are about to perform— called “ringside journalism” by some. The canonic repertoire is still central, but symphonic film music has become part of many orchestras’ repertoires, and even arrangements of computer game music have popped up in orchestral concerts. This is yet another opening towards the popular music sphere that indicates a different relation between high and low. It has become apparent that art music exists in the same conditions as any other genre. This has taken away much of the music’s classical aura and replaced it with the problem so well known to jazz, rock, world music, and other middlebrow genres of how to achieve authenticity.
Conclusion Today, the internet has taken over from radio the role as the locus where “all” music is juxtaposed. The old public service corporations still produce radio with the intention to inform, educate, and entertain. What that means has changed since the early radio days not least because of the changes in the balance between high and low but also because of the impact of neoliberal politics. The millions of songs and works broadcast have contributed to both reinforcing and questioning cultural hierarchies, often at the same time. Nevertheless, the tendency has moved towards multiple hierarchies, distributed along genre lines, at the expense of a single hierarchy. Contemporary pop has become European radio’s mainstream, and genres that were considered more experimental or artistic in some way now belong to the periphery. For many years, live music dominated radio programs. In the 1960s and 1970s, this began to change as commercial recordings became the program main-
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stay. Live radio (here understood as hosts, guests, listeners, and announcers speaking in real time) is still basic to radio, while live music may be found in the more peripheral genres. Whether by in-house ensembles or via transmissions, live music broadcasting is expensive, and, as economics has become a more upfront factor in program planning, external funding has become necessary for the upkeep of the ensembles. Among the consequences are fewer radio ensembles and the partial refunctioning of the surviving ensembles, for example emphasizing various outreach activities at the expense of studio productions. In all this, though, the status of the symphony orchestras as a corporate flagship has not changed, and their primary function is still to musick the classical or contemporary repertoire of the “grand” European tradition, of which more than 40 existing radio symphony orchestras in Europe have become an integral part. During the 2020s, several of them will celebrate their 100th anniversary. Radiogenic principles govern most contemporary flow radio entirely because phonograms have become a break from chatting and not vice versa. So far, live music programs have retained many of the qualities of concerts all through the radio’s history, as they present long stretches of time where the music played sets the agenda. However, the framing of such broadcasts tends to become more radiogenic in the move towards live interviews, with performers and audiences in an interplay between radiogenic and musicogenic elements during introductions and intermissions. Writing about radio in a European perspective rather than a national perspective is a relatively new phenomenon. Media scholars have concentrated on media policies in comparative studies, while culturally inclined scholars have not yet established any research agendas because of their low number, the enormous wealth of materials, the myriad of contexts, the language barriers, and the poor archival situation in general. Sometimes, even nationally based studies are missing, especially with regard to the former Eastern Bloc countries. Nevertheless, discussing music radio in a European perspective in this context demonstrates many basic similarities attributable to the principle of public service media, to the changing configurations given by the hegemonic cultural figure of high and low, and to the international nature of European media, music industry, and cultural politics. Within this framework, each national corporation’s music radio has dealt with virtually the same problems: how to establish music ensembles and symphony orchestras, how to deal with recorded music, how to distribute musical value, how to respond to popular demands, and how to respond to digital challenges. The solutions to such problems have, of course, been varied and applied at different times. However, it seems that music radio has developed in the same general direction, even when the East and the West were divided, and irrespective of the differences between the
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South and the North. The international organizations (especially the IBU and the EBU) have been extremely important for imagining broadcasting in Europe as “European” and for facilitating practical cooperation across borders, not least through program exchanges, temporary ensembles, and competitions. The sounding symbol of this tradition for collaboration has been the opening fanfare of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Te Deum. To most contemporary listeners, though, the perspective of European music radio has become irrelevant because they use music radio for everyday purposes like listening to contemporary hits as a distraction from fellow motorists or keeping time. To them, radio is no longer a medium for exploring sounds from foreign countries via dials and transmissions. Instead, it has become a medium where the personal sphere meets a non-located global music culture. The above discussions have also demonstrated that even though the notions of public service, in one way or another, were and are integral to the medium of radio, European radio corporations have developed their versions of public service most extensively in relation to music and served as a major inspiration for many countries outside Europe, not least during the late years of colonialism. Since the late twentieth century, European public service corporations have become one part in a dual system, a system also found in one variation or another in most countries around the world. This has changed the practices of public service in many ways and made Europe less of an exception, but the ideals are still very much alive—as the many radio symphony orchestras inter alia attest to.
Notes Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, Vol. 1, 1922 – 1939: Serving the Nation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Alf Björnberg, “Medialisering – radiofiering – musikalisering,” in Musikkens medialisering och musikaliseringen av medier och vardagsliv i Sverige, ed. Ulrik Volgsten (Lund: Mediehistoria, Lunds Universitet, 2019), 245 – 261; Ulrik Volgsten and Tobias Pontara, “Musikalisering och medialisering,” in ibid., 263 – 283. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 59 – 62. Vagn Kappel, Musik i Æteren (Copenhagen: Jul. Gjellerups forlag, 1948). Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte, 3rd ed. (Konstanz: UKV Verlagsgesellschaft, 2010), 155.
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Bibliography Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Björnberg, Alf. “Medialisering—radiofiering—musikalisering.” In Musikkens medialisering och musikaliseringen av medier och vardagsliv i Sverige, edited by Ulrik Volgsten, 245 – 261. Lund: Mediehistoria, Lunds Universitet, 2019. Dussel, Konrad. Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte. 3rd ed. Konstanz: UKV Verlagsgesellschaft, 2010. Kappel, Vagn. Musik i Æteren. Copenhagen: Jul. Gjellerups forlag, 1948. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting. Vol. 1, 1922 – 1939: Serving the Nation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Volgsten, Ulrik, and Tobias Pontara, “Musikalisering och medialisering.” In Volgsten, Musikkens medialisering, 263 – 283.
Further Reading Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio. New York: Arno Press & New York Times, 1971. First published in 1936. Barnard, Stephen. On the Radio: Music Radio in Britain. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989. Clemen, Jörg. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk: Die Geschichte des Sinfonieorchesters. Altenburg: Kamprad, 1999. Dubber, Andrew. Radio in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Föllmer, Golo, and Alexander Badenoch, eds. Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018. Kenyon, Nicholas. The BBC Symphony Orchestra: The First Fifty Years 1930 – 1980. London: BBC, 1981. Lacey, Kate. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Leonhard, Joachim-Felix, ed. Programmgeschichte des Hörfunks in der Weimarer Republik. 2 vols. München: DTV, 1997. Lommers, Suzanne. Europe—on Air: Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Malvano, Andrea Stefano. La politica sinfonica della Rai: Storia delle orchestre radio-televisive italiane. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2016. Michelsen, Morten, Mads Krogh, Iben Have, and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, eds. Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2018. Michelsen, Morten, Mads Krogh, Iben Have, and Steen Kaargaard Nielsen, eds. Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Rumpf, Wolfgang. Music in the Air: AFN, BFBS, Ö3, Radio Luxemburg und die Radiokultur in Deutschland. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007. Wijfjes, Huub, ed. De Radio: Een cultuurgeschiedenis. Amsterdam: Boom, 2019.
Part IV: Socializing in Music
Julia Sneeringer
11 Socially Engaging with Music: Pleasure, Distinction, and Identity
The concept of musicking demands that we consider those who consumed, as well as produced, music across Europe’s twentieth century. Like today, audiences in the past engaged with music with varying levels of commitment, from obsessive fandom of music to the use of music as a soundtrack for socializing or working. When audiences turned on the radio, wrote fan letters, or went to concerts, they experienced music physically, emotionally, and intellectually. This chapter surveys these varied social practices across the “long” twentieth century. It starts in the late nineteenth century, when the forces of urbanization and industrialization enabled music’s transformation into a consumer good. It ends in 1989, when communism’s collapse ended restrictions on what masses of Europeans could experience musically and pop-rock’s dominance as the language of popular music peaked. While this chapter considers how people across the social spectrum used music, it is particularly attuned to the dynamics of gender, class, and race. It focuses mainly on the consumption of commercially produced popular music aimed at a general public who needed no special training to engage with it, with youths and women appearing as key drivers of popular music trends. Pop became the dominant musical form in the twentieth century, though classical and jazz (which began as a popular form and then morphed into art music) were also vital. This chapter not only charts mainstream styles but also considers minority, subcultural tastes. Germany (my own area of study) and Britain have been most extensively studied; therefore, examples from “on the ground” in these two countries frequently come to the fore, but I touch on other parts of Europe as well to reveal both commonalities and differences across the continent. This overview aims to trace both broad trends and specific cases of how Europeans in various times and places used music for social communication, identity formation, and pleasure. One way to get at these histories is to pay attention to the spaces where Europeans musicked. Space also reveals the interplay of local, national, and global mechanisms of exchange. From the late nineteenth century, empire and globalizing networks of trade made available to Europeans sounds that were not their own, from Hawaiian steel guitar to Indonesian kroncong. The United States also played an important role as a source of pop culture impulses. Across the long twentieth century, music served as a key site of the development of cultural cosmopolitanism, a place to encounter the “foreign” in a digestible form and to behttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-012
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come comfortable with it—indeed, ease with non-native musics like jazz would become a marker of social status. This chapter considers examples of how encounters with the “Other” through music shaped Europeans’ sense of connection to the world while still remaining anchored in local and national contexts. It also foregrounds city spaces considering that popular music emanated more often than not from urban milieus.¹ The experience of music in various spaces and changing forms anchored itself in daily life, becoming an important way people related to the wider world. Shifts in musicking practices were also driven by technology as well as by large-scale social, economic, and political forces such as fascism, war, and the baby boom. This chapter traces chronologically how technological innovations, changing material realities, and socio-political factors impacted people’s uses of music, without losing sight of how those practices also followed their own logic, particularly around pleasure and the body. Another recurring concept, which figures prominently in social histories of music, is Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “distinction.” For example, late nineteenthcentury classical music cultures in Berlin, London, and Vienna functioned as sites where social inequality was enforced and political relations were reshaped. Europeans during other times and in other places also used music to solidify networks of power or to form communities where status rested on expert knowledge of a genre, such as indie rock. But social practices around music were not just mechanisms of distinction or exclusion: music also brought people together for communal and individual reasons. Whether or not they intellectualized their choices, listeners made critical judgments about what they liked or did not like. Not all of them treated music as a competitive arena or used it to solve social problems. Even if it is not tenable to think of music producers and consumers as engaged in a fully equal dialogue (technology, capitalist economics, and state controls all limited what the public could hear), this chapter takes seriously the agency of listeners and what they did with music in particular times and places. Studying lived experiences of music can reveal new layers of history in which emotion and pleasure share center stage with processes of technological, social, and political change.
1 Inventing Modern Popular Music Practices (1870s–1930) Music making and listening are as old as civilization, but they acquired a new commercial character in the late nineteenth century as a modern infrastructure
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for mass entertainment emerged. The industrial and urban revolutions facilitated a transition from makeshift performance and viewing sites to permanent, often grand, ones. For example, in Hamburg’s St. Pauli—a harborside enclave catering to seamen and travelers—Germany’s postunification gold rush brought impressive new halls that attracted both locals and tourists. Ludwig’s Concerthaus on the Reeperbahn catered to prosperous burghers and workers, offering light classical and martial music under electric lighting in its beer salons, gardens, and “Viennese” cafés. Less family-friendly fare could be found in Paris’ café concerts or Spain’s cafés cantantes, where the main attractions were attractive female singers. Urban audiences could choose from increasingly professional quality offerings, though risqué or earthy fare in local dialects also remained popular. The lines between entertainment and edification were not yet firmly drawn, as programs might include arias and lieder alongside rousing crowd-pleasers. For their part, bourgeois critics disdained working-class enthusiasm for commercial music. There was a strong interplay between musicking in public and private spaces, particularly before the age of recorded sound. Middle and skilled working-class households often had pianos. This allowed them to play sheet music, which increasingly circulated new styles from the US. This in turn stimulated desires for more music, which were met by live musicians or the mechanical players found in many establishments. The public still consumed most entertainment close to home, but from the 1910s, cinema tilted their expectations toward more dynamic, grandiose fare. Tapping into these demands among growing populations with rising income and defined leisure time, entrepreneurs across urban Europe opened bigger venues in specific districts that stayed open longer. These often brought the working and middle classes into the same spaces; as Lynn Abrams writes, “some of the new amusements, while not eliminating [social] divisions, certainly papered over the cracks.”² The music hall, which proliferated across the continent, offered fare reflecting popular concerns, with songs satirizing relations between the sexes or the powers that be. For example, Jewish audiences in Budapest heard songs in Yiddish or even German that spoke to their multiple identities and allowed them to laugh in the face of political tensions. Audiences everywhere sang along in these spaces, bonding over shared knowledges of life. Scholars have debated whether these practices constituted a form of resistance to the prevailing order. Although popular entertainment offered a chance to “talk back” to power, the emotions generated in the music hall tended to be fleeting and rarely translated into political action. Being in the same space did not automatically create cross-class solidarities, as recent scholarship on slumming and social dancing reveals.³
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Mass culture was anchored in urban life by 1900. Women and young people who were denied agency in the political sphere became keen consumers of popular music. Working adolescents took up their now familiar role as pioneers of the latest sensations. They experienced music bodily through dancing. For a fraction of the cost of a theater ticket, they could exchange the drudgery of the work week for the fun of movement on Sundays at halls like Lille’s Alcazar. They adapted traditional partner dances to new sounds, making social dancing central to courting practices and musical engagement. This relates to other modern practices, namely the use of music for physical stimulation and encounter with the “Other.” Nascent tourism industries developed place branding, with entertainment districts like St. Pauli in Hamburg or Pigalle in Paris advertising music as part of a menu of unique pleasures. Dancing and drinking in pubs and communal halls offered relaxation and release. In industrial or port cities, revelers could find themselves elbow to elbow with strangers from around the country or the world. The music they heard was also increasingly unlikely to be homegrown. Audience demands for novelty and exoticism opened the way for more American and African-American fare, such as the “animal dances.” Some young people used their ability to perform these outré dances to establish themselves as a fashionable, “knowing” elite within their own social class—an early version of the “hipster” phenomenon. Whether workers at leisure or bourgeois slummers seeking titillation, urbanites used popular music to experience the pleasures of difference. This could serve merely as a temporary release from normal rules of behavior, but it could also broaden individuals’ horizons and stimulate reflection on their place in the world. Conservatives and elites, for their part, worried that such encounters constituted cultural miscegenation and threatened national identity and morality. A similarly critical stance was taken up by the labor movement, which tried to keep workers from just consuming “worthless” music by founding choirs and other musical associations. Variations of these debates would surface repeatedly throughout the modern era. With critics fretting about popular music’s moral aspects, most music consumption was still done by families, with patriotic fare a substantial proportion of the repertoire. Here music conveyed ideas of respectability, as these listeners distinguished themselves from wild youths and low-class ruffians. Notions of respectability and distinction also motivated classical audiences, who increasingly segregated themselves into purpose-built halls for symphonic music and opera. For the elites who dominated classical audiences, music was an exalted, quasireligious sphere, especially in German-speaking lands, where it became integral to forging a national identity. Classical audiences across Europe used music to perform social identities and communicate values. They saw the symphony con-
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cert as a vehicle for the ethical formation of human beings; liberal reformers dreamed it could bolster national unity by cultivating cultured citizens regardless of class. However, this ideal (also embraced by the socialist movement) ran up against material realities that made these institutions inaccessible to the masses. Expensive orchestra subscriptions and their sartorial demands made the concert hall a site of hardening social distinctions. Silent audiences facing forward in fixed seating were meant to experience music introspectively. Serious music appreciation became divorced from physical enjoyment, a snobbery that later bled into jazz and rock criticism. Even though these trends continued beyond 1914, the war impacted musical practices in several ways. Jingoistic music surged, and officials in every combatant nation criticized “frivolous” entertainment. People seeking consolation or communion attended classical concerts, and women and children made music at home. The British blockade cut off Germany and Austria from outside impulses. After war-time dance bans were lifted, postwar Europe experienced a “dance mania.” In Weimar Germany, Alice Gerstel interpreted this as the hedonistic frenzy of those who had survived the “great collapse of the world and humanity.”⁴ Jazz rose to prominence in the 1920s in Europe. This revolutionary US import made inroads in France through African-American soldiers. It also came via passenger ships to Liverpool and spread to metropoles like Prague after composers heard it in Berlin or Paris. By the mid-decade, punters heard it at burlesque palaces like St. Pauli’s Alcazar (which hosted Josephine Baker’s semi-nude revue). Tours by Sam Wooding’s Chocolate Kiddies spread the gospel from Copenhagen to Istanbul. In 1925, Paul Whiteman brought “symphonic” jazz to European concert halls, realigning the relationship between America and the Old World and opening a debate about whether jazz could be considered “culture.” Jazz elements also seeped into mainstream songs. The syncopated international million-seller Yes, We Have No Bananas exemplified popular desires for the exotic generated by global capitalism and overseas empires, which for decades had generated new commodities avidly consumed by Europeans. Such songs also gave rise to the term “hit.” Hits insinuated themselves into people’s routines across gender and class lines, whistled by the docker, the housewife, and the schoolchild. They also shaped the image of that 1920s icon—the independent, androgynous female known variously as the flapper, garçonne, or neue Frau, with novels like The Artificial Silk Girl using hit songs to narrate her story. Jazz’s high profile in the 1920s should not obscure the fact that its initial fans were an adventurous minority. Mainstream audiences preferred music that was lightly syncopated at best. In provincial cities and towns, popular dances still had roots in local, rural songs. This persistence of regional traditions melded with modern forms can be seen in the Wolf Brothers. This Jewish family act at-
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tained stardom across the German-speaking world and Scandinavia by repackaging traditional, proletarian street life into songs for audiences increasingly disconnected from that milieu (and who enjoyed it being repackaged as nostalgia). Yet despite most popular music’s basic conservatism, it enraged moral crusaders. Legislative campaigns against obscenity dovetailed with conservative and fascist politics; across Europe, the right routinely condemned popular music as American, “Jewish” trash inimical to a healthy national culture. Communists, for their part, hated it for distracting the masses from their revolutionary potential. Political actors were frustrated that they could not control public tastes, particularly those of women and youths, whom they saw as easily manipulated by commercial forces. But these listeners were not just passive dupes—they used music to interpret the world and to find agency denied them in other spheres. Those practices would prove to be compatible with both democratic and authoritarian forms of government.
2 Music for Comfort and Distraction (1930 – 1950s) After 1930, profound changes in technology, economy, and politics reshaped musical practices. While people still made music at home, school, and places of worship, innovations in sound recording accelerated music’s transition from something people did to something they consumed.⁵ Sound film initiated the trend in which movies generated hit songs. While the Depression dampened record and gramophone sales, radio ownership skyrocketed in the 1930s, with British and German urbanites leading the way. Although public dancing remained a common activity across lines of age, class, and ethnicity, people could now enjoy music without leaving home. Radio staked out a culturally conservative position as state-owned broadcasters declared their mission the ennoblement of the nation. In Germany, this meant programming heavy with classical music, news, commentary, and radio plays; Dutch, French, and Italian radio emphasized music, whereas British radio combined current affairs with classical and light music. Radio and recording technology standardized performance styles and raised audience expectations of quality. Standardization opened up mass media to “ordinary” people but simultaneously erased from view those who did not fit the normative images being projected—white, respectable, and heterosexual. The rise of fascism also had huge implications for musicking by turning right-wing cultural grievances into policy. Italian fascists railed against jazz
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and instituted quotas to ensure that a majority of songs played on radio were made by Italians. Nazi hostility to “degenerate” music is well known, though it was actually Chancellor Franz von Papen who first barred African-American and other foreign musicians in 1932 under the pretext of preserving German jobs. After 1933, the Reich Music Chamber made it nearly impossible for Jewish musicians to work except in the framework of the Jüdische Kulturbund. “Hot” swing was banned, and nightclub set lists were scrutinized for “negroid” content. But the line between the musically acceptable and the forbidden remained fuzzy. Fascist officials promoted folk and classical as true national musics but could not reverse the trend of declining orchestra attendance. The big band sound was widely popular—no regime could completely ban an entire genre. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recognized the political value of apolitical entertainment, which could serve as social glue, particularly during wartime (a stance that also fit the record industry’s economic agenda). Thus, the Nazi state ensured a steady supply of music in line with mass tastes, even sanitized jazz played by racially acceptable Europeans. Radio—more dominant than ever due to both fascist promotion of the “people’s receiver” and shortages of shellac for making records—mixed propaganda with light entertainment. Shows that played requests by servicemen were particularly popular. Music provided emotional succor to men at the front and their loved ones at home. It also provided the home front an illusion of normalcy, offering distraction from daily horrors and sensations of pleasure that bonded people to the regime. In short, popular music was compatible with building fascism at the most personal level. It was also compatible with democracy, suggesting that popular music functions in ways that can be both repressive and emancipatory, depending on when and where we look. Music’s community-building aspects were on full display in Britain, where the home front used popular song to soothe their fears and stiffen their resolve in the fight against Adolf Hitler. Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again became burned into the national consciousness as a monument to a mythical national unity, which the English have been chasing ever since.⁶ Young women dancing with locally stationed American troops experienced the sweet diversions of romance and feelings of participation in a noble alliance that had swing as its soundtrack. Besides musicking at home, public dancing remained the most visible way Europeans on all sides experienced music during the war (sexual minorities were excluded from this and had to pursue it deeply underground). The desire to dance intensified, part of the growing consumption of distractions of all kinds during wartime. Whether in fortress Britain or German-occupied territory, dancers kept venues buzzing behind blackout curtains as long as the power
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stayed on. One such hotspot, St. Pauli’s Café Heinze, hosted approved big bands until it was bombed in 1945. It had a dance floor lit from below on which Nazi party members, conformists, and hot jazz fans all might find themselves. This last group has become objects of scholarly and popular interest, as they represent an early example of a youth subculture that used music to assert a distinct identity in a repressive political environment. Swingjugend in Germany and zazous in France modeled a mode of musical engagement that became common across the twentieth century: they collected discs and shared specialized knowledge, simultaneously creating community with each other and distancing themselves from the masses who were content with pale imitations of the original. They combined reverence for “real” jazz (and the Black and Jewish Americans who played it) with distinctive clothes that signaled to other fans their membership in the cult. Mixed-sex groups met in private homes or friendly establishments known to insiders. France’s Hot Club, where aficionados gathered to hear precious recordings by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, flourished during the German occupation. But zazous faced beatings at the hands of local militiamen. German Swingjugend faced even more draconian punishments, with the unluckiest sent to the Eastern front or even concentration camps in 1942/43. Historians debate whether their uses of music constitute a form of political resistance or mere nonconformity—these were middle- or upper-class youths seeking pleasure, but their pursuit of banned music and open sympathy with Jews and Blacks were knowingly dangerous. One thing we do know: Nazi authorities, who were determined to control young people’s movements, perceived them as a threat. Europeans who survived the war used music to mark its end in May 1945. Victorious allies and liberated peoples marked the Third Reich’s demise with singing and dancing in the streets; Germans experienced this moment in numb silence. But even there, women soon waltzed to street music when they took breaks from foraging or clearing rubble. Theaters and concert halls quickly reopened, and rump orchestras played in provisional spaces to rapt audiences. People across the social spectrum hungered for culture, with high hopes for rejuvenation especially among those who suffered under Nazi dictates. In popular music, hot swing ruled, and dancers packed into spaces of all kinds, eager to forget the recent past. The influence of Germany receded while the deepening of the US presence in the Cold War brought a stronger reorientation around American pop culture. During the next 25 years of recovery and economic expansion, popular culture solidified itself as the culture of mass democracy in West Europe.⁷ Live music rode this wave into the 1950s. Adults with rising disposable income flocked to nightclubs in urban sin districts. Among them were individuals that identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer in cities like Am-
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sterdam and Berlin, who re-emerged to congregate in specific bars, albeit under continued threat of police harassment, as antisodomy laws remained in force in most European countries until the late 1960s. Music was essential to adult socializing and sexual stimulation. To meet demand and cut costs, establishments increasingly resorted to recorded music. Jukeboxes proliferated in pubs and snack bars in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1947, Paul Pacine opened the Whisky à Gogo in Paris, a socially exclusive club that mixed live music with records of American jazz. The club was an anomaly, but once amplification technology improved, its “discotheque” format would spread worldwide, starting in the 1960s. Public music consumption faced growing competition from listening at home, emblematic of the comfortable domesticity enabled by the economic recovery in western Europe. The invention of the vinyl LP and 45rpm single made records cheaper and more durable. Innovations in recording and playback technology made sound remarkably clear, giving listeners unprecedented intimacy with performers. This was reinforced by mass-circulation publications like West Germany’s Bravo, whose articles and photographs fed public interest in particular “stars.” Better technology also benefited smaller jazz combos and classical orchestras, fostering cultures of record collecting. Families in the 1950s bought record players after acquiring more “necessary” appliances, making them prized possessions, particularly for adult men. “Hi-fi” stereos allowed them to emulate the sophisticated masculinity modeled in lifestyle magazines like Italy’s Le Ore, enjoying the beautiful women on album covers and journeying sonically around the world. New technologies and media were also eagerly consumed by women and teens, whose tastes still drove the market. In the 1950s, they preferred pop hits. Known variously as Schlager, levenslied, or simply pop, these catchy or sentimental songs produced in every country combined modern production values with elements drawn from regional sounds. These had broad appeal among working- and middle-class audiences at a time when young people’s listening habits still hewed closely to their elders’ because music players were kept in common family spaces. Educated elites, in contrast, detested pop; if they tolerated any nonclassical music, it might be jazz, which was gaining intellectual respectability. Movies often featured pop songs that could then be heard on commercial stations like the high-watt Radio Luxembourg, read about in magazines, and purchased as singles. Such cross-platform marketing, designed to produce fan loyalty, was dubbed the “culture industry” by its critics. Theodor W. Adorno, in particular, derided popular music as a capitalist product engineered to create “fanatics” who responded to its primitive sounds like “fascinated insects.”⁸ Originally written during the Nazi era, Adorno’s influential critique portrayed such
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entertainment as politically dangerous, as it robbed the masses of the capability for independent thought. Adorno correctly argued that pop music is created within capitalist structures of dominance and reminds us that consumers’ choices were limited by what producers and broadcasters made available. However, the culture industry could never completely manipulate people’s engagement with popular music as listeners sought meanings and pleasures in it relevant to their own interests. For example, in the 1950s in West Europe, the vision of monogamous “true love” conveyed in popular songs suggests a strong interest in domesticity, in line with other evidence of a broad desire for “normalcy” after the previous decades’ upheavals. Hits also frequently evoked nostalgia for simpler times and, particularly in Germany, homesickness. Pop music thus served as one of the few places in this emotionally repressed era where feelings of loss or displacement could be openly expressed (though the war itself was never mentioned). Pop music also shaped and reflected Europeans’ changing relationship with the United States. France strove to counter postwar American hegemony while struggling with its own dramatic dislocations of modernization and decolonization. Even though music producers and audiences took in some American influences, they assertively reconstructed notions of French identity through the popular Francophone genres of chanson and yé-yé. During the Konrad Adenauer era, West Germany, in contrast, was unabashedly American-oriented, both politically and economically. Its music industry hewed closely to US models, with hit songs often being re-recorded versions of American ones done auf deutsch with German musicians. Those same dynamics of standardization and selective local adaptation marked European engagements with the cultural earthquake of rock ‘n’ roll.
3 Pop Music as Youth Culture (1956 – 1969) Hitting continental Europe in 1956, rock ‘n’ roll initially fed moral panic due to its overt sexuality, antiauthoritarian ethos, and interracial otherness. Its emphasis on emotional authenticity challenged the prevailing polished aesthetic of popular music. It also sonically declared the power of Europe’s fastest growing demographic, people under 21. Starting in the late 1950s, rising disposable income plus new transistor technology drove purchases of portable radios and record players that youths could use in their own rooms—no longer were they beholden to what their elders listened to. Teenagers without adult responsibilities could spend money on goods aimed directly at them, enhancing their identity as a distinct cohort with its own sensibilities. Being socially mobile and less tethered to
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traditional class identities, they grew up in a consumer society in which mass media preached the joys of prosperity and intense sensations—things to which rock ‘n’ roll provided easy access. Over time, this deceptively simple music proved to contain multitudes, its marriage of Black and white sounds spinning off in dozens of directions. The Beatles and Bob Dylan pushed it to new places artistically after 1965, helping to transform “rock ‘n’ roll” into the more ambitious “rock.” Across Europe, musicians and audiences infused it with elements from their own local idioms, making it a key site of aesthetic cosmopolitanism and “signifier of a universal modernity in the field of popular music,” as Motti Regev writes.⁹ While pop continued to dominate sales and radio airplay, rock became the transnational language of youth in the 1960s, serving both as a broadly popular vehicle for their concerns and a tool for creating social distinctions among devoted fans. When rock first hit, however, this loud, lewd music faced fierce opposition from state broadcasters, promoters, and established musicians who saw their jobs threatened. As a result, listeners had to find it through alternative channels. Radio for the US armed forces in Europe played a key early role. Another source was Hollywood movies such as Blackboard Jungle, whose title sequence made Bill Haley’s Rock around the Clock the first top ten rock ‘n’ roll single in Europe. Early press reports on Elvis Presley, intended to disparage him, piqued many teenagers’ curiosity. British youths embraced the music most readily, and tours there by American acts built a devoted fan base. On the continent, Haley’s 1956 and 1958 shows in France, Belgium, Italy, and West Germany brought youths into the streets and the aisles of concert halls. While sensational media reports often exaggerated the violence at these shows, the linkage of proletarian male “hooliganism” with rock ‘n’ roll reduced its appeal for many years. Ultimately, rock ‘n’ roll did not end civilization, with most listeners still preferring anodyne pop. Some boys and girls, however, tried making a version for themselves: this became the late 1950s skiffle craze, which spread from Britain to middle-class teens in northern Europe. Skiffle combined rock’s three-chord formula with singable sounds from the blues, music hall, and Dixieland traditions. This fusion of traditional and modern Black and white forms became a crucial phase in popular music’s evolution. By 1960, dozens of skiffle bands in Britain traded their acoustic for electric instruments, morphing into rock ‘n’ roll bands who dreamed of becoming as famous as Chuck Berry or Elvis. The resulting sounds and styles would put the UK on an equal footing with the US as a source of popular music influences in 1960s Europe. St. Pauli was an important incubator of this evolution. As Hamburg’s redlight district, St. Pauli had a booming business selling hedonism to adults. In
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1959, an entrepreneur named Bruno Koschmider experimented with rock ‘n’ roll (mainly on the jukebox) as a way to make his nightclubs stand out in a crowded entertainment landscape. His introduction in 1960 of bands from England attracted a local youth audience. Working-class rockers came in their jeans and leather to preen, drink, and fight. A clique of artsy bohemians also found something attractive in this uninhibited music and the young Brits who played it— most famously the Beatles, with whom they formed intense friendships and creative partnerships. Koschmider’s formula became copied by other entrepreneurs, and by 1963, St. Pauli became a mecca for fans from across northern Europe. In the early 1960s, rock ‘n’ roll (now called beat music in Europe) was subculture on the continent. Fans had to create their own fashions. They debated what constituted “authentic” rock ‘n’ roll, with opinion divided over Elvis clones like Billy Fury or Johnny Hallyday. Fans went to great lengths to find records, though Liverpoolers had the luxury of shops, like North End Music Stores (NEMS), that were attuned to sounds from the US and the tastes of hip locals. As far as live performances are concerned, besides St. Pauli, towns connected to bases for North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops offered the best chance on the continent to see rock ‘n’ roll played by actual Americans or at least good imitators, such as Van Morrison’s Irish showband The Monarchs. In Britain, bands weaned on skiffle and the 1960 tour of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran found gigs at regional ballrooms and Butlin’s summer resorts. Several British cities also saw the rise in the early 1960s of clubs featuring Jamaican sounds and American rhythm and blues (R&B), reflecting increased migration from the West Indies. The Flamingo Club in London’s Soho brought together people of color (who were routinely refused admission at ballrooms), gay men and lesbians, local sex workers, and musical adventurers (often from the rising generation of educated youths interested in “low” culture) to see R&B performed by Black and white artists. A new wave of discotheques, such as Rome’s futuristic Piper Club, offered dancing to records loud and non-stop. All of these spaces became zones of encounter between diverse audiences. They cultivated shared structures of feeling generated by the sensation of the liberated body. Participants bonded over shared musical tastes and a youthful sensibility, though fantasies of egalitarianism did not erase racial essentialism or working-class resentments against those perceived to be slumming. New forms of distinction emerged as well around fashion sense and dance ability. Hardcore beat and R&B fans defined themselves by their disdain for mainstream pop, though female fans seemed less invested in those distinctions than males. Without necessarily meaning to, participants’ uses of music in these spaces also helped to loosen the grip of postwar sexual repression, though outright intercourse remained risky in these last years before oral contraceptives. For West
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German participants, the beat music scene allowed them to cast off the weight of a disgraced national identity, offering rejuvenating contact with youths from other countries and liberating impulses from America. Across Western Europe, engaging with the racial, sexual, or national “Other” through the beat and R&B subcultures opened up new possibilities. Black-derived music offered white Europeans symbolic space in which to articulate distance from mainstream society and fashion “authentic” selves. Black Europeans found status within music scenes denied them in other spheres of life. These scenes promoted tolerance as a value and signifier of “cool,” though racism and homophobia did not end by any stretch. These shifts were rarely articulated in political terms, but they had political implications because they allowed participants to imagine other ways of organizing life, cross social divides, and rethink their relationship to the local and the global. In 1964, these possibilities exploded from subcultural space into the mainstream with the global phenomenon of Beatlemania. In the Beatles as well as their contemporaries, girls and boys across the social spectrum discovered alternative role models that represented freshness, “we” feelings, and an aura of freedom that cemented youth’s status as the prime social group. Baby boomers, who were now sexually energized teenagers, used music to show loyalty to each other against what they saw as the moral hypocrisy of their elders. This can be seen in young men’s adoption of beat bands’ longer hairstyles, which unleashed debate from Wales to Warsaw about ideas of tolerance and masculinity. Girls used the Beatles as a safe way to experience sexual feelings, but they also wanted to be like them—witty, forthright, and freewheeling. Even though the burden of maintaining sexual respectability still weighed heaviest on them, young women found in this music new avenues of self-expression. Most people experienced this as fans, but thousands across Europe also formed their own bands. This path was more readily available to young men, who were encouraged to see themselves onstage, for example in advertisements for electric guitars. Beat bands functioned as boys’ clubs, and song lyrics routinely framed females as harpies, nags, or sex objects. Young women, however, also participated, particularly as singers. An intrepid few formed their own bands, such as the Liverbirds and Belgium’s Selenes. Whether or not they found fame, music making became a meaningful ritual in the lives of many young men and women. It allowed them to make aesthetic choices and create new personae. It offered community and access to intense experiences. It became a source of cultural capital, friendship, and sexual contacts. It also created new social hierarchies. Females in particular found themselves increasingly marginalized, as rock moved away from its amateur-friendly simplicity to an emphasis on instrumental virtuosity. Still, the fact that so many youths were able to
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form bands is a sign of the era’s prosperity; that they wanted to do so speaks to music’s centrality to youth culture. Once Beatlemania broke the dam, rock, beat, and R&B made in both America and Europe circulated more widely in mainstream media. Commercial radio, joined by pirate stations, circumvented state broadcasters’ reluctance to play more pop music. Television, which expanded dramatically in the 1960s, now offered weekly or monthly shows, such as Ready Steady Go and Beat Club, that showcased the flourishing beat and R&B genres.¹⁰ Fans became cultural producers in their own right, using a flood of readymade commodities to create their own styles, slang, and ways of moving. Fandom still reflected social inequalities around income and gender: girls usually had less freedom to physically go to nightclubs, forcing them to pursue their passion at home or in adult-sanctioned youth clubs. But whether they gathered at shows or decorated their bedrooms, fandom offered participants possibilities of connection and creativity. How did these trends look in Eastern Europe? While they were not monolithic, most communist states rejected rock and beat as vectors of Western cultural imperialism and sexual decadence, which were incompatible with the formation of the socialist personality. The ideal that culture should ennoble all members of society guided official policy. However, recognizing workers’ need for relaxation, states allowed music for pleasure as long as it was elevated and artistic (“kitsch” was the enemy). In East Germany, where Western impulses seeped into the society across the airwaves, the goal was to outcompete the West. They produced Schlager festivals, radio programming, and films (such as the beach-blanket musical Heißer Sommer [1968]) that attracted receptive audiences of all ages. But a visible minority were dissatisfied solely with the socialist product and sought out sounds from across the Iron Curtain, often at great personal cost. The state, for its part, alternated between suppressing, managing, and co-opting citizens’ desire to determine their own leisure. We see this, for example, in the shifting fortunes of beat music. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, which had relatively liberal cultural policies, audiences could watch the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night or even see the Rolling Stones live in Warsaw in 1965. A cultural thaw in East Germany around the 1964 “Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend” generated youth-oriented radio programming and the formation of dozens of beat bands. The press praised the Beatles for refusing to play to segregated audiences in the American South. But, as in the West, parents and children clashed over short skirts, long hair, and loud music. East Germany suspended its tolerance of beat in October 1965, arresting protesting fans in Leipzig and accusing bands of decadence and profiteering. Still, officials could not stop this music from circulating. As bands and singers across East Europe persisted in making music that combined local elements
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with the international pop-rock sound, states eventually decided to co-opt it, officially licensing performers that sang apolitical lyrics in the national language and pressing records by Western musicians deemed artistically worthy. Opposition to rock was not solely a communist phenomenon: protohippies in Western democracies were often attacked for their nonconformity. Activist Bommi Baumann’s path into radical politics began after being assaulted for his hairstyle; he found solidarity in West Berlin’s beat clubs. Into the late 1960s, adult derision enhanced feelings of unity among rock audiences. Shared musical sensibilities and practices had strong affective power among many students of the anti-Vietnam War New Left. The transnational political moment signified by “1968” had a distinct soundtrack of Anglo-American rock by performers like the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and African-American guitarist Jimi Hendrix, whose success began in Europe. Festivals like the Isle of Wight and the Essen Song Days became places to imagine solidarities and alternative lifestyles. This was also a watershed era when rock was embraced by intellectuals and elites, as seen in the rapturous reception given the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The late 1960s witnessed the kind of utopian hopes once attached to classical music that music could change the world.
4 Community and Distinction (1970 – 1990s) If 1968—in France, West Germany, Italy, Poland, and Czechoslovakia—represented a moment when youthful energy seemed like it could change the world, music mirrored the subsequent dashing of those hopes. Just as the pop-rock sound became the dominant popular form, rock itself splintered into many subgenres in the 1970s and 1980s, its fan base no longer unified (if indeed it ever truly was). It became more musically complex and less danceable, whereas R&B (classified in European record shops as “Black music”) went its own way into funk and disco. Fashion-oriented music subcultures bubbled up with increasing frequency, such as mod, which persisted well beyond its mid-1960s origins. Experimental music maintained a small but devoted following, whereas jazz (long removed from its origins as dance music) gained respectability among educated Europeans. Elites carried on classical music as tradition and heritage, patronizing regional and national orchestras and insisting that their children learn to play instruments. Pop music, in contrast, was identified more than ever with female “teenyboppers” from the less educated and working classes. Family-oriented TV shows like Austria’s Musikantenstadl carried on as if rock barely existed. Music’s stylistic diversity in the last third of the twentieth century makes it impossible to summarize
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fully, but some examples illustrate how users’ practices continued both to foster community and to erect new distinctions. Rock music developed in several directions. While the major Anglo-American acts left politics behind after 1970, it persisted in West Germany, whose audiences rock singer Robert Plant famously called “too political.”¹¹ Floh de Cologne combined rock with Brechtian theater to satirize consumerism and German historical amnesia. Ton Steine Scherben crafted tuneful anthems about anarchy, squatting, and gay rights, spawning a devoted cross-class following that chanted their lyrics at demonstrations and graffitied them on city walls. These bands were part of a diverse set of artists whose sound ran the gamut from rock to electronic experimentation, lumped together by the British press under the label Krautrock. They rejected the orthodoxy that rock had to be sung in English to be authentic. With the exception of a few breakout records (such as Kraftwerk’s Autobahn), performers who sang in their native tongue sold fewer records internationally and even struggled in their respective domestic markets, which were increasingly dominated by pop of the Eurovision Song Contest persuasion. But they were embraced by fans who saw their own concerns given voice. More typical of mainstream rock in Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was the dominance of superstar Anglo-American and European bands (often with beat-era roots) who rocked in English, such as the Golden Earring from the Netherlands or Europe from Sweden. Since the freewheeling early days of beat, social practices around rock had also become more codified with implicit rules on dress or behavior at concerts—not unlike the progression seen earlier with classical music appreciation. Rock’s “progressive” subgenre appealed to a largely male, increasingly older audience who wanted a more complex music (these listeners—often middle class but not exclusively so—were also more receptive to jazz, helping to popularize the 1970s sound of jazz-rock fusion). This points to a trend that has persisted to the present day: people increasingly stuck with the music of their youth as they moved into middle age, partly out of nostalgia for a golden era (for both music and themselves) but also out of the conviction that this music had quality. The rise of rock journalism fed this trend, as a new cohort of mostly male writers grappled intellectually with this music and its sociopolitical significance. Rock journals, which often had roots in the late-1960s underground press, emerged across Western Europe, such as the Dutch magazine Oor. Intended to elevate the level of discourse, they provided in-depth content for serious-minded fans seeking more than the industry-generated fare in mainstream magazines. Rock journalists touted performers with ambitious lyrics (such as Lou Reed) and music (such as Frank Zappa), while deriding groups like Led Zeppelin as “brainless.” As such, rock magazines became key sites of creating distinction in late twentieth-century music.
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It is debatable, however, whether audiences obeyed their dictates. Acts that appealed to the body more than the brain coexisted with progressive (prog) rockers. Fans of David Bowie, an artist who combined elements from rock and R&B’s many streams, took self-fashioning to new heights. Rock fans still danced, whether they swayed to the Grateful Dead or bobbed along to Suzi Quatro. A uniquely European manifestation of fan culture was Rockpalast, a West German TV production that was shown twice a year, starting in 1974, on the Eurovision network and that featured hours of live performances. No matter who was on the bill, rock fans from the Arctic circle to the Mediterranean held all-night watching parties lubricated by hash and alcohol—an “alternative” Europe to the one generated around the Eurovision Song Contest. Rockpalast’s eclectic lineups exposed viewers to diverse artists across the rock and jazz spectrum. Its widespread popularity suggests that the rock audience had not become a closed church, so to say, after all. Subcultures also became increasingly visible modes of musical engagement in the 1970s and 1980s. In the capitalist West, they emerged in response to the hegemony of the major record labels, changing social conditions (particularly postcolonial migrations and working-class fragmentation), and to the rising unemployment that accompanied the end of economic expansion after 1973. In subcultures, the most obsessed fans of a particular genre, who did not see their interests represented elsewhere, wove an all-encompassing way of life out of their passion. They emanated from both the working class and the universities. They mixed materials from the dominant culture to produce new styles that challenged the mainstream (while unintentionally infusing it with new impulses). Participants congregated in urban spaces to socialize, share artifacts, and publicly display their allegiances through style. This was fandom as a creative activity, and adherents saw themselves as more enlightened than the masses who accepted what the music industry churned out. Some combined music with politics: punks in Europe (more so than the US) preached the rejection of a capitalist system that enriched the few and left the masses with no future. Young women used punk to put feminist values into action by critiquing women’s sexual objectification, creating alternative styles, and playing music for themselves. Britain’s ska subculture defied Thatcher-era racism, uniting white working-class youths in cities, like Coventry, with their peers from the African diaspora. In reaction, neo-Nazi subcultures used music to “sell” racism, attracting followers and raising funds through concerts. Heavy metal subcultures, in contrast, tended to be apolitical, though in post-Franco Spain, they used music to articulate local issues of economic inequality and social injustice. These admittedly selective examples remind us that, depending on context, intense engagement with music can serve higher goals—or no goal at all beyond a life devoted to music.
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One subculture rocketed to mainstream prominence in the 1970s: disco. Disco’s roots trace back to Black, Latinx, and queer groups in New York who used vacant industrial spaces for parties, where they could revel amongst themselves without fear. They adapted the discotheque format in which records spun by taste-making disc jockeys provided hours of dancing, and pulsating lights and illicit drugs completed the total sensory environment. Europeans added important elements to disco, namely the Europop style epitomized by Sweden’s ABBA, French-Italian dance pop, and the beat-driven synthesizer sound perfected by producer Giorgio Moroder. Moroder’s recordings in Munich with Donna Summer, which were foundational to the genre, mashed-up “cool” Germanic technology with “hot” African-American sensuality. Disco attained worldwide popularity in the mid-1970s, and its dance-beat sound has shaped pop ever since. Arriving during the sexual revolution, disco built on dancing’s long tradition as parasexual encounter, facilitating actual sex in nocturnal club spaces. It never hid its ties to gay club culture, with disco’s aesthetic rooted in transvestite camp’s love of superficiality—something rock fans, who prized “authenticity,” rejected, often in ways that were homophobic. Historians have shown that disco created something quite authentic by facilitating liberation for sexual minorities. Distinct from disco music, the disco as a place to socialize was a lifeline to other marginalized groups, particularly nonwhite Europeans. Second-generation “guest workers” across northern and western Europe went to discos to experience fun and find romantic partners. In Britain, the first immigrants of the Windrush generation socialized amongst themselves at house parties and unlicensed shebeens. Black neighborhoods in Manchester and other cities gradually saw the opening in the 1950s and 1960s of after-hours clubs and live venues also visited by sailors, African-American servicemen, and curious whites. That desire for encounter with the “Other,” so central to popular music practices in modern Europe, motivated Tony Bullimore in 1966 to open Bristol’s first permanent club featuring music by and for the West Indian community, the Bamboo Club. As calypso gave way to reggae and funk, this white-owned club thrived as a place where Black patrons felt comfortable while also attracting a white audience, including punks who loved Jamaican dub. What began as a means of self-expression and recreation for first-generation settlers grew into an accessible site of intercultural encounter, with creative influences working in multiple directions.¹² Without minimizing the importance of fan practices in Western Europe, the stakes were considerably higher in the communist East. In the 1970s and 1980s, states there gave up most attempts to repress music from the West. Production of homegrown pop-rock in national languages became institutionalized, a part of the improving provision of consumer goods that stabilized support for communist states in this period. To participate in that system, performers had to be li-
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censed to play gigs or to get rehearsal space. Licenses could be rescinded at a moment’s notice if party officials perceived lyrics to be political critique. In perhaps the most extreme example, Czechoslovakia’s Plastic People of the Universe faced not only bans but prison for their unlicensed underground performances; their 1976 trial for “disturbance of the peace” directly catalyzed what became the dissident manifesto Charter 77. Whereas most Eastern Europeans had little interest in the avant-garde, many young music fans desired recordings by Western artists or unsanctioned bands (as with punk after 1980). Records on state labels had limited print runs, while others cost a fortune on the black market. Thus, fans taped songs off of rare copies or Western radio, copying and recopying them to circulate among trusted circles. Practices of “reenactment”—performing a song you may have only heard in a degraded recording of a recording—meant rock musicians in the East, including those who otherwise played by the rules, ended up creating new versions in their own idiom. Less beholden to the mechanisms of the capitalist marketplace, music subcultures in the East spooled out in their own fashion. East Germany’s autarchic Bluesers carried the hippie message of love and peace throughout the 1970s and 1980s, long after the Woodstock spirit died in the West. Hip-hop made in the German Democratic Republic experienced the state’s many sides. On the one hand, the regime disapproved of hip-hoppers’ conspicuous consumption of Western sneakers and other accessories (as in other communist subcultures, early adherents were often youths from elite families with Western connections). On the other hand, since the 1920s, communism had preached solidarity with the struggles of African-Americans—thus, hip-hop became officially permitted around 1984 because it could be cast as the voice of the underclass. But performers and fans were always reminded that permission was fragile and could be revoked if they openly criticized the state. In the end, communist states were caught between disciplining youth and limited accommodation of their desires for individualism through music. Once glasnost made openness the order of the day, communist states’ ability to control popular music practices were stretched to the limit. Escapist pop had been promoted since the 1970s, and the official line now acknowledged rock’s social and intellectual value. Yet police still attacked fans who pressed against the Berlin Wall to hear concerts on the other side by Bowie, Michael Jackson, and Pink Floyd. Hoping to defuse building pressures for reform, the state allowed Bruce Springsteen to perform in East Berlin in 1988; 300,000 attended and millions more watched on television. Depeche Mode’s 1988 shows in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague became gatherings of the faithful who had clandestinely traded cassettes or bleached their hair like Martin Gore. Popular music for them meant hope and the assertion of individuality. As Claudia
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Rusch writes, for decades songs from the West had come over through the air, settling like fine dust: “every song that had the word ‘free’ in it became a protest song in Easterners’ hearts.”¹³ Rather than appeasing them, late communist-era concerts only fueled desires for more reform. Western music may not have destroyed communism, but it eroded its ability to fully win the hearts of youth.
Conclusion Looking back over a century of people’s uses of music in Europe, we see patterns that span multiple times and places as well as local particularities. Music both stabilized political regimes and disrupted them. Although music provided access to new sensations and broadened people’s horizons, it also erected new forms of exclusion. It exoticized the “Other” but also opened up pathways of connection, tolerance, and liberation. Finally, it always contained within itself the tension between music for escapist pleasure and music as a source of meaning. People across the social spectrum used music in public and private spaces to experience joy, aggression, melancholy, and rapture, whether their lives were miserable or comfortable. Music also stimulated thought and the search for meaning by critics, organic intellectuals, and anyone seeking to understand the world. There was no one “European” engagement with music, though we can speak of moments of commonality, such as the Rockpalast watching parties. At the same time, attention to Europeans’ myriad uses of music shifts the narrative away from clichés—that see them merely as imitators or passive recipients of American forms—to viewing them as creative actors whose reworkings and adaptations generated new forms that made sense of their own worlds. Music’s ubiquitous presence in daily life means we cannot understand modern Europe’s social history without it.
Notes Rural practices are outside the scope of this chapter, as are folk and traditional music created and listened to by ethnic minorities. Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London: Routledge, 1992), 179. See, for example, Klaus Nathaus, “Gesichtswahrung, Statuskämpfe und soziale Grenzziehung: Interaktion im urbanen Vergnügen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 2 (2019): 47– 58.
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Alice Gerstel, “Jazz Band,” Die Aktion (4 February 1922), reprinted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 554– 555. Elijah Wald, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. I use “English” deliberately here, as I am writing during Brexit—a process driven by English nostalgia for this imagined community. Kaspar Maase, “Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, Americanization, and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949 – 1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 428 – 450. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music” [1941], in Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 437– 469. Motti Regev, Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 4. Britain was ahead of the continent here, with youth-oriented TV shows that featured music already in the late 1950s such as Six-Five Special (1957– 1958) and Oh Boy! (1958 – 1959). This came in a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone; cited in Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, ed., Rock! Jugend und Musik in Deutschland (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2005), 56. Critics routinely cite Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio (1970) as American rock’s last protest song of the Vietnam era. See Rehan Hyder, “Black Music and Cultural Exchange in Bristol,” in Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945, ed. Jon Stratton and Nabell Zuberi (Farnham: Ashgate, 2017), 85 – 99. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Rock! Jugend und Musik in Deutschland, 117.
Bibliography Abrams, Lynn. Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia. London: Routledge, 1992. Adorno, Theodor W. “On Popular Music.” 1941. In Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Music, edited by Richard D. Leppert, 437 – 469. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, ed. Rock! Jugend und Musik in Deutschland. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2005. Hyder, Rehan. “Black Music and Cultural Exchange in Bristol.” In Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945, edited by Jon Stratton and Nabell Zuberi, 85 – 99. Farnham: Ashgate, 2017. Maase, Kaspar. “Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, Americanization, and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture.” In The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949 – 1968, edited by Hanna Schissler, 428 – 450. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nathaus, Klaus. “Gesichtswahrung, Statuskämpfe und soziale Grenzziehung: Interaktion im urbanen Vergnügen des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.” Moderne Stadtgeschichte 2 (2019): 47 – 58. Regev, Motti. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
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Wald, Elijah. How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Further Reading Briggs, Jonathyne. Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities and Pop Music in France, 1958 – 1980. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Brown, Timothy Scott, and Andrew Lison. The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2010. Gildart, Keith. Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth, and Rock ‘n’ roll 1955 – 1976. New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2013. Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Maase, Kaspar. Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997. Morat, Daniel, Tobias Becker, Kerstin Lange, Johanna Niedbalski, Anne Gnausch, and Paul Nolte. Weltstadtvergnügen: Berlin 1880 – 1930. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. Mrozek, Bodo. Jugend—Pop—Kultur: Eine transnationale Geschichte. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Nathaus, Klaus. “Why ‘Pop’ Changed and How it Mattered (Part I): Sociological Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Popular Culture in the West.” Soziopolis, 1 August 2018. https://soziopolis.de/beobachten/kultur/artikel/why-pop-changed-and-how-it-matteredpart-i/. Nathaus, Klaus. “Why ‘Pop’ Changed and How it Mattered (Part II): Historiographical Interpretations of Twentieth-Century Popular Culture in the West.” H-Soz-u-Kult, 2 August 2018. https://www.hsozkult.de/literaturereview/id/forschungsberichte-1685. Müller, Sven Oliver. Das Publikum macht die Musik: Musikleben in Berlin, London und Wien im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. Ross, Corey. Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ryback, Timothy W. Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. New York: Viking, 2007. Sneeringer, Julia. A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to the Beatles, 1956 – 69. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Ziemer, Hansjakob. Die Moderne hören: Das Konzert als urbanes Forum 1890 – 1940. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2008.
James Nott
12 Getting Together to “Get Down”: Social Dancing from Dance Hall to Rave Introduction “Social dancing”—that is to say, dancing in commercial dance venues—in twentieth-century Europe underwent huge change when, not long into the century, dancing habits were transformed by a series of so-called “animal dances” in the early 1910s, followed soon after by the tango—all of which generated newfound interest in social dancing and its practitioners. Soon after, following the First World War, contemporaries noted the emergence of an even bigger “dance craze” that was sweeping Europe’s major towns and cities. Speaking of the “Craze for Dancing in London” in January 1919, for example, one newspaper noted: “London has gone dancing mad […]. [D]ancing establishments in London are crowded morning, noon, and night with eager pupils studying all the curiosities of the foxtrot, the one-step, the Jazz roll […] whilst dancing halls are booked up for months ahead.”¹ In Italy, dance academies sprung up to cater for an affluent elite intent on practicing the latest dances, and hundreds of venues opened in Rome, Milan, Turin, Florence, Genoa, and Venice.² Even in defeated Germany, interest in dancing remained high despite (or maybe because of) the economic turmoil of the 1920s. Indeed, as Marko Heinrich and Christian Paysan put it, “Out of the Great Inflation of 1923, there came a craving for excitement which elevated dance to a position of unprecedented social and cultural significance.”³ This explosion in the popularity of dancing had obvious repercussions for music making and music listening. Dancing needed music—indeed, the new interest in dancing had been, in part, stimulated by new forms of music arriving at this time. So close was the association between the new music and the new dances that the expression “to jazz” was often used to describe dancing in these early years. Moreover, it was at the dance hall that most people in Europe heard the majority of live music that touched their lives. Increasingly though, dance music and dancing were shaped by their intimate connection with a sophisticated modern music and entertainment industry. These links will be explored below. Moreover, this chapter traces changes in dance styles (from couple to solo and communal dancing), explores its social functions (performing identity, mating, and escapism), and accounts for the various external factors that shaped the dance floor encounter (from the music industry to dance hall business, architecture, drugs, and transport). It does so by first examining the rise https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-013
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of couple dancing in the period up to 1960, exploring the reasons for its popularity, some of the social functions that dancing performed, and the ways in which musicians and the music industry responded to and shaped dancing trends. The second half of the chapter follows the development of dancing beyond the 1960s, taking in disco and rave culture as well as exploring the changing relationships between dancing and music, dancers, and music makers.
1 The Establishment of a Mass Market for Social Dancing and the Rise of Couple Dancing, 1910s to 1950s Social dancing started well before the 1910s. Prior to the emergence of the modern palais de danse, there were public ballrooms, dancing salons, and all manner of commercial venues where dancing took place, often on an ad hoc basis. Couple dancing also predates this period with the waltz popularized among the middle and upper classes in the nineteenth century. What is significant about the period just before and after the First World War, however, is the enormous growth in the audience for social dancing and the development of a sophisticated business—both catering for, and to some extent creating, this huge demand. This period saw the working and lower-middle classes dancing more regularly and in greater numbers than in any previous period. Prior to this, the public dancing facilities that were available to the working class had been restricted. Dancing lessons had been expensive. Holding dances also had involved the hiring of musicians and a public hall and the provision of refreshments, all of which had served to confine it, for the most part, to special occasions organized by large groups of people—weddings, anniversaries, births, and so on. Consequently, in the period up to the 1910s, the most enthusiastic dancers had been the upper and middle class. Styles in dancing, music, and dress had been focused on these groups, and the facilities available to them had far outnumbered those for the working class. Several factors allowed dancing to break away from its exclusively upperclass following and turn it into a chiefly lower-class activity. Changes to dance forms and dance music were vital to the new popularity of dancing across Europe, but there were significant social and economic reasons for the growth too. Of these developments, the most important was an increase in both real wages and leisure time for the working population. These changes were capitalized on by an increasingly sophisticated leisure industry.
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Dancing’s emergence and popularity just prior to the First World War reflected improvements in the social and economic well-being of the working and lower-middle classes across Europe. As part of a vastly expanded leisure industry whose growth was reliant on greater time and money being available, the dance hall’s growth depended on the improved spending power of the masses. Though still living precariously, many more working people across Europe were now in a position to start consuming a range of cheap leisure activities like dancing and the cinema. In Britain, for example, this gave rise to annual spending on leisure, estimated at between GBP 200 – 250 million during the 1920s and 1930s.3 In addition, changes to women’s position in society and new attitudes towards public behavior between men and women made dancing’s growth more likely. By no means transformed by their wartime experience, the position of lower-class women in European society after 1918 nevertheless gradually changed. Being able to attend public dances unchaperoned and being able to dance with strangers became increasingly acceptable. Indeed, dancing came to play an important role in female emancipation. As Sophie Jacotot argued for France, for example, following the First World War the female body acquired a new mobility.⁴ Clothing evolutions and the new movements to these dances (isolation of the different parts of the body; opening of the legs by the passage from the outside to the inside; the exploration of trembling, relaxed, twitching movements; and even bodily percussions in the case of the “black bottom”) were shaping new possibilities for women. In class and gender terms, dance halls opened up a whole new world of public pleasures, and thus of public visibility, to both the working class and to women. In addition to these wider social and economic contexts, of direct consequence to the popularity of dancing were the changes in musical and dancing styles imported from the United States just prior to, and during, the First World War. Between 1910 and 1920, dancing and dance music were transformed by the widespread popularity of revolutionary new styles of music and dance that had arrived from the United States—as first “ragtime” then “jazz”—and the numerous new social dances that developed alongside them, taking hold of and capturing the public imagination.⁵ Their spread by highly commercialized transatlantic companies was the product of a new phase of capitalism that saw the emergence of a global economy and culture, increasingly (though not wholly) guided by America. However, the global transfer routes for new music and dances were, by this stage, well established. The tango, for example, had spread across the Americas and thence to Europe in the early 1900s, initially by stage dancers who popularized the new steps in theatrical and cabaret venues and later by dance teachers who tried to standardize what they saw and teach it to
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willing pupils. Novelty was still the key, however. Ragtime and jazz—inspired by African-American musicians—marked an important break with the popular music of the nineteenth century, the latter which emphasized sequence and melody and required formal musical training. The new music lent itself to smaller groupings of amateur musicians. It emphasized syncopation and rhythm and was open to on-the-spot changes, harking back to older traditions of improvisation in African musical culture. The music sounded revolutionary to European ears. Similarly, the new dances—the cakewalk, bunny hug, turkey trot, and, most importantly, the foxtrot—overturned existing rules and altered practices. Utilizing a completely new set of body movements, the new dances were far freer and undermined older notions of “respectability.” For example, notable aspects of the African tradition in dancing, such as exaggerated hip and pelvis movements, can clearly be seen in dances like the turkey trot, which involved the man “trotting” towards his partner and flapping his arms in the manner of an aroused fowl while his partner did the same in retreat. There was now also considerable room for improvisation; the new dances allowed an unprecedented degree of self-expression for those who wanted to do so. Most significantly, however, they transformed social dance from sequence dances—where everyone performed the same steps—to dances deliberately formulated for couples. The dances involved much greater physical contact between partners—the bunny hug and the grizzly bear dances requiring partners to embrace. This was the beginning of the mass popularity of the partner dance. At a stroke, they turned the main focus of social dancing into a deliberate process of couple formation, one involving considerable bodily intimacy. Such a change had obvious appeal for many, though not all, as we shall see. Indeed, the huge appeal of these dances led to the emergence of a mass market for social dancing across Europe. By 1938 in Britain, for example, it was estimated that two million people went dancing each week, suggesting annual admissions near to 100 million.⁶ A vast dance hall industry sprung up to cater for such demand. Elegant and palatial dance halls, often called palais de danse, emerged in towns and cities across Europe. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain had around 400 – 500 permanent dance halls. In Berlin alone, there were around 900 dance venues by the later 1920s, some of them incredibly elaborate. For example, in 1927, the Residenz-Casino in Blumenstraße, one of the leading dance halls in Berlin, installed telephones at tables, which meant that guests could approach one another without having to leave their seats, followed in 1929 by a tube mail system via which guests could send orders for drinks, cigarettes, sweets, and lipsticks.⁷ In Rome, the famous dancing spot the Bal Tic Tac opened in 1921 with an interior designed by the leading futurist artist Giacomo Balla with vivid, clashing architectural lines in blue, red, yellow,
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and white. As one reporter remarked: “The very walls seems to dance […] they create a luminosity that looks like a carnival in the sky […] this inventiveness, together with the atmosphere of spontaneous joy that is totally suitable for the location, creates a perfect harmony out of the whole.”⁸ By 1924, there were a proliferation of night clubs and dance halls in Italy where one could dance the latest steps—the Tim Tum Bal, La Sala Umberto, L’Apollo, Il Salone Margherita, and Ruel e Calore in Rome; Mirador’s, the Ambassador’s Club, Sporting Club del Casino, Dancing Monte Merlo, Sala Volta, and Sala Orfeo in Milan; Rajola in Florence; Belloni, L’Olimpia, Verdi, and Giardino d’Italia in Genoa; and Lo Stabilmento Romano, Clubbino, Sala Gay, and Cinema Ambrosio in Turin.⁹ But these were not the only venues where dancing took place. Dancing became ubiquitous. There were an unprecedented number of public and private dance facilities, permanent and temporary, throughout Europe. Dancing was provided in restaurants, hotels, cafés, town halls, assembly rooms, and club rooms. Many large businesses provided their employees with ballrooms. Even church halls, swimming baths, and department stores laid on dancing. This proliferation of dancing venues can be seen, for example, in Britain, where estimates suggest that there were 2,000 – 3,000 places permanently licensed for dancing by the end of the 1930s. Thus far we have referred to dancing in a predominantly urban context, but there is considerable evidence to show that social dancing formed a key part of social life in even the most isolated rural areas too. In Finland, for example, one of the most agrarian countries in Europe (in the 1930s, over 70 percent of the population still lived in the countryside), modern social dancing was a common occurrence in rural areas. Tiina Mä nnistö -Funk noted how, throughout the Finnish countryside, young adults danced on specially constructed wooden floors, under the open sky, to music provided by cheap second-hand windup gramophones.¹⁰ Radio later widened the possibilities for rural dancing further still. In France, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands, rural communities were also provided with dance music by “dance organs”—elaborate mechanical organs designed to imitate a dance orchestra that toured rural areas as part of traveling fairs. Over 600 of such machines were produced by the manufacturer Mortier of Antwerp alone, sold mostly to operators in Belgium and the Netherlands. Dance floors and ballrooms, often in the form of elaborate marquis or “spiegeltents,” were part of the equipage of these mobile entertainments too, bringing colorful and comfortable dance facilities to the countryside. Elsewhere, fields, gardens, church halls, village halls, barns, and rural town squares were the more workaday settings for regular rural dances. Thus rural youths across Europe were able to access and share in the dance “craze” of their urban peers.
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Technology and shared dancing practices were helping to bridge the gap between urban and rural social lives. Inevitably, the freedom of expression and apparent spontaneity of the new social dances of the early twentieth century became the focus of intense interest. Dancing became a cultural arena over which various forces sought control for a variety of moral, artistic, and commercial reasons. One development in particular was of key importance in shaping dance trends: the creation of standardized ballroom steps by dance teachers and other dance professionals, in an attempt to lend order to the perceived “disorder” of the new social dances. The growth of social dancing during the 1920s had been accompanied by a rapid growth in the number of professional dancing instructors and associations. In Britain, via a series of informal conferences in the 1920s, groups such as the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing demanded action to improve the reputation and standards of dancing, leading a campaign against what they termed “objectionable dancing.” They did so for a variety of moral and practical reasons. Teachers sought to eliminate the “freak steps” that individuals added to the new social dances because different people dancing different steps to the same music caused practical problems on the dance floor. They also tried to remove the moral suspicion that now surrounded social dancing due to the proximity of dancers in couple dances. To do this, they decided that the basic steps of the foxtrot, one-step, and waltz should be standardized. They also dictated the correct way to hold a dancing partner, distancing the dancers as far as was practical and emphasizing precise movements and steps. As the 1920s progressed, dance teachers began to develop a distinct style of dancing, known as the “English style,” which eventually became associated exclusively with “ballroom dancing.” It was a style characterized by skill, elegance, and decorum. The English style was rapidly exported across Europe via the competitions of the World Championships for ballroom dancing, held annually in Paris from 1925 to 1939, as well as various other international ballroom dancing competitions held in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In addition, dance teachers across Europe adopted similar patterns of codification. In Germany, by 1929, there were some 14,000 dance teachers, and it was the Reichsverband zur Pflege des Gesellschaftstanzes (RPG) that first favored the English style, followed, after some internal disagreements, by the largest dance teachers association in Germany, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Tanzlehrerverband (ADTV) in 1931.¹¹ In the Netherlands, dance teachers developed a “Dutch style,” while in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) a state dancing curriculum based on the English style was gradually developed in the 1930s. There were limits to this, however, and it should be noted that in the USSR and some other European dictatorships (such as Italy and Germany) where we see the state trying to interfere with com-
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mercial social dancing and introducing steps that are promoted as national alternatives, none of these official steps caught on, and the biggest effect of state interference on social dancing was to push it to the private sphere. The vast expansion in opportunities for dancing throughout Europe meant that the dance hall, and dancing more generally, became a key point at which people were exposed to popular music. In the 1920s and 1930s, a “dance music culture” quickly developed across Europe that assumed great importance. The media of the gramophone, radio, and cinema combined with live performance at the dance hall to provide an unprecedented supply of this form of popular music. It was not uncommon for young people to come home from work, listen to dance bands on the gramophone, go out for an evening’s dancing, or watch a musical film at the cinema and then return late to a program of dance music on the radio. In particular, dancing provided a huge fillip to “live music,” partially compensating for the loss of employment opportunities suffered by musicians with the introduction of sound films around 1930. In virtually all venues for dancing at this time, musical accompaniment for dancing was provided by live musicians and dance bands and thus became a very important part of the music profession across Europe. In 1930, for example, Melody Maker estimated that there were about 100,000 performers of dance music in Britain, many of them semiprofessional.¹² As the average dance band consisted of between eight and five musicians, this means that there were approximately 12,500 to 20,000 dance bands operating throughout the country in 1930. The range of work in which such dance bands were engaged offers a fascinating insight into the ubiquity of live dance music in everyday life at this time. In 1929, out of 51 top provincial and London professional dance bands listed in the Melody Maker’s “Who’s Where” section, 33 percent were performing in dance halls, 27 percent were appearing in night clubs and restaurants, 18 percent in hotels, 14 percent in theaters and vaudeville, and 8 percent elsewhere.¹³ In addition, there were hundreds of “gigs”—temporary engagements such as dances organized by factories, offices, and various social and political clubs. In fact, the popularity of dance bands and their music was sufficiently great to encourage hundreds of enthusiastic amateurs to play the music for themselves, and many turned this hobby into a source of income. Dance bands lent themselves to small groupings that were easy to assemble from friends and within a small locality. A host of subindustries also sprung up to support this interest, with selftutor books designed to give amateurs a musical grounding in their chosen instrument. The necessity for advanced musical knowledge was reduced further by the availability of ready-made arrangements from the music publishers, who arranged their latest numbers especially for dance bands, complete with or-
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chestrations for each instrumentalist. For a time, many music publishers, who were keen to have their songs publicized, gave these orchestrations away free to dance bands.¹⁴ In addition, the popular music industry developed intimate links with the new dance culture via the new mass media of the gramophone, radio, and cinema. Radio, for example, was an important impetus to dancing in the 1920s and 1930s. Radio’s growth in interwar Europe was rapid, and it did much to sponsor the development of dance music. The first dance music programs were often live broadcasts from top hotels and restaurants in Europe’s capital cities. In Germany, for example, regular broadcasts were made during the 1920s from Berlin’s Eden Hotel, the roof garden of the Café Berlin, the Femina-Palast ballroom, and other leading nightspots. As early as 1925, 12 percent of daily broadcasts on Unione Radiofonica Italiana were of dance music, and in 1929, an entire station dedicated to dance music was launched in Milan, broadcasting at least four hours every day.¹⁵ As the hours dedicated to broadcasting dance music grew, national broadcasters also created their own resident dance bands to promote dance music. In Britain, the Dance Orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was formed in 1928 with Jack Payne as its musical director, replaced in 1932 by Henry Hall. In Germany, Joseph Goebbels ordered the creation of a “model dance orchestra”—the Golden Seven—which began broadcasting on Berlin’s Deutschlandsender in December 1934.¹⁶ Even the Soviet Union had its own national dance band, the State Jazz Orchestra of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, formed in the mid-1930s. By this time, radio broadcasters across Europe were providing a diet of dance music that proved incredibly popular. In regular late-afternoon and late-night slots, programs were broadcast every day of the week but Sunday. Radio was thus central to the ubiquitous presence of dance music in Europe from the interwar period onwards. In addition to offering the opportunity to hear the latest dance tunes, radio provided the chance for dancing at home. Rolling up the carpet and taking to the dance floor at home became a popular domestic leisure pursuit. Formal dance lessons via the radio also emerged later in the period in various European countries, with illustrations and supplementary instruction often printed in the numerous radio magazines that sprung up to cater for radio listeners. In Germany, for example, Walter Carlos became the first radio dance instructor in 1928, and in Britain, it was Victor Silvester in 1937, both popular with young, cosmopolitan “moderns” who liked the novelty of using new technology to follow a fashionable pastime. The ground for radio had been prepared by the gramophone, which was influential in shaping dancing too. For example, the German gramophone industry, led by its two largest companies Deutsche Grammophon and Carl Lindström, was joined by companies with strong international links in the 1920s—Electrola
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in 1925 (a subsidiary of His Master’s Voice in the UK and the Victor Talking Machine Company in the USA) and Ultraphon in 1929. These global connections had obvious repercussions for the spread of foreign dance tunes. Such companies had mass reach too. By 1929 in Germany, 30 million records were sold.¹⁷ In 1930 in Britain, sales were even more impressive. There were over three times as many gramophones sold (778,492) as the number of houses built that year (200,900), and there was more than one record sold for every single person in Britain (60 million records sold and a population of 45,685,000).¹⁸ As with radio, the gramophone promoted interest in dance music and offered the opportunity to practice dance steps at home. The gramophone was used frequently for domestic parties and home entertainment. In addition, portable gramophones allowed dancing to take place on picnics and group outings. For day-trippers and holiday-makers, dance music could be taken with them wherever and whenever they wanted.¹⁹ Moreover, the gramophone, which provided the occasion for dances, also helped to learn dance steps. For instance, record companies produced special records to aid dancers and provide instruction. Some were recordings of dance teachers reading out instructions, referring to specially produced accompanying dance manuals, followed by snatches of music with the tempo marked out strongly by a drum, during which record owners were supposed to practice their steps. In addition, the record industry, encouraged by the leading dance teachers, issued more straightforward musical records that had been specially recorded at the “official” tempo necessary for dancing to. Film was also utilized to instruct people how to dance, with the obvious benefits that the medium could bring. Famous dance teachers lined up to offer guidance. In Britain, Santos Casani started giving dance steps from 1927 in the weekly film magazine Eve’s Film Review. ²⁰ These films briefly showed dances in full formation and then took each of the fundamental steps and filmed them, showing the dancer’s feet from underneath a glass floor, in slow motion.²¹ As the Dancing Times remarked: “Properly executed ballroom dances, carefully filmed and explained in detail, can show a vast public a high standard of dancing at which to aim […] as a means of showing the multitude how graceful ballroom dancing is when correctly danced, the cinema is unsurpassed.”²² Moreover, the arrival of sound in the cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s resulted in a preponderance of film musicals that cashed in on the popularity of dancing and the newly burgeoning music industry to exploit the new technology to its best effect. Such films made up a big share of film production in Europe, and they were often among the most popular films. They provided yet another boost to the interest in dancing and were important in setting dancing fashions and trends among the mass dancing public. In the Soviet Union, for example, musical comedy films like Tip-Top-Izobretatel’ (Top of the Range Inventor, 1930), Vesyolye rebyata
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(Happy Guys, 1934), Volga-Volga (1938), and Muzvkal’nava istoriva (Musical Tale, 1940) popularized new steps. Even though such films were not meant to be instructional, dances in the USSR were often held straight after film screenings and in the same venues, which made the link even stronger. With social dancing being so central to social and cultural life across early to mid-twentieth-century Europe, it began to perform a number of important social functions for mainstream society on a scale not seen before. The grandest public dance halls in Europe’s cities were “people’s palaces,” offering affordable luxury for the masses. Extravagant, colorful interiors combined with expensive sprung dance floors, ambient lighting, and first-rate music to provide a setting for popular dancing that was unmatched. Cafés, smartly dressed attendants, well-equipped dressing rooms, and a host of other facilities gave a level of service that was unparalleled. All added to the escapism of commercial dance halls, as patrons sought refuge from humdrum routine and the world outside. As we have already hinted at above, dancing was particularly important in the lives of young unmarried women and girls. The alliance of elder and younger sisters, together with groups of friends who went dancing, provided a controlled means of independence for girls, giving them support while being largely unsupervised by adults. Socializing with their own sex was a vital part of a girl’s development. Dancing also provided one of the most important means of physical exercise for women. Many women working in factories, shops, or as typists were required to stand or sit for long periods of time throughout the day. For these girls, there was an urgent need for active recreation, which was no longer available to them in the form of school games and physical drills. Not only did dancing offer exercise, it also allowed expression. The dance hall provided an arena where young women could explore their sexuality and develop an assertiveness seldom found outside. In the dance hall, women not only copied the hairstyles and makeup of Hollywood stars, but also imitated their behavior too. Learning how to kiss or how to behave with men might be learned from the films, but in the dance hall, women could actually try out these techniques. Indeed, perhaps the most important social function of the dance hall was the opportunities it afforded to meet members of the opposite sex. Indeed, the dance hall made the preliminary introductions between the sexes easier, offering a set of prescribed conventions on the choosing of dancing partners and permitting interaction between strangers. With a touch on the elbow, a nod or glance from across the room, a dancing partner could be procured for the dance. The atmosphere of the dance hall, with its soft lighting, partner dancing, and enticing music, also provided the perfect backdrop for romantic and sexual activity. Intimacy was more frequent and more open than in most other public places. Kissing and holding hands were common. For this reason, dancing and dance halls became
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a site of great importance in introducing heterosexual couples to their future partners—millions of married couples across Europe first met their future spouses while dancing. For those outside this mainstream culture, however, social dancing had yet to offer them such opportunities. As we shall see, that had to wait until after the 1950s. Even before the 1950s, however, the freedom of couples to benefit from the dancing in the ways described above was very much subject to the impact of religion or conservative attitudes. Catholic countries such as Ireland and Italy were especially draconian in their attitudes towards women dancing. In Ireland, priests monitored public dances, and the Public Dance Hall Act (1935), which was sponsored by the Catholic Church and conservative organizations such as the Gaelic League, brought in tough restrictions on the conduct and licensing of dancing as part of a moral backlash against the activity. Similarly, in gender equality terms, France was particularly backward in the 1920s and 1930s, with dancing caught up in wider debates about pronatalism and the sanctity of sex in marriage. While Protestant countries were generally more lenient, conservative opinion could also bring considerable pressure to bear on the freedom of women to dance there too, especially in rural communities. In Sweden during the 1930s, for example, conservative opinion condemned the dansbaneeländet (dance hall misery) as responsible for drunkenness and immorality among the young and led to a government investigation into the matter.²³
2 The Transformation from Couple to Solo and Communal Dancing since the 1960s Despite such moral condemnations, after the Second World War the popularity of social dancing across Europe soared to new heights, and it is true to say that the “golden age” of the dance hall was the 1950s. Buoyed up by an era of full employment and rising prosperity, dancing became Europe’s preeminent leisure activity. Despite appearing entrenched in urban European social and cultural life, the dance hall and couple dancing disappeared with surprising speed. By the end of the 1960s, superseded by nightclubs, and later discos, the palais was out of date, and solo dancing had triumphed over couple dancing. A cultural and social phenomenon that had survived for around four decades fell out of favor. Why was this so? There were a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most important was the longterm economic environment. Dancing “at the palais” was the victim of longterm economic security among the working class and the subsequent rise of con-
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sumerism. With full employment and welfare states lifting people out of poverty and giving them increasing affluence, working-class people started to move away from traditional leisure forms. There were important changes to popular music and dancing styles that also caused dance halls to decline. The 1950s saw the triumph of the solo artist and the “small group” over dance bands and music for dancing. The gradual emergence of a pop industry focused on selling music for teenagers, or for listeners, rather than dancers, meant that “dance music” became increasingly seen as out of date.²⁴ Indeed, music and dance tastes became much more stratified along age lines. Ballroom dancing was increasingly regarded as “old fashioned,” and dance halls suffered as a result. Of particular importance for the decline of the dance hall, there was a move by the mid-1960s towards solo dancing, the “twist” being an early success throughout Europe. These dances were not formulated for couples. Indeed, the attraction of these dances was that they allowed dancers a very large degree of individual freedom. Freedom of expression, by now a popular concept in political and cultural circles, became the new driving force behind dances. In tune with the newly liberated times, dancers could move about the dance floor, interacting with various “partners,” or just “do their own thing,” rather than stay with one dancing partner for the duration of a dance. If younger dancers wished to express themselves more freely and openly, they also had a wide range of other venues where they could do this away from the dance hall. The liberalization of copyright/royalty laws allowing greater public performance of records was one reason for this change, underpinned by a huge growth in the recording industry. Dance organizers also favored the use of cheaper recorded music over more expensive live musicians. This increased the number of venues where young people could go and dance. Moreover, young people especially wanted to hear the music of their favorite groups rather than “pale” local imitations of them at their local dance hall. The wider availability of jukeboxes meant that those wishing to dance needed only a small venue in which to dance solo together, rather than a palatial hall with live orchestra.²⁵ In such venues, the young also had total control over what was being played and when. Finally, a change in social mores was also behind the decline of the dance hall and couple dancing. As we have seen, one of the chief social functions of the dance hall had been the opportunity that it provided for members of the opposite sex to meet. Carl Heimann, director of Britain’s biggest dance hall chain Mecca, prophetically noted in 1960, when asked if his business would last: “As long as our dance halls are the only places where nice young girls can meet nice young men without an introduction.”²⁶ Increasingly, they were not. By the mid-1960s, many barriers to interaction between the sexes had been broken down. This, together with changing attitudes towards sexuality and relation-
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ships between men and women, meant that the role of the dance hall as a site for introductions had been superseded. The changing position of women in European society also had an impact on dancing in the traditional dance hall style. Many younger women were no longer prepared to conform to a pastime that utilized a set of rules on introductions little altered since the 1920s. What had seemed groundbreaking and modern then was, by the 1960s, anachronistic to many women. They no longer wished to wait to be asked to dance; they wished to dance when they wanted, how they wanted, and with whom they wanted. By the end of the 1960s, the urban dance hall had thus ceased to be the prime venue for dancing. It was replaced by dance clubs and discos; though for a time in the 1970s, in some European countries (notably Britain), the rise of rock had actually meant declining opportunities to dance, as live pop music moved from club to concert hall and as the recording industry switched promotional attention from singles to albums. There was now an ideological divide between dancing and listening to music. However, disco firmly restored the link between music and dancing. Dancing flourished again. “Discos” had first emerged in Europe in the course of the 1950s as venues where records were played to be listened to and danced to in the absence of live music. The word disco was an abbreviation of the French term discotheque, where such venues had developed first during the Second World War in response to a shortage of musicians and the occupying German’s banning of jazz and swing music on racial grounds. Following the war, Whisky à Gogo was the first new discotheque to open, doing so in Paris in 1947. The first discotheque in Germany was the Scotch Club in Aachen, which opened in 1959, by which time several venues had also opened in Soho, London, such as Les Enfants Terribles in Dean Street. Such venues spread in number in the 1960s, and by the end of the 1970s, virtually every major European city and most provincial ones too had a thriving disco scene. Among the most famous venues was Blow Up in Munich, which had first opened in 1967 and rapidly gained an international reputation. In Italy, the proliferation was particularly strong, with Piper opening in Rome in 1965, Mach 2 in Florence in 1967, and Bang Bang in Milan in 1968, all of which utilized radical architectural styles as part of their attraction. By the 1970s, the term disco was used in two main ways: to describe a type of musical entertainment—dancing to records played by a disc jockey (DJ)—and the places—discotheques, where it took place—and to describe a particular way of dancing to a distinctive sound. Records rather than live music now became central to dancing, though they were not usually played “straight” to dancers as they had been recorded. Dancing and musical experiences were crafted by the DJ. The DJ worked to create a distinctive musical experience tailored to the dancers at each venue. Indeed, initially the use of twin turntables had been motivated
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by the desire to provide “seamless” musical accompaniment to dancing, to help get over the limitations of the three minutes of music contained on a normal 7inch disc by switching from one record to another without gaps. DJs became much more creative however, remixing (editing) songs and adding in new sound effects, new percussion breaks, and special effects to create unique sounds. The popularity of disco was to a great extent technology driven, as key to its success was the development of new amplification and mixing equipment. Despite ultimately developing a mainstream audience, disco began as an underground scene, associated with drug taking, hedonism, and promiscuity. Significantly, early disco also provided a safe space for the nonconformist performance of gender and sexuality. The gay community in particular acted as an avant-garde in spreading the popularity of disco and also took to it and made it their own. In Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, and London, thriving gay disco scenes emerged. Why was disco so appealing for gay people? There are a number of reasons why disco became so popular among gay men. Significantly, the demise of couple dancing, which required heterosexual partner forming, made it much easier for homosexuals to engage in the new form of dancing without having to adopt a role they were uncomfortable with. Disco made it easier for homosexuals to engage in dancing on their own terms, dancing with whoever they preferred and not having to create a “substitute” heterosexual coupling. Disco dancing was about individuals “getting down” on their own and coming together in less formal and restraining ways than ballroom. Furthermore, door staff were keen to waive gay men through because their expressivity often energized the dance floor. Individualism flourished as dancers tried out their own steps and moves, creating distinctive dancing personalities. However, the “partner” aspect of dancing had not entirely disappeared, as now the “crowd” became potential “partners”—moving in and around the crowd altered and expanded the variety of different partnerships. This shift was central to the role that dancing was to play in creating a sense of collective gay identity. As Tim Lawrence put it: “The experience of dancing with scores of other dancers helped generate the notion of the dancing ‘crowd’ as a unified and powerful organism. […] The idea of dancing with a partner didn’t so much implode as expand.”²⁷ Furthermore, it has been argued, gay men made ideal patrons for discos because a lack of family commitments allowed them relatively more time and money to spend on leisure than others. More importantly, in societies where they were repressed, they were loyal to venues that welcomed them and allowed them to be themselves. Discos thus became essential in the expression of a gay identity.
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Having said that, by the late 1970s, major record labels had commodified and packaged disco for mass consumption, and it had begun to lose its close association with underground subcultures. Clearly, the move to dancing and to recorded music had increased the potential for the music industry to shape dance culture in Europe. Indeed, the mainstream commercial success of disco in the 1970s was boosted by several distinct global music industry influences. The first was radio—radio playing disco was huge as programmers realized the newfound popularity of disco music. The second was a shift in focus from the record industry, which, cashing in on the huge popularity of George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby and Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye in 1974, rushed into disco sales promotion. Finally, the cinema provided a substantial fillip to disco when the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever became a huge hit in cinemas throughout Europe. Indeed, disco continued evolving within the broad European mainstream pop music scene, building on the spread of French-Italian dominated Europop hits —such as Quando, Quando, Quando (1962) and Nel blu dipinto di blu (Volare, 1958) in the 1950s and 1960s—which had reached a wide European market via the French Scopitone and Italian Cinebox jukebox systems and television too. Building on this, a discernible “Euro disco” music developed, with acts such as ABBA from Sweden, Luv’ from the Netherlands, and Boney M., a group of four West Indian singers and dancers masterminded by West German record producer Frank Farian. In France, there was also Dalida, and in Italy Raffaella Carra was the most successful disco act. These links between the pop music industry and the dance scene were particularly strong in West Germany. As Klaus Nathaus has argued, the use of recorded music in dance places happened relatively early in West Germany due to the lack of resistance from musicians’ unions.²⁸ Also, while rock ruled in Britain in the 1960s, German rock bands had a hard time in the face of Anglo-American imports, and that was one reason why German music publishers and record producers turned to discotheques. Discos became central to the West German music business—which saw them as places where new songs could be plugged and where new talent could be scouted (the German DJ association hosted an annual event where talent like Peter Maffay could present itself to artists and repertoire [A&R] people from the recording industry) and tested in front of an audience (the DJs association also organized a touring circuit). This model served as a template for the ZDF-Hitparade, the most important platform for new German pop music on German TV, aired from 1969. Television as a source of dance hits became widespread throughout Europe. In part, due to its “over” commercialization, disco as a music genre began to fade in popularity at the start of the 1980s, when a new club scene started to emerge throughout Europe. Those with an interest in the “alternative”—musical-
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ly and sartorially—sought, and were increasingly provided with, club venues with a more eclectic programming policy than mainstream discos and a more enlightened door policy. Famous examples in England included the Haçienda in Manchester, located, like many others, in one of the numerous disused buildings in an increasingly postindustrial urban landscape of the 1980s. Raves first emerged out of the acid house scene that spread in places like the Haçienda, having come first from similar scenes in Chicago, USA. Like disco, rave culture was based on dance music (by now, electronic dance music) played by DJs on powerful sound systems, and was often accompanied by lasers and other light shows. Furthermore, new technology was an important impetus to the spread of house music and raves, allowing a return to previous eras’ predominance of do-it-yourself dance music. In particular, the development of digital recording in the early 1980s allowed not just new kinds of sound manipulation, but also the introduction of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) equipment, which meant that studio-quality recording could take place more or less anywhere. Hundreds of clubbers were inspired to make the music themselves, democratizing dance music production and, in its earliest stages, weakening the grip of the music industry. Raves also allowed dancing to break out of conventional dance venues, often utilizing, usually illegally, warehouses, abandoned industrial sites, aircraft hangars, and open field sites in the countryside. Details of raves were kept secret until the last moment, being released via the newly emerging technology of mobile phones and later the internet. This, together with a strong link with illegal drug taking (which will be explored below), gave rave a kudos and thrill that kept it underground and attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies across Europe. Indeed, one notable feature of raves was that dancers were prepared to travel quite considerable distances to attend. Up until the 1960s, most people’s dancing was local—it took place in the nearest major dancing venues, with few people traveling further afield to hit the dance floor. By the 1970s, with greater car ownership and improved public transport, people began to venture further in order to dance to the music they loved. A good example of this, in Britain, was the popularity of “Northern Soul,” which, as the name suggests, grew up in the north of England, most famously at the Wigan Casino, a longstanding dance venue in industrial Lancashire. Fans of the music traveled from London and the south, as well as Scotland and throughout the north, to towns and venues they would have known little about before reading about them in the music and mainstream press. Travel and dance became firmly linked. Rave took this to another level, with people now willing to cross national boundaries in order to attend if necessary. This was made possible with a rapid opening up of travel opportunities and in particular the boom in cheap flights and cheap package holidays. Most
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notably, the Spanish Balearic island of Ibiza developed into one of Europe’s most significant dance centers during the 1980s and 1990s. It retained this position for the rest of the twentieth century. Ibiza had started to become a venue for alternative culture in the 1960s when it attracted a mix of hippies and bohemians from across Europe and the rest of the world. At first limited to small numbers of privileged travelers, numbers of tourists to the island started to grow quickly after an international airport was built in 1967, and by the early 1980s, a million tourists were visiting each year. By this time there were several thriving scenes in Ibiza where dance music was central. Most notably, the groundbreaking clubs Amnesia, Pacha, and Club Rafael (later renamed Ku) had grown into large, extravagant venues decorated in ornate Moorish fantasy styles with fountains, balconies, and plush cushioned areas. These clubs were exclusive, catering for socialites and celebrities and made more interesting by the often-flamboyant gay clubbers who became a key part of their decadent reputation and appeal. Such exclusivity meant that stars such as Freddie Mercury, George Michael, and Stevie Wonder were regular partygoers in Ibiza, being free at theses stages from the prying eyes of the press. In addition to this more exclusive scene, dance music thrived in the many clubs and bars of resorts such as San Antonio that catered to the large and growing package holiday market. Venues such as Star Club, Tropicana Bar, Nightlife, and Project became particularly popular with young holidaymakers from the UK, Germany, France, and Italy as well as a growing band of young drifters from across Europe bored with the mundane life of some its bleaker urban centers. By 2000, some two million tourists visited the island every year. Inevitably, further commercialization of raves was to follow, driven by a combination of legal/law enforcement problems (most raves were illegal) and recognition of the huge amounts of money to be made from such events. From the mid-1990s, “legitimate” raves began to spring up—circuits of enormous “mega raves” using giant aircraft hangars, huge circus tents, and so on while gaining official permission with promises to the authorities to forbid the use of illegal substances. Huge numbers of dancers could be involved, from 5,000 to 25,000 at the most successful. On the back of these, club-based raves also grew in popularity, with venues such as Ministry of Sound, in London, and Cream, in Liverpool, being two particularly successful examples from England that were to become international successes. Raves had become a lucrative proposition. Indeed, Ministry of Sound, for example, had become a significant leisure business by 1998. Ministry of Sound ran a record label, an internationally franchised radio show, a magazine, an internet site, a shop, a DJ agency, a tour team (which organized 150 events around the world that year), a clothing merchandising company, and a sponsorship team (putting together brands and clubs). In 1996/97,
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the company’s turnover was GBP 20 million—3.5 million from the club, 12.5 million from the label, and four million from tours, media, merchandising, and sponsorship. By the end of the decade, Ministry of Sound Danceclub Ltd was reporting an annual pretax profit of GBP 4.1 million.²⁹ As such businesses grew, they developed an increasingly commercialized international “festival” culture that became central to dance across Europe. For example, Cream organized its first outdoor event in Britain in 1998, launching Creamfield into the UK festival market, and over the next decade, it sold Creamfield events globally. There were Creamfield festivals in Spain, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, Russia, Chile, Brazil, Australia, and Argentina. Similarly, the Love Parade format was also successfully exported around the world. Love Parade started in West Berlin in 1989 with the political objective of bringing people together through music. At its height, it attracted 1.4 million people to its annual German event, before being licensed to allow similar events across Europe and in Australia, Israel, South Africa, Mexico, and Venezuela, among other venues. Raves also took the links between dancing and drugs to new heights. Drug taking and dancing had a long history. In nightclubs in the 1920s and 1930s, musicians and dancers were known to take drugs, and there were numerous headlines throughout Europe concerning “flappers” who died from overdoses of cocaine and other drugs secured while dancing. Marijuana was also known to circulate in some dance halls throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This drug culture was very limited however, remaining peripheral to the dancing experience and taken up by only a handful at the margins of society. It was not until disco and the “all-nighters” of the 1960s that drug taking and dancing became more intimately linked and more widespread. As the name suggests, “all-nighters” involved dancing for hours on end nonstop. Whereas DJs had previously engineered “breaks” in the music to allow a drifting to the bar, now there was a desire not to interrupt the feel and mood of the dancefloor at all. Sessions would run without discernible breaks. Clearly the energy needed to maintain this kind of pace necessitated the taking of stimulants, and the use of amphetamines such as speed became widespread. Disco acerbated this link, at least in its earlier “underground” phase, when LSD and marijuana were particularly popular. New drugs such as ecstasy emerged alongside rave culture and were to become inextricably linked with it. Ecstasy was the “happy drug,” it reduced inhibitions and caused a surge of euphoria and a greater sense of empathy with those in the crowds. In part, because the widespread use of drugs caused dancers to open up and interact with people, raves, and house music in particular, brought a new level of interaction between dancers and music makers. While it is true that even during the golden age of partner dancing and the dance hall from the 1930s to 1960s,
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there was to some extent a two-way process between the bandstand and the dancefloor, it was largely the musicians (and dance teachers) who set the agenda for an evening’s dancing. The DJs of disco’s 1970s heyday also paid attention to the dancers in front of them, yet they were predominantly playing the chief creative role in the production of the evening’s entertainment. In rave, however, dance and music reached a new level of symbiosis. Crucial to understanding this symbiosis is the notion of “the vibe.” As Sally Sommer put it, “the vibe is an active communal force, a feeling, a rhythm created by the mix of dancers, the balance of loud music, the effects of darkness and light and physical/psychic energy. Everything interlocks to produce a powerful sense of liberation. The vibe is an active, exhilarating feeling of ‘now-ness’ that everything is coming together, that a good party is in the making.” Central in the creation of the vibe were improvisational exchanges between DJ and dancer or between dancers, realized through the actions of dancing. The DJ had to be attuned to the mood of the dancers and to be able to respond accordingly. DJ Kai Fikentscher explained, “[t]he response from the dance floor, in the form of the sum of individual responses, is continually evaluated by a DJ who, for hours on end, is involved in structuring his or her musical program.” House, as he explains, involved “the positioning of mediated music at the heart of a complex whole in which music and dance, performance and reception, production and consumption are inextricably intertwined, and simultaneously, and often spontaneously, enacted.”³⁰ These developments also had the potential to alter other central facets of the dancing experience too. Indeed, the longstanding relationship between dancing and mating was, arguably, also disrupted with the arrival of rave. David Walsh and Tim Lawrence disagree over the extent to which disco fulfilled dancing’s traditional social function as a place to make romantic sexual encounters. Walsh argues that despite the ending of couple formation, disco was still central to meeting for sexual and romantic encounters. Lawrence, however, suggests that in fact disco allowed dancing to move “beyond the hustle,” seeing the dancefloor “not as a site of foreplay […] but of spiritual communion where sensation was not confined to the genitals but materialized in every new touch, sound, sight and smell.”³¹ However, it seems undeniable that the link between disco dancing and sex was a topos, established by music, fashion, and the media, and it framed the dance floor encounter as an opportunity to find a sex partner as much as couple dancing was regarded as a means to find a marriage partner. So what about raves, did they finally sever the link between dancing and sex? Sommer argued that the drug-fueled rave culture was predominantly about “hard dancing that engages the body and mind” providing a “total bodily sensuality” where sex was not the ultimate aim. Certainly, the use of energy-enhancing drugs encouraged people to “lose themselves” in the
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dancing. The development of amplified sound technology was also critical to this total body experience. The introduction of tweeter arrays (clusters of small loudspeakers, which emit high-end frequencies) and bass reinforcements (additional sets of subwoofers) meant that dancers heard and experienced music throughout their entire bodies, not just their ears. Longer and longer sets meant that the ritual of coming and going onto the dance floor was reduced and with it the opportunities to find or change partners. For the sizeable numbers who took inhibition reducing drugs such as ecstasy, however, the feeling of being “loved up” inevitably led to sexual and romantic encounters on the dance floor. In this respect, one of dancing’s most central social functions had, even at the end of the twentieth century, been retained.
Conclusion Despite the numerous changes to music styles, the shift from couple to solo and communal dancing, and, moreover, huge social and political changes, dancing’s key social functions remained relatively unchanged at the end of the twentieth century. For millions of dancers across Europe, dancing still allowed them to “find themselves” or to “lose themselves,” and to find love and/or sex. The key to maintaining these important social functions was the adaptability of social dancing. Dancing proved able to reflect and help shape the key social and cultural changes of European societies. It was adept at remaining relevant in the face of changes to class, gender, sexuality, and race. Furthermore, social dancing flourished as a business in the face of huge shifts in the music and entertainment business and in the urban landscape in which much of this dancing took place. Dancing’s dependency on communal or public spaces made this increasingly difficult. The availability and the regulation of spaces is key to the understanding of social dancing and its changes; the building of “people’s palaces,” their decline and repurposing in the 1960s, the abandonment of large-scale properties as a consequence of deindustrialization (taken over by ravers), the rise of low-cost flying, and probably the extortionate rents of inner-city real estate all confirm the point that social dancing adapted to spatial conditions. Whether or not it continues to survive in large part depends on whether it continues to adapt in such ways in the future.
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Notes Dundee Evening Telegraph, 7 January 1919, 7. Anna Harwell Celenza, Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 48. Marko Heinrich and Christian Paysan, Berlin 1920 – 1950: Sounds of an Era (Hamburg: earBooks, 2016), 12. Sophie Jacotot, Danser à Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres: Lieux, practiques et imaginaires des danses de société des Amériques (1919 – 1939) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2013). As has been well documented, ragtime, jazz, and the associated dances evolved from America’s South and Midwest, part of the legacy of slavery. Forced into “juke joints” and “honky tonks,” black Americans evolved unique musical and dancing styles incorporating African and white European traditions. See for example, Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Paul Holt, Daily Express, 16 November 1938, 16. See Klaus Nathaus, “Coordinating for Love: Establishing Conventions of Romantic Couple Dancing in Interwar Germany,” in Social Worlds of Dancing: Practices, Transfers and Infrastructures of Dancing between the World Wars, ed. Klaus Nathaus and James Nott (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2021). Cited in Harwell Celenza, Jazz Italian Style, 54. Ibid., 61. Tiina Mä nnistö -Funk, “‘They Played it on Saturday Nights in a Barn’: Gramophone Practices and Self-Made Modernity in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s,” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 1, no. 2 (2013): 101– 127. Christian Schär, Der Schlager und seine Tänze im Deutschland der 20er Jahre: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte zum Wandel in der Musik- und Tanzkultur während der Weimarer Republik (Zürich: Chronos, 1991). Melody Maker, July 1930, 581. See “Who’s Where,” in Melody Maker, November 1929. For more information on the growth of semi-professional dance bands, see James Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 127– 146. Harwell Celenza, Jazz Italian Style, 81, 91. Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 48. Pekka Gronow and Ilpo Saunio, An International History of the Recording Industry (London: Cassell, 1998), 39. Nott, Music, 1. See ibid., 33 – 55. Dancing Times, April 1930, 43. Dancing Times, December 1927, 349. Ibid. Olle Edström, “A Very Swedish Phenomenon,” in Made In Sweden: Studies in Popular Music, ed. Alf Björnberg and Thomas Bossius (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16. The Times, 6 November 1958, 7.
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Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 50. Daily Mail, 25 April 1960, 2. Tim Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle: Seventies Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 202. Klaus Nathaus, “‘Moderne Tanzmusik’ für die Mitte der Gesellschaft: Diskotheken und DiskJockeys in Deutschland, 1960 – 1978,” in Popgeschichte. Vol. 2: Fallstudien einer Zeitgeschichte des Populären, ed. Jürgen Danyel, Alexa Geisthövel, and Bodo Mrozek (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), 155 – 176. Kai Fikentscher, “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York City (2000), 79 – 80, cited in Sally R. Sommer, “‘C’mon to My House’: Underground House Dancing,” in Malnig, Ballroom, Boogie, 287. Lawrence, “Beyond the Hustle,” 204; David Walsh, “‘Saturday Night Fever’: An Ethnography of Disco Dancing,” in Dance, Gender and Culture, ed. Helen Thomas (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 112– 118.
Bibliography Brennan, Matt, Simon Frith, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain, Vol. I: 1950 – 1967: From Dance Hall to the 100 Club. London: Routledge, 2016. Brennan, Matt, Simon Frith, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain, Vol. II: 1968 – 1984: From Hyde Park to the Hacienda. London: Routledge, 2019. Celenza, Anna Harwell. Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Edström, Olle. “A Very Swedish Phenomenon.” In Made In Sweden: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Alf Björnberg and Thomas Bossius, 15 – 24. New York: Routledge, 2017. Garratt, Sheryl, Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture. London: Headline, 1998. Gronow, Pekka, and Ilpo Saunio. An International History of the Recording Industry. London: Cassell, 1998. Heinrich, Marko, and Christian Paysan. Berlin 1920 – 1950: Sounds of an Era. Hamburg: earBooks, 2016. Horn, Adrian. Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Jacotot, Sophie. Danser à Paris dans l’entre-deux-guerres: Lieux, practiques et imaginaires des danses de société des Amériques (1919 – 1939). Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2013. Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Lawrence, Tim. “Beyond the Hustle: Seventies Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer.” In Malnig, Ballroom, Boogie, 199 – 214. Malnig, Julie, ed. Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
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Mä nnistö -Funk, Tiina. “‘They Played it on Saturday Nights in a Barn’: Gramophone Practices and Self-Made Modernity in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s.” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 1, no. 2 (2013): 101 – 127. Nathaus, Klaus. “‘Moderne Tanzmusik’ für die Mitte der Gesellschaft: Diskotheken und Disk-Jockeys in Deutschland, 1960 – 1978.” In Popgeschichte. Vol. 2: Fallstudien einer Zeitgeschichte des Populären, edited by Jürgen Danyel, Alexa Geisthövel, and Bodo Mrozek, 155 – 176. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Nott, James. Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918 – 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Nott, James. Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ogren, Kathy J. The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Phillips, Dom. Superstar DJs Here We Go! London: Ebury Press, 2009. Schär, Christian. Der Schlager und seine Tänze im Deutschland der 20er Jahre: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte zum Wandel in der Musik- und Tanzkultur während der Weimarer Republik. Zürich: Chronos, 1991. Thomas, Helen, ed. Dance, Gender and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993. Walsh, David. “‘Saturday Night Fever’: An Ethnography of Disco Dancing.” In Thomas, Dance, Gender and Culture, 112 – 118.
Further Reading Fikentscher, Kai. ‘You Better Work!’ Underground Dance Music in New York City. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Malbon, Ben. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge, 1999.
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13 Extending the Sonic Bubble: Solitary Listening as a Technology of the Self It is an extremely pleasant and varied occupation […] You may think that it would set one’s nerves on edge, all this noise from a gramophone from morning to evening. Dear me, you would be completely mistaken—this is no noise, this is music! There is one thing that you clearly did not consider: when you find yourself in a joyless mood and everything seems dark, then you just put on a jazz or foxtrot disc and set the machine going. Does anyone think, then, that one can be gloomy and boring! And, perchance, where the joy of life seems all but too much, one fine day, with the sun beaming down out over the highway, yes, then one can drive away with a sorrowful march. In such a way, one’s mood regulates itself amongst the gramophones! Indeed, wasn’t she sitting there with the phones to her ears, deaf and absent to everything. […] Then, just as he appears, she looks up, raises her hand to show she doesn’t want to be disturbed, shouting that it is a wonderful organ concerto.
Two quotations set the stage for this chapter, both taken from Swedish weekly journals of the 1920s. The first, from an article in Charme, Den moderna damtidningen (The Modern Ladies’ Journal), cites a young saleswoman in a gramophone store describing how gramophone playing can function as a practice of individual mood regulation. The second, from a short story in Hemma: Tidning för hem och hushåll (Home: Journal for Home and Household), describes a solitary listening situation in which a middle-aged woman in her living room listens to music with headphones and is apparently disturbed by her friend entering the room. The significance of these seemingly trivial episodes is that, although recording and playback technology was almost half a century old at the time, the two settings for listening to music were new. Until the 1920s, music listening had hardly, if at all, been available as a means for individual mood regulation, and listening neither to recorded music nor to any music at all had been available as a solitary practice. Music was, until the third decade of the twentieth century—and being strange as it may seem today when almost everybody listens to music with headphones both privately and in public spaces—commonly regarded as a communal rather than as an individual and solitary activity. The quotes are also significant in that they both signaled a trenchant modernity in a cultural climate otherwise dominated by a conservative civilization critique. As the young saleswoman a bit naïvely enjoys entertainment novelties from the other side of the Atlantic, she describes the role that music would acquire in the decades to come as a mood regulator, especially its capacity to reinforce processes of individual and subcultural self-identification (the latter nohttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-014
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tably exemplified in Sweden by the swingpjatt from the early 1940s). And as the slightly older woman uses headphones shielding her ears from her environment, she embraces modern technology in a way that may have seemed even more futuristic as it was deployed to listen to classical music. What neither of the examples reveals is their relation to each other. Music listening as a practice for individual mood regulation and identity reinforcement—music as a self-technology—was carried out in, indeed required, shielded spaces that enabled solitary listening to music. And reciprocally, the attraction of solitary listening seems to a large extent to rest on its ability to facilitate music as self-technology. Accordingly, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight ways that these two aspects of music listening benefited from each other and the role it had for the apprehension of music. The chapter presents evidence from Sweden, by no means a leading nation in matters of phonograph and gramophone playing and listening but still hot on the heels of Germany, Great Britain, and the USA. The emergence of solitary listening and its use as a technology of the self largely depended on the availability of technological equipment and a certain living standard. Consequently, they may be regarded as features of twentieth-century consumer societies more generally, rather than specifically European in scope or nature. The chapter devotes particular attention to the first half of the twentieth century. This is not only because this period has attracted less scholarly attention, neither for Sweden nor for anywhere else, but also because basic changes that prepared the ground for music listening as a technology of the self, with which we are familiar today, took place in the decades before hi-fi, ubiquitous music, and the Walkman. The chapter ends with an overview showing how the tendencies observed continued after mid-century. The chapter considers several interrelated main questions: How was the gramophone used and what social roles did it play? Who listened? What did they listen to? When and where did they listen and why?
1 Playing the Gramophone before the 1920s The scene for recorded music during the first decades of the twentieth century was not dominated by classical or “serious” music. Instead, it was the popular music of the day that sold on record, in Stockholm as much as in many other cities of Europe. However, the “popular” could range from the most trivial fads, speeches by notable persons, stories, and gags, to the inclusion of what in retrospect can be described as “middle music,” including opera arias by an international star such as Enrico Caruso. The latter category was well represent-
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ed at many so-called gramophone concerts that were given in the Swedish capital from about 1900 to 1915. Whereas the earliest gramophone concerts of this period tended to put the technology itself on display (they were often sponsored by the manufacturing company), they soon transformed into more regular entertainment offerings. Caruso could be found on the same bills as the Italian coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini and the local baritone John Forsell, all performing on gramophone while being accompanied by a local string orchestra playing live at the city’s fancier restaurants. The presence of foreign names on the bill should not come as a surprise, however, since in contrast to popular music, opera was an international genre with international stars such as the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, long before the entry of phonography. Less upmarket locales for gramophone playing during the first decades of the century were the countryside fairs where one could listen for a small amount of money to both music and various spoken entertainment. Likewise, many small-town cafés held a gramophone to play background music for their customers. And although far from every household owned a gramophone, those who did usually lent it to their friends and neighbors when there was an engagement or wedding party or just an occasion for youth to come together to dance. The popularity of the gramophone stood in stark contrast to the aversion and even hostility that recording technology met with in the upper-class salong (salon). In those circles, the gramophone, as a machine and a technological innovation, was a sign of civilization gone astray. The fact that the salongsgrammofon (common name for luxurious cabinet gramophones) was marketed by Stockholm retailers already in 1917 did not matter much. As to its content, the cylinders and discs were too obviously carriers of mass cultural expressions— “anesthetics of pleasure,” to use a phrase from 1910 by the Swedish civilization critic Vitalis Norström—to be embraced by the cultural establishment. But how was recorded music perceived during these various occasions, given the fact that it was recorded and not performed “live”? Considering the less fashionable types of occasion, the scarce sources reveal a rather pragmatic attitude to the recordings. The music played on the gramophone should be good to dance to, and the records should play the songs that those who had gathered liked to hear. The same was true for the gramophone concerts. Considering that the artists headlined in the advertisements were well-known opera stars from what can be described as the “live” stage (the expression does not occur in musical contexts until the 1920s), it is not unlikely that the recordings were heard as a sort of sonic postcards. This would be in line with Thomas A. Edison’s suggestion in 1877 that the recordings of his then newly invented phonograph could be used as “family records” (including “the last words of dying persons”). However, it is important to note here that Edison did not care much for the identity of the
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artists on his recordings, focusing instead on the technological standard of his equipment. As he put it in a letter in 1912, “[w]e care nothing for the reputation of the artists, singers, or instrumentalists. […] All that we desire is that the voice shall be as perfect as possible.”¹ Indicative of a similar indifference toward the identity of the artists are advertisements in Sweden of, for instance, the Favorite label in 1905, marketing its records by only mentioning the song titles in its repertoire, and the Pathéfon label, which still in 1916 could announce records perfect for the summer’s dance occasions without mentioning either name of the tune or artist. Taken together, the pragmatic stance toward music played for dance and for atmosphere—at humble small-town cafés as well as gramophone concerts given at high-end big-city restaurants—and the industry’s often blatant disinterest in the personal identities of the artists indicate that many considered the gramophone more or less a mechanical instrument, like a music box or a barrel organ. With reference to the anonymity of recorded artists, one may even say that the gramophone was regarded as a “mechanical musician.”
2 Listening to Records after 1920: The Emergence of New Media Aesthetics The early phonograph and gramophone were “played” rather than “listened to.” With few exceptions, the gramophone and its records were described in the press as something one listened to only after the 1920s. However, a change in attitude can be observed already at the outset of the decade. In 1923, possibly the earliest record review in Sweden was printed in the daily Svenska Dagbladet. It was a piece on a recording of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphonie Pathétique with the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra on His Master’s Voice. The review differs from, but was quite likely inspired by, the review of the same recording in the British Gramophone journal earlier the same year. Toward the turn of the decade, the same newspaper continued to review both classical and popular records on a more regular basis under headings such as Grammofonmusik under kritik (Gramophone Music under Criticism), Grammofonrevy (Gramophone Review), and Inspelat och avlyssnat (Recorded and Monitored). In addition, it also reviewed the new electronic recording and playback technology that had been introduced internationally in 1925, and which became commercially available in Sweden a year later. The emergence of record reviews is important. As these reviews embraced a technological innovation that had been targeted by a critique that accused it of
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being detrimental to culture with a capital “C,” they tied phonography to established cultural values. Initially modeled on the traditional concert review, the record review added an important aura of seriousness to the recording medium by treating it as being worthy of qualified discussion. The record review also represented an implicit reference to solitary listening in a shielded space as it resulted, sometimes explicitly, from repeated listening by the reviewer, something that was hardly possible in public settings. The new attitude toward recorded music can be found in reviews toward the end of the 1930s by Svenska Dagbladet’s critic Kajsa Rootzén. In a review on 17 April 1938, Rootzén criticizes recordings of classical music generally, not only for their limited sound reproduction but also for being no more than a “surrogate” for the collective concert context as well as for domestic singing and instrument playing—what she describes as music’s “intrinsic value.” However, a week later, in a review of a recording of Johannes Brahms’s Violin Sonata in d minor, Rootzén contends that it is “particularly suitable for private company.” The music of a composer like Brahms, Rootzén goes on to say, may even provide “consolation and security, uplift and support.” That Rootzén is talking about the music on record, not as heard in a concert performance, is obvious from the context of the review. And this fact is significantly emphasized when she speaks of “the immediately present music” of the records being hampered only by the limitations of the recording technology, that is to say not by the medium as such. In sum, one can say that Rootzén did not hear the recorded music as some replication by a mechanical music machine, neither as some sonic postcard nor as mere documentation of a past performance event; instead, she listened to music that appeared to her as “immediately present.” However, recorded music was still regarded as inferior to live performance. In the first review, Rootzén writes about the conductor Arturo Toscanini: The Italian maestro has an ability like maybe no other to make the air vibrate with intensity around a gramophone record […] [B]ut equal to what he can bestow in terms of clarity and novelty at the concert podium it will not be.
But the fact that she makes the comparison, and even talks about recordings as vibrant, shows that recorded music was now taken seriously. It shows that recorded music was ascribed aesthetic value. And the fact that listening to immediately present music with aesthetic value on record in private may give “consolation and security” and “uplifting and support” indicates that listening to classical music on record may serve as a serious and multifaceted technology of the self. This is a quality that recordings of classical music would share
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with popular music, from the 1930s onward, although the standards of the self differed significantly.
3 Listen to Me Tonight: Performing for the Solitary Listener A change in listening attitudes to popular music on record can be observed by comparing three representations from three different decades in the weekly Hemmets Journal (The Home’s Journal). The first, from early 1923, is an advertisement promoting His Master’s Voice records with an advertisement displaying not only the company’s familiar logotype but also a picture of two women talking next to a luxurious gramophone cabinet, the one telling the other: “You can’t imagine, but I have put together such a nice program for our next dance evening!” Here the gramophone is still regarded as a mechanical instrument, playing the music that best suits the occasion, a stand-in for a “real” musician or ensemble in a collective situation. The second example is from a short story published eleven years later, in 1934, with an illustration of two women who, according to the caption, “both listened pensively to the male voice singing in the gramophone: ‘only friends, only friends…’” The shift in view in this example is obvious: the two women are pictured as listening to a recorded voice, not to a mechanical musician. And equally significant, they are listening “pensively” to the words sung. The third and last example is from 1942, an advertisement for AGA radio gramophones, picturing a woman sitting alone in front of her record player and imagining singing together with the recorded star. According to the words of the ad “Greta’s chair in the dance-hall is empty—she has found something better. Of course, it can be fun to go out and dance sometime, Greta says, but it is the music one wants… just imagine, Frank Sinatra directly from New York…” Two things stand out here. First, imagining singing with Sinatra is facilitated not just by the recording of his singing, but by his full presence: Sinatra sings “directly from New York” to Greta. And he does so every time she chooses to listen to the record. And second, Greta has no company except for the recorded artist: she listens alone. Similar AGA ads from the same period depicted what one may assume to be Greta’s brother and father, the one dreaming of playing in a jazz band and the other of scantily dressed female vocalists—both alone in their listening. Such themes as presence, or the here and now, and listening alone, or music that is suitable for private company, are familiar from classical music. However, one may also get the impression, especially when regarding the ads in chronological succession, that the experience of an intimate here and now
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with the artist is more or less dependent on the solitude of the listening situation. This impression is further strengthened in a concert review in Svenska Dagbladet from 13 September 1936, whose author, writing under the pen name “Dixie,” evaluates a performance in Stockholm by Viennese chanson and cabaret singer Greta Keller. “Keller,” the reviewer boldly states, “is the priestess of intimate art.” But no matter how well the accompanying orchestra has succeeded in “appropriating the discrete delicacy necessary” for Keller’s performance, it is doomed to fail in its mission because “in her individual way [she] gets close to us when her voice whispers with melancholy from the gramophone or the radio, [which] one cannot obtain from the cabaret scene. Isn’t this a paradox?” The review claims that the intimate presence of the artist is best experienced when listening to her records on gramophone or broadcast through radio. This seeming “paradox” was made possible by the electric microphone (introduced in Sweden in 1926), which allowed artists to sing in a soft and intimate manner rather than with the loud and voluminous technique that had previously been required for a vocalist to be heard in big halls. Reminiscent of Rootzén’s remark about the suitability for one-to-one “private company,” the description of Keller’s singing as an “intimate art” may quite plausibly make the reader conclude that the recordings are best listened to in solitude. Less of a paradox is that Keller was one among many. She demonstrated a vocal technique known as “crooning” in the USA, and made famous in Europe by vocalists such as Jean Sablon, Lucienne Boyer, and Paul O’Montis. In Sweden, the foremost representative of the technique was Sven-Olof Sandberg, who pioneered electric recording in 1927 and whose “lovesick” baritone bestowed upon him nicknames such as “the microphone voice,” “SOS,” and “the gramophone enchanter.” Sandberg’s paraphrase of the lyrics to the American song Are you Listening in Tonight, Mother Dear?—where “listening in” is changed to “listening to me”—was a big hit and is a case in point. Commenting on Sandberg’s technique 30 years after the occasion, former collaborator and radio producer Sven Jerring catches the gist of the new way of singing: “He [Sandberg] intuitively grasped what many radio announcers and radio artists still hadn’t: it’s not a great auditorium they’re addressing, its one single individual, alone in front of the receiver.”² This description, of both the singer behind the microphone and the listener alone in the front of a radio receiver or a gramophone, offers insight into the particular mode of listening made available by this new way of performing popular music: as the listener, I am alone in the encounter with the singer who sings only for me. The intimate and confidential effect was further enhanced by the specific sound production and recording aesthetics. Recordings of orchestral music
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strove to capture a concert feeling and turn the listener’s home into a concert hall, regardless of the fact that listeners had to change record sides every four minutes. In contrast, much popular music of the 1930s and 1940s achieved its effect through a “dry” and limited space approach to sound production. With a relatively depthless sound quality, it rather had the effect of seemingly transporting the vocalist into the intimate vicinity of the listener’s private living room. As in the reviews of classical music, we can extract from these examples a transformation of attitudes and ways of listening. Obviously, the gramophone is not a mechanical instrument any longer (except for the early His Master’s Voice ad), it is a medium capable of transporting the vocalist persona to the listener, staging a present moment rather than a documented past performance. The focus is increasingly on the authentic voice, whereas the artificiality of the technology slips into the background. Considering the social aspect, the distinction between active partaking and passive listening notably gives way to its inverse correlative, where the modern individual listens alone in front of the loudspeaker, rather than together with peers in a group. All this has relevance for the role of music as self-technology, but before looking into the differences of how this role was performed in popular and classical music, a note will be made on the spatial setting for solitary listening.
4 The Living Room: A Place for Solitary Listening The gramophone was not allowed into the upper-class salong of the early decades. However, from the 1920s onward, popular music appeared to have embraced the new listening practice more or less wholeheartedly. It seems to be no mere coincidence that in the 1926 housing exhibition Bygge och Bo (Building and dwelling), the gramophone was assigned its very own place in the plan for a 40 m2 flat. Although the apartment was designed for a family of four persons and therefore could hardly have afforded solitude during any longer time spans, the gramophone’s presence in the plan was a sign of its subsequent status. Notably the exhibition promoted the modern living room as opposed to the old upperclass salong. Whereas the salong was accused of being overloaded and dysfunctional, the modern living room was said to give “the richest possible impression through the smallest means.” Bygge och Bo was followed in 1930 by the Stockholm Exhibition, which focused on urban planning, architecture, and design. It signaled a breakthrough in Sweden for modernist ideals. With its slogan “acceptera!,” it stood in opposition
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to the conservative civilization critique. With its functionalist aesthetic ideals, it came to serve as an ideological basis for the national housing policy well into the 1970s. Symptomatically, the manifesto that followed the exhibition displayed a photo of a gramophone with a caption stating that “[l]uxury is for us the highest degree of quality, not of splendor.” The modernist movement’s rejection of nonfunctional ornamentation did not preclude owning a mechanical instrument such as the gramophone, as long as it was well made and fulfilled its recreational function. An interesting but unacknowledged and hardly intended model for the particular space required for the gramophone and its music can be observed in advertisements for gramophones starting already in 1923 and for records a few years later. In these advertisements, retailers in Stockholm boast specially designed listening booths “furnished according to English/American principles.” The significance of these listening booths is not primarily that they allowed the listener to appreciate the fidelity of the sound reproduction technology. The importance is rather the provision of a shielded space where the listener was able to hear music while being more or less undisturbed and unobserved. Expressed in marketing terms of the day, they were “comfortable listening rooms where each and every one in peace and quiet and in a pleasant environment can make their own choice.” This setting differs radically from the old salong as well as from the phonograph attractions at countryside fairs, both of which were collective displays. In the salong, the music was played and listened to in the company of others, and when the recorded sounds at the fairs were audible only through rubber tubes, the listening act and reactions of the listeners were part of the spectacle. Even the public phonograph parlors, gabinetes fonográficos, and the salons du phonographe, which could be found in the big cities of the Western world already around the turn of the century, were social venues. In this, they differ from their shielded successors of the 1920s. As a model for listening to recorded music, the listening booth of the 1920s conveyed a new ideal according to which listening to music is best done in solitude in a room specially furnished for this purpose. One could also say that the living room is best seen furnished so as to facilitate the undisturbed listening to music. That point was even more pressing as the gramophone was situated in apartment plans and thus became part of the very definition of what kind of space the living room was: a place for recreation, for mood regulation, and for identity reinforcement.
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5 Listening for Identification: Character, Personality, and Self-Technology As pointed out, record companies such as Edison’s Speaking Phonograph Company, Favorite, and Pathéfon did not market until the 1920s their artists to any considerable extent. However, one well-known exception stands out. Italian vocalist Caruso not only was marketed, but was also extensively promoted as a unique personality. In contrast to its competitors, the Victor Talking Machine Company, to which Caruso was signed, went out of its way to present its artist both in its advertisement campaigns and in its public relations, providing the press with prefabricated stories and “news.” As a media celebrity of the day, Caruso was featured as extrovert and charming, a person with a Latin heart and temper. Although he never performed in Sweden, he was well known there. His name was mentioned in a daily paper in the country on average every third day, from his signing with the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1903 to his death in 1921. Likewise, his singing was frequently heard at public gramophone concerts at various cafés and restaurants. Nevertheless, there is a considerable difference both in reception, impact, and display between Caruso and subsequent vocalists such as Keller and Sandberg—differences that shed light on how the solitary listening that emerged during the interwar period afforded music as a self-technology. To begin with, given the widespread criticism from the “civilized” listeners of the time, it is quite unlikely that Caruso’s recordings were heard in the upper-class salongs of Sweden to any considerable extent. Contrary to the aims of the company’s Red Seal series —featuring only the artists the company wanted to boost as culturally prestigious—Caruso’s recordings belonged to the middle music segment. It can therefore be rightfully assumed that solitary listening to his recordings—listening alone in front of a gramophone or a radio in secluded and undisturbed spaces —occurred commonly only after the artist’s passing in the 1920s. Caruso’s acoustic recordings were electronically restored already in the early 1930s, and as such reviewed by the Stockholm press. It is in many ways instructive to contrast Caruso with subsequent artists such as Keller and Sandberg. Although by the 1930s, most record labels had come to follow the Victor Talking Machine Company in promoting their artists, Keller appears as in many ways an antithesis of Caruso. Appealing to an entirely different kind of listener, Keller staged a melancholic personality with an unobtrusive appearance and a voice soft and whispering. Keller sang through a microphone also in concert; still, a reviewer of a Stockholm concert expressed his preference to listen to her on record: “The mechanical reproduction brings the artist
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closer than does her presence in flesh and blood.”³ Keller’s recordings, the first of which appeared almost a decade after Caruso’s last, thus seemed to have been predestined for solitary listening. This was not only because of the increasing availability of secluded domestic space from the 1930s onward, but also because of Keller’s personal style of communication. This is not to say that her style was entirely unique (it was not) but that it was personal in a way that was new in popular music. Much of what can be said about Keller can also be said about Sandberg. Although he had a wider vocal range than Keller, his baritone was relaxed and equalized over the whole register, which proved to be an effective instrument in the personal communication through the recording medium. It can be mentioned in passing that Sandberg also sang opera and made his debut to some acclaim in Stockholm in 1940. In this, he can be seen as a curiously inverse image of an artist such as Caruso as well as of Sandberg’s contemporary countryman Jussi Björling, who both mixed their “serious” opera repertoires with popular melodies (Björling debuted on record as a solo artist at about the same time as Sandberg with a popularly oriented repertoire). Like Keller, Sandberg appeared as anything but extrovert. Although he was praised for his beautiful voice, he was often scorned and dismissed for his “unmanly,” sensitive appearance and repertoire: the press lambasted the music as “sentimental” and Sandberg’s delivery as “greasy,” adding up to no more than “tasteless drivel.” However, listeners who wrote to Swedish radio described Sandberg as an interpreter of “our most beautiful feelings.” Press reviews of popular music were never as comprehensive and ambitious as Rootzén’s reviews of classical records. But what did these letters respond to? The positive opinions shining forth in letters from the audience can be partly explained in terms of the personal tone of the lyrics. In contrast to repertoires of earlier times, the addressee of the lyrics is an often individualized and personalized “you” appealed to by the vocalist/sender, such as in Sandberg’s Are You Listening to Me Tonight, Mother Dear? (which, certainly, may also invite the listener to identify with the singer’s “I”). Together with a sound production simulating a small and private room ambience, this enabled a turning of the listening situation into what may resemble a confidential talk between intimates, and as such the mere situation may affect the listener in a positive way. Sandberg’s lyrics struck a profound emotional chord among his listeners when heard on record, whereas much of the classical music broadcast on national radio was dismissed by many listeners (judging from the many complaints sent by mail to the radio station) as unintelligible and nonsensical. Even more striking is that when it comes to recordings of popular music, it is not just a question of change of the technical, social, and spiritual aspects.
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Whereas these aspects seem to cluster around the particular links of the semiotic communication chain—sender, medium, message, and addressee—much of the recorded popular music of the day seems to emphasize the communication situation as such. When seen in context, many of the recorded songs by, for instance, Keller and Sandberg actualize a distinction between (two-way) communication and (one-way) contemplation. Although one can see how the record industry early on used media in various ways (advertisements, public relations, and the Red Seal star label, etc.) to sell its products in terms of a public persona, a personalized mode of listening to records that provided a communicative and quasi-dialogic attitude toward the artist occurred in Sweden and elsewhere primarily during the interwar years. This attitude was directed in particular at so-called microphone singers like Keller and Sandberg toward the end of the decade, and it would be firmly established during the subsequent decade. Once this mode of listening was in place, it was possible to see also how it differed from the focused and contemplative mode of listening assumed by a reviewer of classical music such as Rootzén. When, in a review on 1 January 1939, Rootzén refers to Franz Schubert’s “poor and troublesome life,” she did not mean to arouse pity in the listener. Instead, the review breathed admiration and esteem for Schubert’s capacity to overcome melancholy when facing death and composing a symphony (his Ninth) full of “singing power [and] inexhaustible rivers of light.” One can rightly say that Schubert’s symphony was regarded as a monument over its creator’s exemplary character, rather than as an expression of his private personality. An overcoming rather than an indulging in common emotion was what the reviewer wanted the listener to hear in the recording of the work. The difference from and distance to the private, intimate, and personal feelings expressed and aroused by the sentimental songs of the popular idiom is striking: the one evoking universal values of character held up to the listener as ideals to pursue, and the other suggesting individual traits of personality to be tested and tried out.
6 After the War: New Rooms for Music as Self-Technology The new mode of solitary listening to music, emerging during the interwar years, had come to stay. Although it never displaced the “old” way of listening to music —collective and more or less participative singing or playing—after the Second World War, solitary listening and its self-technological possibilities were diffused
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to ever more spaces, places, and situations of everyday life. It was helped by various technical innovations of sound recording and reproduction. For instance, whereas the electric microphone and the electric pickup saw the light of day already in the 1920s and the 1930s respectively, the long-playing vinyl record (LP) was introduced in 1948 and became stereophonic ten years later. Although the expression can be found in the 1930s, it is not until the mid1950s that the concept of hi-fi (short for high fidelity)—“launched by the Americans,” as the journal Estrad put it in 1954—appeared regularly in Swedish contexts.⁴ Originally an expression referring to sound technology’s ability to reproduce recorded sound as “truthfully” as possible (thus the “fidelity” to the sound source), it soon became an expression implicitly connecting the new stereo technology to connoisseur listeners. Moreover, when hi-fi was discussed in papers and journals, it often went together with an attempt at disciplining the listening practice. Statements such as “[y]ou will find that you hitherto have listened to mechanical music [sic] in a totally erroneous way” and “[t]rain the ear correctly from the start” were common. In addition to a strong focus on technicalities of the equipment, the disciplining often concerned the music, as in the following quote from the July issue of the journal Musikrevy in 1959: Then you should relax, sit still and comfortably and listen relaxedly like at an ordinary concert. Concentration should be directed toward hearing stereo music as an artistic experience rather than exploring acoustic or technical details.⁵
The quote points to aspects that go well beyond the scope of this chapter, such as the extent to which and in which ways recorded music was still heard as a documentation of a previous event (“an ordinary concert”) or whether the recording was heard as a generic aesthetic expression (“an artistic experience”). Equally important, the quote also indicates how a way of focused listening to musical detail and theme became extended from classical music to include popular music, a change in listening that ultimately paved the way for ambitious pop and rock albums that would follow in the wake of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! (1966). Considering hi-fi, the year 1960 saw the advent of a new journal devoted exclusively to the subject, Musik och ljudteknik (Music and Sound Technology). Besides technical and aesthetic matters, the journal also brought up a rather different and hitherto neglected issue, namely the gendering of solitary living room listening. In the following quote from the March issue in 1960, two distinct gender-specific subject positions are simultaneously described and ascertained, one explicit and the other implicit:
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The greatest resistance raised primarily by wives toward the acquisition of a system for high-quality sound reproduction is usually based on two recurrent arguments: 1) loudspeakers are ugly and too bulky for modern flats and 2) high-class loudspeakers are disproportionally expensive.⁶
The presumably male reader learns from this and other articles that it is “the husband” who listens appropriately and purchases the speakers despite the resistance from “his wife.” Judging from a telling advertisement of the day, wives were not particularly welcome in the hi-fi milieu: “Make your wife happy,” the ad boldly asserted, “with an extra loudspeaker in the kitchen.” In terms of self-technology, and judging from the hi-fi discourse presented in journals, one may rightfully assume that buying and listening to hi-fi stereo equipment was—and perhaps still is today—a way of doing (male) gender. Corresponding ways of doing identification work through the solitary listening to music can be traced, following the advice of the advertisement above, to other rooms as well. Not only was the husband in the mentioned ad suggested to make his wife happy “with an extra loudspeaker in the kitchen,” it was further suggested that “the rest of the family” got “a loudspeaker in the bedroom or some other space.” Whoever took care of the purchases, the increasing market supply of cheap portable gramophones made it possible for many teenagers to buy and listen to single records (less expensive than LPs) in their own bedrooms. Also important was the cassette tape, introduced in 1963, and the radio recorder, launched three years later. With this inexpensive equipment, which had become ubiquitous by the end of the 1970s, it was possible both to record and replay broadcast music. This was done with songs towering the hit lists of radio programs like Tio i topp (Ten at top), from 1961 to 1974; followed by shows like Poporama and Discorama in the 1970s; and Tracks in the 1980s and 1990s, but also with a host of radio shows during the same decades directed at more narrow tastes. The teenage bedroom thus turned into an important space for solitary listening, enabling cultivation of the adolescent’s private self and a renegotiation of the relationship with parents, both being important in the process of growing up. The aspects of solitary listening already mentioned in relation to the microphone singers of the 1920s and 1930s, emphasizing the communicative and quasi-dialogical qualities, were particularly actuated by singers/songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, whose personal lyrics distanced the songs from the average pop music idiom. And although solitary bedroom listening has been particularly associated with young girls, it is quite likely that it played more or less the same role for boys.⁷ Moreover, the music did not necessarily have to have the poetic and “serious” aura of a Joni Mitchell. As popular music recordings in the course
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of the second half of the century became more oriented toward adolescents, so did the contents of the lyrics, which in being superficially “trivial” provided a distracted and even ruminative listening equally focused on the listener’s own self and situation, whether the music was ABBA or Entombed.
7 Listening Practices Moving Out of the Home The living room had served as an ideal setting for solitary listening since the 1920s. However, there was an early competitor outside the safe walls of the family home: the automobile, which was available with a radio from around 1930. A luxury item at the time of its introduction, the car radio soon became everyman’s property. By the mid-1970s, the journal Stereo Hifi reported Swedish sales of car stereos being the highest in the world per capita. While the car has always been a transportation utility, for many the car also served as a refuge, for instance when the home was crowded with other family members or too demanding with inescapable duties and responsibilities. Against that backdrop, the car became the truly shielded room where one could be alone and undisturbed. Going away with the car became an escape, a justifiable one or not. The car was particularly suited as a place for music listening due to its limited space, which brought the listener closer to the sound source. In this way, it allowed for more effective immersion in the music than was often possible at home in the living room. For the purpose of driving, music may fulfill functions such as enhancing concentration and counteracting dreariness and fatigue. But music may also provide self-technological functions that are specific to the driving situation. In an investigation carried out during the very last years of the century, “existential” qualities stand out as being important to drivers listening to music.⁸ “Existential” here means a subjective feeling of heightened presence, more or less intentionally sought after as remedy in a stressful everyday life where the self was often experienced as fractured. This could take different forms of rehabilitation, with significant variations between sexes, age groups, and educational backgrounds. However, two alternatives stand out in the investigation. On the one hand, there was a strong tendency toward seeking solitary space for undisturbed reassembly of a fractured self. On the other hand, there was also a more expressive and outward-directed tendency whereby sound and speed were experienced as strengthening each other. Driving fast and playing music loud resulted in an intensified sense of self. A similar emphasis on the connection between speed and sound is found in what can be described as the ultimate portable music-listening device, including
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its Swedish popular denomination. The device is the Sony Walkman, a pocketsized portable cassette player, launched around 1980 in Europe. In Sweden, it was sold under the name Freestyle, due to its popularity among downhill freestyle skiers. Equally important for its success were the minimally sized earphones or earbuds that enabled mobile activities. Whereas it may initially have seemed a gimmick for various speedy outdoor sports, the use of the Walkman—the name of the device becoming a generic label for all portable players— increased continuously over the decades, eventually paving the way for iPods and cellphones in the new millennium. The role of the Walkman for the individual listener’s ability to seize both urban space and time through the soundtracking of everyday-life situations is well known. However, the use of personally compiled sets of songs on the cassette tapes should not be underestimated (not least since it points toward today’s streamed playlists). The recording and exchanging of mixed cassette tapes among teenagers, which became a widespread activity from the 1970s to the 1990s, enabled the expression and articulation of self-identity in terms of personal taste and preferences. But it was certainly not limited to adolescents. And although not explicitly mentioned in the examples of solitary listening given here, jazz, classical, and other styles of music were recorded, played, and listened to, with more or less the same potential for technologies of selfcare. In retrospect, it has been pointed out how self-compiled mixtapes came to “anchor personal memory” by providing “contextual narrative[s] for channeling concrete feelings or experiences; they ‘burn’ certain impressions into the mind, consigning audio-image maps to memory.”⁹ It may be assumed that no music was precluded from playing such roles.
Conclusion: Solitary Listening in Pursuit of Personality Music’s therapeutic and healing powers have been known for millennia. But the power of music was in the unapproachable hands of the magus musician. What is new in the contemporary period is that the affective power of music becomes increasingly available to the individual listener—music is no longer just a technology of the self but a self-technology, meaning that it is a technology available to each and every one as a self-care carried out by oneself. The primary means for this self-technology initially were the gramophone and the radio. As the century proceeded, new technologies were added, especially magnetic tape recording. The tape recorder, introduced in the 1950s, is particularly significant in that
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it was not only portable, like many types of gramophone; in its 1979 Walkman cassette version, it also allowed for listening while moving around, through headphones, to a prerecorded soundtrack of one’s own compilation. With headphones—becoming demonstratively bigger around the turn of the millennium— the solitary space of the living room would eventually become transferrable as a sonic bubble into public space. This transfer of one’s sonic bubble into public space can, in its turn, be seen as both projective and introjective. It is well known that solitude as such may make available both imaginatively involvement in multiple realities as well as the trying out and testing of alternative identities in such imagined realities. While this may be described as aspects of introjection, a corresponding outward tendency can also be discerned. Once solitude becomes mobile, as in solitary listening through headphones, the walls of the domestic living room are transgressed, enabling a projection and expansion of the listener’s subjective world into the swarm of public space. This tendency has been described as an extension of interior life “that work[s] to subjectivize such spaces and transform them into arenas of personal experience.” ¹⁰ Taken together with, for instance, the widespread sharing and communicating of personal soundtracks in the form of playlists on streaming sites, this can be seen as a vital social circuit in what may otherwise appear as a stiflingly solipsistic and self-centered activity. In the end, and despite the cloistering tendencies of solitary listening, the self-technological aspects of music would still be social activities. Finally, one can say that in as much as the practice of solitary listening and music’s role as a technology of the self have been of vital importance for each other, their intertwined development warrants further investigation that takes the various transformations of the values and conceptualizations of music into consideration. In Europe, as the Swedish case suggests, this process began around the turn of the century and accelerated from the 1920s onward. As a playback technology, music recording turned from a machine, a mechanical musician utilized at communal gatherings, to a documentary of past performance events, to an object repeatedly instantiating an imaginary here and now. Electronic microphones made it possible to record soft voices suitable for creating an atmosphere of intimacy and privacy where the listener could be “alone” with the artist. Sound production simulating a small and private room ambience further provided various modes of listening, such as engaging in a quasi-dialogic relationship with the singer’s persona, or identification by the listener with this persona, or even a total immersion with the particular soundscape of the recording. And whereas classical music tended to evoke universal values of character
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for the listener to pursue, popular music offered individual traits of personality, or identities, to be tested and tried out—emotional rooms or images in or around which temporary self-images and self-conceptions could be balanced and attuned. Once this practice of listening was embraced, music could function as an emotional memory—a soundtrack of my life—that could be recalled in critical situations or when one’s identity needed boosting in more everyday situations. As this chapter has shown, the entry of electric recording and playback at the end of the 1920s was critical in the European history of music, arriving on the scene at the same time as the modern living room and the individual needs of personal identifications. To repeat, it is a process that continues to this day. And while this chapter started at the beginning of the twentieth century, the insight of the young saleswoman quoted at the outset—that “one’s mood regulates itself amongst the gramophones”—is echoed in the context of solitary music listening at the end of the century by the Icelandic singer Björk in her 1995 song Headphones, whose lyrics perfectly encapsulates solitary listening as a technology of the self. Genius to fall asleep To your tape last night (So warm) Sounds go through the muscles These abstract wordless movements They start off cells that Haven’t been touched before These cells are virgins (Waking up slowly) My headphones They saved my life Your tape It lulled me to sleep To sleep, to sleep Nothing will be the same (I’m fast asleep) I like this resonance It elevates me I don’t recognize myself This is very interesting…
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Notes Quoted in David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 128. Quoted in Karin Strand, “Mikrofonsångaren: Sven-Olof Sandberg och gestaltningen av närhet och distans i de tidiga elektriska ljudmedierna,” in Musikens Medialisering och Musikaliseringen av Medier och Vardagsliv i Sverige, ed. Ulrik Volgsten (Lund: Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2019), 122. Quoted in ibid. The following paragraphs on hi-fi culture in Sweden are largely based on Alf Björnberg, “Learning to Listen to Perfect Sound: Hi-fi Culture and Changes in Modes of Listening, 1950 – 80,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 105 – 129. Quoted in ibid., 114– 115. Quoted in ibid., 117. See Reed Larson, “Secrets in the Bedroom: Adolescents’ Private Use of Media,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 24 (1995): 535 – 550. See Carin Öblad, Att använda musik: Om bilen som konsertlokal (Göteborg: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, 2000). José van Dijk, “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (2006): 357– 374. Tobias Pontara and Ulrik Volgsten, “Musicalization and Mediatization,” in Dynamics of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age, ed. Olivier Driessens, Göran Bolin, Andreas Hepp, and Stig Hjarvard (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 269.
Bibliography Björnberg, Alf. “Learning to Listen to Perfect Sound: Hi-fi Culture and Changes in Modes of Listening, 1950 – 80.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, edited by Derek B. Scott, 105 – 129. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Dijk, José van. “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23 (2006): 357 – 374. Larson, Reed. “Secrets in the Bedroom: Adolescents’ Private Use of Media.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 24 (1995): 535 – 550. Öblad, Carin. Att använda musik: Om bilen som konsertlokal. Göteborg: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, 2000. Pontara, Tobias, and Ulrik Volgsten. “Musicalization and Mediatization.” In Dynamics of Mediatization: Institutional Change and Everyday Transformations in a Digital Age, edited by Olivier Driessens, Göran Bolin, Andreas Hepp, and Stig Hjarvard, 247 – 269. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Strand, Karin. “Mikrofonsångaren: Sven-Olof Sandberg och gestaltningen av närhet och distans i de tidiga elektriska ljudmedierna.” In Musikens Medialisering och Musikaliseringen av Medier och Vardagsliv i Sverige, edited by Ulrik Volgsten, 107 – 128. Lund: Mediehistoriskt arkiv, 2019.
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Suisman, David. Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Further Reading Bijsterveld, Karen, Eefje Cleophas, Stefan Krebs, and Gijs Mom. Sound and Safe: A History of Listening behind the Wheel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Chanan, Michael. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music. London: Verso, 1995. DeNora, Tia, Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Edström, Olle. “The Place and Value of Middle Music.” Swedish Journal of Music Research 73 (1992): 7 – 60. Gauß, Stefan. Nadel, Rille, Trichter: Kulturgeschichte des Phonographen und des Grammophons in Deutschland (1900 – 1940). Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2009. Herlyn, Gerrit, and Thomas Overdick, eds. Kassettengeschichten: Von Menschen und ihren Mixtapes. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2005. Lockheart, Paula. “A History of Early Microphone Singing, 1925 – 1939: American Mainstream Popular Singing at the Advent of Electronic Microphone Amplification.” Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 367 – 385. Maisonneuve, Sophie. L’invention du disque 1877 – 1949: Genèse de l’usage des médias musicaux contemporains. Paris: Éditions des archives contemporaines, 2009. McCracken, Allison. Real Men Don’t Sing: Crooning in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Moreda Rodriguez, Eva. “Prefiguring the Spanish Recording Diva: How gabinetes fonográficos (phonography studios) Changed Listening Practices, 1898 – 1905.” In Listening to Music: People, Practices and Experiences, edited by Helen Barlow and David Rowland, n. p. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2017. https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2017/ 2017/02/27/prefiguring-the-spanish-recording-diva-how-gabinetes-fonograficos-changedlistening-practices-1898-1905/ (accessed 16 August 2020). Männistö-Funk, Tiina. “‘They Played it on Saturday Nights in a Barn’: Gramophone Practices and Self-made Modernity in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s.” International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 1 (2013): 101 – 127. Pontara, Tobias, and Ulrik Volgsten. “Domestic Space, Music Technology and the Emergence of Solitary Listening: Tracing the Roots of Solipsistic Sound Culture in the Digital Age.” Swedish Journal of Music Research 1 (2017): 105 – 123. Volgsten, Ulrik. “Work, Form and Phonogram: On the Significance of the Concept of Communication for the Modern Western Concept of Music.” IRASM: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 46 (2015): 207 – 232. Volgsten, Ulrik. “A Technology and its Vicissitudes: Playing the Gramophone in Sweden 1903 – 1945.” Popular Music 38 (2019): 219 – 236.
Part V: Politicizing Music
Friedrich Geiger
14 Conducting the Masses: State Propaganda and Censorship “Propaganda” is a dazzling term that has eluded all attempts to define it succinctly since its emergence in the seventeenth century—it “can bring the best of us down,” sighed media scientist Neil Postman in 1979.¹ A quarter of a century later, Thymian Bussemer therefore proposed a catalog of characteristics, which represents the intersection of previous definitions. This catalog should help to distinguish propaganda from related and neighboring phenomena such as indoctrination, immersion, advertising, public relations, or even religious mission. According to Bussemer, propaganda should be understood as “a special form of systematically planned mass communication” that does not argue but manipulates.² It aims at short- or long-term “changes in people’s subjective construction of reality.” The goal is to persuade them “to take a certain stance on a specific question and to act according to this conviction. Often it is also about encouraging people in an existing attitude.” Propaganda is “dependent on a media system” that allows it to “spread its messages” on a mass scale. It is “usually oriented towards gaining or retaining power” and works with the threat of negative consequences if its messages are not followed. Complementary to this is “integration propaganda,” which rewards the stabilization of the desired norms within a community with the feeling of belonging. From a music-historical perspective, this catalog of characteristics appears not only as a highly reasonable explanation but also as an invitation to describe in more detail the important role that music can play in a conceptualization of propaganda understood in this way. The essential tasks that this conceptualization of propaganda poses—demonstration of power, overwhelming the mind, emotionalization, mass appeal, removal of reality, and community building— are genuinely aesthetic tasks, which are fulfilled particularly effectively by music. In addition, words, images, and movement, on which propaganda research has so far concentrated, can be amplified with music in such a way that these media gain a multiple effect. As the earliest surviving aesthetic testimonies regarding music suggest, the reflection on the psychological power of music can be traced back thousands of years. In ancient Greece, the doctrine of ethos emerged in the late sixth century BCE. It is based on the Pythagorean idea that music has the greatest effect on the human soul among the arts because its interval proportions correspond to those of the cosmos. Music is therefore capable not only of reflecting psychological https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-015
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phenomena but also of evoking them. From this perspective, music becomes an important tool for education. According to the doctrine, appropriate music should be used in education to achieve the desired results. In contrast, music that causes undesirable effects, like sexual arousal or sluggishness, must be removed from the educational repertoire. Since this purposeful handling of the great potential of music to influence people requires extensive control over its dissemination, it is no coincidence that the doctrine of ethos was formulated in detail in the writings of Plato and Aristotle on state philosophy. As is well known, music thinkers in many European countries received these thoughts and passed them down continuously through the generations. That a unified “European music” would be a construct hardly needs to be emphasized, given the innumerable regional phenomena that would have to be taken into account. But it cannot be denied that certain beliefs that developed in Greco-Roman antiquity continuously influenced the musical thinking of the countries where these beliefs were adopted. This is why especially in Europe philosophers, pedagogues, and politicians attributed such great power to music on the human psyche that this power had to be declared a state affair. That a state should make it its business to steer this power in the right direction is by no means self-evident, but it is a direct and widely accepted legacy of ancient musical thinking. For this reason, in most European cultures the notion of the power of music is almost reflexively linked to questions of media control and state censorship. Against this background, this chapter examines musical propaganda and musical censorship as two directions in which state control can act. Both directions are based on certain goals that were pursued by the state. If one looks at the states of twentieth-century Europe, four effects in particular emerge, which were frequently intended by musical propagandists as well as by musical censors: representation, integration, mass communication, and mobilization. These objectives will now be examined in more detail. After that, I will try to summarize the development that the constellation of musical propaganda, censorship, and media control underwent in the twentieth century. As no overall studies in this field are available to date, the present chapter is a preliminary sketch that draws on a number of well-documented, exemplary cases.
1 Representation Musical genres associated with large ensembles and festive spaces—for example, symphony concerts as well as the opera—are excellent for representing political power. Rulers are staged and exalted by the music. Their strength, which remains
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abstract in everyday life, becomes present, tangible, and impressively aestheticized. Even the power of a community abstracted by individuals can be represented by sound, as national anthems or military music show. The fact that music can have this effect has been used by different leaders all over the world. But the musical history of many countries in Europe, with its vast number of both great and small rulers, has formed a particularly comprehensive and rich heritage of representative and affirmative music. The relationship between music and representation shaped the history of entire genres: in France, for example, the emergence of an opulent opera tradition is intimately linked to the ambitions and desires for recognition of Louis XIV. This representative function has deeply ingrained itself in music history and is reflected in the festive style of numerous works. Characteristic of the latter is, for instance, the instrumentation topos of timpani and trumpets, which is still proverbial today and can be easily deciphered by listeners as a sounding symbol of worldly power. Percussion and brass, together with fanfare-like motifs are therefore often heard when dominance is marked acoustically. Also, adoption of church music elements underlines the sacrosanct claim to power; for instance, in Russian opera, where the appearance of the tsar is often announced by the ringing of bells. Similar to church music, affirmative sounds can also be used to represent positive utopias such as the glory of the kingdom of heaven—a tradition that was directly adopted in the sonic repertoire of socialist realism, whose task was to portray the glory of a future socialist world. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism, many works such as Johannes Brahmsʼs Triumphlied (1872) had ingrained the vocabulary of powerful music deeply in the consciousness of the listeners. With the First World War, composing in this musical idiom and performing respective works reached their first peaks in the twentieth century, especially with the colonial powers Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy. Glorious music resounded everywhere, from troop deployments to concert halls, and was distributed through all channels, from picture postcards to gramophone records. The totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany were then able to follow on seamlessly from this nationalist charge and take the propagandistic exploitation of the corresponding repertoire to extremes. This also led to significant changes in the works, which were not only usurped but sometimes also deliberately prepared for the regimes’ own purposes. Such cases indicate how closely related propaganda and censorship are, since both can lead to interventions in the music itself. Significant in this regard, for instance, is Franz Liszt’s symphonic poem Les Préludes. The composer had prefaced the orchestral work, composed between 1848 and 1854, with a text in which he explained the content that the music
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was to reflect. To the main musical theme, with its well-known fanfare, he had attributed the following meaning: Nevertheless, the man does not long carry the comforting peace in the midst of soothing natural moods, and “when the trumpet storm signal sounds,” he hurries, whatever the name of the war may be, which calls him to join the ranks of the warring factions, to the most dangerous post, in order to regain full consciousness of himself and to come into full possession of his power in the crush of the battle.³
Liszt had already given this main theme an emphatically martial character, in which, however, the aspects of disquiet and danger mentioned by the composer still resonate. Almost hundred years later, German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels personally selected this fanfare at the beginning of the Russian campaign in June 1941 in order to announce the special reports of the Wehrmacht High Command on the radio. Liszt’s score was specifically edited, and a new version with significantly reduced strings was recorded especially for this purpose. This made the timpani and trumpets stand out particularly clearly, and the sounding result, robbed of all subtlety, disquiet, and danger, produced exactly the effect Goebbels wanted: blaring, in brutal brilliance, it radiated sheer certainty of victory. Such usurpation of music was flanked by contemporary representative works, some of them dedicated by composers to those in power. Often, these pieces had been commissioned by the regimes or emerged from specially advertised competitions. Commissions and competitions can be understood as attempts to exploit both the representative musical heritage and the cultural reputation of the commissioned composers. For example, on the occasion of the Double Centenary commemorations in Portugal, which, in 1940, simultaneously celebrated the founding of the Portuguese state in 1140 and the regaining of independence from Spain in 1640, the Salazar regime initiated a whole series of compositions that glorified the Portugese nation and its rulers. Among these compositions, the Solemn Overture 1640 (1939) by Luís de Freitas Branco is particularly revealing. In December 1938, the prominent composer received a commission from the National Board of the Centenaries for “a symphonic piece that should be entitled 1640 and express the heroic spirit of the 1 December rebellion.”⁴ This is remarkable in that Freitas Branco was not close to the regime, but its representatives had a strong interest in the composer because of his reputation as the greatest national authority in the field of music. It seems that Freitas Branco felt so uncomfortable with the commission that he deliberately overfulfilled it: he wrote a symphonic poem that was quite atypical of his modern style at the time and so massively anti-Spanish that even the committee feared
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diplomatic repercussions and placed the work at the very margins of the program. However, the representative function not only extends political power but also the repeatedly asserted superiority of a national cultural and musical tradition. Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven in Germany, Mikhail Glinka and Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Russia, and Antonio Vivaldi and Giuseppe Verdi in Italy—all these composers had to serve time and again to culturally legitimize the leadership claims of the nations concerned. This function of music to represent cultural superiority also dates back to colonial times. It then played a particularly important role for Germany under Adolf Hitler and Italy under Benito Mussolini. Nationalists in both countries proudly claimed to be leaders in music and developed fierce competition in this field. But in other countries, too, nationalism showed itself preferentially in the field of music. In Scandinavia, for example, many listeners considered music the most direct expression of the “Nordic,” which is why they stylized composers such as Hugo Alfvén in Sweden, Christian Sinding in Norway, Jón Leifs in Iceland, and Jean Sibelius in Finland as national artists. The goal of musical propaganda—to represent the regime, the nation, and its cultural excellence—corresponds to censorship measures against music that was unsuitable for these purposes, perhaps even threatening to undermine them through ambivalence and ambiguity. The hatred of musical modernity that all dictatorial regimes, whether in Russia, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Austria, Portugal, or Spain, displayed to varying degrees in the first half of the century was essentially triggered by the fact that the protagonists of this modernity pursued aesthetic goals that were incompatible with national pride, serious pathos, and a superior will to represent. The deliberately unsentimental music of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), the critical humor of the antibourgeois Dada composers, the activities of the International Society for New Music, and the enthusiastic reception of jazz by European musicians were only the most visible tendencies that these regimes thought had to be fought to maintain power in the long term. Numerous sources therefore accused composers of being deliberately agitative with their music and “hurting national feelings.” Nazi journalists, for example, constantly polemicized against the “impertinence” of a modern music, which “knowingly and intentionally […] despised healthy feeling and wanting, as it is lived in a strong, self-confident people, and possibly also openly disparaged and ridiculed it through its own means of expression.”⁵ Under Joseph Stalin, composers like Dmitri Shostakovich saw themselves attacked in a similar way. In the editorial article “Hypocrisy as Ballet,” which appeared in Pravda on 6 February 1936, Shostakovich’s new ballet The Bright Brook
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op. 39, which was about a collective farm with the same name in the Kuban region, received a devastating critique. Further performances became impossible as a result of this semiofficial criticism. It was directed above all at the depiction of the kolkhoz (collective farm), which, as a symbol of “the present life of the Soviet people” and its new forms of communalization, “deserved the greatest respect, care, and conscientious study.” Shostakovich’s music, on the other hand, “has nothing whatsoever to do with our collective farms or even with the Kuban region,” the critics complained. Rather, they went on to accuse, the composer showed a “disdainful attitude” towards the “folk songs of this region.” According to the critics, the music testified to “an absolute indifference of the composer towards his subject.”⁶ The music-political parallels between fascist and communist regimes, which may at first seem surprising given the diametrical ideologies, can thus be explained to a large extent by the fact that both fought the same opponent—namely musical modernity. In the Soviet sphere of influence, the defence of “socialist values” against music remained fundamentally unbroken even after Stalin’s death, with varying intensity depending on time and place. The ideologists of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, for example, considered rock music a constant provocation, as musicians and their listeners regularly made fun of the state’s inability to provide consumer goods for young people such as jeans or records. Until its collapse in 1989, the regime therefore carried out intensive propaganda in the media against rock artists and censored their music, for example by banning them from performances and broadcasting. Meanwhile, the ideas of the representation of state values through music and protection against its musical destabilization took a back seat in post-1945 European democracies. By no means did they disappear completely, however. In Germany, for instance, the idea that German music was superior remained unbroken in the occupied country. For many Germans, it became a substitute for lost political power, especially in relation to the USA. With reference to Bach and Beethoven, the increasingly successful popular music from America was dismissed both in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and even more so in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as “inferior” and demonized as a symptom of “Americanization.” Continuities become particularly apparent when one looks at the prototype of musical representation, namely the national anthem. The degree to which music is considered capable of national representation is evident in this field. Many citizens firmly believe that these hymns have the potential to represent characteristics of the nations concerned not only through their texts but explicitly also through their melodies. It is therefore not surprising that the anthem of a country is almost sacred to many living there. This representative aura of the na-
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tional anthem is still today protected by laws in several countries. In Greece, for instance, Article 188 of the penal code stipulates that disrespectful behavior during performances of the national anthem can be punished by a fine or imprisonment for up to two years. In Germany, too, anyone who grossly disparages the national anthem commits the criminal offence of “disparaging the state and its symbols,” which is punishable by imprisonment for up to three years. Just how sensitive this terrain remains was demonstrated in 1998, when the composer Bardo Henning was commissioned to write the music for the official ceremony on the occasion of German Unity Day. When word got out that Henning had quoted not only the anthem of the FRG in his work but also—albeit only briefly—the national anthem of the former GDR, Auferstanden aus Ruinen (composed by Hanns Eisler), a storm of indignation broke out. Edmund Stoiber, the Bavarian minister president at the time, demonstratively stayed away from the ceremony, and a lawyer from Lower Saxony filed a complaint against the composer, citing the “disparaging” paragraph. Apparently, the conservative forces that took credit for German reunification saw the propagated image of history endangered by the fact that the GDR was also represented musically.
2 Integration Besides having a representative function, national anthems also show that music is regarded as the community-building art par excellence. Feelings of belonging could easily be evoked through music: “A great rush of enthusiasm has captured people. Horst Wessel’s song sounds faithful and strong in the evening sky,” Goebbels noted enthusiastically in his diary entry about the May Day celebrations in 1933.⁷ As he knew very well, the sense of community helped rulers achieve reach, influence, and homogeneity. Many sources show how the integrative potential of sharing aesthetic experience through music was propagandistically instrumentalized in twentieth-century Europe. This instrumentalization could take place, for example, in the context of not only factory or open-air concerts, festivals, rallies, or mass marches but also music venues such as opera houses or concert halls. Such events were often put into an ideological context, for instance by decorating them with party emblems. Even nonmusical aesthetic experience—such as the experience of light spectacles, parades of weapons, choreographies, and the like—was guided and intensified by music just as soundtracks amplify and direct the effect of moving images in films. The combination of musical performances with pithy speeches and addresses is also characteristic. This was based on the mutual enhancement of sound and speech. In this process, the communal perception of music was
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supposed to be ideologically guided, and the ideology was supposed to be solemnly exaggerated by the emotional impact of the sounds and therefore become a communal experience. Such a use of music not only is specific to dictatorships but also is known from other contexts—for example, in the areas of the church, the military, or sport. Democratic states also practice it frequently, especially for celebrations. In the European dictatorships of the twentieth century, however, it reached a new dimension both quantitatively and qualitatively, and it was reflected very carefully and used with calculation. For the Third Reich especially, it is possible to trace exactly which music the regime intended for which occasions, often down to the order in which it was to be played. The Main Cultural Office of the Reich Propaganda Administration, the department responsible for the organization of festivities, issued several publications for this purpose, most importantly the series Die neue Gemeinschaft: Das Parteiarchiv für nationalsozialistische Feier- und Freizeitgestaltung (The New Community: The Party Archive for National Socialist Celebrations and Leisure Activities), starting in 1934. In addition to the party, government agencies such as the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Chamber of Music) also initiated corresponding reference works, such as the compendium Musikalische Feiergestaltung: Ein Werkweiser guter Musik für die natürlichen und politischen Feste des Jahres (Organizing Musical Celebrations: A Guide to Good Music for the Natural and Political Holidays of the Year), presented by Wilhelm Ehmann in 1938. These sources not only show how communal singing or listening was supposed to integrate participants into a “community” through collective aesthetic experience but also reveal lesser-known strategies for using music for propaganda purposes. For example, Ehmann elaborates on how celebrants should be positioned in space and how a celebration could achieve a dramaturgy through music. All this advice was based on the premise that “the bearers of political action are at the same time the bearers of musical action.”⁸ In fact, musical action is political action here. The overall aim of this propagandistic use of music is to form a mass following that is as homogeneous as possible according to the respective ideological standards. The shared aesthetic experience of music gives the community presence. Through the feeling of community, this mass can then be easily influenced in the desired direction. In this way, the propaganda of the twentieth century again drew on topoi of musical genres that were popular in the respective European countries. The emphasis varied according to the regional music culture. While in Italy, for example, opera played the most important role in creating a sense of community, in Germany it was mainly symphony. In 1918, the German music writer Paul Bekker characterized the nature of the symphonic genre, as it had existed since Beethoven, as follows:
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The cause of symphonic creation lies […] in the artist’s need to speak to a mass audience, in the compulsion to communicate with a large circle. […] The symphony is thus, by its very nature, the object of a far-reaching general interest, and the performance of a symphony is equivalent to a popular musical assembly, an assembly in which a common feeling expressed through music is alive and active.⁹
For most European nations, the genre of the mass song, in particular, has played an important role in the creation of a sense of musical community. This led to lively transfers between individual countries. The mass song goes back to the French Revolution and reached Italy and Germany during the period of national unification. The German workers’ movement developed the genre further, from 1917 in an intensive process of exchange with the Soviet Union, but also with other countries of the Communist International. Subsequently, the fascist dictatorshipʼs “thefts from the commune”—as called by Ernst Bloch—also included several mass songs with new lyrics. After 1945, mass songs like Die Partei— “The party, the party, is always right” was written and composed in 1949 in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic by Louis Fürnberg but was especially popular in the GDR—lived on in the socialist states of Europe, while the whole genre of mass song had a bad reputation in the democratic countries because it had been used in dictatorships. Therefore, in democratic countries it appeared rather in apolitical forms like football songs. In addition, from the 1960s onward (at the latest), international mass concerts of pop artists, at which the audience could sing along loudly, took over the function of community and identity building. That music is able to increase the reach of community sense through the media was systematically exploited especially by the Nazi regime. Inexpensive radio sets (Volksempfänger) and broadcasting formats with a wide stylistic range (Wunschkonzert) promised to appeal to and integrate social classes and generations. Other states copied this approach. For example, music was prominent when the Spanish Franco regime celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1964 with the biggest propaganda campaign the country had ever seen. At the heart of the campaign was a monumental concert on 16 June, for which the state commissioned renowned contemporary composers such as Cristóbal Halffter. Conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, the concert was broadcast live on radio and television. On the following day, an enthusiastic review appeared in the Madrid newspaper Ya, highlighting the community-building effect of the concert event. The nationwide broadcast, the writer claims, had brought the nation together in a common musical experience: Everyone: the scholar, the cosmopolitan, the peasant and the intellectual; all remained obsequiously silent while Frühbeck’s magisterial baton kneaded the crystalline calm of our screens. […] In the most remote of hamlets, lost in a faraway valley, it did not smell of stable
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and thyme: it smelled like a concert evening, while the oboes celebrated the wide smiles on our ladies’ faces. Blessed TV and blessed Spain in God’s peace!
This dithyramb on the community experience via media seems all the more significant because it was largely pure wishful thinking: at the beginning of the 1960s, neither had all parts of Spain access to TV nor did the concert receive an exclusively positive response where it could be heard. On the contrary, the Ministry of Culture received several angry anonymous letters complaining bitterly about the modernity of the music: “My dear sir, the concert was appalling. The orchestra seemed to be made of hooligans or lunatics escaped from the asylum,” one of these letters said.¹⁰ This clearly shows that not all music is suitable for achieving the desired sense of community. In order to avoid such mishaps with the audience, censorship usually was suspicious of music that could run counter to the homogeneous experience. What this experience actually meant depended very much on the ideological orientation of the respective regime. Strict care was taken to exclude music that was, according to the ideological definition, “alien” to the community. For example, censorship under Stalin aimed particularly at the so-called “class enemy,” that is to say, music that was in some way related to the bourgeoisie or the “West.” This allegation could be levelled at musical genres, for example the string quartet, which was suspected of being an elitist art of connoisseurship due to its bourgeois history, or jazz, which was considered an outgrowth of American capitalism. But it could also be aimed at a composer’s person. The career of Vsevolod Zaderatsky, for example, was massively impaired by the fact that he came from Russian nobility and had taught the tsar’s son Alexei Romanov as a piano teacher before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Concomitantly, censorship in the Third Reich targeted primarily so-called “non-Aryans,” who were to be banned from German musical life. This dominant anti-Semitic accent of Nazi music censorship is illustrated by the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (Lexicon of Jews in Music), edited by musicologists Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk, which first appeared in 1940 and had brought out four editions by 1943. The reference work was compiled, as it says on the title page, “on behalf of the Reich leadership of the NSDAP, on the basis of officially verified documents” by employees of the Hauptstelle Musik im Amt Rosenberg, an administrative unit in Alfred Rosenberg’s organization that declared itself responsible for the formulation and implementation of the National Socialist music ideology. “With the claim to the greatest possible reliability,” as the foreword says, the encyclopedia contains about 320 pages of names and data of Jewish composers, interpreters, music teachers, and music journalists, supplemented by a “Title Index of Jewish Works.” The book should be a “sure guide,” Gerigk claims in the foreword, “for
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cultural politicians, for stage managers and conductors, for the radio, and for the leading personalities in the offices of the party organizations” as a “means of quickly eradicating all erroneous remnants from our cultural and intellectual life.” Vigorousness was required because, as the book asserts, “individual Jews, as masters of camouflage, even now manage to slip through the net unrecognized here and there.”¹¹ In addition to the exclusion of undesirable groups and images of the enemy, censors in European dictatorships of the first half of the century mistrusted “subjectivism” and “individualism” in general. They used these terms to denigrate music that aimed at the individual and the special and was therefore fought as harmful to the desired mass formation. It was only legitimate to give aesthetic expression to individuals if the figures in question were suitable for mass identification with the regime’s goals—such as the little boy Peter in Sergei Prokofiev’s most famous composition from 1936. People all over the world love Peter and the Wolf op. 61, but few know that its draft was titled How Pioneer Peter Caught the Wolf and that its aim was to make children familiar not only with orchestral instruments but also with the fight against “greedy capitalism,” namely Hitler’s Germany. From the 1950s onward, a large part of the community-building function of music was taken over by popular music, which the younger generation did not suspect of being ideolocially motivated, unlike the compromised “classical” music. Great musical mass events, above all the legendary Woodstock Festival in February 1969, created a countercultural sense of community. In Europe, the festival format was embraced enthusiastically, and watched suspiciously by the respective authorities. In the early 1970s, a wide spectrum of festivals were held: in Germany the Love and Peace Festival on Fehmarn, in the Netherlands the Pinkpop Festival in Landgraaf, in Denmark the Roskilde Festival, in Yugoslavia the BOOM Festival, and so on. How nervously the state initially reacted to these countercultural events is shown, for example, in Great Britain, where the Isle of Wight Festival has been held since the summer of 1968. After the number of visitors had risen enormously in 1970, the British parliament passed a regulation in 1971 that banned open-air overnight stays of more than 5,000 people on the island without special permission. But the more rock and pop music developed from counterculture to mainstream in the decades that followed, the more government bodies put aside their reservations and recognized that there were excellent opportunities to borrow the popularity of this music and use its community-building potential for their own purposes. An early example of this is the Republic of Malta, where the social democratic Malta Labour Party (now Partit Laburista) ruled from 1971 to 1984. This party had already relied heavily on musical folklore in the 1970s to achieve national unity and solidarity
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among workers. However, when Maltese folk music began to lose its place among the general population to rock music, the party adapted its policy to this development. In 1982, it initiated the rock opera Ġensna (Our Nation), for which the most famous Maltese pop musicians of the time were signed. With a libretto in Maltese, this monumental work celebrates the most important stages in the country’s history, highlighting the struggles for liberation from foreign rule and drawing parallels to the party’s concerns with the workers’ struggle for selfdetermination. Ġensna became an overwhelming success, which ensured the fame of the participants that has lasted until today. The songs literally became folk songs that every inhabitant of Malta knows.
3 Mass Communication In research, propaganda has often been described as a communication technique. Although this communication tends to be much more controlled by the sender than by the receiver, recent analyses nevertheless point out that propaganda cannot be effective if it does not take into account the attitudes and feedback of its audiences. These have to be addressed regarding their already existing opinions and views. This is why prejudice plays such an important role in successful propaganda. It forms the ground in which messages can be anchored. As is well known, the essence of strong prejudice is that those who harbor it are unaware that it is an adopted view. Rather, they think that they have formed their opinion autonomously. Consequently, they feel acknowledged, taken seriously, and valued when these “opinions” are confirmed by propaganda. On this basis, propaganda messages can be conveyed very effectively. Against this background, music has a double function as a propaganda medium. On the one hand, states, by using music that is capable of attracting a majority, can aesthetically create an atmosphere of familiarity among a large number of people that is conducive to communicating the desired content. By addressing listeners with sounds that suit their taste, the readiness of recipients to adopt messages grows. On the other hand, music itself is an object that is ideally suited for making populist statements. Due to the forcefulness of the sense of hearing, through no other art form is the identification with the preferred aesthetics so strong, and no other art form evokes such vehement rejection if it does not correspond to one’s own taste. To praise music that corresponds to the taste of the majority and to condemn music that deviates from it are therefore effective ways to gain popularity. By acting as advocates of majority taste and a “healthy popular jugdement,” regimes enhance the value of the majority, therefore securing sympathy and approval.
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A work that deliberately fulfilled both communicative functions of propaganda was composed by Shostakovich in a phase of his life in which he was in great danger—after the so-called “February decision” of the Central Committee in 1948, which had outlawed him by name as a representative of formalism. Song of the Forests op. 81, first performed in November 1949, is an oratorio for tenor, bass, boys’ choir, mixed choir, and orchestra that lasts just over half an hour. In terms of subject, it deals with a project of the Stalin regime that was current at the time, namely a massive reforestation campaign. The lyricist Yevgeniy Dolmatovsky praises the “great gardener” Stalin as the almighty designer of nature. The oratory celebrated the reforestation, promoted it, and exaggerated it to religious dimensions—in short, it communicated the current concerns of the regime effectively. The musical language that Shostakovich chose is masterful, but in style, it differs markedly from his independent works. The idiom is populist in the sense that the composer often draws on elements that were familiar to the audience from national Russian heritage: echoes of Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, or Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, for example, cannot be missed. Shostakovich’s calculation worked out, and the oratorio was applauded by the highest leadership. Mikhail Suslov, successor of Andrei Zhdanov as the supreme ideologue of the Soviet Union, wrote about the work: “Good. A beautiful Russian melody. On the transformation of nature”¹²—a characteristic formulation that connects the content to be disseminated (“transformation of nature”) with the medium of musical populism (“beautiful Russian melody”). The functions of music as a means of mass communication explain why the censors often became active. In the first place, music is undesirable if its style and aesthetics make it unsuitable for mass taste. This is frequently the case with complex, dissonant, experimental, or any other kind of music that causes difficulties or even provokes the average listener. Propagandists labeled such music dismissively as “l’art pour l’art,” “elitist,” or music from the “ivory tower.” This shows how music policy took advantage of existing popular resentments against musical innovation. In this respect, the possibilities of propaganda in the twentieth century were greatly expanded by developments in both music and media technology. The progressive and provocative currents that took hold in music after the turn of the century created a feeling of insecurity among traditional listeners, not least due to their novel mass media presence, which propaganda sought to capitalize on. “Progressive” music not only offered a projection screen for political, racist, and aesthetic animosity but also made the counterimage of an accessible “music for all,” anchored in the “people,” shine all the brighter. African-American music took up a significant intermediate position here. As popular music, it was undoubtedly music that appealed to a
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broad range of listeners. But its non-European origins made it suspicious to many who reserved “popularity” for members of a particulary ethnicity. As far as progressive music is concerned, regimes used powerful popular aversions against unfamiliar aesthetic to win the approval of the masses. They ostentatiously shared their resentments, made the average taste absolute, and instrumentalized it in service against the respective enemy images. The scheduled premiere of Luigi Dallapiccola’s opera Volo di notte in Braunschweig in 1938, for example, was banned by the Ministry of Propaganda because “such music, which goes too much into the atonal, would be rejected by German theater audiences.”¹³ What is telling here is that atonality was not condemned for aesthetic reasons but for its unsuitability to reaching the masses. A second important cause for repressive censorship is when a message effectively propagated through musical works suddenly contradicts a changed ideological line. The problem here is not the medium but the content of the communication. This was the case, for example, in Moscow in 1948 with Mieczysław Weinberg’s orchestral composition Sinfonietta no. 1 in D minor, op. 41, whose deliberately accessible music was initially received very positively by the authorities. As late as December 1948, Tikhon Khrennikov, the general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, publicly and effusively praised Weinberg’s Sinfonietta as a “brilliant, joyful work dedicated to the theme of the joyful, free life of the Jewish people in the land of socialism.”¹⁴ However, after Stalin’s anti-Semitic “anticosmopolitan campaign” had begun in 1949, the reference to Jewish folklore in Weinberg’s music was anything but opportune. Although the Sinfonietta could continue to be performed, other works by Weinberg, in which the connection to Jewish music was even more obvious, were put on the index.
4 Mobilization As early as 1922, the German national sociologist Johann Plenge defined propaganda as “the spreading of intellectual impulses that are intended to trigger action.”¹⁵ Not only the manipulation of attitudes but also of the concrete actions that resulted from it belong to the central goals of propaganda. Its importance becomes evident in the case of the regimes in twentieth-century Europe, which are often described as “mobilization dictatorships.” Music deserves special attention regarding this aspect—considering the fact that music’s triggering or influencing of human action was already one of the basic assumptions of the doctrine of ethos. This reputation drew a high level of attention to music from the authors of propaganda. Depending on the cultural and historical contexts, opin-
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ions diverge, but almost all societies share common ideas—for example, music tempts people to move, and it is possible to synchronize the movements of large groups of people through rhythm. That is why music has always been of great importance in the military field, since it could serve both to bring people into line when marching and to awaken and support martial impulses. Still in 1978, the Handbook for Political Work of the National People’s Army of the GDR states: The promotion of marching songs, the cultivation of the socialist soldier song, the workers’ fighting song, and the workers’ youth song must be the concern of all leaders. Here it is possible to use the mobilizing and disciplining power and effectiveness of the song, the specifically consciousness-forming and collectivity-enhancing power of the music and the lyrical content as potentials for conscious military action.¹⁶
In the aggressively charged context of expansive regimes, heroic features of music are particularly desirable. In his programmatic speech at the opening of the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) on 15 November 1933, Goebbels emphasizes the “heroic view of life” of National Socialism. He describes it, in a formulation that since has become infamous, as “a kind of romanticism of steel that has […] the courage to face the problems and to look them firmly and without flinching into their pitiless eyes.” Artists must be “willing and unresistingly fulfilled” by this attitude. Only then will their work “last and win the future.”¹⁷ Musicians were particularly eager to accept this ideological postulate because they were able to fall back on long-proven models. Beethoven’s music from his so-called “heroic period” was declared paradigmatic for the music Goebbels had in mind. An explicit reference is the Sinfonia Eroica op. 55, from which the ideas of “heroism” and “romanticism” could be combined in a way that came quite close to Gobbels’s “romanticism of steel.” From there, Nazi ideologues, like Alfred Rosenberg, drew a “heroic-romantic” line of German music through Richard Wagner to the present day of the Third Reich, with its plethora of heroic music, and backwards at least to George Frideric Handel. Heroism, dynamism, and energy were virtues that the Nazi regime needed to achieve its political goals. At the beginning, music that featured these properties served the mobilization for the National Socialist “movement,” but with the war, the “heroic” aspect took on a new relevance. Music played an important role in warfare, especially with the Nazis but also with other war powers. For example, between the declaration of war on 10 June 1940 and the Allied invasion in September 1943, the Italian state radio produced and broadcast 128 complete operas, almost exclusively by Italian composers and with first-class performers. In Great Britain, the British Broadcasting Corporation developed an intense anti-National Socialist propaganda through popular music programs, such as “Workers’ Play-
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time,” “Music While You Work,” and especially “Desert Island Discs” (the last with the musical comedian Vic Oliver, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill). But the efforts of the National Socialist state exceeded all other such initiatives by far. Measures ranged from meticulous program planning on the radio by Goebbels himself to the gigantic enterprise of musical Truppenbetreuung (troop care) at the front. In the volume Lebendige Musik (Living Music), which was published in 1943 by the German air force as a vademecum for soldiers, music critic Edwin von der Nüll describes the program conference of an ensemble, providing insight into the mobilizing function of the concerts. The “music adviser of the air force command staff, where the responsible decision lies,” rejects a suggested piece by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. It is “not able to inspire the soldier,” he laments and goes on to complain that it “has too little melodic content, too little immediate conviction, too little gripping rhythm, it is too much attached to the world of thought.” Instead, the choice falls on “a minuet from Beethoven’s Sonata in E flat major,”¹⁸ which seems to the advisers to be more suitable for the purposes of the desired conditioning—certainly also because of the key of E flat major, to which the character of heroism was ascribed. Here it is already becoming apparent which music was considered unheroic in the Nazi state, but also in other regimes, and was therefore censored in a preventive and repressive manner. Ideologists like Goebbels in Germany or Andrei Zhdanov in Soviet Russia regarded the “world of thought” as a dangerous, disintegrative opponent to the instinctive “world of action” and affiliated musical styles that appealed to the intellect with the former. They also opposed music that allegedly fostered “defeatist” sentiments. At the beginning of the war, Peter Raabe, the president of the German Reich Chamber of Music, stated: “Anything that, according to its attitude, is not compatible with the greatness of the time does not belong in the concert program now.”¹⁹ Such unheroic music included works that did not follow the pattern of the familiar “per aspera ad astra” or “through night to light” dramaturgy. In this desired model, of which Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 in C minor is the classic example, the musical development leads to a radiant, bright, and optimistic finale in a major key, after having had to go through dark phases beforehand. This dramaturgical tradition corresponded perfectly to the cultural and political demand to express optimism. Works, however, that refused an affirmative conclusion and faded away like Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony could not hope for any applause in “mobilization dictatorships.” However, it was crucial that mobilization through music was done for the right purposes. In many cases, danceable popular music also fell victim to censorship, especially when it was of African-American origin. This practice was rooted in racist resentment as well as was driven by deep-seated fear of the mo-
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bilizing potential of these musical genres. By encouraging people to dance, African-American music in the eyes of the censors appealed to “low,” that is to say, physical and sexual instincts, and thus threatened to lead the youth down the wrong path. In the worst case, censors thought the impulse of movement would turn into open revolt. Still, in the early 1980s in Bulgaria, for example, the regime’s law enforcement agencies were so concerned about the mobilization potential of rock music that a concert by the band Signal in February 1982 in Burgas caused turmoil that led to a general ban on the group. The singer of Signal, Yordan Karadzhov, describes the events in an interview published by the Bulgarian news provider Novinite on 26 November 2013, almost thirty years later: The kids started jumping and having fun. […] The security took out the police batons and started beating everybody, because the kids were enjoying themselves. I stopped the concert, saying we were not used to [singing] under militia violence. […] On the very next day, “Politburo” became engaged with us […] we were banned from performing for a year, all our records in the stores were confiscated, we were blocked from radio and TV —they took us off the face of the earth.
Karadzhov describes a scene from a repressive state that, just a few years before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, still violently attacked an enthusiastic rock audience. Characteristic of the regime, however, is only the timing of police violence, not the use of force against pop fans itself. For about 25 years earlier, very similar incidents had also occurred in democratic countries when rock ‘n’ roll was celebrated by European youth. During Bill Haley’s famous tour in 1958, for example, there were riots in several German cities, the climax of which was a brawl in Berlin’s Sportpalast, where the police vehemently attacked the youthful audience with truncheons. Four years later, Haley went on tour again, which was peaceful not least because there was no massive police presence. This shows that democratic societies learned to deal with the mobilizing potential of popular music. This process happened much slower in totalitarian states. The fear of losing control over the masses was also deeper in such states because the regimes attributed to music a strong mobilization potential, which they themselves used for their own propagandistic practice.
Conclusion Summarizing key trends in state musical propaganda and censorship in twentieth-century Europe, we see both phenomena reaching new heights in that period. Two world wars, the expansion of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes over almost the whole of Europe in the first half of the century, and the Cold War in
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the second half of the century coincided with a massive increase in propaganda and censorship. Music played a central role in this. It was predestined because European thinkers and state theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche ascribed great power over the human psyche to music. But the fact that propaganda and censorship were particularly prominent in the field of twentieth-century music, however, is also due to certain developments in music history—which, certainly, did not occur independently of general history. Three developments should be emphasized here: Firstly, we need to mention the formation of a European musical modernity, which, already at the turn of the twentieth century and on a broad basis after the First World War, increasingly questioned the traditional aesthetic standards of music. This musical modernity’s conspicuous internationality as well as its critical and mocking rejection of bourgeois norms encouraged a concept of nationalistic culture oriented on national categories. In the first half of the century, dictatorships therefore fought this musical modernity vehemently through censorship. At the same time, they used it as a welcome image of the enemy, to which they built up a musical counterworld in their propaganda. Since this counterworld sounded more accessible to most ears than the progressive currents, it was used intensively to arouse sympathy among the population. In the second half of the century, this continued in the Soviet-controlled part of Europe, albeit with varying intensity, which decreased continuously since the mid1970s. In democratic countries, oppositely, musical modernity after 1945 enjoyed the demonstrative support of the state, which was thus able to distance itself from its totalitarian past. Secondly, the media dissemination of music has constantly increased since the beginning of the twentieth century through records, radio, sound film, television, and finally the World Wide Web. The rapid development of media technology gave the well-known effects of music a tremendously broad impact that no state power could ignore. From the perspective of music history in particular, it is easy to see how in the first half of the century the dissemination and development of media was often directly related to the propaganda interests of the regimes. Thirdly, popular music of African-American origin spread widely in two phases: once after the First World War and then again, much more strongly, after the Second World War, when many European states saw danger in “Americanization” through jazz, rock, and pop. Especially the second phase radically changed the music scene in Europe and forced the cultural policies of its states to position themselves against the background of the Cold War, but also against the background of generational conflicts and not least commercial interests. Generally, propaganda oscillated between ostracism and appropriation of Afri-
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can-American music. In both the first and second half of the century, the respective turning point came when the popularity of the genres in question became so great that propaganda could no longer pass them by. In that situation, leaders tried to appropriate them for their own purposes and to use the popularity of the genres to spread their messages. In the second half of the century, it was favored by the generational change in the political leadership as well as the gradual realization that pop music could also be used to advertise the state. In this way, conditions in Europe, relating to specific music history as well as general contemporary history, developed dynamic interactions that made the twentieth century not only one of political but also of musical extremes.
Notes Neil Postman, “Propaganda,” Et Cetera: A Review of General Semantics 36 (1979): 128. So the simplified basic formula in Thymian Bussemer, “Propaganda: Theoretisches Konzept und geschichtliche Bedeutung,” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte (2013): 2, https://docupedia.de/zg/ Propaganda (accessed 28 March 2020). Similar in id., Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2005), 31– 32, also for the following citations. Franz Liszt, Musikalische Werke: Serie I, Band 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1908), 1. Manuel D. Silva, “Salazar’s Dictatorship and the Paradoxes of State Music: Luís de Freitas Branco’s Ill-Fated Solemn Ouverture 1640 (1939),” in Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships, ed. Esteban Buch et al. (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016), 144– 167, also for the following quotations. Walter Abendroth, “Kunstmusik und Volkstümlichkeit,” Die Musik 26 (1934): 413 – 414. Quoted after “Volksfeind Dmitri Schostakowitsch”: Eine Dokumentation der öffentlichen Angriffe gegen den Komponisten in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion, ed. Ernst Kuhn and Günter Wolter (Berlin: Ernst Kuhn Verlag, 1997), 10. Quoted after Peter Reichel, Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus (Munich: Hanser 1991), 215. Wilhelm Ehmann, Musikalische Feiergestaltung: Ein Werkweiser guter Musik für die natürlichen und politischen Feste des Jahres (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938), 16. Paul Bekker, Die Sinfonie von Beethoven bis Mahler (Berlin: Schuster und Loeffler, 1918), 12– 15. Igor C. Zubillaga, “El Concierto de la Paz (1964): Three Commissions to Celebrate 25 Years of Francoism,” in Buch et al., Composing for the State, 178 – 179. Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, ed. Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk (Berlin: Bernhard Hahnefeld Verlag, 1940), 8. Marina Frolova-Walker, “A Birthday Present for Stalin: Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests (1949),” in Buch et al., Composing for the State, 115 – 116. Quoted after Friedrich Geiger, Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004), 108. Quoted after Verena Mogl, “Juden, die ins Lied sich retten”: Der Komponist Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 – 1996) in der Sowjetunion (Münster: Waxmann, 2017), 118.
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Johann Plenge, Deutsche Propaganda: Die Lehre von der Propaganda als praktische Gesellschaftslehre (Bremen: Angelsachsen-Verlag, 1922), 13. Quoted after Manfred F. Heidler, Musik in der Bundeswehr: Musikalische Bewährung zwischen Aufgabe und künstlerischem Anspruch (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2005), 522. Goebbels-Reden, Volume 1: 1932 – 1939, ed. Helmut Heiber (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1971), 131– 141. Edwin von der Nüll, Lebendige Musik (Leipzig: Schwarzhäupter Verlag, 1943), 65, probably referring to the Piano Sonata op. 31, 3, the third movement of which is entitled “Menuetto.” Peter Raabe, “Über den Musikbetrieb während des Krieges,” Zeitschrift für Musik 106 (1939): 1029 – 1030.
Bibliography Bussemer, Thymian, “Propaganda: Theoretisches Konzept und geschichtliche Bedeutung.” Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, August 2, 2013. https://docupedia.de/zg/Propaganda (accessed 28 March 2020). Bussemer, Thymian. Propaganda: Konzepte und Theorien. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2005. Frolova-Walker, Marina. “A Birthday Present for Stalin: Shostakovich’s Song of the Forests (1949).” In Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships, edited by Esteban Buch et al., 96 – 120. Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016. Geiger, Friedrich. Musik in zwei Diktaturen: Verfolgung von Komponisten unter Hitler und Stalin. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004. Heidler, Manfred F. Musik in der Bundeswehr: Musikalische Bewährung zwischen Aufgabe und künstlerischem Anspruch. Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2005. Kuhn, Ernst, and Günter Wolter, eds. “Volksfeind Dmitri Schostakowitsch”: Eine Dokumentation der öffentlichen Angriffe gegen den Komponisten in der ehemaligen Sowjetunion. Berlin: Ernst Kuhn Verlag, 1997. Mogl, Verena. “Juden, die ins Lied sich retten”: Der Komponist Mieczysław Weinberg (1919 – 1996) in der Sowjetunion. Münster: Waxmann, 2017. Postman, Neil. “Propaganda.” Et Cetera: A Review of General Semantics 36 (1979): 128 – 132. Reichel, Peter. Der schöne Schein des Dritten Reiches: Faszination und Gewalt des Faschismus. Munich: Hanser 1991. Silva, Manuel D. “Salazar’s Dictatorship and the Paradoxes of State Music: Luís de Freitas Branco’s Ill-Fated Solemn Ouverture 1640 (1939).” In Buch et al., Composing for the State, 144 – 167. Zubillaga, Igor C. “El Concierto de la Paz (1964): Three Commissions to Celebrate 25 Years of Francoism.” In Buch et al., Composing for the State, 168 – 186.
Further Reading Buch, Esteban, et al., eds. Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships. Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016.
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Fairclough, Pauline. Classic for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Hall, Patricia, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Moore, Rachel. Performing Propaganda: Musical Life and Culture in Paris during the First World War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018. Perris, Arnold. Music as Propaganda: Art to Persuade, Art to Control. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. Sala, Massimiliano, ed. Music and Propaganda in the Short Twentieth Century. Turnhout: Brepolis, 2014.
Friedemann Pestel
15 Performing for the Nation: Perspectives on Musical Diplomacy
“Musical diplomacy,” “cultural diplomacy,” and “music and international relations” are but a few of the labels and categories scholars have used for addressing the political uses of music beyond the nation-state. They serve as a frame for explaining musical performances in their political contexts. A typical example are three concerts in each of which the Berlin Philharmonic played Ludwig van Beethoven’s Eroica symphony over the twentieth century. The orchestra performed the Eroica in 1897 in Paris at the first visit of a German orchestra in France after the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71); the work also figured prominently on the program when the orchestra, sponsored by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, toured neutral Sweden in 1940 immediately after the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had occupied Denmark and Norway; and the symphony closed the Berlin Philharmonic’s first concert in Israel on a state-sponsored “reconciliation” tour in 1990 shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In each of these cases, the concerts were to carry a political meaning to their audiences: they involved state actors, music agents, and the musicians, and the very same work was received in radically different ways. Over the last 10 to 15 years, the literature on musical diplomacy has considerably expanded. As many contributions are diverse and innovative in developing a broader understanding of the “diplomatic” in musical diplomacy, a major challenge revolves around the questions whom and what music politically represents on the international stage and how musical diplomacy is related to musical mobility more in general. The problem of how to gauge the impact of musical diplomacy on international relations has often led to privileging a perspective of the emitting side—on musicians as being “sent” by governments and on the “power” of state institutions and public officials in constellations where their reach of influence was significant but nevertheless limited. In light of other actors and interests involved in musical diplomacy projects, I call this problem the “aporia of state-centrism.” In this chapter, I argue that a narrow focus on state-sponsored performances abroad captures only one dimension of how music and politics interacted in the international sphere. In response to this aporia, I present an actor-centered approach that decenters musical diplomacy from the state and highlights the agency of the different actors involved in politicized musicking on a transnational scale. This take implies looking at the entanglements between musical life, political institutions, the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-016
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music business, audiences, and artistic careers. Through the lens of actors, this chapter both surveys the current state of research on musical diplomacy and presents new directions by bringing further strands of literature on the political, social, and economic functions of music in a dialogue with the scholarship on musical diplomacy. With regard to the European scope of this handbook, this chapter not only covers a range of Eastern, Central, and Western European initiatives but also looks at Europe as a target region, in particular of US cultural diplomacy. With cultural diplomacy being closely linked to the promotion of Western music of different styles and genres—classical, jazz, and popular music as well as instrumental and vocal styles—and, to a lesser extent, extra-European musical genres, we have to keep in mind that twentieth-century musical diplomacy reached beyond Europe and the Western world to become a global phenomenon. Accordingly, if we look for specific European characteristics, then they are probably to be found in the link between the interference of state actors in international musical relations and the considerable involvement—though to different degrees in different countries—of public authorities in music sponsorship at home. There are good reasons for addressing musical diplomacy as, by and large, a twentieth-century phenomenon. Though scholars have convincingly argued for expanding the temporal framework into the modern and early modern periods, state attempts at planning, controlling, and financing music making beyond the own nation-state and empire gained decisive momentum with the cultural mobilization during World War I. While the twentieth-century dictatorships and Cold War polarization marked other key phases of diplomatic uses of music, it would be shortsighted to deduce an “end” of musical diplomacy from the close of a “short” twentieth century. Rather, this chapter follows its evolution into the twenty-first century.
1 Concepts and Approaches to Musical Diplomacy Starting with a recent handbook definition by political scientist Patricia Goff, cultural diplomacy revolves around artists, by and large, in nation- or stateframed cultural settings establishing “meaningful ties” between two areas that maintain international relations.¹ At best, these ties contribute to setting up “communication” between governments that is independent from official diplomatic relations; these ties can also act as a tool for developing diplomatic relations or simply a means for affirming the status quo of existing relations. In that
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understanding, cultural diplomacy is conceptualized much more with regard to diplomacy than with regard to culture. For this reason, many scholars treat it as a specific form of “public diplomacy.” Closely entangled with diplomatic practices, this concept reacts to a conventional understanding that considers diplomacy to be only driven by political, military, or economic interests while taking place in confined spaces, shielded from the public sphere. By contrast, public diplomacy targets larger audiences. In a state-centered understanding, public or cultural diplomacy projects are promoted by state actors in governmental offices at home or attached to embassies abroad. Musical performers often appear as “instruments” or “tools” of diplomacy if not as “musical ambassadors” on their own. Typical objects of such top-down approaches are jazz bands or symphony orchestras that were sponsored by US governmental authorities and toured Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Latin America, and the Middle East. During the political deadlock of the Cold War, their task—in particular in Europe—consisted in promoting the high level of American artistry against (partly imagined) allegations of cultural inferiority, decadence, and subversion. From a state point of view, the US Cultural Presentations Program—active from the 1950s to 1970s and certainly the largest cultural diplomacy project of the century—served to demonstrate the social and artistic inclusiveness of a democratic society through the means of jazz and classical music, countering communist accusations of racism or social exclusion as symptoms of a capitalist and imperialist order.² Historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht has highlighted that music is a good example of increasing state control over the twentieth century—a development that is all the more remarkable as it became narrowly tied to an influential discourse of framing music as “apolitical.”³ Such understandings of musical diplomacy share the belief that musical actors had to promote and diffuse a positive national self-image to influence the attitude of foreign governments and/or public spheres in favor of their own country or regime or to contribute to more overtly political interests such as the establishment of official diplomatic relations or the development of trade relations. Rhetorical tropes of music that promotes “understanding between peoples” and the inclusive power of music as a “universal language” as well as musicians as “ambassadors” are widely used and thus may seem unproblematic. However, we should consider that such ideas were normatively charged as well as historically and spatially contingent. Over the twentieth century, they served political power struggles, contestation, and negotiation, mobilizing specific self-images as well as concepts of the enemy. The history of musical diplomacy, therefore, is a history of attempted inclusion inasmuch as of imposed conditions and performed exclusion that deployed their own logics. As a case in point, the US Cultural Presentations Program relied
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on the target audiences’ acquaintance with or curiosity about artists, styles, and repertoires, thanks to media or local performance traditions. In Europe in particular, the performances did not create a cultural image out of nothing, which resulted in ambivalent audience reactions and pragmatic compromises. In postwar Italy, the promotion of American jazz struggled with fascist legacies because, in contrast to Nazi Germany and its censoring of the genre, jazz music had been actively supported by the fascists as a “native” art form displaying the regime’s modernity. The anti-totalitarian narrative, saying that jazz and dictatorships represented a political misfit and jazz performances in post-fascist or communist countries had an inherent democratizing or even subversive potential, is a typical example of how political and diplomatic actors tended to “exoticize” musical cultures in the destination countries for such self-fulfilling prophecies. In Iceland, the United States recurred to music for solving a crisis about an airbase, yet US officials deliberately refrained from sending jazz musicians to avoid racial resentment by Icelandic nationalists. Similarly, Soviet officials forced their American counterparts to adjust their musical agenda to their political requirements, as they preferred white musicians to African-American musicians in order to maintain the anti-American stereotype of racial discrimination. On a historiographical level, we have to take into account that historical studies of cultural diplomacy are sometimes related to studies rooted in professional diplomatic practices. As a consequence, there is a risk of blurring analytical and professional approaches to the field so that historical analysis may easily replicate the views of the diplomatic actors. In parts, this overlap also accounts for the specific junctures in cultural diplomacy studies that had a first peak during the Cold War and are preoccupied with this conflict to this day.
2 Responding to the Aporia of State-Centrism Recent interdisciplinary scholarship on musical diplomacy agrees on the need for multiperspective and process-oriented approaches. It has shifted the focus beyond state-sponsored planning, programming, and financing to pay greater attention to the reception abroad as well as the relative autonomy of nonstate actors. Challenging the aporia of state-centrism, recent contributions broaden traditional policy-oriented, top-down frameworks of diplomatic history by bringing in sociocultural perspectives such as Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture. Musical sociologist Cécile Prévost-Thomas and political scientist Frédéric Ramel address the aporia of state-centrism by considering musical diplomacy as the entire “ecosystem that includes all actors, spaces, networks, protocols,
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procedures of an area field.”⁴ Musicologists Damien Mahiet, Mark Ferraguto, and Rebekah Ahrendt consider agencies of musicians and diplomats and how these agencies use music across space and time. They understand music as “practice, institution, idea, and expression” putting particular emphasis on unpredictable effects.⁵ Cultural studies scholars Mario Dunkel and Sina Nitzsche seek to “decenter exclusively government-oriented perspectives” by shedding light on “reception processes and the manifold cultural repercussions of music diplomacy rather than reducing the field to the study of cultural policies.”⁶ Even though these approaches allow for a larger cast of actors and greater complexity of the phenomenon, the aporia of state-centrism still puts them to the test when it comes to translating them into empirical research. As long as empirical investigations continue to start from the state and often remain there, the fundamental question remains of how to evaluate the impact of musicking on international relations. This observation applies particularly when scholars assume that musical practices not only reflect but also shape international relations. Against this aporia, we might ask whether investigating the impact of musical diplomacy implies a more general reorientation of our questions about musical diplomacy. Twentieth-century cultural diplomats themselves often fell prey to a self-fulfilling prophecy when they took the success of musical performances as evidence for political affirmation. For example, in 1970, for the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, when the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performed his Ninth Symphony at the Fête de l’Humanité in Paris, the annual festival of France’s largest communist newspaper, the socialist officials interpreted the cheer from the 85,000 listeners at the end of the concert as a gesture of political recognition for the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At that time, the socialist state had not yet established diplomatic relations with France. Given the fact that the Gewandhaus concert took place among rock and folk music events, the far more probable explanation for the audience’s reaction is, however, that festival visitors simply applied behavioral patterns from Western rock music to a classical performance. Casting her view beyond governmental authorities and state officials—that is to say, music “pushed”—musicologist Danielle Fosler-Lussier highlights that music was also “pulled across borders by people who actively wanted it.”⁷ To be sure, following up on this observation brings with it the challenge of conceptualizing musical mobility in more complex ways than the traditional idea of musical diffusion allows for. However, the push-pull distinction resonates with the well-established concept of cultural transfers as well as Everett S. Lee’s push-and-pull model from the 1960s, which has been thoroughly revised in migration studies, where it originally stems from.
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We might ask whether the causal link that cultural diplomats made between state-sponsored musical performances and audience reactions actually reveals a belief in the political power of music shared by both sides. It may well be that rather different expectations and interests by politicians, audiences, and musicians converged in musical diplomacy. Whom or what did audiences of statesponsored guest performances applaud—a state, a nation, a political regime, an artist, a musical work, or even themselves? At what point can a musician be considered to have been an agent of cultural diplomacy: when performance fees and travel costs were paid by governmental authorities, when state sponsorship was acknowledged on the concert posters, when performers understood themselves as “cultural ambassadors,” or when they were perceived as such by their audiences, the press, or foreign officials? Finally, how can we make sense of the contingency of concert tours taking place in multinational settings or in strong competition with other musicians, performing arts, or entertainment genres? As such considerations quickly broaden the field of cultural diplomacy studies, there are nevertheless good reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Decentering musical diplomacy from the state implies rather re-embedding the state and state actors within the musical field than writing the state out of the field or abandoning the category of musical diplomacy in favor of an unlimited notion of the “political” in music. Diplomats, state officials, and governmental institutions were undisputed driving factors for fostering and maintaining international musical relations throughout the twentieth century. Yet, neither did pronounced state involvement in international musicking guarantee musicians’ identification with political agendas or audience reactions along political lines (even if, for political purposes, state actors framed them as “apolitical”) nor did the absence or low visibility of state involvement prevent contestation by audiences and the media. There are two questions here: to what extent did different expectations and appropriations of musical practices reinforce or contest each other, or did they simply coexist as self-fulfilling prophecies about the significance of international musical relations?
3 Musical Diplomacy: An Actor-Centered Perspective The response to the aporia of state-centrism I develop in this chapter is a broader perspective on actors of musical diplomacy and their agency, related to state involvement. The following section shows that state actors depended on the coop-
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eration of (a) cultural brokers, (b) audiences, and (c) musicians, whereas these groups used the prestige and financial options provided by state agencies and cultural diplomacy schemes for their own agendas. At best, these agendas overlapped. At worst, they led to open contestation. In most cases, they resulted in some pragmatic arrangement.
A) Subsidies and Cultural Brokers The economic dimension of musical diplomacy is crucial for two reasons. On the one hand, all music-related diplomatic agendas remained at the project stage as long as musical tours or international education programs were not funded. The decision about whether a touring project would materialize, or not, did not solely depend on political intention; it also rested on foreign or cultural ministries’ capacities of covering likely deficits. An abundance of files in governmental, orchestral, or musicians’ archives on projects that were never realized provides impressive evidence for the relevance of this aspect. On the other hand, inasmuch as state authorities allocated substantial funds for musical diplomacy, their participation in musical appearances abroad or international encounters—such as competitions or festivals—turned them into an important economic force on the musical market. Therefore, understanding the economy of music to a large extent as a political economy adds an often-neglected dimension to concepts such as “public diplomacy” and provides a first response to the aporia of state-centrism. Firstly, public subsidies came into play in the financial support of musical institutions themselves. Many European opera houses, orchestras, and conservatoires received public grants at local, regional, or national levels. In some instances, these funding frameworks emerged well before the twentieth century; in others, for example, for British musical institutions, state involvement was far less important. Without this institutional support, touring of large ensembles would hardly have been possible as they would not have been able to exist on a permanent basis. Secondly, at the core of the economy of musical diplomacy were the subsidies paid by state authorities for musical mobility across genres and at different scales: from soloists and jazz bands to symphony orchestras and opera companies. These funds came not only from foreign offices or ministries of culture but also from public broadcasting stations in the case of traveling radio ensembles. Here, state subsidies impacted the selection of destinations as they facilitated or even enabled long-distance traveling and performances in regions and venues that would not have been able to cover the costs on a purely commercial
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basis. While subsidies catalyzed musical globalization, the question remains how lasting such connections based on public funding were. On their 1959 world tour, the Vienna Philharmonic, thanks to Austrian government funding, was able to visit India and the Philippines, places the musicians had never considered before and never returned to. By contrast, the early presence of the Philharmonic in Japan increased the financial involvement of private sponsors both in Japan and in Austria. In the long term, this rendered state subsidies unnecessary for subsequent visits. Thirdly, subsidies also involved the destination countries as concert halls and music festivals were often run by public authorities and received subsidies, thereby allowing them to cover guest performances. From this perspective, musical diplomacy has to be considered an integral part of the complex settings of indirect profitability around private sponsoring, public-private partnerships, tax revenue created by tourism, and other forms of consumption as well as local, regional, or national branding. Other actors of the music business such as musicians’ unions—which pressured governments to restrict the admission of foreign musicians to the country—and record companies—which adapted their marketing strategies to state-sponsored touring—also became part of these intertwined regimes of supply and demand in musical diplomacy. In the complex interplay between public authorities and artists, music agents served as indispensable intermediaries because state agencies normally have neither the infrastructure nor the expertise to handle big projects on their own. Besides covering large parts of performance logistics, music agents integrated musical diplomacy into the professional and commercial routines of international musical life. This commercial appearance often concealed outspoken political agendas that might have sparked controversies in the public sphere. Thanks to their language skills, professional networks, and intercultural awareness, migrants played a pivotal role as intermediators, especially in politically tense encounters. Music agent Sol Hurok, leaving his native Russia for the United States before World War I, established himself as the main collaborator for US appearances of Soviet artists from the 1950s onwards. He was equally on good terms with state authorities and artists. An example of his concern for the latter is that he secretly provided Soviet orchestral musicians with free meals so that they could save their daily allowances for shopping. From a commercial point of view, music agents considered state subsidies as a convenient means for covering deficits. Subsidies were one source of income among others, though a particularly attractive one. Substantial state intervention directly impacted profit margins as well as musicians’ fees. Even the target audiences participated in this bargain, as subsidies lowered ticket prices. In turn, this increased the like-
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lihood of bigger audiences, which politicians took as evidence for the “success” of the musical-diplomatic mission. In Europe, the starting point for this tangled relationship between musical diplomats and cultural brokers was World War I when especially Germany, the Habsburg monarchy, and France set up large-scale state-financed cultural propaganda schemes. Against the military stalemate in the trenches, the Central Powers and the Triple Entente competed for cultural supremacy by mobilizing artists and musicians. Neutral Switzerland turned into a major center for these activities. Between 1916 and 1918, the cultural officer at the German embassy in Bern, Harry Graf Kessler, organized a packed program of solo recitals, orchestral tours, and opera performances to win over the Swiss public opinion in favor of Germany. The main antagonist in Switzerland were French artists and ensembles who, thanks to state subsidies, took turns in entertaining Swiss audiences with high-quality performances that could not have been operated commercially during peace times. Cultural diplomats like Kessler, however, took great care to veil this massive state involvement by relying on established business routines. For that purpose, the foreign ministry in Berlin founded a private concert agency named Intergast. While also organizing the logistics of the Swiss tours, the agency primarily served to channel the subsidies into Switzerland without raising political and public suspicion. The fact that Intergast was headed by Otto Fürstner (a leading music publisher and close collaborator of Richard Strauss, who as a composer and a conductor was one of the major profiteers of the Swiss propaganda scheme), highlights that musical diplomacy also provided business and income opportunities. The same holds true for Swiss music agents who took charge of the ticket sales and earned provisions in return. Subsidies were essential, though only rarely did they fully cover the expenses of international performances—that is to say, musicians’ fees, agents’ provisions, traveling costs, accommodation, advertising, and hall rental. The need for covering deficits implied that, in many cases, audiences still had to pay considerable sums for their tickets and private sponsors became involved as well. As a case in point, a closer look at the tours of the Berlin Philharmonic during National Socialism reveals that, regardless of support by the Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, they continued to depend on fees, ticket sales, and logistical resources provided by concert agencies. In Western Europe, performances were organized by local music agents with which the orchestra had already collaborated before the Nazi takeover. The importance of ticket sales limited the extent to which the tours could be openly politicized through Nazi symbols, a Germanized repertoire, touring frequency, and destinations as well as the immediate exclusion of Jewish musicians. This gave the performances an aspect of continuity and routine that helped to downplay the political pro-
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tests by German émigrés or left-wing groups and, in that sense, served the propagandistic intentions of the National Socialists in return. Finally, understanding musical diplomacy as a political economy that involved cultural brokers has important consequences for reconsidering Cold War touring, in particular from the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain. After 1945, the socialist countries set up public concert agencies that monopolized the organization and budgeting of all incoming and outgoing guest performances, from large-scale classical ensembles to folk music groups and sought-after rock stars. In all these cases, the states aimed at gaining political as well as financial capital that fulfilled the dual function of managing financial profits and deficits alike. From an Eastern perspective, the prospect of financial gains could compensate for ideological reservations about frequent and large-scale mobility across the Iron Curtain. Commercial exchanges of records were also part of this East-West brokerage, including competition and cooperation between Eastern state record companies and their private Western counterparts. Following the licensing agreement made between the British company Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) and the Soviet Melodiya label in 1975, 90 percent of the Soviet recordings sold to the Western market consisted of Russian or Soviet composers, with Dmitri Shostakovich, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Sergei Prokofiev being the most prominent names. These agreements were supposed to deal with the problem of mobile Eastern artists recording directly with Western labels during their tours. A case in point is the pianist Sviatoslav Richter who, between 1960 and 1964, produced no less than 32 discs in Western studios without Soviet permission. A crucial element of this state-driven brokerage of East-West musical mobility was currency transfer in order to cover travel expenses, in particular when Eastern transportation companies were not on hand for certain destinations. As the fees of Eastern musicians, in return, were paid in Western, transferable currencies, the tours provided an important source of “valuta” income for Eastern authorities. Artist fees were negotiated by the public concert agencies. As Jonathan Yaeger has shown for the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, agencies aimed at obtaining “valuta profits” that cross-financed other touring projects or contributed to the government’s general Western currency budget.⁸ The fact that Eastern ensembles primarily traveled to Western countries and extensively toured musical peripheries with great frequency was mainly related to these financial considerations. As a result, musical diplomacy and music business were two inextricably intertwined aspects of musical mobility across the Iron Curtain.
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B) Audiences and Journalists Paying attention to the social dimension of international musical relations shifts the focus of musical diplomacy away from diplomats, cultural brokers, and musicians to those seated in the auditorium and also in front of radio and TV sets. In fact, audiences inside and outside the concert halls were not only the primary target group of musical diplomacy, but also constituted by far the largest group of actors involved. While we have gained a deeper understanding of the interrelations between national musical cultures and transnational musical practices, audience reactions to state-sponsored international performances have barely been systematically analyzed. Reports by cultural officers and embassies to their foreign offices back home often reduced the agency of audiences to applauding the cultural “ambassadors” on stage, revealing more about the way diplomats gauged “success” than offering deep insights into audience reactions. To the same category belong collected excerpts from journalists turning the collective cheering, at best, into hymnic reviews, praising the musical qualities of the artists, and, ideally, attributing them to a political regime or a national musical culture. Such accounts, which have frequently made their way into the research literature, obscure two major points. On the one hand, positive audience reactions and press coverage were far from being unconditional and being restricted to the moment of performance. It is, therefore, well worth looking at the multiple factors that produced such reactions. On the other hand, guest performances, in particular in times of political tensions, also sparked open or muted contestation or gave rise to misunderstandings. Here, it is helpful to look for those parts of media coverage that were not usually quoted in the official reports of “success.” The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra was booed in Madrid in 1950, during the strongly anticommunist Franco dictatorship; this rejection had nothing to do with insufficient artistic quality but rather with the fact that the orchestra, which consisted of numerous German-Czech musicians expelled from Prague in 1945, performed there under the name Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and was mistaken as a cultural representative of a communist state.⁹ What had initially been a publicity strategy to raise attention for an otherwise unknown musical ensemble with an “invented” musical tradition did indeed provoke strong reactions, though in an uncontrollable way. Such situational effects on the spot could in fact have a stronger impact on the overall significance of international performances than all planning beforehand. To be sure, many of the available sources relate to the emitting side of musical diplomacy. In order to learn more about reception political reports must be read for information beyond applause and the selection of sources must be ex-
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tended to include local material. For example, journalists from the destination countries not only provided their own opinions about performances in more or less explicitly political terms but also observed audiences and sometimes spoke to them. In reverse, journalists from the musicians’ home countries who covered important tours shaped a certain image of cultural diplomacy in their media that would meet the readers’ national, cultural, and political expectations. The audience attended performances for many reasons: love of music and favorite artists, entertainment, social gathering, or the display of social and material prestige are but a few motives. Europeans who came to a concert of an American jazz artist that was advertised to them as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity may have been predisposed to cheer the performance. In other places, audiences largely consisted of subscribers to an international concert series offered by a concert hall of national or local repute. Yet, in another peripheral place in Europe or North America, audiences were sold tickets to a mixed-genre season of international musicians, ballet companies, ice shows, and folklore programs. Tastes differed and preferences diverged, regardless of whether performances were part of state-sponsored cultural diplomacy schemes. The political message was often conveyed via concert posters and program notes. To give but two examples: when the Berlin Philharmonic undertook a Wehrmacht tour to France after the German occupation in 1940, the program notes, apparently written by a German author, announced an inclusive panorama of French and German music but nevertheless established German hegemony by stating that “German masters gave more than they received.”¹⁰ By contrast, the program notes penned by local organizers in India in 1959 presented the Vienna Philharmonic’s visit to the country as Western recognition of India’s progress since independence.¹¹ Once the political background of a concert was acknowledged, political symbols played an important role. For a state like the GDR, which lacked international recognition outside the communist world, placing its name or flag on the posters announcing a tour by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra or the Dresden Staatskapelle represented an eminent strategy of musical diplomacy. Hence, sources like program notes and concert reviews provide valuable insights into the multilayered meanings, traditions, transformations, and appropriations produced by and connected to the works on the program and the musicians on the podium. Finally, diplomats and politicians were keen promoters of broadcasts, urging (and sometimes paying for) radio and television transmissions of concerts in order to enhance their assumed political impact. Applause and cheers could have multiple meanings, which scholars only partly succeed in accessing. By contrast, negative reactions were much more ex-
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plicit in the targets of their critique. When the Vienna Philharmonic came to Switzerland on a World War I propaganda tour, a group of Belgian internees in Neuchâtel disrupted the concert. They protested against conductor Felix von Weingartner because he had signed, in 1914, the “Manifesto of the 93,” which justified German war atrocities in Belgium. During National Socialism and World War II, Jewish and left-wing protesters—both émigrés and locals—called for boycotting the concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic in France, organized protests outside the concert halls, condemned the performances in émigré journals, distributed leaflets, and even spread tear gas and stink bombs during the concerts. Such contestations entailed personal risks for the protesters: the person spreading tear gas at the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert in Lyon in 1942, for instance, was deported to a concentration camp. Less ostensibly, low concert attendance could be an indicator not only of unattractive programming or unfavorable economic situations but also of indifference, skepticism, or open rejection of the performing artists and the political regimes. Nevertheless, as soon as audiences and journalists attended performances that political actors considered as politically relevant and meaningful for international relations, they were likely to be instrumentalized for political purposes regardless of their motives. Audience behavior left space for the expression of individual attitudes—which could also be taken as a collective demonstration and thereby be politicized for different purposes. Only rarely did these different interpretations openly contradict each other. This openness made the audiences of musical diplomacy politically attractive.
C) Musicians A third response to the aporia of state-centrism consists in bringing the musicians into the panorama of musical diplomacy. Such a refocusing considers their transnational careers and their artistic as well as political agency in the musical settings in which the state intervened in different forms and degrees, but this agency cannot be reduced to political or diplomatic agendas. Instead of primarily regarding internationally active musicians as political “instruments” or cultural “ambassadors,” we should look at how musicians related themselves to public initiatives in order to pursue their own professional interests as mobile artists. To be sure, some musicians would indeed have considered themselves national representatives or have subscribed to ideas of cultural superiority if not imperialism. Others actively embraced political agendas of cultural diplomacy. American musicians engaged for the US Cultural Presentations Program were
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given language training and instructions about how to behave on international tours. Additionally, some of them endorsed the task to promote democratic values through musical performances. Yet, considering them as “amateur diplomats” is at odds with the professional self-understanding of many musicians.¹² Usually, musicians did not care much about political orders in countries where they were to perform or about the diplomatic interests of their home countries. From a professional viewpoint, mobility was an integral part of their lives, and they often traveled to many places over a short time. Here, an actor-centered approach allows for analyzing more closely what difference musical diplomacy actually made to them and how they perceived, instrumentalized, and reshaped state inference in their music making. Also, members of larger ensembles were far too heterogeneous—or sometimes controversially homogenous—in terms of nationality, class, race, ethnicity, gender, language, or political orientation to represent a state simply along national lines. Traveling musicians also brought controversies and tensions from their home societies to the international stage, thereby complicating straightforward ideas of representation. Moreover, musicians of all genres had transnational careers well before and without state interference, and many of them simply regarded public subsidies as additional support or income. What matters here is that the politicization of musical relations in the twentieth century had unintended consequences. Musicians on tour took on and were assigned different roles in the countries they performed: from artists to tourists, from stars to “foreigners,” from colleagues to national representatives. They regularly met local musicians officially, privately, and illegally. Occasionally, they also performed with them in carefully arranged and symbolically charged musical encounters, such as the joint concert of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Chinese Central Philharmonic in Beijing in 1979, shortly after the public performance of classical Western music had been permitted again after the Cultural Revolution, or the jam sessions of musicians from the Benny Goodman Orchestra with their Soviet counterparts in 1962. For all these reasons, touring musicians raised attention far beyond the concert stage. They posed the question of autonomy, surveillance, and perception, in particular when traveling in larger groups. In consequence, cultural diplomacy was particularly prone to become “risk diplomacy.”¹³ Musicians conformed to state expectations and political instructions only to a limited extent, depending on their career objectives, professional routines, and artistic self-conceptions as well as including the inevitable limits of control and discipline beyond the national realm. The 1980 tour of the Orchestre de Paris to Argentina, at that time under a military dictatorship, is a revealing example of how musical diplomacy could go off its state-intended tracks. Some orchestral players refused any con-
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tact with representatives of the junta regime and even provoked a diplomatic incident by expressing their solidarity with the desaparecidos and meeting the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. In his account centered around an emblematic performance of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in Buenos Aires’ Teatro Colón Esteban Buch resituates musical diplomacy at the intersection of the politicization of music, musicians’ agency, memories of mass violence, and an emotional history of the symphonic canon.¹⁴ Probably the most notable manifestation of risk diplomacy emerged during the Cold War, when Eastern Bloc artists defected during tours to the West. Besides the prominent cases of pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy, violinist Gidon Kremer, and conductors Rafael Kubelík and Klaus Tennstedt, defections counted among the common experiences of traveling musicians. They were one result of rapidly increasing musical mobility across the Iron Curtain from the 1950s. This mobility included second- and third-rank ensembles whose members had fewer traveling opportunities to the West than compared to musical stars such as conductor Kurt Masur and tenor Peter Schreier, who had permanent travel permits. Available data on the scale of defections is still scarce, yet the fact that GDR ensembles alone lost more than 50 artists and technical staff annually in the 1980s highlights the pervasiveness of this problem.¹⁵ In West Germany, highly qualified musicians from the East were welcome “recruits” in times of declining domestic applicants for vacant positions. In the heated controversies over the admission of foreign and female musicians into West German orchestras, players from the East had professional advantages given that they were mostly male and considered “German” in terms of training and tradition. Notwithstanding the radical option of defection, Eastern musicians also expanded their scope for undertaking different activities on tour. At a professional level, they made recordings for their own profit, gave master classes, or even auditioned for vacant positions. On a personal level, they regularly met family members, friends, and colleagues living in the West. As consumers, they sometimes lived on canned food, reception buffets, and dinner invitations for weeks, saving their allowances to buy goods not available in their home countries. These practices brought them in regular conflict with domestic customs authorities and hardly met the official behavioral expectations. Struggling with risk diplomacy, Eastern state authorities, when granting or denying travel permissions, constantly had to ponder the intended political and economic outcomes of musical diplomacy against matters of control. Defections meant a loss of talented and home-trained musicians, and they were also politically compromising when they became global news. Internationally active musicians reacted to, conformed with, distanced themselves from, circumvented, or counteracted musical diplomacy. Some of them
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also dedicated themselves to political, educational, and humanitarian engagement at the international level, in particular as peace or human rights activists. An early representative of political activism through music was conductor Arturo Toscanini. Raised in a republican Risorgimento tradition, he broke with fascist Italy in 1931. In the following years, he carefully planned his appearances in democratic countries, in particular the United States; declared his solidarity with persecuted musicians by performing with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra; and helped alternative festivals to National Socialist Bayreuth, such as the Salzburg Festival (until 1938) or the Lucerne Festival, to gain international reputation. However, in order to demonstrate his rupture with Adolf Hitler’s Germany, he did not hesitate to perform in other authoritarian regimes as in Austria under the Dollfuß/Schuschnigg dictatorship and Hungary ruled by “Regent” Miklós Horthy. From the 1950s, conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein switched swiftly between different musical roles and genres as much as between his artistic, educational, and political commitments both in the USA and internationally. Pop singer Billy Joel took the role of a “self-made musical ambassador” to the Soviet Union with his popularity transcending negative attitudes towards American politics or politicians.¹⁶ Embracing goals commonly associated with cultural diplomacy agendas, Joel and his commercial self-marketing resonated with the cultural apparatus in Eastern Bloc countries that organized his appearances as part of their cultural politics schemes. For the Soviet regime, his concerts provided a welcome occasion for displaying its glasnost ambitions. Rising attention has been granted to institutionalized musical youth projects. Two prominent examples are the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO) and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Both ensembles’ activities are closely related to international touring. Founded in 1976 by the Britain-based International Youth Foundation, shortly after the first major enlargement of the European Community, the EUYO brings together young musicians from all European Community/European Union member states and since has grown into a more and more international body. Placed under the protectorate of the European Commission and receiving European Union funding, the orchestra, according to the former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, serves as “the best possible ambassador for the European Union. Wherever it plays, the European tune becomes a political programme, and vice versa.”¹⁷ However, it was rarely discussed what this rhetoric came to mean apart from the orchestra’s performances inside and outside Europe and the use of European Union symbols. Therefore, one may argue, it has a greater impact on the professional training of young musicians than on promoting European cohesion. This became clear when the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in 2016 drove the
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EUYO out of its British headquarters in London and made a new funding scheme necessary. The orchestra finally moved to Italy and is currently financed by the European Union’s “Creative Europe” program. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded in 1999 in Weimar in commemoration of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 250th anniversary, is closely associated with non-governmental organizations like the Barenboim-Said Foundation and brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine, the Arab countries, and other regions. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra not only is funded by private donors, but also receives public subsidies. Together with its conductor Daniel Barenboim’s political and humanitarian commitment in the Near East conflict and the roles ascribed to him in terms of national belonging and religion, it raises a whole set of questions about ideas of musical reconciliation and the autonomy of musical practices facing political violence in the Middle East and international diplomatic tensions as well as about overlaps between public action and political action. The picture is further complicated by the entanglements between public sponsorship—the orchestra and Barenboim’s activities have been subsidized in several ways by Spanish and German political bodies—and philanthropy, commercialization, and transnational musical branding as the orchestra regularly performs at leading music festivals, mostly in Europe. Moreover, the collaboration between Barenboim and postcolonial theorist Edward Said in setting up the orchestra points to the interplay between national and universalizing, transnational, and postcolonial conceptions of musicking in a global world.
Conclusion This chapter identified two challenges of conceptualizing musical diplomacy. First, the aporia of state-centrist approaches may lead scholars to overemphasize the role of state actors and underestimate the question of the effects and impact of musical diplomacy on musical practices. Second, this aporia is often related to a diffusionist understanding of musical diplomacy from one country to the “outside” that replicates the expectations of the emitting side. As a response, this chapter proposed an actor-centered approach that, building on more flexible frameworks in recent scholarship, resituates state actors and state agency within the manifold interests and practices involved in musicking on the international scale. As the fields and cases presented demonstrate, there is a strong potential for rewriting the histories of musical diplomacy from the angle of musical actors. Such decentered histories combine a political focus with economic and infrastructural perspectives and, most importantly, a broad-
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ened range of actors, in particular musicians, music agents, journalists, and audiences along with politicians and diplomats. These intersecting interpretive frames allow for a more nuanced discussion not only of the impact of musical diplomacy but also of its contingencies and limits. Not all of the initiatives subsumed under musical diplomacy were political or politically effective. In many cases, the commercial importance of musical diplomacy in connection to audience demand prevailed. State officials as well were not the only actors creating political meanings of music making beyond the national scale. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, musical diplomacy depended on many factors that came into play at different moments and places. As the actors involved had to prioritize these factors, the outcome, in particular from the state point of view, would have to remain largely unreliable. These observations complicate both a linear and a European narrative of twentieth-century musical diplomacy. Although we can observe an evolution in its structures and financial means starting from World War I and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s, the major challenge of musical diplomacy being risk diplomacy persisted over time. In a similar way, musical diplomacy schemes opened up to different genres—to “classical” music of different scales as well as “popular” music (though far more to jazz than to rock and pop)—but we should be careful about overemphasizing programmatic discussions that easily turn into normative assumptions. All these genres traveled, continued to evolve, and were politicized also beyond state intervention. While musical diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century was mainly geographically centered on Europe and gained increasingly global dimensions after 1945, its driving forces remained, by and large, national. In consequence, musical diplomacy was an international rather than a European practice. In the overall picture, “Europe” rarely emerged as a purpose, let alone as a clearly identifiable actor here, and remarkably, European integration has had little impact on the structures, practices, and reception patterns of international musical performances. The precarious status of the EUYO as a scarcely visible representative of the European Union is both an exception and a confirmation of this observation. To be sure, as an analytical concept, musical diplomacy still keeps a distinctive value within twentieth-century musicking, and state intervention remains a pivotal factor, provided that we reorient our questions toward its manifold forms, different levels, fields of actors, and its effects and take “Europe” not for an end in itself in this history.
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Notes I am indebted to the Baden-Württemberg Stiftung for the financial support of this research by the elite program for postdocs. Patricia M. Goff, “Cultural Diplomacy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, ed. Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 421. The most comprehensive account of this program is Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). See also Stephen A. Crist, “Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics,” Journal of Musicology 26 (2009): 133 – 174; Emily Abrams Ansari, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The complete tours can be searched here: http://musicdiplomacy.org/database.html (accessed 15 January 2020). Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Introduction: Sonic History, or Why Music Matters in International History,” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. id. (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 19. Cécile Prévost-Thomas and Frédéric Ramel, “Introduction: Understanding Musical Diplomacies—Movements on the ‘Scenes,’” in International Relations, Music and Diplomacy: Sounds and Voices on the International Stage, ed. id. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 6. Damien Mahiet, Mark Ferraguto, and Rebekah Ahrendt, “Introduction,” in Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, ed. id. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 3. Mario Dunkel and Sina A. Nitzsche, “Popular Music and Public Diplomacy: An Introduction,” in Popular Music and Public Diplomacy: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. id. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), 12. Danielle Fosler-Lussier, “Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism,” Diplomatic History 36 (2012): 60. Jonathan L. Yaeger, “The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Wages of Diplomatic Service,” in Ahrendt, Ferraguto, and Mahiet, Music and Diplomacy, 69 – 91. Neues Volksblatt, Bamberg, 10 and 15 June 1950. “Das Berliner Philharmonische Orchester spielt für die Wehrmacht 1940,” Archiv der Berliner Philharmoniker, Reisepläne 1940. Program notes, Vienna Philharmonic, Bombay, 20 October 1959, Historisches Archiv der Wiener Philharmoniker, Reiseprogramme. Fosler-Lussier, Music in America’s Cold War, 13. See also Didier Francfort, “Tournées musicales et diplomatie pendant la Guerre froide,” Relations internationales, no. 156 (2013): 74. Esteban Buch, “Mahler’s Fifth, Daniel Barenboim, and the Argentine Dictatorship: On Music, Meaning, and Politics,” Musical Quarterly 100 (2017): 122– 154. See the statistics in Behörde des Bundesbeauftragten für die Stasi-Unterlagen Berlin MfS, HA ZKG 21207 A. Nicholas A. Brown, “Becoming a Blue-Collar Musical Diplomat: Billy Joel and Bridging the US-Soviet Divide in 1987,” in Dunkel and Nitzsche, Popular Music and Public Diplomacy, 180. Jean-Claude Juncker, Speech at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Berlin, 9 November 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/SPEECH_16_3654; on the orchestra, www.euyo.com (accessed 15 January 2020).
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Bibliography Ahrendt, Rebekah, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet, eds. Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ansari, Emily Abrams. The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Brown, Nicholas Alexander. “Becoming a Blue-Collar Musical Diplomat: Billy Joel and Bridging the US-Soviet Divide in 1987.” In Dunkel and Nitzsche, Popular Music and Public Diplomacy, 175 – 196. Buch, Esteban. “Mahler’s Fifth, Daniel Barenboim, and the Argentine Dictatorship: On Music, Meaning, and Politics.” Musical Quarterly 100 (2017): 122 – 154. Crist, Stephen A. “Jazz as Democracy? Dave Brubeck and Cold War Politics.” Journal of Musicology 26 (2009): 133 – 174. Dunkel, Mario, and Sina A. Nitzsche, eds. Popular Music and Public Diplomacy: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. Dunkel, Mario, and Sina A. Nitzsche. “Popular Music and Public Diplomacy: An Introduction.” In idem, Popular Music and Public Diplomacy, 9 – 26. Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. “Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization, and Imperialism.” Diplomatic History 36 (2012): 53 – 64. Fosler-Lussier, Danielle. Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Francfort, Didier. “Tournées musicales et diplomatie pendant la Guerre froide.” Relations internationals, no. 156 (2013): 73 – 86. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. “Introduction: Sonic History, or Why Music Matters in International History.” In Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, edited by idem, 1 – 30. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Goff, Patricia M. “Cultural Diplomacy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, edited by Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur, 419 – 435. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Mahiet, Damien, Mark Ferraguto, and Rebekah Ahrendt. “Introduction.” In idem, Music and Diplomacy, 1 – 16. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Prévost-Thomas, Cécile, and Frédéric Ramel. “Introduction: Understanding Musical Diplomacies—Movements on the ‘Scenes.’” In International Relations, Music and Diplomacy: Sounds and Voices on the International Stage, edited by Frédéric Ramel and Cécile Prévost-Thomas, 1‒19. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Yaeger, Jonathan L. “The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Wages of Diplomatic Service.” In Ahrendt, Ferraguto, and Mahiet, Music and Diplomacy, 69 – 81. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Further Reading Abeßer, Michel. Den Jazz sowjetisch machen: Kulturelle Leitbilder, Musikmarkt und Distinktion zwischen 1953 und 1970. Cologne: Böhlau, 2018.
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Ansari, Emily Abrams. “Music Diplomacy in an Emergency: Eisenhower’s ‘Secret Weapon,’ Iceland, 1954 – 59.” In Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, 166 – 188. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Aster, Misha. The Reich’s Orchestra, 1933 – 1945: The Berlin Philharmonic and National Socialism. Toronto: Mosaic Press, 2010. Beckles Willson, Rachel. “Whose Utopia? Perspectives on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.” Music and Politics 3, no. 2 (2009): 1 – 21. Caute, David. The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Celenza, Anna Harwell. “The Birth of Jazz Diplomacy: American Jazz in Italy, 1945 – 1963.” In The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, edited by Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin-Paschal, and Tony Whyton, 315 – 325. London: Routledge, 2019. Davenport, Lisa E. Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Dietze, Antje. “Cultural Brokers and Mediators.” In The Routledge Handbook of Transregional Studies, edited by Matthias Middell, 494 – 502. London: Routledge, 2019. Elsig, Alexandre. Les shrapnels du mensonge: La Suisse face à la propagande allemande de la Grande Guerre. Lausanne: Éditions Antipodes, 2017. Gienow-Hecht, Jessica C. E. Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in Transatlantic Relations, 1850 – 1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Kondrashina, Evgeniya. “Soviet Music Recordings and Cold War Cultural Relations.” In Entangled East and West: Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction During the Cold War, edited by Simo Mikkonen, Jari Parkkinen, and Giles Scott-Smith, 193 – 215. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Kube, Sven. “Music Trade in the Slipstream of Cultural Diplomacy: Western Rock and Pop in a Fenced-In Record Market.” In Dunkel and Nitzsche, Popular Music and Public Diplomacy, 197 – 208. Melvin, Sheila, and Jindong Cai. Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. New York: Algora, 2004. Mikkonen, Simo, and Pekka Suutari, eds. Music, Art and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and the Cold War. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. Münzner, Isabel, and Simon Obert. “Felix Weingartner und der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt.’” In Im Maß der Moderne: Felix Weingartner—Dirigent, Komponist, Autor, Reisender, edited by Simon Obert and Matthias Schmidt, 59 – 84. Basel: Schwabe, 2009. Pestel, Friedemann. “‘Ein Programm, was auch irgend etwas über die Situation Deutschlands aussagt’? Wagner auf internationalen Orchestertourneen (1930er bis 1960er Jahre).” In Sündenfall der Künste? Richard Wagner, der Nationalsozialismus und die Folgen, edited by Katharina Wagner, Holger v. Berg, and Marie L. Maintz, 154‒73 and 207‒213. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2018. Pestel, Friedemann. “Prekäre DDR-Repräsentation: Die Europa-Tourneen des Leipziger Gewandhausorchesters in den 1950er bis 1980er Jahren.” Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande 51 (2019): 83 – 97. Pestel, Friedemann. “Global Trajectories and National Representation: German and Austrian Orchestras Touring Latin America in the 1960s.” In Trayectorias: Music between Latin America and Europe 1945 – 1970/Música entre América Latina y Europa 1945 – 1970, edited by Daniela Fugellie, Ulrike Mühlschlegel, Matthias Pasdzierny, and Christina
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Richter-Ibañez, 43 – 57. Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, 2019. https://www.iai.spk -berlin.de/fileadmin/dokumentenbibliothek/Ibero-Online/Ibero_Online_13 _Trayectorias.pdf (accessed 15 January 2020). Ramel, Frédéric, and Michael Jung. “The Barenboim Case: How to Link Music and Diplomacy Studies.” Arts & International Affairs 3 (2018): 39 – 67. Rempe, Martin, and Claudius Torp. “Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s.” Itinerario 41 (2017): 223 – 233. Robinson, Harlow. The Last Impresario: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Sol Hurok. New York: Viking, 1994. Rosenberg, Jonathan. “‘The Best Diplomats Are Often the Great Musicians’: Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Play Berlin.” New Global Studies 8 (2014): 65 – 86. Sachs, Harvey. Toscanini: Musician of Conscience. New York: Liveright, 2017. Seldes, Barry. Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Trümpi, Fritz. The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Jeff Hayton
16 Shouting Back: Popular Music and Protest In December 1915, a ship carrying members of the American peace movement set sail for Europe to stop the Great War. Earlier that year, activists in the suffrage movement had formed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in The Hague, and they hoped to persuade the warring nations to agree to peace. As passengers boarded the Oscar II, a band serenaded them on the quayside with a popular song composed by one of their own, Alfred Bryan. Set to music by Al Piantadosi, the chorus to I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier was a searing indictment of war and a plea for maternal solidarity: “I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier / I brought him up to be my pride and joy / Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder / To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?”¹ Fast forward to February 2003, demonstrators in hundreds of cities around the world took to the streets to protest the looming American invasion of Iraq. In London—as in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and elsewhere—three-quarters of a million marchers snaked their way through the capital to Hyde Park where Mayor Ken Livingstone, the US civil rights icon Jesse Jackson, anti-war activists, and others spoke to the massive crowd. One of the highlights of the events —which were partially organized by Blur and Gorillaz musician Damon Albarn— was a performance by Ms. Dynamite, soon to win best “Female Solo Artist” at the Brit Awards. While the final participant totals will probably never be accurately known—estimates range between six million to 36 million people worldwide— most agree that, combined, it was the largest protest event in human history.² Separated by nearly a century, and amidst very different historical moments, these two events nonetheless share abundant similarities. Both were antiwar protests. Both pitted individuals and crowds against politicians and states. And both ostensibly failed: negotiating an end to World War I and preventing the invasion of Iraq. Yet what is striking about these events is the deep imbrication of music and protest. In 1915 and in 2003—and in countless moments in between, as we will see —individuals and collectives have mobilized popular sounds to register discontent with the status quo and to push society towards alternative futures. Those who have engaged in musical protest have come from a broad spectrum: from artists and fans to amateurs and professionals. Furthermore, their activism has not been confined to explicitly political concerns as music has been used to create frictions for the regular order of business on a multitude of planes: from government policy to everyday style—on each level—music has provided individuals with a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-017
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ready instrument for rebellion. As one of the most dynamic varieties of cultural politics throughout the twentieth century, music has functioned as a key resource for change, through which Europeans have contested societal consensus, political hegemony, and the daily routine. The precise relationship between popular music and protest politics remains contentious. Older scholarship tended to equate protest with cultural content. In these interpretations, protest is embedded, for example, in song lyrics.³ Other studies concentrated on how music is critical in mobilizing mass protest movements or in opposing political dominance.⁴ In each interpretation, protest is tied to explicit political messages and to explicit political affairs. On the one hand, the ambiguous relationships between artists and audiences as well as their products and their reception remain relatively uncomplicated. On the other hand, protest remains wedded to a narrower understanding of the political. Problematically, these readings tend to erect unhelpful binaries in which ambiguity is flattened: bands either support or oppose regimes; lyrics either support or criticize consensus. In such literature, nuance and complexity is lost. More recent literature, in contrast, has begun to focus on the specific contexts of protest and on how popular music intervenes in these moments. In these works, scholars argue that protest enables new forms of musical possibilities and that music helps reshape the nature of protest.⁵ Ian Peddie, for example, suggests that because music is a “discursive practice” grounded in “the social,” the many meanings evoked by musical protest are fluid and indefinite.⁶ Whereas an earlier generation of scholars sought to identify the precise qualities of musical activity that constituted protest, Peddie and others now argue that the relationship between music and protest is a dialectical one as users engage with the material regardless of initial intent.⁷ Especially important in this regard has been the push to expand our understanding of what constitutes politics and of how music informs protest. John Street argues that rather than just functioning as a “vehicle of political expression,” popular music “embodies political values and experiences, and organizes our response to society as political thought and action.” And since states and ruling elites organize society through their “management of music and sound,” all musical activity is perforce political and can be mobilized either for or against the grain.⁸ It thus follows that music is less a representation of politics than a political act. As such, musical protest needs not be concerned explicitly with political organizations or movements, and scholars of popular music have been reconstructing the many ways in which music has been used to upset everyday conventions throughout the twentieth century. In this sense, Christopher Small’s concept of musicking is a helpful conceptual tool for thinking through the relationship between music and protest. Ac-
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cording to Small, music—both making and consuming popular music and its related doings—is an activity and is something that is done.⁹ For activists seeking to upset dominant political and social hegemonies, musicking was a means to an end: musical activities did not simply signify change but drove it. While not all music making constitutes protest—it can shore up the status quo as much as it can tear it down—nonetheless, musicking in twentieth-century Europe has been integral in the pursuit of change. There are four threads running throughout the history of popular musicking and protest in twentieth-century Europe. First, popular music making in Europe has been heavily influenced by constant interactions from abroad. Whether we are talking of American influences on Europe, Cold War connections between East and West, or the discovery of the Third World in the First World, the relationship between music and protest has always been international and transnational. Second, musical protest has always been contingent across time and space. Even if certain types of music making were innocuous in Western Europe during the Cold War, the very same activities could be heavily contested in the Eastern Bloc. Equally, musicking protesting the consensus in one era might solidify them in the next: since musical and political meanings are fluid, cultural productions could be appropriated for a variety of political purposes. Third, ruling elites of the twentieth century have been exceedingly adept at domesticating protest. To this end, the limits of musical protest must be recognized. Just as popular music can be used for protest, it can likewise be deployed to reinforce existing power structures. What changes is not popular musicking’s politics so much as the needs and ends towards which they are deployed and received. Whether to protest nationalist aggression in Spain during the 1930s or to act as a soundtrack for democratizing Poland in the 1980s, musicking has enabled both producers and consumers to challenge social conventions. While musical protest has not always achieved its goals—halting the Great War or the American invasion of Iraq—even in failure, it has nevertheless broadened the realm of politics. Protest, that is to say, the act of intervening in society to force political change, has been instrumental in Europe throughout the twentieth century, and musicking has been integral in this process; whether or not musical protest is essential in the construction of “Europe,” however, remains an open question.
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1 This Machine Kills Fascists: Protest and Popular Music between the World Wars While the passengers of the Oscar II failed to stop World War I, their voyage demonstrates that the Great War was equally a sonic conflict. Pitting musicians and sounds against one another, the war saw the combatants turning to music to shore up morale and justify national actions amidst the devastation accompanying the war. The importance given to music during the Great War speaks to how musicking was mobilized in the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to 1914, music had been an integral aural component to the political battles of the Belle Époque, fueled by long-standing popular traditions and the recent growth of the music industry. After war was declared, German soldiers sang the Deutschlandlied and Die Wacht am Rhein as they boarded trains for the front. Back home, despite calls for restraint, French civilians crowded into Parisian theaters, cinemas, and music halls to seek normalité amidst wartime privations. As the war progressed, however, discordant noises disrupted national unities. Already before 1914, the avant-garde composers Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky had shocked the public with dissonant sounds that seemed to herald an end to tonal harmony and prefigure the cacophony of artillery fire. As the war persisted, censors worked strenuously to weed out music that might weaken national resolve: Henry Moreau’s Réveil nocturne, for example, fell victim to Parisian censors due to its “lewd” lyrics (it described a married couple who chose to stay in bed rather than shelter during a zeppelin attack). With casualties mounting and no end in sight, soldiers criticized civilian jingoism and officer incompetence in popular song: if La Marseillaise spoke patriotically of French unity and victory, then the anonymous La Chanson de Craonne, which circulated during the French mutinies of 1917, more credibly depicted the dangers soldiers faced while condemning profiteers enjoying life back home. In myriad ways, the musicking that accompanied total war gave soldiers and civilians alike a means of challenging official narratives of the conflict. Although the guns fell silent in 1918, ideological polarization stalked the continent and musical protest featured prominently in the political battles of the interwar era. Crucial was the Russian Revolution in 1917, which inspired artists such as the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler to apply their musical talents towards advancing socialism. Though Schönberg’s student, Eisler rejected his teacher’s emphasis on art for art’s sake and instead composed music to advance leftist politics. Moving from Vienna to Berlin in the mid-1920s, Eisler quickly became involved in the German workers’ movement whose musical activities gave him an outlet for producing socially engaged music. Enmeshed within the Ger-
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man communist milieu, Eisler composed choruses for working-class choirs and what he called Kampflieder (Songs of Struggle) whose militant themes were intended to address contemporary issues affecting the lower classes. In contrast to older worker hymns, Eisler sought a more direct style whose simple musical notation was accessible to amateurs: in perhaps his most famous political song, the Solidaritätslied (Solidarity Song), a march-like rhythm undergirds singers’ complaints of hunger and reminders of working-class strength (its lyrics were supplied by Bertolt Brecht). Against the background of the Great Depression and the subsequent political crisis of Weimar democracy, Eisler’s songs became a sonic weapon in the fight against fascism. Eisler’s musical oeuvre was part of an international popular front strategy against fascism, which reached its apotheosis in Spain during the civil war. In 1936, the Spanish military revolted against the government, and for the next three years, Nationalist forces led by Francisco Franco eventually overwhelmed Republican defenders of democracy. Foreign intervention on both sides occurred from the outset as Germany and Italy supplied Franco with troops and arms, while the Soviet Union sent advisors and materiel to the Republicans. Although the Western democracies officially stayed out, at least 40,000 volunteers served in the International Brigades on the side of the Republicans. Among those volunteering were musicians, such as German singer Ernst Busch, who applied their artistic talents to the fight against fascism. As an ardent communist who worked in the Weimar cabaret and theater scene during the 1920s, Busch fled Germany after the Nazis came to power. In 1937, he joined the International Brigades in Spain and for the next year and a half entertained the fighters with songs like Die Thälmann-Kolonne and Hans Beimler. In late 1937, Busch began recording them in Barcelona (later re-released as Songs for Democracy in 1961 by Folkway Records, the most important label in the American folk revival of the early 1960s) and published an extensive songbook, Canciones de las Brigadas Internacionales, which featured 150 songs in 15 languages representing the many nationalities fighting for Republican Spain. Certainly, musicking was not solely the preserve of the Republicans: during the Battle of Jarama (1937), Nationalist forces were able to secretly infiltrate Republican positions by singing The Internationale. Nevertheless, as these various examples attest, musicking was a powerful means of protesting opposing political beliefs on both sides of the interwar ideological divide. In the field of entertainment, jazz also became a medium of protest during the interwar era as its hot rhythms proved an instrument for upsetting established conventions. Arriving on European shores during the Great War via James Reese Europe’s American military band, jazz quickly exploded across the continent, disseminated by a stream of touring American orchestras like Will Marion
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Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra or Sam Wooding’s Chocolate Kiddies. Dancing the night away to the swinging sounds of le jazz hot, while some critics bewailed the threat that jazz posed to the European classical tradition, enthusiasts cavorted to the foxtrot, the shimmy, and the Charleston. Over the 1920s, jazz was a flashpoint for debates surrounding European modernity: in Paris, over American influences in France; in Berlin, over the influence of African-Americans in the German music industry. And jazz challenged bourgeois conventions and provided the sounds for a young, carefree era: it is not for nothing that the 1920s are called the “Jazz Age.” Quickly, indigenous institutions such as the Weintraub Syncopators in Germany, the Hot Club de France, or the Italian singer Natalino Otto (“Mister Swing”) promoted jazz as the radio, cinema, and phonograph disseminated it across the continent. However, popularization saw jazz losing some of its rebellious potential. By the end of the decade, under the influence of American bandleader Paul Whiteman’s lushly orchestrated symphonic jazz and of the success of jazz-infused operas like Johnny Strikes Up (1927) and The Threepenny Opera (1928), the syncopated sounds lost their edge as they became more palatable to bourgeois ears. Domestication made jazz a poor musical medium for protest. Yet under the increasingly European-wide authoritarian wave of the 1930s, as jazz was targeted for repression, prohibition transformed it into a soundtrack of resistance against fascism. From the outset, jazz had been condemned by conservative critics who lamented the deleterious effects the genre was having on national and racial collectives. For example, in Germany, the Nazis, as part of their culture war against democracy and modernity, associated jazz with racial degeneracy and Jewishness. The Germans were not alone in such views; French critics too bemoaned the “primitiveness” of jazz and its effects on European civilization. With more national governments turning to xenophobia and nationalism in the 1930s, jazz became the site of contested politics. Once in power, the Nazis banned jazz from broadcasting and sought to hinder jazz performances. In 1938, they staged an exhibition on “degenerate music” in Düsseldorf in which the rhythms of Kurt Weill and Ernst Krenek were condemned. In Italy, fascist critics already in the 1920s had disparaged the supposed licentiousness and depravity accompanying American music and dance styles. Despite efforts at making jazz “Italian,” by the late 1930s—after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and racial legislation following the Manifesto of Race in 1938—the Fascist state tried to purge Italy of jazz: African-American artists were censored, even though in practice one could still hear ‘Luigi Braccioforte’ (as Louis Armstrong was referred to) on the radio. For authoritarian governments, the freedoms voiced in jazz improvisation and its racial tolerance were anathema to the obedience and ethnic purity demanded of its citizens.
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Yet, despite such efforts, jazz proved resilient, and indeed, listening to jazz increasingly became a means of expressing displeasure with authoritarianism. In Germany, entertainers were able to sneak jazz songs through the censors by labelling it “German dance music” or playing it in private clubs. Eager for revenue amidst the Great Depression, international recording companies, like Brunswick, were able to sell jazz until 1938. Privileged youths from cosmopolitan cities, like Hamburg and Berlin, formed clubs to listen to and disseminate hard-to-find records. For enthusiasts, listening and dancing to jazz was a means of asserting one’s individuality against the uniformity of fascism. And such activities only increased during World War II. Fearing that harsh occupation policies would hinder collaboration, German authorities tended towards cultural leniency. In France, for example, bourgeois Parisians and German officers listened to chansonniers, like Charles Trenet, Edith Piaf, and Maurice Chevalier, in the music halls, cabarets, and nightclubs of occupied Montmartre, where an underground jazz subculture, the zazous, flourished. Dressed in garishly colored jackets, short skirts, and furled umbrellas, the zazous quickly evolved from a rejection of fascist regimentation to more active political protest: after Jews were forced to wear the yellow star in May 1942, zazous wore their own emblazoned with “Swing,” “Zazu,” and “Goy.” Even in Germany, Hamburg’s Swingjugend, middle-class youths who listened to jazz, circumvented Nazi strictures. Though the Nazis clamped down on the Swingjugend after 1941—raiding clubs and arresting kids—the popularity of jazz meant they could never fully repress it: in 1940, the Nazis even created an official swing band, Charlie and his Orchestra, to convince British listeners that they were American pawns. Up to the end of the war, musicking afforded Europeans a means of disputing hegemonic political cultures and transforming the everyday through their subversive practices.
2 Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Protest and Popular Music in Eastern Europe As Europe emerged from the turmoil of war, music remained a medium of protest as Cold War tensions politicized popular sounds. Since art was considered crucial for building a socialist utopia, music had long been encouraged in communist states: in Joseph Stalin’s words, artists were “engineers of the human soul.” Except by giving weight to musicking in this manner, musical activity became a source of political challenge, especially Western musical developments, which were denounced as a form of capitalist imperialism sent eastwards to corrupt socialist youths. Over the decades, Eastern responses to the popular music arriving
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from the West—first beat and folk, then rock and pop—oscillated between desires to co-opt and fears of subversion. Equally, the ideas, products, and praxis that became associated with consuming and producing popular music—jazz improvisation, rock ‘n’ roll hedonism, and the commercialization of stardom—lent themselves to overly politicized meanings. Eastern Europeans gloomed onto these meanings because musicking provided them with a means to expand the boundaries of possibilities in the socialist bloc. This interactive duality meant that musicking in the communist East was almost invariably political as regimes sought to police their citizens’ musical habits while fans and musicians strove to consume and produce their preferred sounds. And such importance and contestation meant that popular music became a prominent site of protest. In 1945, musical developments that had been temporarily put on hold during the war took off again. Across Eastern Europe, musical infrastructure was rebuilt: radio stations reestablished, orchestras and ensembles reformed, and music halls and opera houses reopened. Jazz burst forth again as musicians incorporated swing and bebop into their repertoires while teenagers copied the fashions and styles gleaned from American films and music. These burgeoning trends were denounced as decadent in the communist media, and by the early 1950s, numerous jazz musicians and composers had become victims of repression. Stalin’s death in 1953, however, changed the dynamic. While the last years of Stalinism saw jazz fans forced to live a precarious existence—trading in smuggled records and secretly listening to the Voice of America broadcasts —upon his death, Eastern European regimes loosened up. In Hungary and Poland, for example, even though officials continued to deplore syncopated rhythms, jazz was heard in nightclubs and on the radio. After de-Stalinization in 1956, jazz was made acceptable by reinterpreting its origins as proletarian, which decoupled it from American imperialism. Although never fully acceptable to hardline Stalinists, during the cultural thaw undertaken by Nikita Khrushchev, jazz was prevalent throughout the Eastern Bloc: symbolically, 30,000 youths from around the globe danced to jazz and boogie-woogie at the Sixth World Youth Festival, held in Moscow in 1957. Khrushchev’s thaw led to a period of opportunity and tension across the Soviet Bloc. In the 1950s, faced with the global expansion of rock ‘n’ roll, communist authorities struggled to deal with its consequences as youths mobilized Bill Haley and Elvis Presley to protest socialist society. While socialist regimes condemned rock ‘n’ roll as evidence of Western decadence and depravity, Easterners crowded into record shops and nightclubs to listen to and dance to the new sounds. After the violent suppression of unrest in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary between 1953 and 1956—partially blamed on Western listening tastes,
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which authorities claimed had led to the oppositional behavior among young people—socialist regimes softened their positions: by the end of the decade, Western hits could once again be heard on jukeboxes, radios, and in clubs in Leipzig, Sopot, and Budapest. There were also class distinctions to musicking during this decade as record players, LP records, and fashions required a certain means that were usually only available to social elites. Indigenous artists began to cautiously incorporate Western rhythms and melodies into their repertoires, often translating lyrics into their native tongues and thereby domesticating them. By the 1960s, the Reduta Jazz Club in Prague shook to the sounds of Western rock ‘n’ roll, while the first indigenous Eastern acts began to appear, such as Niebiesko-Czarni in Poland. Yet authorities were increasingly uneasy with the penetration of rock ‘n’ roll into socialist societies and began to crack down. Officials sought to restrict rock ‘n’ roll consumption in several ways. The mainstream press continued its broadsides against playing and dancing to “decadent music.” Inspectors patrolled clubs to ensure bands were playing officially approved music. In East Germany, authorities introduced an ordinance in 1958 to restrict Western music content as well as to create Eastern alternatives to the twist, such as the Lipsi. But socialist youths continued to consume Western music: as soon as inspectors exited the clubs, orchestras started up the “hot rhythms” again. In Romania and Bulgaria, authorities had firmer control over their citizens, but elsewhere, fans were regularly able to evade official prohibition: even in the Soviet Union, where Western music penetrated more slowly, contraband sounds circulated on discarded X-ray plates (Roentgenizdat). What is noticeable about the politicization of rock ‘n’ roll during the 1950s is how apolitical most of the sounds and lyrics were as opposition lay almost entirely in musicking, in the practices of producing and consuming popular music. Yet precisely these clumsy efforts to restrict popular music consumption and the inventive evasion of these endeavors by Easterners are what made rock ‘n’ roll political in the socialist bloc. These small, daily insurgencies—listening to Western radio, illegally acquiring a banned jazz recording, and incorporating “Tutti Frutti” into a nightly set—were the means by which citizens protested officially-sanctioned socialism. If the Eastern Bloc had difficulties controlling the political importance of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the arrival of Beatlemania in Eastern Europe in the 1960s upped the ante considerably. As elsewhere globally, the Fab Four swept through the socialist bloc, converting Czechs, Poles, and Russians equally to the trends of mop tops and tight pants and the sounds of the big beat. Many of Eastern Europe’s most acclaimed rock acts over the years began in the 1960s as groups that imitated the Beatles: Illés in Hungary, Mashina Vremeni in the Soviet Union, and Olympic in Czechoslovakia. These bands copied their
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British forerunners, sometimes singing in accented English and at other times in translation, and they even began to pen their own lyrics. Authorities at first were unsure how to respond. On the one hand, they liked the idea of tapping into the Beatles popularity. Youth club managers, for example, supported amateur bands and held amateur competitions. The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night (1964) was shown to packed cinemas in Warsaw in 1965. Millions of youths listened to beat on the radio, bought albums on the black market, and formed amateur bands. But officials constantly worried about control. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), authorities had introduced modest youth reforms after building the Berlin Wall in 1961, which included support for amateur guitar groups. Leipzig saw a flourishing beat scene. Except worried about growing public disorder surrounding the amateur scene, officials banned local heroes the Butlers in October 1965. The next day, fans gathered to protest the decision, and police violently dispersed the crowd. Later that year, beat was condemned for its pernicious influences on youth as communist party chief Walter Ulbricht denounced beat’s “endless monotony” as “not just ridiculous” but also “spiritually deadening.” As Leipzig illustrates, the popularity of Western music pushed communist authorities to politicize Easterners musical praxis. But the political content of popular music also increased as folk and rock grew in popularity. Long-promoted by socialist regimes as an expression “of the people”—only adding to its political weight—folk scenes in Eastern Europe nurtured a critical musical grammar, for example with singer-songwriters such as Vladimir Vysotsky in the Soviet Union or Wolf Biermann in East Germany and their sparse, penetrating songs about socialist society. And by the latter half of the 1960s, these criticisms were informing rock music, which was becoming ever more dissatisfied with “real-existing socialism.” Hippies—máničky in Czech—listened to underground bands playing in underground clubs to the worry of regime authorities, especially when they spilled out into public spaces. On the airwaves, youths listened to the harder Anglo-American rock on Western radio, and some socialist authorities even tolerated indigenous rock scenes: Budapest nightclubs swayed to the sounds of Illés and Omega while the Rolling Stones performed in Warsaw in 1967. Late that year, the first national beat festival took place in Prague, with the Primitives—appearing on stage in masks—covering Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and the Fugs. Even in the Soviet Union, by the end of the 1960s, thousands of amateur bands played in hundreds of unofficial clubs. These underground scenes provided Easterners with freedoms often denied to them in official culture as they constructed worlds alternative to “real-existing socialism.” And through popular musicking, fans and musicians exerted agency by finding inventive ways to produce and consume popular music despite official stricture.
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But as the 1960s turned to the 1970s, regimes across Eastern Europe clamped down on their increasingly unruly underground scenes. The Prague Spring set these events in motion after ambitious efforts to reform communism in Czechoslovakia over 1968—“socialism with a human face”—ended with an invasion by Warsaw Pact troops and the reimposition of Soviet authority. Repression inspired countless protest songs by artists like Karel Kryl and Waldemar Matuska. But it also signaled an end of tolerance for musical experiments, and socialist regimes began to tighten the screws on outspoken artists. In Hungary, for example, after Illés criticized the state of Eastern popular music on the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1970, authorities punished them and other beat bands by limiting performances, shelving recording opportunities, and forcing them to recant publicly. In the GDR, critical voices like Biermann were confined to house arrest, and in the Soviet Union, authorities cracked down on unofficial rock bands and singers. Across Eastern Europe, officials vigorously policed musical consumption: seizing illegal recordings and fining citizens for listening to Western radio. By the early 1970s, liberties briefly experienced in the prior decade had been curtailed as state authorities ground down any musical expressions of opposition to its control. Accompanying the crackdown were renewed efforts at promoting acceptable artists, the carrot for the stick. In exchange for supporting state policies—either wholeheartedly or at least tacitly—numerous popular music acts were offered access to media, recording facilities, and stages. Over the 1960s and 1970s, elaborate rock bureaucracies and state infrastructures were established—radio programs, youth clubs, and record labels—to develop alternatives to Westerninspired popular music. And by the 1970s, such support had led to distinctive national rock cultures. Whereas in the 1960s, most Eastern bands sounded like the Beatles, by the 1970s, indigenous music cultures were emerging across the socialist bloc as artists sang in their native tongues and produced songs reflecting their specific national experiences. Favored bands appeared on state television and radio, recorded albums, and were even promoted in the West: die Puhdys, East Germany’s longest-running rock band, released albums in the West and frequently toured West Germany. Of course, state support meant compromises. Censors carefully poured over lyrics. Repertoires were purged of Western numbers. Stage shows were carefully choreographed with appearances and fashions minutely managed to jettison any hint of decadence: die Puhdys, as one example among many, had to cut their hair and ditch their English lyrics before they were ruled acceptable. But Eastern fans accepted these concessions as popular music moved from a soundtrack of protest to one of professionalism with state-approved bands such as the Soviet Union’s Mashina Vremeni enjoying enormous popularity and conferring their legitimacy onto the regimes that sponsored them.
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In the 1970s, immense pressure was exerted on artists to cooperate with socialist regimes: with détente loosening external contacts, internal conformity was tightened. Yet integration led to a visceral rejection among musicians who insisted on using sound to protest socialism. Those declining to stay silent were repressed by state authorities; exiled, such as Biermann from East Germany in 1976; or put on trial, such as the Plastic People of the Universe in Czechoslovakia in 1976. And nowhere did such rejection meet unruly sounds more forcefully than with punk. Punk sounds made their way across the Iron Curtain by the end of the 1970s, and scenes sprang up across the Eastern Bloc. Youths were attracted to punk’s “no future” ideology that spoke to a listless society while its style and sounds contrasted strikingly to the commercialized and conformist Eastern rock mainstream. Across Eastern Europe—Mosoly in Hungary, Namenlos in East Germany, Dezerter in Poland—punk bands played illegal concerts, circulated do-it-yourself (DIY) cassettes and condemned the injustices of “real-existing socialism.” By the early 1980s, Eastern punk scenes had become large enough to make authorities anxious, who blamed Western “troublemakers” for its spread. On the streets, observers saw Eastern punks as the embodiment of a rotting system. Facing this astonishing attack on socialist values and being fearful of rising public disorder, Eastern Bloc regimes cracked down on punk: by the mid-1980s, authorities in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union had all moved to repress the subculture with thousands of youths ending up in jail and in army barracks or being expelled to the West. Whereas repression in previous decades meant isolation and silence, by the 1980s, artists refusing to compromise increasingly lent their voices to the emerging opposition movements. By the last decade of communism, popular music had become an important avenue for protest, which authorities were unable to control. Punk inspired artists to take greater risks lyrically, sonically, and sartorially. Global media contacts meant Eastern artists were more accessible than ever, and they used their Western prominence to protect themselves. The very importance socialist states had lavished on indigenous musicians meant coercion often backfired; by popularizing Eastern rock, authorities made it harder for them to repress artists who crossed the line. Confronted with the impossibility of silencing musical voices, socialist regimes tried to manage the criticisms. On the one hand, they sought to further incorporate artists into the folds of state support. However, all this did was give insurgents larger platforms to express their musical voices. Simultaneously, Eastern authorities sought to dilute homegrown criticisms by importing Western artists: Billy Joel, Bonnie Raitt, and Santana, among others, played in Moscow in 1987. Yet neither track seemed to work as socialist regimes were forced to repeatedly back down to unruly cultural producers. Leningrad’s Aquarium was banned after a scandalous perfor-
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mance at the 1980 Tbilisi Rock Festival, only to be rehabilitated during glasnost without marked musical changes, with their 1987 debut album being released on the state record label Melodiya which went on to sell more than a million copies. Such schizophrenic posturing illustrates how socialist authorities were never able to tame popular music. Indeed, precisely by trying to exert control, they ensured that musical production and consumption became a site of oppositional praxis. By 1989, musical protests were erupting across the socialist bloc. In the Baltic states, popular song festivals witnessed patriotic anthem singing as crowds repudiated Soviet oppression and celebrated national rebirth during what has become known as the “Singing Revolution,” which led to independence of these countries in 1991. In Ukraine, in September 1989, the first Chervona Ruta festival saw 500 artists performing to tens of thousands of fans dressed in yellow and blue and singing patriotic songs. That same month in the GDR, as the regime was coming apart at the seams, musicians threw their support behind the pro-democracy group Neues Forum. Reading out a “Rocker Resolution” during their concerts, artists urged the communist regime to work with the people to reform the state; despite ignoring such appeals, within two months, the Berlin Wall had fallen. As these many cases suggest, the overlapping of popular musicking and musical protest played an essential role in the demise of communism across the Eastern Bloc.
3 Rebel Yell: Protest and Popular Music in Western Europe Even if the popular sounds emerging in Europe in the 1950s did not cause the same levels of political unrest in the West as they did in the East, it does not mean they were any less rebellious. From the mid-1950s onwards, driven by films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rock Around the Clock (1956) and the music of American performers such as Haley, Presley, and Little Richard, rock ‘n’ roll swept across Western Europe. Soon, European artists like Tommy Steele in Britain, Johnny Halliday in France, and Peter Kraus in West Germany were belting out their own versions of American hits. Young Europeans flocked to cinemas, record stores, and nightclubs to listen to and dance to the newest sounds. Consuming popular music quickly became big business as labels and promoters pumped out product to satisfy listener demands: the Hamburg clubs where the Beatles got their start, for example, were interested in profit not rebellion. Yet despite these intentions, rock ‘n’ roll provided enthusiasts with a potent instrument of change. Whether it was middle-class West German
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rockers donning proletarian leather jackets or French female yé-yé singers like France Gall, Sylvie Vartan, or Françoise Hardy breaking into the musical mainstream, popular musicking put conventional assumptions concerning class, race, and gender into question. And while the sounds of the 1950s did not constitute any coordinated effort at political protest, the handwringing of critics who worried about delinquency or the lax morals that supposedly accompanied rock ‘n’ roll illustrates how musicking forced significant cultural and social re-evaluations, which Beatlemania continued to cause into the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, however, this situation had begun to change as popular music was increasingly mobilized politically, part and parcel of an emerging generational revolt that would shake Western European society to its core. This shift occurred thanks to a combination of foreign and domestic developments as the protest music originating in the American folk revival of the early 1960s crossed the Atlantic and became married to native efforts to produce indigenous music. Since the 1950s, in many ways a response to the Americanization of the initial rock ‘n’ roll wave, European singer-songwriters sought a more critical musical syntax rooted in national traditions divorced from commercialism. These artists were inspired by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, for example, whose music and politics offered models for cultural and political engagement. Mining musical heritages from the labor movement and indigenous repertoires, folk singers from Scandinavia to Spain, accompanied by simple instrumentation, sang poignant songs criticizing contemporary society in their native tongue. In France, singers like Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel established chanson in opposition to pop as an expression of genuine French musical culture. In West Germany, artists like Franz Josef Degenhardt, Hannes Wader, and Dieter Süverkrüp played at the influential Burg Waldeck festivals to tens of thousands under open skies. In Great Britain, Topic Records released The Iron Muse (1963) to considerable acclaim, a collection of industrial folk songs dealing with the lives and experiences of workers. The folk movement was especially critical of the hypocrisies of bourgeois society, and their musical output led to the development of a critical lexicon of oppositional songs that mobilized national heritage for contemporary critique. Inspired in part by the folk wave, popular music became much more outwardly political in the latter half of the 1960s. Such transformation was aesthetic, political, and social. After 1965, following Dylan going electric and the Beatles producing more mature music, popular musicking assumed a more socially conscious edge: by the end of the decade, the electric sounds of blues-based rock music had become the soundtrack of street marches, factory occupations, and insistent demands. Tapping into the anger expressed out on the streets, the harder and distorted sounds of the Rolling Stones or the Who gave voice to pent-up
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frustrations with existing society, whether it was protesting the Vietnam War abroad or condemning authoritarian tendencies at home. These sounds emerged simultaneously to the burgeoning student protest movement, whose actions and demands intensified from mid-decade onwards. Upset initially at outdated university regulations, protest soon evolved into a broad-based critique of contemporary Western society. Punctuated by spectacular explosions of violence—the murder of Benno Ohnesorg in West Berlin in 1967 and riots in Paris in May 1968—youth unrest in the late 1960s saw Europe teetering on the edge of radical change. In these circumstances, certain forms of popular music were endowed with revolutionary meanings. Musicians and fans saw in rock music oppositional politics by which producers and consumers could rally adherents to the cause and unite a younger generation against oppression. Instead of order and obedience, the rebellious sounds called forth new values and attitudes that would chart an egalitarian future in opposition to the rigid organization of the Western present. At the same time, we should not overstate the importance or impact of popular music to the events of the late 1960s. Compared with the visual arts or political theater, musical protest remained muted, especially contemporary popular sounds: indeed, during May 1968 in France, the two most common songs heard on the streets were The Internationale and La Marseillaise. Efforts at reimagining musical production and the role of artists remained stymied by endless disputes over how art could best intervene in everyday life. Petitions were circulated, benefit concerts were staged, and chants filled the air. But musicians and their music occupied an ambiguous role. Emblematic was a concert by French anarchist singer Léo Ferré at the Maison de la Mutualité in Paris on the night of 10 May 1968. As barricades were being raised out in the streets, students called for him to join them, but he remained in the concert hall. That European popular music remained intimately connected to existing power structures—radio and television networks, youth magazines and record labels, and concert halls and recording studios—illustrates the limits of musical protest in the 1960s. Indeed, there was considerable skepticism among protesters about the intentions of the music industry and whether capitalism could be a vehicle for emancipatory change. Thus, while popular music provided a younger generation with common vocabulary, shared networks of community, and a rebellious ethos, in practice, sonic protesting seemed strangely irrelevant to the public events taking place in streets across Europe in the latter half of the 1960s. The collapse of the student movement at the end of the 1960s did not signal an end to musical protest, but rather a transformation. On the one hand, as the national protest movements splintered into radical groupuscules, popular music continued to be mobilized around leftwing causes. Supporting issues such as the
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squatting movement and homosexuality by the band Ton Steine Scherben in West Berlin, for example, or performances at occupations and strikes by the group Komintern in France speak to efforts by musicians to continue politicizing the everyday. On the other hand, auditory experimentation expanded the field of musical protest. Since the 1950s, postwar avant-garde artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Luigi Nono had long pushed sonic experimentation, and popular musicians in the 1960s began incorporating their innovations, mixing in elements of free jazz and new technologies to create new soundscapes that might better reflect the modern age. These eclectic endeavors—whether by the progressive rock of Yes or King Crimson in Great Britain or the Krautrock of Can, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk in West Germany—were attempts at retaining the utopianism of 1960s social movements while connecting it to everyday conditions. Nevertheless, despite the esoteric push in the 1970s, the commercial popular music of the day—either the mainstream rock of Wings or the disco of ABBA—remained dominant as musical experimentation stayed elitist and its sonic protest often inaccessible to mass audiences. By the mid-1970s, musical protest was also returning to the streets as a new generation of musicians and fans sought to mobilize music for protest politics. One of the best examples of these efforts was the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement in Great Britain and elsewhere. Initiated in response to rising public racism and political support for the xenophobic National Front, RAR saw a diverse coalition of musicians, organizers, and fans coming together to denounce racism in Britain. After Eric Clapton urged his audience to “Keep Britain White” during a concert in 1976, activists in the Socialist Workers Party wrote to the popular music press urging “support for Rock Against Racism.” Out of this modest call developed a larger movement that sought to mobilize listeners to combat racism. Over the following years, numerous large outdoor festivals and marches, especially in London, were staged featuring a diverse collection of punk and reggae acts: throughout its existence, RAR paired racially-diverse music bands as a manifestation of its inclusive message. Hundreds of thousands attended the festivals, a mixture of older activists and younger punks and Rastafarians. Bands played short sets and urged the crowds to confront public displays of racism and to get involved in the movement. While the central RAR organization planned several large concerts and tours, energy quickly devolved into local groups both within and outside Britain who began organizing events under the RAR banner: in 1979, the first Rock gegen Rechts (Rock Against the Right) festival was held in Frankfurt, Germany, to protest the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany. Aesthetically and politically, punk was the most important influence on RAR. While the organizers came out of a 1960s antiestablishment milieu, most
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of the musicians and bands who were involved—the Clash, Tom Robinson, the Specials, the Fall, Misty In Roots, Steel Pulse, etc.—came to prominence with the arrival of punk. Their activism was not by chance. Whereas the early 1970s had witnessed a depoliticizing of music making, punk reinvigorated musicking through its confrontational style. And punk also refreshed politics by taking its challenges out onto the streets. Punk aesthetics produced visceral reactions while its abrasive music and lyrics condemned existing inequalities and demanded change. RAR festivals were overtly pedagogical with music sets interspersed by short speeches and copious literature available on site. The carnivalesque atmospheres were intended to promote solidarity between black and white youths as well as to generate a groundswell of political pressure. Lasting until 1982, the RAR movement was an important means of protesting against rising racism in Britain and elsewhere. At the same time, the RAR initiative demonstrates some of the limits that protest music has faced historically. For all its punk attitude, the concerts followed an unimaginative structure, which was little different from the events of the 1960s in which attendance was equated with understanding. The lyrics and other textual sources—the organization put out the important fanzine Temporary Holdings—remained the primary sources of enlightenment. Over the years, it remained unclear what antiracist music sounded like: was punk or reggae inherently antiracist? What about the racist bands that came out of punk like Skrewdriver? And the punk influence hindered RAR’s ability to broaden its core constituency. With nearly all the artists involved coming from either punk or reggae, other genres of popular music were conspicuous by their absence; indeed, other contemporary popular genres such as hard rock, funk, or disco were deliberately excluded as commercial and therefore reactionary. Even some of the more radical punk bands such as the Sex Pistols were excluded because their alleged destructiveness and narcissism was anathema to the community building that RAR sought to accomplish. Despite these reservations, the RAR movement was nonetheless successful in its aim of raising awareness about racism and remains today a powerful memory of how protest and music can be united. At the time, the concerts were immensely popular and gave activists enormous platforms to disseminate their message. While it is unclear how much RAR contributed, political support for the National Front plummeted after 1979. By offering a political alternative to young Brits, it seems likely that RAR was at least partially responsible for an increased awareness of the threat posed by the far-right political party. Moreover, by mixing reggae and punk acts, the RAR concerts opened the doors to diverse racial coalitions. If audiences for these genres had remained fairly segregated before, RAR introduced partisans of either side to new opportunities that led to
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electrifying political and musical partnerships. That several RAR artists such as the Specials experienced considerable popular success after their involvement speaks to these new-found coalitions, and importantly, they brought an antiracist message further into the mainstream. The commitment, therefore, to attracting a broad listening public, while somewhat limited in practice, was successful. Finally, re-politicizing popular musicking after the post-1960s malaise has been extraordinarily important for political causes the world over. From the 1980s onward, as the wave of mega-events addressing global issues such as Live Aid attest, RAR has been one of the most important examples illustrating how music and protest can join forces.
Conclusion: Rebel Sell? Protest and Popular Music in Twenty-First Century Europe Since 1989, popular musicking has continued to function as a form of political protest. As the events following 9/11 indicate, music and protest have remained intimately interlinked. And as the globe becomes ever more media saturated, it seems unlikely this relationship will be severed any time soon. The many examples from Europe throughout the twentieth century illustrate how artists and audiences have frequently mobilized popular music to challenge the status quo. Yet what is striking about such activism is the absence of “Europe.” Whether playing syncopated rhythms in 1930s Milan or circulating cassettes of taped radio shows from the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1970s Budapest, continent-wide developments have been less important than national or ideological contexts. In some ways, it is difficult to speak of a “European” musicking protest culture since many of the actions that challenge convention have often appeared across the globe. What we see instead is how actors within specific national environments have repeatedly mobilized music to challenge national hegemonies regardless of transnational circulations even if such internationalism was often a necessary precondition. At the same time, however, the antagonisms and transformations engendered by these initiatives have “European” characteristics that should not be downplayed. The turmoil accompanying the appearance of beat music in the socialist bloc in the 1960s or the antiracism of the RAR movement in Great Britain in the 1980s could only have occurred amidst very specific “European” settings: an authoritarian society fearful of Western cultural products and a postimperialist nation confronting contemporary racism. In both cases— and in many others—music provided a means through which individuals sought
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change, although it is striking that musical protest seemed to rely less on music than on the historical contexts in which such protest was enacted. As this conclusion suggests, musicking has been critical to musical protest. The daily rebellions throughout the century—whether the battle against fascism, the criticism of socialism, or the push to overcome capitalist inequalities—have witnessed musical practices at the center of these struggles. Looking back, it seems clear that democratic and capitalist societies have had an easier time domesticating musical protest and thereby diffusing its political challenge. As the examples of jazz in Nazi Germany or punk in the socialist bloc demonstrate, authoritarian regimes have had a much harder time asserting control that speaks to the power of music as a political act: precisely because authoritarian regimes politicized popular music, musicking became a ready and effective resource for protest. In this regard, musical protest in twentieth-century Europe has been most effective under dictatorships. By contrast, the political challenges of the folk movement or RAR, despite their ambitions to overturn the status quo and to offer alternative visions of change, were rapidly incorporated into the existing system. Such observations raise hard questions about the efficacy of musical protest: is musicking under capitalism a rebel yell or the rebel sell?¹⁰ And they suggest that for musical protest to be effective—especially in our globalized, neoliberal world—it must remain outside the system; this is the challenge for musical protest in the twenty-first century.
Notes Clive Barrett, “The Music of War Resistance in Britain, 1914– 1918,” in Popular Song in the First World War: An International Perspective, ed. John Mullen (London: Routledge, 2019), 65. Simon Jeffery, “UK’s ‘Biggest Peace Rally,’” The Guardian, February 15, 2003. R. Serge Denisoff, The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1972). Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999); Sabrina Petra Ramet, ed., Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Ian Peddie, ed., The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), xvi. See also Jonathan C. Friedman, ed., The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music (New York: Routledge, 2017). John Street, Music and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 1. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
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See Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005).
Bibliography Barrett, Clive. “The Music of War Resistance in Britain, 1914 – 1918.” In Popular Song in the First World War: An International Perspective, edited by John Mullen, 64 – 83. London: Routledge, 2019. Denisoff, R. Serge. The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1972. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Tradition in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Friedman, Jonathan C., ed. The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2017. Garofalo, Reebee, ed. Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Cambridge: South End Press, 1992. Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Peddie, Ian, ed. The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ed. Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Street, John. Music and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.
Further Reading Betz, Albrecht. Hanns Eisler: Political Musician. Translated by Bill Hopkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Bolton, Jonathan. Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012. Briggs, Jonathyne. Sounds French: Globalization, Cultural Communities, and Pop Music, 1958 – 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Drott, Eric. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968 – 1981. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Goodyer, Ian. Crisis Music: The Cultural Politics of Rock Against Racism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Harwell Celenza, Anna. Jazz Italian Style: From its Origins in New Orleans to Fascist Italy and Sinatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Jackson, Jeffrey H. Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
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Kater, Michael H. Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Kenney, Padraic. A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Kutschke, Beate, and Barley Norton, eds. Music and Protest in 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Poiger, Uta. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Rachel, Daniel. Walls Come Tumbling Down: The Music and Politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge, 1976 – 1982. London: Picador, 2016. Riding, Alan. And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Robb, David, ed. Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s. Rochester: Camden House, 2007. Ryback, Timothy W. Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Simonelli, David. Working Class Heroes: Rock Music and British Society in the 1960s and 1970s. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Sneeringer, Julia. A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956 – 69. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Sweeney, Regina M. Singing Our Way to Victory: French Cultural Politics and Music During the Great War. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Voit, Jochen. Er rührte an den Schlaf der Welt: Ernst Busch; die Biografie. Berlin: Aufbau, 2010. Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
Part VI: Globalizing Music
Rachel Anne Gillett
17 Glocal Invasions: Appropriating Music from Abroad Introduction The title of this chapter relies on several contentious terms that need careful definition. Glocal, combining the global and the local, is shorthand for phenomena that reveal the intersecting forces of globalization and the passionate assertion of local identities—the two trends Samuel Barber famously identified as “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The constituent features of globalization are complex and multifaceted, but they include the extensive movement of goods, capital, ideas, and people that brings much of the globe into contact and connection. Many scholars emphasize the dominance of a global economic system of capitalism within which goods travel far and wide—if not freely. Globalization has been made possible in part by technology, especially communications technology—from the advent of the telegraph, wire transfers, and the radio to the rapid spread of literacy and newspapers to late-twentieth-century innovations in the worldwide internet. Localization is, conversely, a return to, or insistence on, the specificity and uniqueness of small, site-specific or culturally distinct communities that draw on a shared understanding of the past and an assertion of group practices and values. The term glocal is awkward, but it recognizes that these two historical processes are not clearly distinct. They are both seen at work in the transmission of some forms of popular music into Europe and in their reception and further history once they arrived. As Martin Rempe and Claudius Torp argue, people move from place to place, bringing their culture and music with them; thus they become “cultural brokers” in a process that links different regions and communities.¹ Music is a particularly rich medium for this process of cultural connection and exchange that results in “glocalization.” Three cases, discussed below, reveal some shared features of the glocal in twentieth-century European musicking: jazz in interwar Paris, Dutch Indo-rock in postwar Netherlands, and Italy’s hip-hop entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019. Given that many other musical encounters and appropriations took place that have brought the local and the global together, why these three cases? Obviously, the author’s own areas of expertise come into play here. However, each case also foregrounds how certain sites were hotspots of musical appropriation and exchange because of the way they brought people, ideas, and products together. Ports, big metropolitan cithttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-018
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ies—particularly those associated with empire—and large, well-publicized, and transnational events—such as musical festivals and competitions—have served as “portals of globalization” in Europe as elsewhere in the globe and in musicking as in other areas of life.² They are the site of global interactions, and they mediate between global forces and local (or state) control. These three cases illustrate that the intensity of appropriation was higher in some places and at some times than others: for example, in urban zones rather than rural ones or at moments that saw high migration often due to war. Before turning to the three case studies, however, the remaining terms in the title merit some explanation as well. The title hints that music from “abroad” that is to say “outside” is an invasion when it becomes popular within Europe. Treating culture as a site of national identity that needs defending against outside forces is a recurrent form of group behavior in global history, particularly at moments of encounter between different cultures and classes. The appearance of jazz in Paris was greeted with unbridled enthusiasm by some—but it was also labelled an invasion by others, some of whom linked it explicitly to the increased migration of colonial subjects into the metropole. The outcry against the opera Jonny spielt auf, which drew on jazz rhythms and which was designated entartete Musik (degenerate music) in Germany, speaks to the same fears. The term invasion was applied to the Beatles’ rising popularity in America and subsequent global dominance. It conveys the historical reality that the movement of music from one culture into another is sometimes hailed as an unwelcome intrusion and displacement rather than exchange and enrichment. The language of invasion can emerge from and encourage prejudice, whereas the terms transmission and exchange reflect more positive processes of musical movement. Appropriation is also a fraught term. It has become a weapon in the twentyfirst-century “culture wars” or societal conflicts over values, community standards, and legal responses to issues such as gay marriage, abortion, gender relations, migration, and racial equality.³ In musicking, it refers to instances where new audiences and communities have picked up and consumed music without understanding the culture from which it emerged or the history to which it speaks and without engaging with the shared experiential context of the people who have made it. Taking and using musical styles or pieces, virtually unchanged, from individuals or groups without acknowledgement thus constitute appropriation. One could argue that the term reflects over-sensitivity and that enjoying and reproducing the music of others are natural occurrences. Turning one group’s cultural treasure into another group’s playful leisure, however, can cross from appreciation into trivialization. The adoption and adaptation of jazz, for instance, as it became popular outside the African-American tradition in which it arose has sometimes involved white performers and producers taking aspects
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and practices from African-American cultures without acknowledging the history of suffering inherent in the music. Each of these two positions—that appropriation is an overused and exaggerated charge or that it is a damaging process that has done harm—recognizes that music travels, and is adopted and adapted by other cultures. Music is one of many cultural practices and produces—art, fashion, and food, for example—that lend themselves to exchange and appropriation. Music’s ubiquitous presence on a range of media platforms and in everyday life, its performative dimension, and the role of jamming and collaborating involved in music make it a particularly visible site of exchange, encounter, and appropriation.⁴ The notion of appropriation gets more complicated when the issues of ownership, invention, and creativity are related to the role of commercialism, consumption, production, and money making in musicking (for more information on those issues, see the relevant chapters in this volume). Yet it is important to remember that sometimes listeners and scholars contrast “authentic” music with commercial music. This is naïve. The blues, for example, is music of resistance born out of hardship and suffering, but it was also commercial and “authentic” at the same time. Blues performers were exploited and underpaid but were also creators of their own image and agents in their own marketing. Those who interpret singer/dancer Josephine Baker as naïvely pandering to the exotic tastes of her white audiences for personal profit underestimate her. She was also a canny and ironic performer who parodied the stereotypes of jungle dancers and exotic princesses she seemed to perpetuate. The biggest danger of framing the entry of musics from “abroad” into Europe purely as a process of appropriation or invasion is that it simplifies the motives of performers, singers, and creators—cultural brokers—who brought, sent, or sold their music into Europe. This framing also underestimates the extent to which those musics were shaped, adapted, and changed by European performers, creators, and audiences of many backgrounds, who consumed, reproduced, performed, and reinvented the music. And what counts as “abroad” especially given that the borders and understandings of Europe have shifted over time and remain contested? As Martin Rempe and Klaus Nathaus explain, in the introduction to this volume, “Europe” cannot be reduced to a geographical entity. It is also, and even primarily, an imagined and experienced space. In this chapter, I therefore consider “abroad” or “from outside Europe” by using the viewpoint of the people making and reacting to the music in the case studies. In these studies, we find critics of jazz, of Indo-rock, and of hip-hop asserting the existence of Europe by determining what it is not. In each of these cases, however, after some time, these musical styles have also been incorporated into the European music scene, being locally produced and thereby sustaining
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European presence and stylistic/linguistic modifications that bring “Europe” into the music. In sum, neither invasion nor appropriation captures the complexity of the way in which, for centuries, music from abroad has moved into Europe, has changed European culture, and has been changed in the process. The chapter’s title exposes the tension between how communities experience musical exchanges as invasion (their music coming over here) and appropriation (Europeans got pleasure and exacted money out of other people’s cultural property). Reality is more complicated than either alternative. It often involves a process of exchange, which can exist alongside appropriation. The fear of invasion, similarly, can be part of an exchange because it generates representations and even hostile adaptations that are attempts to naturalize new music and neutralize its seeming threat. The following case studies show how glocal musicking in Europe has involved exchange, appropriation, and fears of invasion. It argues that the process has resulted in innovative refashioning of forms. It concludes with a close reading of a 2019 Eurovision performance that encapsulates how musicking in Europe is inextricably both global and local.
1 Jazz in Interwar Europe Jazz may seem an arbitrary place to start the examination. Music and musicians had been circulating around Europe from various regions within the continent, as well as from North Africa, and other areas for hundreds of years, including the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. But the arrival of jazz occurred just after the globalizing moment of World War I, a moment during which the forces of nationalism and racial discourses of purity (scientific racism) were also in full development. Karl Miller and Celia Applegate examined how developments in folklore studies, elite culture, and musical populism, both in America and in Europe, linked racialized ideas to music emerging from a particular “folk” or community. As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, academics, opinion makers, and the rapidly growing commercial music sector produced sets of “sonic demarcations”—categories and features of music—that bore the hallmarks of nationalism and nation making.⁵ They began to identify aspects of music that, they argued, showed elements of blood (genealogical descent), tradition (history), and soil (being born and raised in a place)—together making these aspects “authentic” to a region, ethnicity, and race. The way in which jazz was racialized as black music meant that it clearly brought out societal tensions between fears of cultural invasion and the desire to embrace exciting music from another culture.
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In addition to these historical aspects of the decades preceding jazz, the technical advances in recording technologies and radio, as well as global travel and World War I, meant that the impact of jazz was more widespread than many transatlantic musical exchanges that preceded it. When jazz arrived in Europe, it had an extraordinary effect. Some records and early precursors of black American music and dance had arrived before the war with the famed American dancers Irene and Vernon Castle. The Castles showcased dances such as the black bottom and the grizzly bear, which were influenced by early African-American music. An African-American choir, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, included AfricanAmerican spirituals in their repertoire when they toured Europe in the late 1900s, performed before royalty, and attracted sellout crowds.⁶ Yet this American musical impact upon Paris increased exponentially as a result of World War I. The first jazz bands arrived with the American troops stationed in Europe during the last months of the war, and they remained during the period of stabilization and treaty making afterward. James Reese Europe, the visionary leader of the band Harlem Hellfighters, toured Europe after the war and played at the Tuileries Garden during the period of the peace talks. His fellow composer and pianist Noble Sissle stated that when the “band struck up,” the audience had “awed look on their faces […] amid smiles of pleasure at hearing the music.”⁷ Sissle also mentioned that it was the music that made the French take notice. Before the band started playing, they were assumed to be North African, and, according to Sissle, the audience was not that interested. This memory of Sissle’s may be exaggerated, but numerous other records show that jazz had immediate appeal to the European public and was simultaneously understood to be a signifier of race and a nonlocal presence in the European metropoles. The European consumption of jazz as black music and the way that many musical critics in the 1920s described it in very racialized terms recognize that the music is glocal from its inception. Men and women who were captured from various regions of Africa, enslaved, and labored on plantations in the Americas brought a variety of musical practices with them, such as complex polyrhythms and syncopation (a classic example is Oh When the Saints Come Marching In, which starts on an offbeat). Enslaved men and women combined this with the music they heard being performed by their white masters and by white Europeans living in the Americas, such as hymns, military brass music, and classical European dance music. Spirituals, the blues, gospel, and jazz were the musical results of this history. When black jazz bands came to Europe, the music they brought with them was already the product of mixing and exchanging, although it had been created and passed on in black American culture (see figure 1).⁸
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Figure 1: “In the courtyard of a Paris hospital for the American wounded, an American [black] military band, led by Lt. James R. Europe, entertains the patients with real American jazz,” 1918.
The impact of jazz in Europe was initially limited to the locations in which army bands performed, but their visibility and popularity grew through both word of mouth and newspaper coverage. Nightclub owners were quick to hire black American bands who played the Charleston and other jazz-influenced dance styles. By 1924, most Europeans had heard, or heard of, this music from “across the pond” and could see it performed in major cities.⁹ The working, jobbing musician Opal Cooper, for example, toured from Cannes to Berlin, from Bruges to Amsterdam, and as far as Delhi. Baker’s passport lists a similar variety of destinations. Louis Armstrong toured Europe twice in these years, and European performers like Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli were sitting in with African-American musicians, jamming and learning from them. Avant-garde
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classical composers like György Ligeti, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill and surrealist poets and artists like Francis Picabia and Jean Cocteau were incorporating jazz styles, themes, and motifs into their work. Jazz was in Europe to stay. What the music audiences heard at the time was an eclectic mix. It varied from lightly syncopated arrangements of well-known sentimental numbers to original compositions that featured innovative improvisation. In France, it was played by bands with white players and leaders from Britain and America (for example, Jack Hylton or Paul Whiteman) as well as by bands with black leaders (Duke Ellington, Willie “the Lion” Smith, or Arthur Briggs). James Reese Europe’s band, the Harlem Hellfighters, performed widely, and their repertoire included a syncopated version of La Marseillaise and a piece that became iconic of the American experience in war—How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree). Both show how early jazz in Paris became a glocal form. The African-American genre traveled to Europe along with the players. How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm was inspired by the experience of war, which brought hundreds of Americans into Europe where they enjoyed “Paree” and London when on leave. The piece was a product of migration and movement. The extent of the impact of jazz across the continent of Europe can be measured in several ways. Newspapers in many countries reported on the new music. The French press was full of reports on jazz, and widely circulated dailies, such as Paris-Midi and Paris Soir, ran “journalistic inquiries” into the new music while glossy gossip magazines, like La Vie Parisienne, featured numerous quips, cartoons, and satires about jazz—and the Europeans who embraced it.¹⁰ The magazines Melody Maker, Jazz-Tango, and La Revue du Jazz were founded in this era as jazz boomed. Radios played jazz, and films featured it even before the transition to sound, which debuted in a film featuring jazz—The Jazz Singer. Baker, the iconic black American performer, appeared in at least three films, dancing to jazz music. The first record stores were founded during this era, and sales of jazz discs increased. Newspapers listed, reviewed, and advertised new releases. Pathé recorded a lot of American music (variously marketed and stylistically falling between swing and jazz) between 1919 and 1941. Sellout concerts in various cities drew crowds and attention. Armstrong toured, as did Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins, and hundreds of American musicians playing dance music that we would now call jazz. Musicking goes beyond simply performing, dancing, and listening to records. Baker’s image was everywhere but so was that of other jazz musicians who appeared on posters, in newspapers, on record covers, and on postcards.
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Record stores were augmented and sometimes formed by a small but enthusiastic number of fan clubs who published magazines, held listening events, and (some of which) did mail sales for members. In France, for example, two young men Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay, passionate amateurs, founded the Hot Club de France and then argued bitterly over developments in the form jazz was taking in the 1930s. Panassié disliked the innovations—appropriations perhaps—that black and French musicians were creating in France, while Delaunay sponsored events and concerts that facilitated new sounds and combinations such as the music of Grapelli and Reinhardt. The emergence of “Jazz Manouche,” also known as “Gypsy Jazz” (a term used at the time), as one of the first “Europeanized” styles of jazz/swing music was indebted to Reinhardt’s influence. The disagreement between Panassié and Delaunay brings up the question of how the audiences and musicians who received and transformed jazz in interwar Europe absorbed and simultaneously contested glocalization in music. Panassié and Delaunay both embraced the new music from abroad. This distinguished them from a series of commentators who saw it as a descent into decadence and primitivism. One of the most vehement advocates of this position was the composer and music critic Sir Henry Coward, who thundered: Jazz is a low type of primitive music, rounded on crude rhythms, suggested by stamping feet and clapping hands. It puts emphasis on the grotesque by banging and clanging of pots and pans […] The noble trombone is made to bray like an ass, guffaw like a village idiot, and moan like a cow in distress. The silver-toned trumpet, associated in poetry with the seraphine [sic], is made to screech and produce sounds like […] the wailing of a nocturnal tomcat. Jazz cannot make anything but the essence of vulgarity. The popularity of jazz and the attendant immodest dances are lowering the prestige of the white races.¹¹
One of the many posters produced about the jazz “craze” in Paris similarly characterized it as “l’Invasion Noire,” and another piece of journalism described it as “a dark series of events” and asked if it would prove to be, in the end, a series of events “too dark” for France.¹² That latter article wondered if the acceptance of jazz would pave the way for the acceptance of black men and women in every part of society, which the author clearly thought was a threatening, rather than positive, development. Panassié—who loved the music—considered the best players to be black because of his ideas about racial difference. He believed that black jazz players were naturally good and instinctive musicians with rhythmic and improvisatory ability that proved their biological distance from true “Europeanness.” These reactions show how musicking was clearly interwoven with larger concerns about race and globalization, in the public imagination. By 1926, even avant-garde artists and writers, such as Cocteau, who had been eager to em-
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Figure 2: Georges Pavis, L’Invasion Noire, for Fantasio Magazine, 1925, courtesy of the Pavis family. Author’s copy.
brace jazz when it first appeared, were calling for a “return to order” by which they meant French classical and cabaret music. This reaction was a combination of racial prejudice and fear and a connected resurgence of pride in French patrimoine, the country’s cultural heritage. The arrival of an exciting, bold, innovative, and widely appealing music from abroad felt like a threat to a variety of European national cultures (British, French, English, German, and Belgian). Jazz therefore symbolized the invasion referenced in the title of this chapter. In the aftermath of a war that had brought many non-Europeans into the continent, the musical phenomenon became a symbol of the fears about change and the
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arrival of newcomers into a society associated with the idea of an invasion (see figure 2). The mixing, hybridity, and global-local aspect of jazz in interwar Europe can be heard in the music itself. Baker’s signature song was entitled J’ai deux amours, in which she sings about having two loves—her country and Paris. This makes sense for an American in Paris. But the song was written for a musical revue that portrayed the French colonies, country by country, and in that context, the singer was portrayed as a colonial maiden torn between love for her homeland and a (white) French colonist. The lilting melody, in the style of the foxtrot, combines the character of a French chanson with the swing and syncopation of American music. In the song, Baker sings that her “savannah is beautiful” but that she finds Paris enchanting.¹³ The reference to a savanna is drawn from French West Africa while the musical style and original singer hailed from America, and the language of the lyrics and location of the performance was French. Further examples of this exchange and mixing can be found in the recordings Hawkins produced in 1937 in Paris with Reinhardt, Benny Carter, and Andre Ekyan and Alix Combelle, both members of the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. One of the most iconic is Crazy Rhythm, which, as its name suggests, is a fast piece of music. In the opening bars, Reinhardt, on the guitar, punctuates a brass riff with a percussive, syncopated cluster of chords. He then drives the piece forward with a walking bass jazz rhythm, above which his bandmates take turns improvising tight but rhythmically and harmonically creative solos. The combined American and French band is stylistically coherent, smooth yet energetic, and “glocal.” The historic context of the interwar period and the resulting musical migration fostered this musical mixing. However, following occupation in 1940, Nazi officials and their Vichy collaborators sought to limit and control the presence of black musicians. They banned the performance of music seen as “degenerate” in regions over which they had control. Yet the musicking continued in the form of underground jazz clubs in Germany and France. After the war, it continued with avant-garde jazz, but the popularity of that was less than the fame of the new rock stars like Johnny Hallyday and their “polyglot” pop music.
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2 Dutch Indo-rock in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1950s The case of Indo-rock, the rock ‘n’ roll music produced by performers of mixed Indonesian and Dutch descent in Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s, offers some productive similarities and illustrations to that of jazz in interwar Paris. The themes of migration, musical invasion, and global exchange are very present. The term “Dutch Indo” needs some clarification. I have adopted the terms “Indo” and “Dutch Indo” used by the advocacy group and community heritage project, “The Indo Project.”¹⁴ These terms are awkward English translations of the Dutch term Indische, which has had negative connotations in the past. Indonesia has a rich musical history that was deeply affected by colonization and, in turn, affected musicking in the Netherlands. As early as the 1400s, traders from North Africa, India, China, and Japan exchanged not only goods but also musical instruments and cultural practices with residents of the various islands in the archipelago. From 1500 onward, Dutch colonialism intensified the cross-cultural contact and, since the nineteenth century, imposed a Dutch presence in Indonesia. Colonization resulted in intimate and reproductive relationships, both forced and voluntary. By 1942, Dutch sociologist Wim Wertheim estimated that 8 to 9 million of the colony’s 90 million inhabitants had a European ancestor.¹⁵ This hybridity was also evident in the popular local musical style, kroncong —which incorporated guitars (first introduced by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century) with traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments and brass instruments brought over by Dutch military bands and missionary settlers. Kroncong even utilised country music sounds from America that were transmitted via the Philippines. The music had frequently been played by slaves and by local inhabitants for Europeans. By the late 1940s, the influence from America (which included touring minstrel shows) led to the adoption of the banjo. In the 1950s, popular music bands and musicians in Indonesia had embraced the electric slide guitar popularized by Hawaiian music, and they also absorbed and incorporated aspects of early rock ‘n’ roll sound, as typified by Elvis Presley, who was played on the radio and was as controversial in Indonesia as he was in America and Germany. The collective biography of the Tielman Brothers, a popular Indo-rock band shows how this Indonesian style of music entered Europe and became part of European musical and social history. The Tielman family had mixed fortunes in World War II and the tumultuous period of decolonization and independence that followed. They, like many Indonesians loyal to the Dutch, suffered in the pe-
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riod of Japanese occupation during the war and flourished when the Dutch returned. However, the Tielmans decided during the Indonesian War of Independence to “return to” (or arrive in) the Netherlands, bringing their music with them. Before turning to the way the group—later known as the Tielman Brothers— were formative in the Dutch Indo-rock style, it is worth emphasizing how their experience in Indonesia up until the moment of their move to the Netherlands illustrates the processes of musical exchange and mixing. The combination of instruments and styles that constituted kroncong was a result of empire building, trade, migration, and a global war. The Tielmans switched effortlessly from that local urban style to American jazz and swing, depending on their audience’s desires. Like many musicians, they were adept at musical mixing and adaptation. The Tielmans were part of a significant migration of Dutch Indonesians who had been loyal to the Netherlands, from Indonesia (back) to Holland. They received a mixed welcome. Their right to residency was acknowledged, yet culturally they were treated as both Dutch and “other.” Many Dutch Indonesians sought assimilation into Dutch culture while also desiring to retain and honor aspects of their Indonesian heritage. One result was that members of the community began to gather together at events called Pasar Malam to enjoy the music, dances, food, and games they had brought with them from Indonesia. This formed the cultural context within which the Tielman Brothers launched their European career. They were among the most popular and innovative performers of Indo-rock, a style of music that blended rock ‘n’ roll with some elements of kroncong. Yet due to local factors in the Netherlands, the Tielman Brothers remained a niche band. These factors included Dutch ambivalence toward their community, the relative slowness with which the Dutch warmed to rock ‘n’ roll, and widespread concerns about the unwholesome nature of the music (the Elvis Presley factor) especially as played by Dutch Indonesian young men. In 1958, however, the Tielman Brothers had a breakthrough at the Brussels World Exhibition. They were booked as a supporting act at the Hawaiian pavilion, but audiences responded rapturously to their live show, and they were offered top billing and long-term contracts first at the exhibition then in Germany. Their music from this era is heavily instrumental rock, blending the use of sentimental and melodic guitar duet above a syncopated rhythmic line, produced by strings and percussion—characteristic of kroncong—with the driving rhythms, occasional vocal crooning, and physical stage gymnastics and spectacular tricks that early jazz performers had used and that rock ‘n’ roll performers, and later heavy metal performers, would adopt. A formidable televised performance recorded in the Netherlands in 1960, for example, featured one of their iconic hits Black Eyes Rock. It starts slow, with a
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kroncong-style nostalgic tone created by a lead guitar playing a sentimental melody accompanied by melancholic chords from a second guitar, over plucked rhythmic bass and a syncopated but steady drumbeat. Two guitars (played by Andy Tielman and Reggy Tielman) then repeat and vary that central melody, playing it with doubled chords reminiscent of gamelan sonority, then rhythmic pizzicato, tremolo ornamentation, and slide guitar techniques drawn from classic American and Hawaiian rock. At around the second minute of the performance, the band speeds up into a driving, rock treatment of the same melodic themes, but the plucked pizzicato string sound (which evokes kroncong) persists. As the piece nears its end, the players begin to add a variety of performative elements, such as guitars played behind the head. The second number of this televised live performance, Rollin Rock, ends with a spectacular set piece in which Loulou Tielman rises from the drum set, dances behind it, then slowly saunters around the kit, playing an elaborate and lengthy cymbal solo (suggestive of the brass sounds of the gamelan). The camera then switches, along with the solo, to Ponthon Tielman, lying on the ground, plucking his double bass strings fast and furiously with the instrument laying sideways. Shortly afterward, Andy Tielman is shown playing his guitar by sliding his feet down its neck, before hopping on top of the double bass, which his brother is still playing, and continuing to play his own guitar behind his neck. The visual and musical impact is astonishing. The television performance raised their popularity in the Netherlands but also intensified the critique they received from conservative listeners.¹⁶ The popularity of Indo-rock, and of the Tielmans, continued to rise throughout the early 1960s. They played in Hamburg at clubs in the Reeperbahn neighborhood where the Beatles had long-term gigs between 1960 and 1962. It is possible the Beatles heard them play in Hamburg as they were there at the same time. Scholars have now recognized Indo-rock as one of the earliest forms of Euro-rock. The globally inflected music they brought to Europe with them was part of the cultural context in which the Beatles developed their sound, which they then exported to America and around the globe, in the “British invasion.” The music had come full circle. The lines of globalization and mixing outlined above also generated debates about cultural invasion and appropriation both in their time and now. Some players insist that they were accepted in Europe and were glad to bring kroncong elements into European popular music, but players also documented racist insults directed toward them and toward their music. Moreover, the spectacular performative techniques used by the musicians were described as exotic and perhaps contributed to stereotyped ethnic perceptions on the part of a Dutch public that was already scandalized by rock ‘n’ roll. This process was also evident when
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jazz performers in Paris played the saxophone sideways, danced while playing, or shimmied topless in a feather loincloth and were accused of being “clownish” or “primitive.” This reaction was, apparently, intensified when the Tielman brothers adapted a Mozart piece by giving the high-art classical composition an Indo-rock twist. The Indo-rock youth scene certainly generated criticism and concern in conservative Dutch circles. And finally, in terms of appropriation, some commentators have argued that a generation of Dutch-born, white rockstars benefited from the musical innovation of Indo-Rock and then rapidly eclipsed the groups who had created it.¹⁷ The narrative of the Tielman Brothers band illustrates themes of Europeans fearing a musical and cultural invasion. It shows how such fears contrast with a different interpretation of a process that emphasizes white Dutch colonial appropriation of Indonesian music. Along with the advent of yé-yé and Schlager, popular European music (which the Tielmans also performed), the advent of Indo-rock shows how Europe was a major node in a network, or circuit, around which cultural brokers moved, bringing and creating music.
3 Mahmood’s Eurovision Moment In February of 2019, Italics Magazine, an English language online publication aimed at “foreign readers, professionals, expats and press interested in covering Italian issues thoroughly” and “appealing to diverse schools of thought,” published an article on Italian performer Mahmood (Alessandro Mahmoud). The performer wrote and performed Soldi, Italy’s entry in the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, which ultimately came in second. The article opens: From the very beginning, the victory at the Sanremo Music Festival of Mahmood (Alessandro Mahmoud his real name) has turned into a political issue, highlighting that in Italy two different schools of thought exist, even in music: one which believes different roots are good for our country, and the other claiming that any kind of foreign influence destroys our culture and identity. The controversy generates from the origins of the singer: born and raised in Milan of an Italian mother and an Egyptian father, many people consider him as a foreign and only “half Italian.”¹⁸
This quotation and the musical events it describes summarize many of the themes discussed in the chapter so far. It identifies two clashing interpretations of Italian cultural identity. The first is that Italian identity is being threatened by “foreign influence” and the second is that it is, conversely, strengthened by “different roots.” The quotation illustrates how such concerns about national identity play out in the realm of music. The quotation does not delve into the actual
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musical components of the song, which weaves together components from hiphop, North African music, and Italian music. The performance context mentioned here is also important. The Sanremo festival is self-designated as Italy’s premium national musical event, and it aims to represent the best of Italy and Italianness in music. As the winner of Sanremo, Mahmood was selected to represent Italy on the European stage. The Eurovision Song Contest, founded in 1956 with seven nations participating, has grown to include 43 nations as of 2019. The television audience for the show is large with estimates for the 2008 competition, for example, as high as 208 million viewers having seen all or part of the three final shows.¹⁹ The competition’s name and format stress both the concept of European identity as well as the diversity and local specificity of the nations that compete. Scholars have shown how the contest is not only a showcase for ideas of the nation-state but also a forum for showcasing how diverse cultures (and music) comprise supposedly “national” identities.²⁰ Mahmood’s entry illustrates how contestants and their music have raised the visibility of migration and mixing in Europe in recent years. Italy, like many European nations, has a population that has been shaped by global processes of migration and cross-cultural interaction. This has increased in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Italy, like Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France, is connected to North Africa by the Mediterranean, which has seen musical and cultural movement around and across it for many years. Mahmood’s stage name is a combination of his last name, which indicates North African ancestry, and the American rap informality of the phrase “my mood,” pronounced “mah mood.” The singer is Italian by birth and identifies as “100 % Italian,” but his father’s Egyptian nationality led to some politicians questioning the singer’s national and cultural identity and thus his suitability as the country’s representative for Eurovision. The entry is instantly recognizable as European hip-hop, a genre that inherently testifies, like jazz in Europe, to the presence of black music from the Americas in Europe. Mahmood has been influenced by the trap music subgenre of hip-hop. The synthesized string sounds, melancholic harmonies, and nostalgic tone of Soldi could show that influence. Yet this “Italian language rap tune,” as one journalist described it, is also “tinged with a Middle Eastern flavor.” The Egyptian music that Mahmood listened to with his father during his youth almost certainly included the songs of Umm Kulthūm, Egypt’s preeminent singer whose music also featured melancholic harmonies and orchestral string sounds. Listening carefully to the song and watching the live performance, however, reveal more specifically the elements that comprise its fusion of rap and “Middle Eastern” flavor. The basic structure of the song has three components: a verse, a
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prechorus, and a chorus. In Mahmood’s live performance at the 2019 finale of the Eurovision Song Contest, the song opens with a simple, minor-sounding piano chord and a scattered flight of notes from a qanun (a lap harp used a lot in Middle Eastern music). The rhythmic low bass beat sets up a hip-hop rhythm, but tonally it recalls the darbukah, the Middle Eastern “goblet drum.” The singer enters quickly, walking to the front of the stage, rapping, with a hip-hop swagger including a knee dip, a hand gesture to the heart, and out to the audience with a flat hand. The first verse includes lyrics describing his family life as a young child, which includes the line “beve champagne sotto Ramadan” [he drank champagne during Ramadan]. The singer states that this line, like many others in the song, is a metaphor for his father’s hypocrisy and his own sense of abandonment. The lyrics throughout portray a father more interested in money than family and show how this causes pain. That emphasis reverses trap music’s frequent glorification of money. The song contains two more elements: a prechorus, with a soaring vocal line reminiscent of Italian songs like the previous Eurovision Song Contest’s winner Volare, and a rhythmic-pop-music, dance-style chorus, punctuated by a quick double clap, in which the audience joins rhythmically and with great enthusiasm in the live performance. That quick, responsive handclap is also a stylistic feature of Arabic music, and sonically it also recalls the punctuation of the castanet in flamenco. In live performance, Mahmood adds a zugrahdah (an Arabic term for an ornamentation that could be either a trill, a mordent, or a combination of them— he basically shakes the note a quarter- or semi-tone in either direction), which intensifies the “Middle Eastern” flavor of the music. In other places, he combines this trill with a “terminal trail-off.”²¹ This is most noticeable in a line toward the end of the live performance: “Primo mi parlavi fino a tardi, tardi” [Back then you would talk to me till late]. The Arabic lyrics come in as a bridge to a final repetition of the prechorus and chorus, and here the qanun sound comes through very clearly, as does the drum, and faintly, the oud. The singer recalls his father calling “waladi habibi ta’aleena” [My son, my love, come here]. The harmonies here, too, sound the most “Middle Eastern” with flattened seconds, thirds, and augmented intervals. The musical detail in this close analysis neglects the use of dancers and visual images in the music video version. Yet it reveals the extent to which hip-hop has become part of a European musical tradition just as jazz did. Moreover, North African musical influences have been a recurrent feature of European musical culture for centuries but are now reappearing in new combinations in popular music.
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The Eurovision performance, however, had some unique elements that illustrate further several themes of this chapter. The first is that in the Eurovision performance, Mahmood uses more overtly North African musical flourishes than in the music video. Live performances can offer greater possibilities for fluidity, surprise, and musical mixing, while recorded music is more easily aligned with genre boundaries that often overlap with ethnic and national distinctions. Second, in that performance, the singer included a backdrop with an English translation of a key line: “It’s hard to stay alive, when you’ve lost your pride.” Many of the performers in the Eurovision Song Contest sing in English, but many do not. Throughout much of its existence, the language and lyrics of the competition— especially when the chances of winning may be affected by language choice— have reflected tensions and anxieties about balancing the global and the local. And third, viewers had the option to watch with simultaneous sign-language music translation, a rapidly growing global genre of its own. The translators are specially trained to convey the beat, sonority, and atmosphere of the music, as well as the meaning of the lyrics. This plurality of language in the Eurovision Song Contest underlines the globalizing forces of popular music, which at times have tremendous inclusive power. Other aspects of the live performance, however, were less celebratory and optimistic about inclusion and the power of musical exchange. The 2019 Eurovision Song Contest was held in Tel Aviv and was subject to a boycott by many critics because of Israel’s treatment of Palestine. The star guest, Madonna, has been critiqued for her eclectic approach to spirituality and the Kabbalah tradition and has faced direct charges of appropriation for wearing Berber attire without demonstrating respect or cultural understanding.²²
Conclusion The three cases that this chapter has focused on—jazz in interwar Paris, Dutch Indo-rock in postwar Netherlands, and Italy’s hip-hop entry in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019—span a hundred years of musicking in Europe. The forces of globalization and localization have operated throughout that time. Audiences and commentators have frequently wondered if the latest musical invasion was the end of Europe as they know it. Accusations that cultural “others” exert undue influence on local populations have been a persistent feature of these musical and personal encounters as much as celebrations of musical richness and innovation. The explicit language of appropriation has become a feature of this history only in the latter years of the twentieth century. Appropriation has occurred prior to this, although one could argue that the period since the 1970s has
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seen a vastly increased awareness of how disrespectful it can be to take and use the music of another culture without respecting the traditions and belief systems in which it flourished. An increasing consciousness of how this could cause harm gave rise to the term, although the practice had been around for centuries. The debates over whether musical exchanges are invasions, appropriations, or positive and mutual encounters that lead to creative adaptations simmer beneath the visions of musical hybridity and in the European Union’s motto of “United in diversity.” The case studies presented in this chapter therefore show how music can help us understand European history in the long twentieth century. They reveal sustained processes of migration as well as colonial and postcolonial relations that have shaped contemporary European demographics. They show that Europe has been constantly declared as both a place and an identity and that commentators have found it easier to determine what it is not than what it is. They also show that musicking, like many other cultural practices in Europe, has been as divisive and xenophobic as it has been enriching and diversifying. They show that whatever Europe and European are, they change over time and have been created by cultural exchange and encounter. This conclusion is thus inconclusive. These case studies are snapshots in space and time. They capture and freeze living processes of music making on the page. Each case study could have been one of a dozen others. Each case study reduces a genre and a historical context that could produce (and sometimes has done so) dozens of books to a short example. Each invites us to analyze the music, the musicians, the audiences, and the historical context in far greater depth. Each leaves the reader to scrutinize the presence of the local, the global, the appropriation, the invasion, and the creative remixing in these examples. Collectively, however, these musical genres that are now staples of European music illustrate that glocalization happened and continues to happen, that it generates passionate public response, and that this is audible, visible, and evident in musicking. The conclusion, then, is to hope that further discussion and research into these processes will fill in gaps, add detail, bring nuance, and enrich our understanding of these glocal invasions.
Notes Martin Rempe and Claudius Torp, “Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s,” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 223 – 224. Thanks are due to Isaak van Dijke for his generous assistance with the section on Indo-rock.
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Claudia Bauman, Antje Dietze, and Megan Maruschke, “Portals of Globalisation: An Introduction,” Comparativ 27, no. 3/4 (2017): 8. It also captures a reaction amongst some scholars to the work of other scholars on indigenous experiences and to academic work showing how clashes between different cultures often took the form of Europeans and Americans doing harm. Scholars who query the focus on colonization as harm, on empire as violence, and on the inclusion of indigenous histories and non-European voices often argue that such research is “biased” and nonobjective. These scholarly disputes arise out of and are cycled back into popular culture. It is important to register, however, that fashion, art, and even poetry/literature are intertwined with musicking, so this distinction is slightly artificial. Karl H. Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). “Why Jazz has conquered the world,” La Dépêche Africaine, no. 8 (October 1928). By the mid-1920s, so many black American performers were playing in Europe that the Chicago Defender—one of America’s leading black newspapers—had a weekly column devoted to musicians entitled “Across the Pond.” Andre Coueroy and Andre Schauffner, “Enquete de Paris-Midi sur le Jazz-Band,” Paris-Midi, 9 May 1924; Raoul Laparra, “Aimez-Vous le Jazz: M. Raoul Laparra,” Soir, 14 July 1926 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu, Département des Arts et Spectacles, file R 98531). See also Comoedia and La Vie Parisienne, for example, “Le Jazz-band,” La Vie Parisienne, 1 January 1921, 16. Sir Henry Coward, “Address to the Sheffield Rotary Club,” cited in Dave Peyton, “The Musical Bunch,” Chicago Defender, 15 October 1927. Interestingly, this comment was excerpted in the Chicago Defender and mocked because, despite Sir Henry’s opprobrium, jazz bands were making huge amounts of money in interwar Europe. Georges Oudard, “La Série noire,” La Revue Française 21, no. 46 (1926): 546 – 547. Vincent Scotto and Ge´o Koger, J’ai deux amours: fox-trot chante´ par Jose´phine Baker [in the musical “Paris qui remue”] (Paris: Salabert, 1930), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= lVROHNH9YLU (accessed 27 January 2020). See its website, https://theindoproject.org/ (accessed 31 January 2020). Hans Heijnen and Lutgard Mutsaers, Rockin’ Ramona (Haarlem: Rarity Records, 2004); the performances can be found online: “Black Eyes Rock,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= IOZl7gXj_io and “Rollin Rock,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muKkVufgkAE (all accessed 18 August 2020). Isaak van Dijke, “The Rise, Reception, and Demise of Indorock” (Master thesis, Utrecht University, 2020). Sophia Rita Jadda, “Eurovision Song Contest 2019: Who is Mahmood?,” https://italicsmag. com/2019/02/23/eurovision-song-contest-2019-mahmood/ (accessed 5 January 2020). Note the article identifies Mahmood’s mother as Italian, whereas other sources specify that she is Sardinian. The following section draws on this and other news articles about the singer cited below. All of the articles touch on the themes of Mahmood’s national/ethnic identity, the “Middle Eastern flavor” of his music (although they do not define the musical components of the sound), and the fusion of rap with Italian song in this piece and in his musical style in general. Sanremo 2019, Mahmood: ecco testo e significato di Soldi, la canzone vincitrice, https://www.ilmessaggero.it/ televisione/sanremo_2019_mahmood_testo_soldi-4290765.html (accessed 20 June 2020); Jason Horowitz, “Italian Minister Pans Hit Song by an Immigrant’s Son,” in New York Times,
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31 March 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/world/europe/italian-minister-pans-hitsong-by-an-immigrants-son.html (accessed 20 June 2020). This estimate is from the contest’s own official website, https://eurovision.tv/about/factsand-figures (accessed 18 August 2020). See Dafni Tragaki, Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013). These terms are taken from Lois Ibsen Al Faruqī, “Ornamentation in Arabian Improvisational Music: A Study of Interrelatedness in the Arts,” The World of Music 20, no. 1 (1978): 22– 25. Cf. English lyrics from the translation, https://lyricstranslate.com/en/soldi-money.html (accessed 6 February 2020). For a strongly stated example of this critique see Craig Wood, “Madonna Wishy-Washes Apartheid Israel at Eurovision,” Dissident Voice, 24 May 2019, https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/ 05/madonna-wishy-washes-apartheid-israel-at-eurovision/ (accessed 6 February 2020). For a contrasting opinion on Madonna’s berber attire see Joanne Lu, “The Story Behind Madonna’s Silver Horns at the VMAs,” National Public Radio, 21 August 2018, https://www.npr.org/sec tions/goatsandsoda/2018/08/21/640587899/the-story-behind-madonnas-silver-horns-at-the-vmas (accessed 6 February 2020).
Bibliography Applegate, Celia. The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Bauman, Claudia, Antje Dietze, and Megan Maruschke. “Portals of Globalisation: An Introduction.” Comparativ 27, no. 3 (2017): 7 – 20. Dijke, Isaak van. “The Rise, Reception, and Demise of Indorock.” Masters thesis, Utrecht University, 2020. Erlmann, Veit. Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Gouda, Frances. Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900 – 1942. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995. Heijnen, Hans, and Lutgard Mutsaers. Rockin’ Ramona. Haarlem: Rarity Records, 2004. Ibsen Al Faruqī, Lois. “Ornamentation in Arabian Improvisational Music: A Study of Interrelatedness in the Arts.” The World of Music 20, no. 1 (1978): 17 – 32. Jackson, Jeffrey H. Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Miller, Karl H. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Rempe, Martin, and Claudius Torp. “Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s.” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017): 223 – 233. Tragaki, Dafni. Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013.
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Further Reading Barendregt, Bart, and Els Bogaerts, eds. Recollecting Resonances: Indonesian-Dutch Musical Encounters. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Blake, Jody. Le Tumulte noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900 – 1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Jordan, Matthew F. Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Herbert, Trevor, and Margaret Sarkissian. “Victorian Bands and Their Dissemination in the Colonies.” Popular Music 16 (1997): 165 – 179. Mitrovic, Marijana. “‘New Face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: International Media Spectacle and National Identity.” European Review of History/Revue Europeenne d’histoire 17, no. 2 (2010): 171 – 185. Mutsaers, Lutgard, and Gert Keunen, eds. Made in the Low Countries: Studies in Popular Music. London: Routledge, 2018. Nitzsche, Sina A., and Walter Grü nzweig, eds. Hip-hop in Europe: Cultural Identities and Transnational Flows. Wien: LIT, 2013. Rollefson, J. Griffith. Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Salamone, Frank. “Jazz and Its Impact on European Classical Music.” Journal of Popular Culture 38 (2005): 732 – 743. Sneeringer, Julia. A Social History of Early Rock ‘n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to The Beatles, 1956 – 69. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Wipplinger, Jonathan O. The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017.
Bob van der Linden
18 Global Connections: Attuning to European Music Abroad
Introduction¹ In 1939, at the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Xian Xinghai composed his Yellow River Cantata, in which he incorporated Chinese traditional songs and evoked the image of the Yellow River as a symbol of Chinese defiance against the Japanese invaders. Three decades later, four Chinese composers rearranged the piece under the supervision of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, into the Yellow River Piano Concerto, one of the best-loved of all Chinese compositions. It was this work—which in its finale includes excerpts from The Internationale and the Maoist hymn The East is Red—that the renowned Chinese pianist Lang Lang performed during the countdown festivities at Tiananmen Square, one year before the start of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. For Lang Lang and many Chinese, undeniably, the occasion celebrated the country’s reemergence as a dominant world power and stirred up nationalist emotions. The pianist himself explained: China went through a terrible nightmare over the last 150 years. Our creative standing in the world was lost, compared to the past, when China was a powerful country. But this piece helped to bring back our energy and self-confidence. It was like a wake-up call from a nightmare, a reminder that we would do great things again. It has a special meaning for me. I get very emotional when I play it because it’s part of my culture, and I am really proud of this heritage.²
Ironically, to define “Chineseness,” Lang Lang played not only a work from the Cultural Revolution but also one that largely follows the European romantic classical music idiom. Moreover, the Yellow River Piano Concerto was specifically composed for the piano, in equal temperament tuning,³ and for another European invention, namely the disciplined symphony orchestra. That said, Nicholas Cook wrote: The developments of Western music within East Asia—in Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan—has been so effective that on many indicators these, together with Israel, might be seen as the heartlands of classical music in the twenty-first century (and without their East Asian students, European and North-American conservatories could not survive in their present form).⁴
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As a matter of fact, the role of Japan as the world’s main piano manufacturer since the 1970s—with Yamaha Corporation (founded as Nippon Gakki in 1887) as the leading brand—has recently been overtaken by the Chinese company Pearl River (founded in 1956) in Guangzhou. As a joint venture, Pearl River works together with Yamaha and the world’s greatest piano trademark, the American Steinway & Sons (founded in 1853), which in 2007 for the first time in its history named a piano line after a living artist: indeed, Lang Lang. During many centuries, European music largely developed through musical interactions with other cultures, both intended and accidental, and especially along the Silk Road. It is well known, for instance, that most European musical instruments originated in their earliest forms in Asia and were adopted by Europeans in the Middle Ages. Even so, these musical interactions changed in the period of overseas expansion and colonialism when European music became a marker of “Europeanness” in two dominant ways. First, European music practices and instruments had become distinctly different from those elsewhere mainly due to technological developments (keyboard instruments especially), the use of equal temperament tuning, (functional) harmony on the basis of the use of chords, and staff notation. Second, European music was directly connected to imperial power relations and, particularly from the late nineteenth century onward, dominantly imposed and globalized itself in a variety of forms. In this context, the great majority of Europeans saw their own music in evolutionary, and indeed often racial, terms as the pinnacle of progress and culture. In The Evolution of the Art of Music (1893), for instance, the British composer Charles Hubert Hastings Parry argues that the maturity of the music of different races depended “on the stage of each race’s ‘mental development,’” and accordingly, he believes that European classical music had developed from “primitive” music and had, of course, become the highest stage to be reached.⁵ In fact, into the twentieth century, many Europeans continued to degrade especially African music and jazz because of their supposedly “primitive” and “sexual” rhythm. In their turn, non-Europeans in the imperial encounter had to deal with European (scientific) ideas (about music). This resulted in new “modern” ways of musical thinking, feeling, and action that to a great extent were dissimilar to what they had ever experienced before. While self-consciously redefining themselves as modern musical subjects, non-Europeans, for example, redeveloped their own art music traditions in view of European music (history), whereby they became preoccupied, among other things, with the systematization of scales, equal temperament tuning, and the origins of their own music. Moreover, in the process, they repeatedly claimed that their own music was more “authentic” and “spiritual” than European music to boost burgeoning national and anti-imperial identities.
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This chapter, then, explores the worldwide diffusion, in different ways and to various degrees, of European art and popular music, including “pop-rock” music since the 1950s. On the whole, it argues that European music in its basic form gradually replaced, appropriated, or at least influenced indigenous musical traditions and that this resulted in an ever-growing degree of musical uniformity around the world. In doing so, the chapter builds on and expands the late Christopher Bayly’s argument about the emergence of “global uniformities” since the nineteenth century.⁶ Closely related, it simultaneously questions and aims to show what lies underneath the dominant (politically correct) ideas about the global “diversity” of music that particularly come to the fore in the discussion of so-called “world music.” Along the way, the chapter underlines the central role of technological developments in this long-term and ongoing historical process. It also discusses how the encounter with European music repeatedly led to the emergence of non-Western national music traditions. Throughout the chapter, I will use the terms European and Western synonymously while including North America in the discussion of European music in a global and imperial context.
1 European Music in the Imperial Encounter: Cultural Brokers and Technology From the very beginning of their overseas expansion, Europeans brought music along. Besides clocks and other technological advanced items, they often gave keyboards (virginals, clavichords, and organs) as gifts to non-European rulers. A famous case is that of the Italian Matteo Ricci presenting such a gift to the Chinese Emperor, which led to European music being studied and performed at the court in Beijing ever since. In fact, the Qianlong emperor apparently was so taken by a performance of Niccolò Piccinni’s La Cecchina (1760) by Jesuits that he had Chinese musicians trained to play this work and specifically also ordered a theater to be built just for it. Most non-Europeans, nonetheless, first gained familiarity with Christian hymnody and military music. Throughout the world, instrumental music and hymns proved crucial to the spread of Christianity. As Father Organtino Gnecchi-Soldo wrote from Kyoto in 1577, “if only we had more organs and other musical instruments, Japan would be converted to Christianity in less than a year.”⁷ In general, music education formed a dominant part of the curriculum of missionary schools. Then, into the twentieth century, students of these institutions worldwide were fundamental to the establishment of national music schools and, at a later stage, conservatories, especially in Japan, China,
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and Korea. At the same time, of great significance, missionaries often suppressed indigenous music traditions because, from an evolutionary perspective, they found these traditions too “primitive” in comparison to European music. In this context, the opera houses built around the world, for example in Rio de Janeiro (c. 1760), Kolkata (1827), Cairo (1869), and Hanoi (1911), are most important markers of the authoritative presence and civilizing mission of European colonial rulers as well. In general, non-European elites were impressed by the technology of keyboard instruments, staff notation, and the (orchestral) discipline of European musicians in playing together. Accordingly, they came to see the study, performance, or patronage of European music as a way of being modern and civilized. Since the late nineteenth century, a great number of non-Westerners actually studied music in Europe and America. Isawa Shūji, the key figure behind the Japanese government’s propagation of Western music through the so-called “school song movement,” had studied in the United States before becoming the founder rector of the Tokyo Academy of Music (1887); he was also fundamental to the creation of the European music education programs in Japan’s colonies: Taiwan and Korea. The creators of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (1927), Xiao Youmei and Cai Yuanpei as well as Wang Guangqi—the founding father of modern musicology in China—studied in Germany. As a matter of fact, after Japan’s military victories over China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, numerous young Chinese went to Japan to study European music. Upon their return, they began music reforms that mirrored those in Japan, and in this, they were often helped by Japanese educators. Thus, millions of children in East Asia, besides their parents, friends, and neighbors, gained a basic familiarity with European music. Successively, some of them felt motivated to form choral groups or to study Western music more intensively. In British India, the songs of the Bengali polymath and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore remain a particularly intriguing example of the impact of European music in Asia. During his late nineteenth-century visits to Europe, he was very impressed by local classical and folk songs, of which he learned to sing some himself. Partially inspired by such songs, he then composed an oeuvre of over 2,000 “modernist” songs, including the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. Non-Western rulers, who sometimes themselves played and/or composed European music, often also appointed Western musicians at their courts to form and conduct their European-style (military) bands or orchestras: to name but a few, John William Fenton at the Japanese Meiji court, Alfred Jean-Baptiste Lemaire in Persia during the reign of King Naser-al-Din Shah Qajar, and the German Heinrich (Henry) Berger in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi (see figure 1). While all three of them composed (the first) national anthems of these respective coun-
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tries, Berger also became known as the “father of Hawaiian music” because of his recordings of traditional Hawaiian songs as well as his own compositions in a similar style. Until his death in 1856, Giuseppe Donizetti, the elder brother of the famous Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti, worked for 28 years under two Ottoman sultans, Mahmud II and Abdulmecid I, and was eventually elevated to the rank of a pasha. He taught the basics of European music to young Turkish soldiers as well as members of the Ottoman imperial court. Further, he arranged concert trips of the famous European virtuosi of the time to Istanbul, including Franz Liszt, and supported the annual Italian opera season at the imperial Ottoman Theatre in Pera, the “Christian” district across the Golden Horn from the sultan’s palace. Due to his efforts, European music was also played in Istanbul at most solemn religious ceremonial occasions. The sultan’s regular Friday procession to the mosque, for instance, was accompanied by a march of Rossini, Giuseppe Donizetti, or another European composer instead of the drums and cymbal clashes of a janissary band.
Figure 1: Royal Hawaiian Band led by Henry Berger, 1889. Wikimedia Commons: https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Hawaiian_Band#/media/File:Royal_Hawaiian_Band_in_1889_(PPWD1 – 3 – 012).jpg.
On the whole, numerous individual Western musicians and music educators were responsible for the global distribution of the knowledge and practice of European music. In Japan, the aforementioned Isawa Shūji was helped by Luther Whiting Mason, the renowned American music educator and author of the National Music Course. Shūji had met Mason during his studies in Boston and,
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after his return to Japan, invited him to come over as a special advisor to the Ministry of Education. Particularly important in China was the presence of the antiBolshevik Russian community in Shanghai between the two world wars. By 1936, these “White Russians” comprised around 60 percent of musicians employed at the foreign-run Shanghai Municipal Orchestra. After years of denial, the latter also accepted Chinese musicians, performed for mixed audiences, and built up a reputation as the best orchestra in the Far East. Some of the orchestra’s Russian musicians taught Chinese students at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, too. Between 1934 and 1937, the renowned Russian pianist and composer Alexander Tcherepnin made several extended visits to China and Japan. He encouraged Chinese and Japanese composers to create “national” music and even founded a publishing house in Tokyo for the promotion of their work. In 1936, he introduced a very influential piano method in China that was based on what he saw as China’s pentatonic scale. His Technical Studies on the Pentatonic Scale were soon adopted by the government as the official piano method and used in lessons throughout the country. Around the same time, in Turkey, under the leadership of President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and strongly influenced by the writings of Ziya Gökalp, large state-supported modernization programs for national music education were introduced. For this purpose, actually, as in the case of most European nations, the state authorized the collection and research of Turkish-language folksongs, so that these could become the basis for modern Turkish national music. At the request of Ataturk, then, Paul Hindemith and Eduard Zuckmayer, who both fled to Turkey from Nazi Germany, reorganized Turkish music education and were fundamental to the establishment of the Ankara State Conservatory. As director of the music branch of Gazi Institute for Education in Ankara between 1938 and 1970, Zuckmayer trained nearly all Turkish teachers who later taught European music throughout the country. Moreover, in 1935/36, Béla Bartók was invited by the Turkish government to conduct a major expedition in the south-eastern part of the country and to teach local folklorists to collect, transcribe, and analyze folk songs. Based on his fieldwork and Edison phonograph recordings, Bartók created a collection of detailed notations and song analyses that subsequently became fundamental to the creation of Turkish national music, whether art or folk. Ultimately, of course, Ataturk’s national music project was meant to replace music that evoked Central Asian-Persian art music and the Sufi tradition (which both flourished at the Ottoman courts), Islamic music more broadly, and any “gypsy” associations. To a great extent, therefore, these initiatives overlapped with the creation of a modern Turkish language purged of Arabic and Persian loanwords.
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Figure 2: Claudio José Brindis de Salas Garrido, 28 years old, posing with his Stradivarius and his Prussian decoration “Order of the Black Eagle,” 1880. Wikimedia Commons: https://ca. wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudio_Jos%C3 %A9_Domingo_Brindis_de_Salas_y_Garrido#/media/Fit xer:Claudio_Jose_Brindis_Salas_Garrido_1880.jpg.
Without any doubt, the globalization of European music was very much helped by technological developments, including the printing of musical scores since the sixteenth century and the production of musical instruments in factories since the nineteenth century. While steamships and railways radically shortened travel time—for instance, to Asia especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869—telecommunications (telegraph and telephone) virtually erased the obstacle of distance. All this allowed international tours for early twentieth-century stars, such as Clara Butt, Nellie Melba, Fritz Kreisler, and Enrico Caruso. One fascinating story is that of the Cuban concert violinist Claudio José Brindis de Salas Garrido (see figure 2), who in 1871 won the first prize at the Paris Conservatoire and, after touring Europe and South America extensively, became known as the “Black Paganini.” The French government made him a member of the Légion d’Honneur and he was also temporarily appointed as a chamber musician to the German emperor, who decorated him with the Order of the Black Eagle. The most influential technological change was the invention of Thomas Edison’s phonograph in 1877. Whereas the dissemination of European music earlier de-
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pended on individual cultural brokers, recording and reproduction technologies (at first gramophone records and later radio broadcast and sound film) as well as music journalism created new ways of performing, listening, and thinking about music. Indeed, in retrospect, the networks of phonograph companies—British Gramophone, Victor Talking Machine, Columbia Records, and so on—provide persuasive evidence for the argument that the beginnings of the globalization of the music industry should be placed at the beginning of the twentieth century instead of towards its end, as is conventional.
2 Non-European Art Music: Modernization and Nationalism While the adoption of European music was most immediate in East Asia, compared to other world regions, its presence and history generally also led to the modernization of Asian art music traditions. From Syria to Japan, music reformers aimed to modernize and nationalize their art music traditions on a par with European classical music. Among other things, they did so through the establishment of modern music schools, music conferences, by defining canonical repertoire and “scientific” music theory, and (staff) notations. Sometimes this process of classicization resulted in the ossification of music repertoires and performance practices, as in the cases of Japanese imperial court music (gagaku) and “traditional” music ensembles in Central Asia. Classicization of national music even happened in the Indian subcontinent, the area in the world with art music traditions that, in comparison to elsewhere, until today remain least affected by European music. Although India still has no Western music conservatories, symphony orchestras, and so on, the European harmonium (in equal tempered tuning) and violin were widely adopted, with the first more or less becoming the country’s “national” accompanying instrument. Also, classicization of music in India, for example, has led to a more “standardized” performance practice (for instance in terms of intonation and public presentation) and, closely related, to less variety between individual improvisational styles. Telling in this context of music modernization—while keeping in mind the relation to (the history of) European music—was the first Congress on Arab Music held in Cairo in 1932. Actually, its organizers used the term “Arab music” to replace the more common expression “Oriental music,” and hence the congress was also a manifestation of Arab nationalist sentiment, in keeping with the idea of the existence of a “Muslim world” that had emerged in the late nineteenth century. Though most participants came from Egypt, there were
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scholars, musicians, and music ensembles from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Moreover, delegates discussed the present and future of Arab music not only with each other but also with Europeans, such as comparative musicologists Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs, and Robert Lachmann; Arab music scholar Henry George Farmer; as well as composers Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. In general, the Europeans saw Arab music as being linked to the past, and they therefore recommended the preservation and research of “primitive” folk music, which they believed contained the “authentic” spirit of Arab music. In contrast, most nationalist Arab music reformers were disparaging folk music and favored a radical modernization of their art music traditions. In doing so, they took the European evolutionary scheme of music—that is to say, from “primitive” music to European classical music—as the ultimate referential model. They envisaged a musical renaissance of Arab music along similar lines. Nonetheless, they argued that these modernizing efforts would not impair the inherent “authenticity” and “spirituality” of Arabic music. In fact, they believed that modern Arabic music would be a revival of a past golden age, finding support in the work of Western Orientalist scholars such as Farmer and Rodolphe d’Erlanger. The main discussion points at the congress were the precise definition of an Arabic scale and intonation, the classification of melodic scales (maqam), and the problem of notation. Unlike the Westerners, most Arab reformers advocated the introduction of an equal-tempered Arabic scale of 24 quarter-tones, analogous to the European equal temperament tuning, because this would help rationalize Arab music and also allow functional harmony. Following the congress, the equal-tempered Arabic scale has been taught as the standard at Arab conservatories and has had a definite impact on modern Arab music practice. Besides, Arab music reformers began to create orchestras using both traditional and European instruments in order to preserve their musical heritage in a modern outfit. As a result, the violin soon gained a dominant presence and replaced traditional string instruments. The prevailing presence of “traditional” orchestras in the Arab world ever since—when accompanying the late Umm Kulthūm or Fairuz, for example (see figure 3)—shows the continuing importance of the views of the Arab music reformers at the 1932 congress. Most significantly, the performers in these orchestras, above all by playing from scores, distanced themselves aesthetically from that fundamental element in traditional Arab music, namely, improvisation, and thus overall adapted their former more individualist musicianship to ensemble playing. This situation parallels that of Chinese orchestras that developed in the 1930s, which today can be found throughout the Chinese-speaking world. These orchestras not only employ modernized Chinese instruments, which earlier would seldom be used together, but also perform
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arrangements of European classical music, Chinese music, and original compositions.
Figure 3: Fairuz and Umm Kulthūm in Beirut, 1967. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Umm_Kulthum_and_Fairuz,_Beirut_-_1967_(2).jpg.
Meanwhile, the making of national music in Turkey was of a different order. Supported by the state, the earlier work of Bartók was continued by the modernist composer Ahmed Adnan Saygun, who studied in Paris, and other folksong students. All of them had worked with the Hungarian, and over the years, they succeeded in making modern Turkish national music based on Turkish-language folksongs. Influenced by contemporary theories about the Ural-Altaic linguistic group, Bartók believed that the oldest forms of Hungarian music and Turkish music were linked through their common pentatonic melodies. In doing so, he strengthened the nationalist search for the Central Asian origins of Turkish music by Saygun and other folk music collectors, which had already begun before his arrival. For them, pentatonicism was the seal of “authentic” Turkish music because it showed that the folk songs originated from Central Asia. While composers such as Saygun appropriated Turkish folk music in their Western classical compositions—a tradition that still continues today on a small scale —the main long-term result of early twentieth-century state-supported folk music research in Turkey, as heard and seen on Turkish radio and television, was the
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establishment of folk music schools and orchestras with refurbished traditional instruments largely tuned in equal temperament throughout the country. As in Turkey, local composers around the world appropriated traditional music into the European classical music idiom. In communist China, a national music tradition was invented that translated folk melodies and certain traditional instrumental techniques into an idiom of pentatonic Romanticism, of which the Yellow River Piano Concerto is a prime example. As a matter of fact, this process is still ongoing in a different way. Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary classical composers like Tan Dun have rediscovered and incorporated the country’s traditional music. In contrast to earlier modern Chinese music, however, their compositions emphasize sound rather than melodic structure and rhythmic effects rather than a regular meter. Initially, the Chinese government approached this “Chinese new music” as a dubious anarchist force, but eventually Tan Dun gained their support to the extent that he was invited to compose music for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. All the same, “Chinese New Music” more or less stands in an already existing tradition of what may be called “self-Orientalist” music, of which the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu remains the most famous proponent. Partly influenced by contemporary Western composers with an interest in Asian music and culture, like John Cage, Takemitsu made claims of the “wisdom of the East” variety about his own music. An example is the equality of sound and silence as well as the fact that the Japanese perceive time as circulating and repeating, whereas the modern Western concept of time is linear. Such ideas, of course, are often also heard elsewhere in Asia, especially in India, and among musicians in Africa and South America. In turn, Cage described how in the music of Tan Dun “sounds are central to the nature in which we live but to which we have too long not listened.”⁸ Typically, Japanese and Chinese audiences only began to appreciate the “self-Orientalist” music of modernists like Takemitsu and Tan Dun after these composers had become successful in the West. To be clear, Nicholas Cook’s earlier remark about East Asia as the heartland of European classical music largely refers to a rather conservative musical taste and performance practice. The musical interactions that took place across what Paul Gilroy called “the Black Atlantic” were dissimilar from those between Europe and Asia,⁹ mainly because Africa, except for the northern Islamic region, and the New World did not have comparable art music traditions. Yet, as a consequence of the history of slavery, the Americas and Europe, and later Asia, became familiar with (syncretic) African rhythms and music. Moreover, in many South American countries, African music was adopted as the basis of national music traditions in the European classical music idiom. The Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (see figure 4), for instance, wrote numerous compositions based upon Afro-Brazilian musical
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styles such as lundu, the modinha, and especially the choro. Between 1895 and 1918, syncopated ragtime, a blend of European march music and African rhythm, was very popular in the United States and soon also became fashionable among European classical composers. Subsequently, American composers like George Gershwin used early blues and jazz rhythms and melodies in their compositions. Although the music of “the Black Atlantic” ever since remained rather marginal to European classical music making in Africa and the Americas, on the contrary, its impact was crucial to the emergence of distinct popular music traditions in these regions. But here it should be emphasized that, while Christian hymnody was crucial to the making of African popular music since the late nineteenth century, the territories around “the Black Atlantic,” like many parts of Asia, had already become familiar with equal temperament tuning since the sixteenth century through the use of the guitar.¹⁰
Figure 4: Heitor Villa-Lobos bows to the public after his concert at the Ohel Shem Hall in Tel Aviv, Israel, 1952. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Heitor_Villalobos_TA.jpg.
3 Non-Western Popular Music: Cross-Pollination and Nationalism Although the impact of European classical music on non-Western art music traditions, as discussed above, was relatively straightforward—albeit obviously in divergent ways and with Japan and India at the contrasting ends—the same cannot be said about the numerous non-Western popular music styles that simulta-
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neously emerged in the imperial encounter. This is especially due to the mixing of local singing, playing techniques, and instruments with European instruments, harmony, temperament tuning, and ensemble formats. Interestingly, such hybrid music traditions often appeared on the edges of societies in urban cafés, dance halls, theaters, and brothels. Some of the most famous examples are “yellow music” (Shanghai),¹¹ kroncong (Batavia), son (Cuba), marabi (Cape Town), samba (Rio de Janeiro), and tango (Buenos Aires). According to Peter L. Manuel, these musical subcultures generally reflected an urge for freedom “not only from premodern forms of patronage and exchange but also from elite, including bourgeois, musical tastes, and inhibitions, which could be limiting in their own way.”¹² In any case, most of the abovementioned genres over time came to be seen as respectable and often also as national music. In addition, they reached wider audiences because of gramophone recordings and radio broadcasting as well as use in films. Indeed, a crucial aspect of the emergence of popular music since the early twentieth century remains its dissemination through modern media and, closely related, its commodification by the music industry. At the same time, a kind of cross-pollination between these hybrid popular music forms around the world makes understanding the circulation of European music in its basic form even more complicated, and this is especially the case when considering traversing “the Black Atlantic.” As is commonly known, the connection between the Caribbean (above all Cuba) and New Orleans (a city that was first under French and then Spanish rule) was crucial to the emergence of jazz. Yet this music style afterward spread out globally, and, for instance, Shanghai, which was known at that time as the “Paris of the East,” outrivaled Paris in its appreciation for jazz in the late 1920s and 1930s. Conversely, from the 1940s onward, Cuban music became “all the rage” throughout Africa, with so-called Congolese rumba becoming the first truly transnational African popular music style. New York salsa, as pioneered by the Cubans Frank “Machito” Grillo (see figure 5) and Tito Puente, similarly fed this process of bringing African rhythms full circle. Interesting to mention in this context remains the fact that because pianos were generally unavailable in Africa, their part was played by guitars; hence, Sue Steward wrote, “[m]any modern African bands use not one but a whole line of electric guitars, playing densely layered and repeated patterns of hypnotic delicacy, in imitation of horns.”¹³ Yet again, the point is that these guitars ultimately play European harmonic chords in equal temperament tuning, and likewise—as in jazz, funk, and soul music—horn players adjust their melodies and riffs to the same. In Asia, Indonesian kroncong and Indian film music had a musical impact that went beyond their regions of origin. The first largely was a legacy of the Portuguese and has often been compared to fado. The term kroncong represents a
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Figure 5: Machito and his sister Graciela performing at Glen Island Casino in New York during the late 1940s. Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machito#/media/File:Ma chito_and_his_sister_Graciella_Grillo.jpg.
five-stringed ukulele-like instrument, and, besides one or two of these instruments, a typical kroncong ensemble consists mostly of European instruments: guitar, violin, flute, cello, and so on. These accompany songs that are usually sung by a solo female and in a style that resembles European bel canto. Over the decades, kroncong was inspired by popular music genres such as jazz, Latin American music, and Indian film music. Between the 1920s and 1970s, it was very popular also in the Netherlands, where Indonesian and Dutch artists took it in new directions. Significantly, although kroncong until the 1960s was the only Indonesian popular music genre to employ the Western diatonic scale and functional harmony in a very basic form, it was nonetheless adopted as Indonesian national music successively in opposition to Western, Chinese, and Japanese cultural imports. By the late 1960s, young Indonesians considered the genre old-fashioned, but in a revamped electric pop-rock format, it became popular in the nightclubs of Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, and Hong Kong. Within Indonesia, kroncong was classicized on a par with the traditional gamelan art music ensemble as well. In comparison to kroncong, Indian film music provided a much wider musical stimulus, as it was performed in local variants by musicians in East and
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Southeast Asia as well as in Africa and Eastern Europe. In Indonesia, dangdut, in its first incarnation, more or less emerged as a Malay-Javanese offspring of Indian film music. Whereas local vocal styles were combined with Indian film music-style orchestration in Gulf States, like Oman, in the Arab world the genre was particularly crucial to the emergence of Egyptian cinematic music. Obviously, Indian film music also globalized because of its great popularity among South Asian immigrant communities in Fiji, the Caribbean, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. In former Yugoslavia, intriguingly, Roma(ni) “gypsy” musicians felt inspired by the music of Indian Bollywood films, which for decades were widely available as a cheap alternative to Hollywood films, mainly because of the close political links between Yugoslavia and India at the time of the Cold War. Indeed, stimulated by the fact that Roma audiences could understand a great deal of the Hindi language of Bollywood movies, Roma throughout Yugoslavia became captivated by their country of ancestry. Evidently, the sound of Indian film music changed over time, appropriating music from around the world and generally adapting itself to the times. The point, however, is that, unlike India’s art music, the genre from the beginning has been affected by European music through and through: melodies tend to be in diatonic scales, to which harmonies can be added in the background, and Western instruments are used (orchestrated violins, drums, guitar, and so on). Perhaps therefore it is unsurprising that in South Asia, Indian film music has largely taken the place that elsewhere in the world is occupied by pop-rock music. Another fascinating way in which European music was dispersed globally was through Hawaiian “steel” guitar music. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hawaiian music was greatly influenced by Christian missionary music, and, in particular, the guitar became widely popular on the islands. Next to falsetto singing, which includes yodeling, Hawaiian music remains best known for its use of the steel guitar, for which Joseph Kekuku developed and popularized a distinctive technique during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Partially because of the spread of local recordings, Hawaiian music became so fashionable in the United States that, by 1916, pseudo-Hawaiian songs produced by Tin Pan Alley were more popular than any other American popular music. As is commonly known, the Hawaiian steel guitar became most important to American blues and country music. A popular steel guitarist during the 1940s and 1950s was Julius “Papa Cairo” Lamperez (see figure 6), the author of the tune Grand Texas, which later would be popularized as Jambalaya (On the Bayou) by Hank Williams and others. Yet, the Hawaiian steel guitar became incredibly popular around the world as well. The instrument inspired local playing techniques from Eastern Africa to Indonesia, while in India and the Arab world it was especially used for special effects in film music. In the Dutch East Indies, the Hawai-
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ian steel guitar was adopted by kroncong and other ensembles. By way of this route, it also became a fashionable instrument in the Netherlands, especially through the performances of Indonesian musicians such as George de Fretes, whose Royal Hawaiian Minstrels not only was the most popular and best-paid band in the Dutch East Indies but also generally made a name for itself in Europe after the Second World War.
Figure 6: Cajun Guitar Player Julius “Papa Cairo” Lamperez at the National Rice Festival in Crowley, Louisiana, 1938 (American Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/ 2017737876/).
Thus, modern non-Western popular music largely came to be played on Western instruments, particularly as brass instruments and guitars became very popular in Africa and Latin America, where they were played in a modern ensemble format. In addition, it made use of harmonic chords moving in accordance with the basic tenets of European music theory, although it should be emphasized that non-Western performers did not necessarily perceive these progressions in the same way. With that being said, especially around “the Black Atlantic,” musicians continued to see their music not only as being “authentic” and “spiritual” but repeatedly also as national music and a mouthpiece for anticolonial or antiWestern protest, as in the cases of samba in Brazil and chimurenga in Zimbabwe. In this context, Jamaican reggae, another synthesis between European music and African and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, should be mentioned as well. Emerging in the 1960s, the genre to a great degree was triggered by the idea of Rastafari, a popular black cultural resistance movement proclaiming a back-to-Africa identity. The Rastafari movement regards the Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus
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Garvey as its prophet and adheres to his early twentieth-century philosophy, known as Garveyism, of recovering and rebuilding the African culture that was stultified by European colonialism. At the same time, however, it should be emphasized that nationalist popular music around the world changed remarkably during the 1950s, when it became increasingly amplified and electrified and entered the era of pop-rock music.
4 The Global Dominance of “Pop-Rock” Music Today, one clearly makes a distinction between pop-rock music and most of the non-Western popular music discussed above—as well as, for example, Arab popular music of the Kulthūm and Fairuz variety or, in Europe itself, French chanson and Spanish flamenco. Yet there is no doubt that, following the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll in the United States in the 1950s, popular music globally underwent further processes of standardization through what may be called “pop-rockization.” Following Motti Regev, this means that: activities like sitting in cafés, shopping for food or clothes, dining in restaurants, riding public transportation, or simply taking a walk in a modern city, almost anywhere in the world, seem to be accompanied in [the] early twentieth-first century by the constant presence of soaring electric guitars, electronic beats, and guttural vocals emitted from loudspeakers.¹⁴
As a matter of fact, most contemporary popular music forms to a great extent are derived from music practices that appeared in the countries around “the Black Atlantic.” Besides the global influence of Latin American and Caribbean music, especially on African popular music genres, according to Denis-Constant Martin, two strands of hybrid North American music proved particularly fertile: a secular strand leading from blackface minstrels to an infinite range of light musical forms but also to the blues, country and western, jazz, rock, and all their offshoots; and a second, initially sacred strand beginning with spirituals and leading, after many twists and turns, to soul, reggae and rap.¹⁵
Moreover, for the discussion about global attuning to Europe, pop-rockization most likely remains of greater importance than the earlier globalization of European classical music. This, above all, is because of the emergence of an evergrowing commercial popular music industry that caters to far larger audiences than before, specifically in comparison to the market for European classical music, both of the past and present. On the one hand, the global success of
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pop-rock music was directly related to the growth of new amplified and electric technology-based sounds. On the other hand, it was the result of the increasing dissemination of music by the mass media (sound film, radio, and television) and the media of sound recording (playing records, cassettes, compact discs, and later the internet), including marketing and selling on a mass-commodity basis. In addition, it should be attributed to, for example, the short duration of songs, which often alternate verses and choruses at the same time; simple melodies and harmonic developments; bel canto singing techniques; spontaneity of expression; personality cults; and the employment of a pronounced and constant (danceable) beat. In any case, the electric guitar and the modern drum set became the iconic pop-rock instruments worldwide. Conversely, global pop-rockization principally remains the product of “youth culture” and an urban affair. Being comparable to earlier forms of popular music, pop-rock was also often counter-cultural as well as inspired by an inclination to be modern, although now especially technologically new or innovative. As in the case of European classical music, this generally happened in reference to a musical canon as well. Depending on the music style, a musician referred, for example, to individuals/groups such as Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson or genres like rock ‘n’ roll, soul, R&B, punk, heavy metal, rap, and so on. Thus national popular music traditions emerged in the pop-rock music idiom, for instance the earlier mentioned chimurenga (Zimbabwe), reggae (Jamaica), and a developed form of dangdut (Indonesia). Juju, as made famous by King Sunny Adé, and the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti are another two examples, both from Nigeria. By and large, the formation of these hybrid non-Western popular music genres can be compared to that of pidgin languages, “in which elements of the parent languages are simplified in the process of mixing.”¹⁶ In fact, counter-cultural musical identities also emerged in new “transnational” ways. So, for example, young Japanese, who feel out of place with mainstream society and sometimes even seek a life that returns to an imagined traditional Japan, find solace in Jamaican reggae and Rastafarianism, whereby they identify “Babylon” (referring to the corrupt West) as a negative force as part of what Marvin Sterling calls the “global imagination of blackness.”¹⁷ The latest feature of the global pop-rock music scene, then, is the making of regional/ethnic music that simultaneously continues to be seen as being national. In Brazil, for example, famous earlier popular music genres such as samba, bossa nova, and Música Popular Brasileira (or Brazilian Popular Music, MPB—as popularized by Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento, Caetano Veloso [see figure 7], and so on) have been complemented/replaced by pop-rock music genres such as samba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, Afrobeat, for-rock (a merging of forró and rock), sertaneja-country, and samba-rap.
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However, as in the case of Indonesian dangdut, which as Andrew Weintraub argued became increasingly regional/ethnic as well,¹⁸ it may be said that this representation of diverse regional interests in Brazilian pop-rock music continues to enhance national unity.
Figure 7: Caetano Veloso at the third Festival of Brazilian Popular Music, 1967. Wikimedia Commons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic%C3%A1lia#/media/File:Caetano_Veloso_no_ III_Festival_da_M%C3%BAsica_Popular.tif.
Returning to China, the country where our overview of European music abroad began, the recently arrived “China wind” (Zhongguofeng) genre remains a succinct, although extreme, illustration of what dealing with European music abroad has led to in the field of pop-rock music. Since 2000, the Taiwanese superstar Jay Chou popularized “China wind” and remains one of its prime advocates with audiences throughout the Chinese-speaking world. His compositions combine, among other things, European classical music, rock, R&B, soul, hiphop, and rap. Yet, at the same time, he regularly uses Chinese “traditional” instruments and folk songs. Moreover, not only do his lyrics refer to Chinese poetry, history, and Confucianism but also his video clips and stage decor during worldwide live concerts generally evoke the notion of “Chineseness.” Although he is Taiwanese, Jay Chou has successfully generated airtime on Chinese national television, and, like Lang Lang, he was one of the artists who participated in events associated with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. All this remains unsurprising because “China wind” fits in completely with the country’s political and cultural agenda of promoting the idea of “One China” or one (global) Chinese culture shared by all ethnically Chinese people and celebrating the so-
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called Confucian values. All the same, Jay Chou’s notion of “Chineseness,” like that of Lang Lang and Tan Dun, is largely “self-Orientalist.” For example, he often writes songs on a pentatonic scale to accentuate an “Oriental” style, and the Chinese instruments that he uses are refurbished ones, with steel strings, in tempered tuning, and so on. From a global historical perspective, then, this certainly is European music dressed up under the banner of nationalism. In addition, Jay Chou’s music remains a remarkably clear example of pop-rock music disseminated through the mass media as well as marketed and sold on a masscommodity basis.
Conclusion Overall, this chapter underlined that the study of non-European music in the imperial encounter remains crucial for one understanding of the emergence of European music as a most distinctive global marker of “Europeanness.” In this, it particularly emphasized the importance of the relationship between music and technology for dealing with European music abroad. Among other things, non-European (elitist) musicians impressed by the technology of European music initially wanted to play the piano, form an orchestra, notate music, or adjust existing intervals to equal temperament tuning. In other words, they wanted to adopt European music and/or classicize their art music traditions in reference to the European evolutionary view of music history. Moreover, since the second half of the twentieth century, electric music technologies accompanied the making of non-Western pop-rock music in the context of an ever-increasing process of commodification of music, particularly through the mass media. To a great extent, of course, all of this concerns processes of modernization. At the same time, however, it was often also related to anticolonial or anti-Western nationalist thinking. Even so, music making around the world adopted Western aesthetic values. For instance, it was increasingly performed in a European (classical or popular) concert setting, by “traditional” orchestras or professional bands for a paying audience, and on retuned and modernized instruments. Furthermore, the proliferation of both classical and popular European music led to global standardization in music, namely on the basis of functional harmony—although often used in the non-West, as in pop-rock music at large, in a non-classical manner—, of Western instruments, bel canto singing style, and equal temperament tuning. From the 1950s onward, pop-rockization only accelerated this process of providing, as Nicholas Cook put it, “a structure that is as ubiquitous and universal as Western science and engineering, while local elements merely add exotic color.”¹⁹
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Without any doubt, my long-term historical account of global standardization in music may be criticized for being oversimplified and too linear, if not Eurocentric. So, for instance, Timothy Taylor wrote: A music that sounds as though it has been polluted by Western musical styles can, nonetheless, occupy the same social space and fulfill the same social functions as a more “traditional” music that is being supplanted by newer music. In other words, if one views music not simply as a formalistic-stylistic entity and understands it instead as an activity serving certain functions in particular cultures, it might not be so easy to conclude that Western music is wiping out local musics.²⁰
For the discussion, however, I would argue that the case of musical diversity in the world today is similar to that of the number of spoken languages, which “dropped from about 14,500 in 1500 to less than 6,500 in 2012,”²¹ and that this fact should be kept in mind when writing about the dissemination of European music around the globe. The well-known ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, for instance, likewise argued that global musical diversity diminished in ways similar to the drastic decrease in natural languages, “to be replaced by an increasing number of ‘dialects’ in music (like the number of dialects of the dominant languages, such as English, Spanish, Chinese, replacing those disappearing tongues).”²² Furthermore, he rightly emphasized the ironic fact that, in the face of all this musical homogenization, “the normal musical experience of the typical individual throughout the world—surely of the world’s urban dwellers—who has access to radio, the internet, and all the other marvels of modern technology, has become more heterogeneous, more varied.”²³ Be that as it may, for the historian, the cross-cultural (intellectual) interactions in music between Europe and the rest of the world since the nineteenth century provide the basis for one understanding of the globalization of European music as “world music.”
Notes I am thankful to Klaus Nathaus and Martin Rempe for their perceptive and supportive comments upon earlier versions of this chapter, as well as for their initial invitation to contribute to this book and to participate in the authors’ workshop. It all has been a most rewarding experience. Also, the series editors’ feedback was helpful for the chapter’s final form. Amanda Holloway, Liner Notes: “Lang Lang, Dragon Songs” (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, 2006). In equal temperament tuning, each interval (distance between two pitches) is adjusted or tempered equally and thus everything is equally a little bit out of tune. This contrasts with other systems of intonation, which exist(ed) worldwide and generally are/were based on unequally
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spaced acoustic intervals, as naturally heard by the human ear. Equal temperament emerged in Europe not only as the foundation of modern harmonic hearing and thinking, which is based upon the relationship between the diatonic major and minor scales, but also as the tuning system for the piano, whose pitches are fixed. By dividing the octave into twelve semitones (the smallest difference between two pitches in Western music) of equal size, all scales can be played in any key with minimal perceived differences in intonation. Nicholas Cook, “Western Music as World Music,” in The Cambridge History of World Music, ed. Philip V. Bohlman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 78. As cited in Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5. Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 – 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); specifically in relation to non-Western national music traditions Bob van der Linden, “Non-Western National Music and Empire in Global History: Interactions, Uniformities, and Comparisons,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 3 (2015): 431– 456; in connection to “pop-rock” music Motti Regev, Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). As cited in Cook, “Western Music as World Music,” 75. John Corbett, “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 179. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Rogério Budasz, “Black Guitar-Players and Early African-Iberian Music in Portugal and Brazil,” Early Music 35, no. 1 (2007): 3 – 21; James A. Millward, “Cordophone Culture in Two Early Modern Societies: A Pipa-Vihuele Duet,” Journal of World History 23, no. 2 (2012): 237– 278. Andrew F. Jones described “yellow music” (huangsi yinyue), meaning pornographic music, as “a hybrid genre of American jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk song,” in id., Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 6. Peter Manuel, “Music Cultures of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Bohlman, The Cambridge History of World Music, 59. Sue Steward, Salsa: Musical Heartbeat of Latin America (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 157. Regev, Pop-Rock Music, 159 (word added by author). Denis-Constant Martin, “The Musical Heritage of Slavery: From Creolization to ‘World Music,’” in Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters, ed. Bob White (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 18. Peter Manuel, Popular Music of the Non-Western World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 85. Marvin Sterling, Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Andrew Weintraub, Dangdut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Cook, “Western Music as World Music,” 81. Timothy D. Taylor, “World Music Today,” in White, Music and Globalization, 181. Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 86.
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Bruno Nettl, Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 57. Ibid.
Bibliography Bayly, Christopher A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 – 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Budasz, Rogério. “Black Guitar-Players and Early African-Iberian Music in Portugal and Brazil.” Early Music 35, no. 1 (2007): 3 – 21. Corbett, John. “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 163 – 186. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Cook, Nicholas. “Western Music as World Music.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 75 – 100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Holloway, Amanda. Liner Notes: “Lang Lang, Dragon Songs.” Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, 2006. Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Linden, Bob van der. Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Linden, Bob van der. “Non-Western National Music and Empire in Global History: Interactions, Uniformities, and Comparisons.” Journal of Global History 10, no. 3 (2015): 431 – 456. Manuel, Peter. Popular Music of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Manuel, Peter. “Music Cultures of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Bohlman, The Cambridge History of World Music, 55 – 74. Martin, Denis-Constant. “The Musical Heritage of Slavery: From Creolization to ‘World Music.’” In Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters, edited by Bob White, 17 – 39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Nettl, Bruno. Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Millward, James A. “Cordophone Culture in Two Early Modern Societies: A Pipa-Vihuele Duet.” Journal of World History 23, no. 2 (2012): 237 – 278. Regev, Motti. Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sterling, Marvin. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Steward, Sue. Salsa: Musical Heartbeat of Latin America. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.
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Taylor, Timothy D. “World Music Today.” In White, Music and Globalization, 172 – 188. Weintraub, Andrew. Dangdut Stories: A Social and Musical History of Indonesia’s Most Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Further Reading Bohlman, Philip V., ed. The Cambridge History of World Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Osterhammel, Jürgen. “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik, 1860 – 1930.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 38, no. 1 (2012): 86 – 132. White, Bob, ed. Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Martin Rempe
19 Backstage Integration: Europeanizing Musical Life Through International Organizations How does “Europe” actually sound? In the aural imagination, it evokes at least three melodies: the UEFA Champions League Anthem—which represents an arrangement of George Frederick Handel’s Zadok the Priest—written by the British composer Tony Britten; the Eurovision hymn of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which is based on the opening theme of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Te Deum; and the Anthem of Europe of the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe, which is an instrumental version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s final chorus “Ode to Joy” from his Ninth Symphony. These sounds may be familiar to most people living in Europe and beyond. They are linked to exciting football games, pulsating song contests, and the noble idea of peace and international understanding (even if the text of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy is actually not part of the Anthem of Europe). The widespread publicity of these canonical “European” melodies is in stark contrast to their promoters, all of them being international organizations whose activities are often deemed complicated, technocratic, or simply not important. This holds especially true for international organizations concerned with musical matters. As I argue in this chapter, despite the great promotional qualities of music, the manifold activities of these organizations took place backstage—out of sight of music lovers, consumers, and the musical public sphere more generally. Nonetheless, international organizations contributed to the Europeanization of musical life because they provided several transnational fora where ideas about “European” music were generated and exchanged as well as where important economic issues of the music industry were negotiated and regulated. In highlighting the unevenness, the fragmentation, and the global linkages of this development, central aspects of twentieth-century European history come to the fore. There are many ways to classify international organizations. They may feature nongovernmental or governmental membership. They may operate on a for-profit or a nonprofit basis. They may geographically have only a European scope or a truly global reach—as long as they deal with music in one way or another on a transborder level in Europe, they are considered part of backstage integration dealt with here. With regard to music, however, the most suitable way of classification is to divide them into two functional categories. Following a tyhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-020
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pology by Lester M. Salamon and Helmut K. Anheier, organizations that are active in the fields of culture, education, and research are discerned from those that act like business associations and professional unions.¹ These two categories roughly equal political-cultural and socioeconomic arenas of musical life, and only the equal consideration of both prepares the ground for a thorough analysis of institutional contributions to musical Europeanization in the long twentieth century. Three questions are raised: Why did musical international organizations emerge? What activities did they pursue? And how did these activities add to Europeanize musical life? This holistic approach has several advantages. Firstly, by looking at the process and practices of many organizations instead of exploring a single one, a one-sided institutionalist account of musical Europeanization will be avoided, even though in this chapter some organizations will be treated more prominently than others. Secondly, only by examining both European and global organizations can we gain a perspective that encompasses the many musical activities and assess their Europeanizing effects. Europeanization here refers to varying processes that foster European connections as well as alignments and trigger reflections about “Europeanness” in one way or another.² Hence, Europeanizing effects are discussed with regard to the scope of actors involved in international organizations as well as the reach and depth of their activities. Of particular interest are the notions of “Europe” and imaginations about “European” music generated within these bodies. Thirdly and finally, a holistic view on international organizations serves to bridge the aesthetic divide between art, popular, and folk music, which characterizes the research literature to a considerable extent. Altogether, this approach allows us to regard these organizations as both sites and agents of Europeanization, where European (and global) actors generate ideas about “European” music and negotiate socioeconomic issues of musical integration. In contrast to other topics covered in this handbook, the relationship between music and international organizations has not developed into a proper research field yet, which probably will never happen because most of this research locates itself in the flourishing field of cultural diplomacy. However, as this chapter makes clear, this relationship cannot be adequately understood through the lens of cultural diplomacy alone because many activities of international organizations went beyond the purely political dimensions of displaying national competition and fostering international cooperation. Generally, music is often used to explore mechanisms of internationalism. Much less ink has been spilled so far on the inverse case, which is studying the consequences of international cooperation for musical life. This holds partic-
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ularly true for international organizations that dealt with socioeconomic matters; accordingly, literature on them is exceptionally sparse. Another challenge that the present chapter faces results from the fact that extant research has focused much more on the first half of the twentieth century than on the second one. Given this sketchy state of the art, the chapter tentatively uncovers contours of European musical integration during the twentieth century in order to grasp its varying relevance and, ultimately, to spark further research. The chapter will proceed in three parts. The first part sketches out early international initiatives in both the political-cultural and socioeconomic arenas around 1900. The second part focuses on the growth of international organizations and their changing cultural activities in the twentieth century, while the third part scrutinizes their involvement in the changing political economy of the music industry. The conclusion wraps up the main developments and discusses what the trajectories of musical Europeanization can tell us about the history of twentieth-century Europe more generally.
1 Early International Initiatives The history of international organizations goes far back into the nineteenth century. The International Committee of the Red Cross (1863) and the Universal Postal Union (1874) are only two examples and vanguards of a broader development of international institutionalization. This process, which originated in Europe, coincided with the world exhibitions in London, Paris, and other Western metropoles in the second half of the nineteenth century and reached its peak at the turn of the century. The motivation for international cooperation varied: economic and strategic considerations were just as important as the thorough belief in transnational problem solving and the desire for competitive comparison among European empires and nation-states. Music became part of this international arena around 1900. The International Musical Society, founded in 1899 by the German musicologists Oskar Fleischer and Max Seiffert, is commonly mentioned as the first organization to deal with musical matters in an international setting. As was often the case at that time, the international scope of this organization was largely limited to Europe: in 1911, of more than 1,000 members, almost 90 percent came from Europe, and two-thirds of them came from Western Europe, whereas the continental margins—for example, Spain, Portugal, and Romania—featured only one to two representatives each. Moreover, US members constituted the only larger branch outside the continent. Grouped in national sections, the members met on several
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congresses in cities such as Leipzig, Bale, Vienna, London, and Paris before the Great War led to its dissolution. The activities of the International Musical Society were, on the one hand, of a purely scientific nature. Members aimed at fostering the transnational exchange of the young discipline. This included practical issues, such as the establishment of comparable repertories and other forms of musical knowledge production and its documentation. On the other hand, the congresses were increasingly charged with political and representative functions in the host countries, which intensified nationalistic tensions within the society. Right from the beginning, the German dominance within this organization was a contentious issue and, ultimately, proved to be a major reason for its dissolution shortly after the outbreak of World War I. Accordingly, in the publications produced by the society, authors often presented their research in a national framework. In addition, they perceived their object to be so naturally a part of an occidental tradition that only its opposite, namely “primitive and oriental music,” became part of a distinct research field.³ Quite at the same time, a second international body emerged in Europe’s musical life. In 1906, the International Confederation of Musicians was founded on the occasion of the third International Congress of Musicians in Milan. Members of the confederation comprised national musicians’ unions and associations. The confederation basically aimed at regulating the European musical labor market through mutual codes of conduct, common black listing of musicians, and boycotting of musical entrepreneurs who did not comply with the rules set up. During the first years of its existence, the confederation was apparently very successful in getting more and more national unions on board: in 1911, it counted associations from 12 European countries its members, from Portugal to Hungary and from Sweden to Italy. The secretary based in Paris was also in constant exchange with the American Federation of Musicians. The driving force for establishing the confederation was not so much the search for comparison and national prestige, but the idea of a transnational solidarity and the need to improve the socioeconomic working conditions of an occupation that faced very similar problems of unfair competition throughout Europe. The two organizations had a number of things in common: despite their potentially global outlook, both the International Musical Society and the International Confederation of Musicians were largely European bodies with close transatlantic ties to the United States, and both emerged as nongovernmental initiatives. As such, they also hardly differed from other internationalisms at that time. The main difference between the two lay in their function for musical life. The society was concerned with music as a cultural issue and located itself in the realm of international politics, while the confederation acted as a Euro-
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pean lobby, fighting for the socioeconomic interests of a distinct professional group. As I will show, these different functions made for different trajectories of Europeanization over the rest of the twentieth century: one in which “Europe” and “European” music were explicitly addressed as a geographical-cultural entity and musical tradition to be juxtaposed with the rest of the world; and another one in which “Europe” was increasingly fragmented: on the socioeconomic level, it primarily materialized in practices and regulations within the Western, capitalist part of the continent.
2 From Competitive Nationalism to Cultural Diversity: Envisioning “European” Music The 1920s saw various attempts of European cooperation that followed in the footsteps of the International Musical Society. At the same time, the new initiatives reflected a certain degree of differentiation between (1) research and composition, between (2) the focus on art music and folk music, and between (3) issues of live music and mediated music. (1) Composers and music critics interested in the development of art music formed the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1922. Based in London, the ISCM was structured according to national sections and continued the prewar modus of competitive comparison of “national” music. It organized yearly festivals where selected and representative new art music was performed. Even if membership was not restricted geographically, Europeans continued to dominate: during the first ten years of its existence, primarily music from German-speaking countries, Czechoslovakia, France, England, and Italy was staged, and the host cities changed between these countries as well. Apart from American composers, only the Brazilian composer Heitor VillaLobos and the Argentinian composer Honorio Siccardi made it on the festival program in the interwar years; both, however, had studied in Europe before. It took the festival until World War II to leave the continent for the first time—to be held in New York in 1941. Although the ISCM survived the war and continues to exist until today, it did not entirely escape the political upheaval that resulted from the rise of fascism. In 1934, the National Socialist regime and its fascist Italian counterpart founded their own organization and named it Permanent Council for International Cooperation of Composers, with Richard Strauss acting as its first president. Chief ideologues, such as the German musicologist Herbert Gerigk, radicalized the concept of competitive musical nationalism and linked it to Nazi ideology of
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Blut und Boden (blood and soil). However, as with many other projects of fascist internationalism, the musical version did not prove very successful, and the new rival of the ISCM quickly lost momentum. The split and politicization of the composers’ guild led the ISCM to insist on the integrity of artistic freedom and to strengthen the idea of the fundamental political neutrality of contemporary art music, as Anne Shreffler has convincingly argued. This attitude represented in and of itself a political position between the competing political ideologies of fascism and communism. Thoroughly stuck with the nineteenth-century European idea of genius, after the war this avant-garde could be easily put at the service of Western activities in cultural diplomacy even if fewer and fewer people were interested in listening to this music.⁴ In contrast to the ISCM, the International Musicological Society (IMS) was mainly oriented to the musical past even if members of both bodies overlapped to some extent—British musicologist Edward Dent, for example, served first as the president of the former and later as the president of the latter. The musicologists formed their association in 1927 in Basel on the occasion of the centenary of Beethoven’s death. Research and documentation were among their most important tasks. To this end, they founded the journal Acta Musicologica. Articles that should transcend the purely local and national matters appeared in German, English, and French. The Latin name of the journal, including information on collaboratores principales and a redigenda curavit (the Danish musicologist Knud Jeppesen) in the imprint, also reflected the European bias of the IMS. With regard to the editorial board, the German dominance of the prewar period had given way to a far more balanced European network covering 15 musicologists from every corner of the continent plus one (European-born) representative from the United States. When Dent stated in the first issue that “it is gradually beginning to dawn on European musicians that Europe is not the whole world in music,” this triple tautology must be taken literally. As with the composers, the horizon of musicologists’ international activities remained largely stuck to Europe as well, not the least because Dent’s statement actually applied to “musical ethnology.”⁵ Musicologists were not the only ones who felt a desire for international scientific cooperation in the field of art music. Next to this bottom-up initiative, there was also a top-down dynamic at play that originated within the League of Nations (hereinafter the League) with the foundation of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris in 1925. This institute—which, like the League as a whole, had a European bias as well—hosted a Committee on Arts and Letters, and once again, Dent was in the thick of it, serving as its musical expert for two years. His colleague, the Austrian conductor and composer Felix Weingartner, compiled a report on music and international relations that
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recommended to foster scientific centralization as well as international standardization and to do everything to increase the esteem of European art music. However, the response to his report seemed to remain rather weak, as did the musicrelated actions of this committee in general. (2) Nonetheless, research within the Paris institute did not restrict itself to art music. Weingartner also stressed the importance of folk music research in his report. Interestingly, this broadening of musical scope slightly widened the involvement of people and musics from non-European countries. The International Congress of Popular Arts held in October 1928 in Prague, initiated by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, marked a starting point for this development. Its main objective was to emancipate folk arts from their alleged natural state and to elevate them to the realm of “Culture” with a capital “C.” Music was one popular art among others to be discussed, including woodwork, ceramics, and traditional architecture. Even if comparative nationalism continued in the presentations and a focus on Slavic folk songs dominated the program, it also assembled eminent folk music researchers from Latin America as well as Jaap Kunst, a Dutch expert for Javanese music and a founding father of ethnomusicology. Altogether, on a personal and thematic level, the Prague congress formed the most “global” gathering in European musical life up until then, as Christiane Sibille has shown. Subsequently, several folk scholars merged to form the International Commission of Popular Arts and requested to bring the new forum under the umbrella of the League. The cooperation between the League’s International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation and the International Commission of Popular Arts resulted in a twovolume documentation on Musique et chanson populaires, published in 1934 and 1939, which contained extensive data gathered through questionnaires about folk music research in the world. Once more, a strong European bias prevailed, with both volumes covering altogether almost 30 European and only five other countries: the United States, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and, thanks to Jaap Kunst, the Dutch East Indies. Nonetheless, without entirely abandoning the idea of comparative nationalism, the collection signaled a certain intellectual change towards cultural preservation. The Hungarian composer and folk music researcher Laszlo Lajtha, who had followed in Béla Bartók’s footsteps, explained the motivations for the anthology in the introduction: it was, first of all, about documenting traditional music that was deemed in danger of vanishing. Secondly, it was about rescuing national treasuries and transforming them from an immaterial heritage into legible and audible storage media. And thirdly, in order to fully grasp the origins and meanings of traditional music, Lajtha regarded international comparison still as indispensable.⁶ In any case, Dent was absolutely correct: the
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gradual dawning of music’s diversity within and beyond Europe began in the realm of folk music. (3) While all initiatives mentioned so far emphasized comparison to acknowledge and categorize national musical differences, another important player in the field also acted in the opposite direction and sought to truly integrate the continent musically: the International Broadcasting Union (IBU), created in 1925 in Geneva. The IBU not only aimed at the establishment of a standardized technological infrastructure in Europe, but also worked hard to provide a common musical program for the listeners of its member states and, in doing so, to create a common European audience. Starting as a nongovernmental association of commercial national radio stations, the ongoing nationalization of broadcasting in the 1930s all over Europe made the IBU a mixture of cartel capitalism and governmental organization. Geographically, the IBU pursued a policy that Suzanne Lommers pointedly calls a “Eurocentric kind of globalism.”⁷ Radio stations from the European broadcasting area could become full members, whereas stations from outside this area received only an associated status. This version of musical Europe reached from the Arctic and the Atlantic to the western parts of the Soviet Union, Turkey, the Levant, and the northern shores of the African continent. The technical inclusion of the Mediterranean meant that countries such as Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey also became regular members of the IBU in the course of the 1930s. Only the Soviet Union stayed away for political reasons and, following World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, created its own international body: the International Broadcasting Organization, which was established in Prague in 1946. Four years later, the IBU was relaunched as European Broadcasting Union (EBU), geographically limited to Western Europe. The introduction of broadcasting in the 1920s caused great debates in European countries about the appropriate use and suitable content of the new media, and to some extent, these debates were also present at the European level. As early as 1926, the IBU created the Committee on Intellectual, Social and Artistic Rapprochement. Its mission was to design international programs that would foster ideas of peace, mutual understanding, and collaboration in Europe. For the early phase of broadcasting in general, such educational pretensions typically shaped the activities of the committee as much as the question of how genuinely European programming, including its musical part, should look like. These issues got even more complicated when the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation discovered broadcasting as an important field of activity and tried to impose its understanding of high-quality content on the creators of international programs. In any case, this conflict-prone cooperation had the side effect that discussions about the establishment of national
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repertories of recorded sound intensified, which would also facilitate exchange between the European countries. Even if an international resolution on repertory exchange did not materialize before World War II, such exchanges of programs and recorded music increased considerably. Likewise, in the interwar years, the IBU organized several series of programs with live and recorded music, which were broadcast to many European countries simultaneously, including National Nights, European Concerts, and even World Concerts, which reached audiences beyond the continent as well. These programs often served to portray “typical” music of one country and, as such, once again followed a comparative approach of “national” music. At the same time, it primarily featured art music, even though the representatives quickly realized that light music was more popular than long operas or symphonies. In any case, commercial popular music had been totally excluded before World War II, which, in the end, reflects the extent to which the whole undertaking was rooted in nineteenth-century ideas of European highbrow culture. Scientific interests were as much a driving force for Europeanizing musical life in the first half of the twentieth century as was the urge for competitive musical comparison in this period of heightened nationalism. Even though the effects of these mainly intellectual activities remained largely unknown to the musical public, the setup of a common European broadcasting infrastructure testifies to another backstage process of integration that, in the long term, was very effective for musical Europeanization. The Western European Eurovision Song Contest, established in 1956, might be the best-known example of this development. However, the Intervision Song Contest, its Eastern European counterpart, which followed suit in the 1960s in Czechoslovakia and moved to the Polish town Sopot a decade later, became part of it as well. Interestingly, while the former reached more audiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain, the latter’s musical programs were more “pan-European,” as Dean Vuletic has recently shown.⁸ After World War II, musical and intellectual cooperation continued in some extant organizations, such as the ISCM and the IMS, as well as in various new bodies. The latter included, to name but a few, the International Folk Music Council (IFMC), established in 1947, and to some extent following up on the activities of the interwar years; the European Music Festival Association, founded in 1952 with the help of the Swiss federalist Denis de Rougemont; and the International Music Council (IMC). This council, which emerged from discussions within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1949, became an umbrella organization for the former and many more international fora concerned with musical issues. In contrast, the European Economic Community, established in 1957, which was the forerunner of today’s
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EU and is usually mentioned first when it comes to Europeanization, largely stayed away from musical affairs throughout the twentieth century. The modified institutional setting of the postwar era also entailed significant changes in form and content of cooperation. Firstly, those organizations that had a potentially global reach became less European. Decolonization in Asia and Africa resulted in a stronger representation of countries from these continents especially in the UNESCO, the IMC, and the IFMC. Cooperation between European and non-European experts, musicians, and officials in these bodies intensified considerably between India’s independence in 1947 and the retreat of Portugal (the last European colonial power) from the African continent in 1975. This holds true for the realm of European classical music as well. For example, the meetings of the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, which in some way superseded the foundering festivals of the ISCM, gradually globalized; in the 1970s and 1980s, they usually included composers from every continent. Even explicitly regional organizations such as the European Music Festival Association admitted festivals in Jerusalem and Osaka as new members at that time. Within the IMC, globalization of membership was apparently felt so strongly among European representatives that they deemed it necessary to found a European Regional Group in 1974. This subcommittee assembled members from Western and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union. With regard to people involved in musical organizations, the development of North-South relations had a far greater impact after 1945 than the temperature changes of the Cold War. Secondly, a direct consequence of the globalization of the IMC was a weakening of the highbrow European musical approach, which had still dominated many organizations in the first half of the century. This cultural provincialization was a primary concern of UNESCO from the very beginning. As early as 1947, the journalist and United Nations (UN) expert Baron Ritchie-Calder identified mutual understanding of “the peoples of the world” as UNESCO’s prime function. He described the new mission this way: “Intellectual cooperation in the League days meant the Co-operation of Intellectuals. That is not the assignment of Unesco. Unesco has to discover the idiom of the ordinary people. It is the People’s Palace as well as the Aeolian Hall; it is the Light Programme as well as the Third Programme.”⁹ Undeniably, it took some time to put this programmatic change into practice. A first balance sheet of UNESCO’s musical activities from the middle of the 1950s still revealed a bias towards highbrow music, albeit in a more global perspective —the first two musical publications were dedicated to Frédéric Chopin and Indian art music. In contrast, projects in the realm of folk music still largely addressed European peoples. Nonetheless, as Anaїs Fléchet has shown, from the
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1960s onward the organization shifted its focus from conceptions highlighting European music as a universal language to approaches that emphasized global musical diversity. As a consequence, ethnomusicologists gained recognition and influence within these international bodies.¹⁰ Thirdly, together with this general provincialization of European music, competitive comparison of mainly European musical works gave way to collecting, recording, and ultimately preserving global musical diversity. As has been shown above, this approach followed in the footsteps of earlier European folk music initiatives and became particularly manifest on the occasion of a conference hosted by the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation in West Berlin in 1967. Through its director Alain Daniélou, this institute, which was mainly funded by the American Ford Foundation owing to Cold War concerns, also maintained close links to UNESCO. The French ethnomusicologist put himself regularly into the service of the cultural organization and was also the author of the catalog on Indian classical music just mentioned. Daniélou presided over the conference entitled “Creating a Wider Interest in Traditional Music,” which assembled representatives from the IMC, the IFMC, the IMS, and other international associations. Out of 43 participants, at least 15 came from non-European countries. However, the conference brought a very particular concept of diversity to the fore: participants largely agreed that global musical diversity was endangered by what Egon Kraus, general secretary of the International Society for Music Education, called the “standardized style of a worldwide civilization.” This, Kraus continued, was the result of the “wanton insolence of European music” aggressively distributed by the music industry. Daniélou and the Vietnamese musicologist Trần Văn Khê seconded him in complaining about a musical inferiority complex that would spread out in non-European countries and hinder their own musical development. As a consequence, the conference’s final resolution stuck to a rather static concept of culture and emphasized the preservation of authenticity in traditional musics. “Preserve the integrity of the musical heritage and avoid all kinds of adaptations and arrangements,” reads one suggestion. Another one, directly addressed to UNESCO, recommended a priority program for “sound and visual recording […] of traditional music threatened with extinction.”¹¹ Hence, this approach to diversity excluded once more commercial pop music as well as it did not allow for intercultural exchanges. Moreover, with this approach participants unintentionally hardened the dichotomy between European and non-European music even if the beauty and the beast reversed roles. Indeed, UNESCO and the IMC, as its musical branch, became the most important players in recording and preserving traditional musics from all over the world. Nonetheless, since the 1970s and following the World Heritage Con-
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vention, the management and marketing of cultural heritage increasingly gained attention. Musical performances as part of such a heritage only came to the fore more prominently in the 1990s when UNESCO began to address “intangible heritage” as well. It is not without irony that these activities, with their universal application procedures and evaluation processes, not only commodified traditional music but also fostered some sort of standardization and, as such, again contributed to a freezing of musical expressions. Hence, to this day on the global stage, it remains difficult to escape a static concept of culture that in itself represents a very “European” intellectual heritage going back to the late nineteenth century. Fourthly and finally, a closer look at the European Regional Group of the IMC, which renamed itself the European Music Council in 1992, reveals a similar change from universalistic and highbrow concepts of music to ideas of cultural diversity within Europe. However, given the overall trend within the IMC and UNESCO, the Europeans were true latecomers. When the European Regional Group held a conference in 1979 in Vienna on “Institutions of Musical Life in Europe” as its first noticeable activity, participants once more focused on classical concert culture and opera. This can be read as a defense of the European classical tradition in the name of universality against the idea of global cultural diversity because of the noteworthy composition of participants coming from Eastern and Western Europe in almost equal parts.¹² Roughly 25 years later, in contrast, the European Music Council launched its “Extra! Exchange Traditions” project. Started in 2006, this project aimed at “the exchange of musical traditions existing nowadays in Europe with a special focus on minority and migrant cultures, which form a vital part of the musical diversity in Europe.”¹³ Ironically, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Europeans have apparently accepted musical provincialization right on their doorstep while rather static imaginations of culture still shape their (and others’) views on musics from the rest of the world. In addition, and in this case simultaneously to UNESCO’s path, the 1979 Vienna conference marked an important conceptual shift from a purely aesthetic and cultural perspective on different musics towards a socioeconomic understanding of musical life in Europe. The meeting explicitly aimed at taking stock of classical music institutions such as opera houses, concert venues, and music festivals, including their legal and economic functioning, data about their audiences, and their relationship to broadcasting and television stations. The shift was mainly motivated by an overall concern to activate the extant public and to generate new audiences in order to safeguard the classical European tradition in the long term. To be sure, the outcome of this conference was rather meager—not even the envisioned common European bibliography on these questions was realized, much less any topical follow-up meetings.
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Nonetheless, the fact that international organizations which primarily felt responsible for cultural cooperation discovered the socioeconomic dimensions of musicking in the last third of the twentieth century reflects a more general trend within musical life towards commodification—even in Europe, one may add. As the next section will show, this development largely happened on another backstage, involved other actors, and, ultimately, followed a rather different trajectory of Europeanization.
3 From Stage to Studio: Building a European Rights Industry The commodification of music can be traced back to the early nineteenth century; however, possibilities to make money out of music multiplied and diversified considerably since around 1900. This was primarily due to the formation of a socalled secondary market of recorded music. Mediated music became more and more important in the course of the twentieth century. Recordings, broadcasting, film, television, and internet streaming by no means replaced the primary market of “live” music, but they complicated the political economy of musical life enormously and made international cooperation necessary. These new media caused a fundamental change of the music business, transforming it from an industry primarily based on services—musical performances—to an industry based on rights—especially those rights that were related to the secondary market. Also referred to as “mechanical rights,” they extended existing musical copyright and licensing rights, such as the right of (written) reproduction and the performing right to records and other storage media. While record companies quickly agreed to pay composers for the recording and sale of their works, the question of whether recorded musicians should be remunerated for their studio performances as well was debated for a long time during the twentieth century. The transformation from stage to studio came along with the foundation of new nongovernmental organizations. They shaped the debate about the mechanical rights at the European and global level. An appropriate way to scrutinize their involvement is to look at those actors whose position was mostly endangered by the rise of the secondary market: performing musicians. After World War I, performers called attention to varying concerns at different sites of the League’s system. The International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation was interested in improving and facilitating the conditions of intellectual work in general. It initiated country-specific studies and fostered the
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production of cultural statistics. In particular, collaboration between this commission and the International Labour Organization (ILO), founded in 1919, resulted in a comparative study on musicians’ working conditions in five European countries—Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, and Poland. The survey, published in 1923, contained information about access to the labor market, working and living conditions, as well as special interest groups.¹⁴ Whereas the commission subsequently lost interest in such socioeconomic issues, the ILO continued to collect information about the music profession. For instance, in 1927, it conducted a study about weekly rest periods among performers from nine European countries and the United States. The data collected by the ILO came primarily from national musicians’ unions. Indeed, they were the first to go “European” again after World War I; in September 1924, they formed the International Musicians’ Union (IMU) in Vienna. International mobilization was similarly confined to the continent as before the war, encompassing unions from 16 European countries, including Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. However, important European players such as the British Musicians’ Union, the French Fédération du spectacle, and the Dutch Toonkunstenaarsbond did not join, and the American Federation of Musicians, at that time the biggest and most powerful musicians’ union in the world, also stayed away. The reasons for their absence might have had to do with a certain social democratic if not socialist fervor that accompanied the establishment of the new union. In any case, the noninvolvement of important national sister organizations limited the IMU’s efficiency in regulating the European musical labor market, which was its primary task. Nonmembers simply did not feel bound to the rules of the international association. These commitments concerned engagements in foreign countries, which were subject to ex ante permission from the unions in the host country. With this agreement between national unions, the IMU sought to protect musicians’ national wages as well as their job opportunities. The more musicians felt obliged to comply with such rules, the more efficient the latter became. In practice, however, even members of IMU-affiliated unions ignored these attempts to Europeanize the musical labor market. The issue remained one of the urgent questions in the International Federation of Musicians (FIM), the postwar successor of the IMU, headquartered first in Zurich and later in Paris, where it is active still today. Beginning around 1930, the dominant focus on conditions of live performing was complemented by a growing concern to protect and commercialize musicians’ work in recording studios. At that time, musicians all over the world faced a profound crisis, which threatened to wipe out many jobs in music. Next to the introduction of sound film in 1927 and the world economic crisis fol-
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lowing the stock market crash of 1929, the competition of recorded music and the rise of broadcasting made many musicians feel dispensable in the long run. One strategy to adapt to technological change was to get a share in these new forms of music consumption: a so-called performers’ right should secure a payment for recordings that were played on air or in public. This idea quickly met with powerful resistance. On the one hand, composers did not want the performers to break into their domain of copyright law. In 1926, several European collecting societies formed the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers in order to defend their interests. This confederation was quite successful in preventing a uniform regulation of performers’ and authors’ rights under the umbrella of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, signed in 1886. On the other hand, broadcasting stations had no interest in compensating performers in addition to the composers and authors to whom they already had to pay license fees since the revision of the Berne Convention in 1928. Another important player in this conflict was the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), founded in Rome in 1933 and afterwards headquartered near London. This body represented leading enterprises from Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. The initiative to form the IFPI came from Italian industrialists headed by Amadeo Giannini, who was part of the fascist movement and a loyal collaborator of Benito Mussolini’s regime. It would be misleading, however, to overemphasize the fascist imprint on the early IFPI. One of its most important lawyers in the first decades was the German Alfred Baum, who was of Jewish descent and had to flee Germany a few weeks after Adolf Hitler’s takeover. Baum was instrumental in the fight against broadcasting—which the recording industry deemed its most dangerous competitor after record sales had diminished, following the world economic crisis of 1929/30. Directly competing with musicians, the record companies aimed to protect their records under the copyright regime of the Berne Convention as well. This would have allowed them to consider records not only as consumer products but also as works of art: both the reproduction and the use of the record were supposed to be protected. Once again, composers opposed this attempt, but in contrast to the unionized musicians, the IFPI finally reached an agreement with the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers. Following a joint meeting in Stresa in 1934, the composers acknowledged the record industry’s exclusive right to reproduction, whereas the companies accepted to handle the secondary use of records outside the Berne Convention. In the following years, two competing concepts of what was to be termed “neighboring rights” shaped the discussions. In 1939, the ILO, representing the musicians’ interests, lobbied for a solution that would compensate the perform-
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ers collectively and exclusively. For the ILO, “the problem was one of ‘technological unemployment,’” as Rasmus Fleischer has put it, and because of this conceptualization as a labor conflict, the ILO saw no reason to include the recording industry in such a compensation scheme, too.¹⁵ The IFPI, in contrast, favored a different concept, which developed at the same time between the United International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI)—the organization governing the Berne Convention—and Italian lawyers of international law, including Giannini from the IFPI. This concept not only merged performers’ and record companies’ rights into one legal problem but also weighed these rights against each other: while performers would only be compensated for radio broadcasts of their records, the record industry would get money for all kinds of public secondary use. Following the end of World War II, it took about ten years of negotiations between the ILO, the BIRPI, UNESCO, and, finally, national governments from many corners of the world until the problem was solved with the signing of the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations in 1961. The FIM, EBU, and IFPI closely monitored and, to a certain extent, also shaped these difficult negotiations, which still await detailed historical examination. In any case, the stipulations of the international treaty were rather disappointing for musicians for at least two reasons. On the one hand, the crucial concern of musicians (and the record companies) to achieve a legal right to compensation for the secondary use of recorded music was watered down. The convention states that “a single equitable remuneration shall be paid by the user to the performers, or to the producers of the phonograms, or to both.”¹⁶ This clause represented merely a recommendation for users. On top of that, a regulation could also be laid down by the state if the parties concerned would not come to an agreement. On the other hand, broadcasting stations took great pains to prevent national governments from ratifying the convention because it granted musicians at least a right to prevent the public use of their performances without prior consent. Indeed, only eight out of 25 signatory states ratified the convention within the first years— four from Western Europe, and another four from Latin America—and only three further countries joined, including Czechoslovakia as the only country from the Eastern Bloc. Hence, the implementation of neighboring rights remained a great challenge at the global level of international law. At the Western European level, in contrast, FIM, IFPI, and EBU found a modus vivendi: separate agreements between the three bodies bridged the gap and resulted in a gradual and fragmentary Europeanization of musical rights management. The arrangements worked for musicians from Western Europe only because of the different economic systems in
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the Eastern and Western Blocs and due to the Western orientation of the EBU. Likewise, even though the FIM assembled a few members from the Eastern Bloc, attempts to reach agreements with their broadcast organization failed. Two examples may illustrate this gradual Europeanization. The first example concerns a deal reached in 1954 between musicians and record firms. It guaranteed the former a share of 25 percent of the payments the IFPI received from broadcasting stations for the airplay of its records. It is no coincidence that the deal shared some similarities with a national agreement from 1946 between the British Musicians’ Union and Phonographic Performance Limited, which actually was a joint venture of Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) and Decca Records because personnel and structural entanglements were obvious. For instance, Hardie Ratcliffe was the founding president of the FIM and at the same time the general secretary of the British Musicians’ Union, and the IFPI, led by the Briton Brian Bramall, had its headquarters in the EMI offices in Hayes before moving to London in 1953. Until the early 1960s, the agreement covered primarily countries from Western Europe and generated altogether two million Swiss francs, which were distributed among the national unions to support their fight against unemployment. The second example is the Eurovision agreement between FIM and EBU, signed in 1957. “Eurovision” meant the international exchange of television content. The first Eurovision program was transmitted in summer 1954 from the Montreux Narcissus Festival to eight Western European countries. The show included a parade of 25 floats, staging yodelers, singers, and a couple of brass bands. Whereas the FIM was principally against any exchange of musical content between European states and sought to limit such Eurovision events, it also wanted to get its musicians compensated for the wide distribution of their work as well as for possible secondary transmissions. Depending on the number of connected television stations, the agreement determined additional fees of up to 150 percent of the original remuneration. In contrast to the collective orientation of the IFPI agreement, international television exchange reimbursed individual musicians for their work. These largely intangible transnational performances could lead to material gains in musicians’ wallets and, in the end, made them experience “Europe” in a very tangible way. Altogether, these nongovernmental transnational agreements as well as the Rome Convention exemplify the rise of the secondary use of music and the increasing significance of the rights attached to it since the middle decades of the twentieth century. It is a story about musical commodification and the fair share of these new opportunities to make money out of music. At the same time, it testifies to the (limited) depth and scope of socioeconomic integration in Europe’s musical life, which nonetheless extended to its Eastern parts follow-
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ing the end of the Cold War in 1990/91. Last but not least, it reveals the shifting power relations within the industry and puts current challenges into a historical perspective. For instance, the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market of the EU, which in spring 2019 caused a great stir among musicians and other creative laborers, users of digital content, and record labels as well as other rights holders, is but the most recent chapter of this conflict-laden story of Europeanization. Finally, one should not forget that despite the overall economic shift from stage to studio, the live music sector remained an important field of concern for international organizations throughout the second half of the twentieth century. For example, the transnational mobility of musicians was still a great issue for the FIM. Echoing the nationalist conceptions of culture of the interwar period, the musicians early on opposed the formation of the European Common Market and its ambition to allow the free movement of people. A recurring argument of the federation was that the “wording and spirit of the Common Market agreement are violated when cultural matters are dominated by entirely material interest.” In the middle of the 1970s, the musicians still evoked UNESCO’s static and preservationist concept of culture discussed above in order to defend the maintenance of a “national musical craft” (nationaler Musikerstand).¹⁷
Conclusion At about the same time that the FIM staunchly defended “national musical craft” within the European Community, the Council of Europe adopted as its anthem Beethoven’s famous melody that evoked the idea that “all men shall become brothers.” This paradoxical coincidence shows once more that there were many facets to the role of international organizations in Europeanizing musical life in the twentieth century. International organizations were only one player among many and certainly not the most prominent in this process since they primarily acted backstage, largely unnoticed by performers, audiences, and the musical public. Nonetheless, in providing nodes where musicians, composers, musicologists, broadcasters, and representatives from the recording industry from different European (and non-European) countries met, socialized, exchanged their ideas, and joined forces to fight for their interests, the significance of these organizations increased in the course of the twentieth century. In this general sense, musical life was in no way different from other fields of institutional action where political, cultural, social, and economic issues since around 1900 began to matter at a European level.
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However, beneath this general observation, both the cooperation in the political-cultural and socioeconomic arenas revealed a high fragmentation of musical Europeanization: participation of Europeans varied from one organization to the other, and none of them included people from the whole continent until the end of the twentieth century. The variety of musical “Europes” as reflected by these organizations ranged from the West—Western Europe plus the United States—and Europe plus the Mediterranean to the Eastern Bloc only and largely contingent entities. Thus, in a long twentieth-century perspective, the East-West conflict was only one structural factor for European topographies of musical organizations among others, and in the realm of cultural cooperation, the Iron Curtain was rather porous anyway. Another and perhaps even more important factor for the loss of a distinct “European” point of reference after 1945 resulted from the globalization of membership in many organizations following the decolonization in Asia and Africa. Decidedly “European” responses to this development were rare. Hence, seen through the lens of international organizations, Europe’s musical life was never a stable entity internally nor an enclosed body vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Next to the variegated memberships, the content, scope, and reach of international organizations’ activities were quite uneven. Comparing the two trajectories within cultural and socioeconomic fields, the latter forged a relatively stable institutional setting with distinct tasks, such as labor issues and rights management, and produced concrete results with noticeable effects. Setting up transnational agreements and establishing regulations, these organizations built “Europe” without sparing much thought about it. Nonetheless, their issues became so important—rights management in Europe amounted to five billion euros in 2004 alone, three times as much as in the United States—that finally the EU also got involved in this field. In contrast, intellectual cooperation worked the reverse way: it was more informal and rarely had a direct impact on policies. Still, organizations such as the cultural bodies of the League, UNESCO, and the IMC provided platforms where ideas about “European” music were generated, contested, and adapted to a changing political environment. Thus only the examination of both trajectories reveals the many facets of institutional Europeanization in twentieth-century musical life. Ultimately, given the state of the art, this interpretation of the role of international organizations in Europe’s musical life remains highly tentative and needs to be substantiated by detailed studies on individual organizations. Nonetheless, this chapter addressed major trends in twentieth-century Europe. The global linkage, a fragmented and highly variegated topography, changing imaginations, and uneven materializations are such elements that shaped both this account of musical Europeanization and contemporary European history more generally.
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Notes Lester M. Salamon and Helmut K. Anheier, “Towards a Common Classification,” in Defining the Non-Profit Sector: A Cross-National Analysis, ed. id. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Ulrike von Hirschhausen and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Europeanization in History: An Introduction,” in Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, ed. Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. Christiane Sibille, Harmony Must Dominate the World: Internationale Organisationen und Musik in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Diplomatische Dokumente der Schweiz, 2016), 102. Anne C. Shreffler, “The International Society for Contemporary Music and its Political Context (Prague, 1935),” in Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 58 – 92. Edward J. Dent, “Music and Musical Research,” Acta Musicologica 3, no. 1 (1931), 7. Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, ed., Musique & chanson populaires (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1934); Institut international de coopération intellectuelle, ed., Folklore musicale (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1939). Suzanne Lommers, Europe—On Air: Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 69. Dean Vuletic, “The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial and Pan-European Alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest,” in Eastern European Popular Music in a Transnational Context, ed. Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Györi (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 173 – 190. Ritchie Calder, “Unesco’s Task,” Political Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1947): 136. Anaїs Flechet, “Le Conseil international de la musique et la politique musicale de l’Unesco (1945 – 1975),” Relations internationales, no. 156 (2013): 53 – 71. Alain Danièlou et al., eds., Creating a Wider Interest in Traditional Music: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Berlin in Cooperation with the International Music Council 12th to the 17th June 1967 (Berlin: International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation, 1967), 214, 235 f. Irmgard Botinck and János Breuer, eds., Institutionen des Musiklebens in Europa: Konzertwesen und Musiktheater (Wien: Doblinger, 1979). Ruth Jakobi and Simone Dudt, “Extra! Exchange Traditions—On the Project,” in Music in Motion: Diversity and Dialogue in Europe, ed. Bernd Clausen et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 11. William Martin, Enquête sur la situation du travail intellectuel: Les conditions de vie et de travail des musiciens, vol. 1 (Genf: Service des Publications de la Société des Nations, 1923). Rasmus Fleischer, “Protecting the Musicians and/or the Record Industry? On the History of ‘Neighboring Rights’ and the Role of Fascist Italy,” Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 5, no. 3 (2015): 327– 343. International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, Rome 1961, §12, WIPO, https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/rome/ index.html (accessed 4 June 2020). “Minutes of the 25th Meeting of the FIM Executive Committee, 23rd – 26th July 1962,” in International Institute of Social History Amsterdam, Fédération Internationale des Musiciens Collection, 16.1962, 18; “Die wichtigsten Beschlüsse des 9. Ordentlichen FIM-Kongresses, Stockholm, 30. August bis 3. September 1976,” Fédération Internationale des Musiciens Collection, 27.1976.
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Bibliography Botinck, Irmgard, and János Breuer, eds. Institutionen des Musiklebens in Europa: Konzertwesen und Musiktheater. Wien: Doblinger, 1979. Calder, Ritchie. “Unesco’s Task.” Political Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1947): 123 – 136. Danièlou, Alain, Rudolf zur Lippe, Arthur Tomson, Thérèse Markhoff, and Mireille Darge, eds. Creating a Wider Interest in Traditional Music: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Berlin in Cooperation with the International Music Council 12th to the 17th June 1967. Berlin: International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation, 1967. Dent, Edward J. “Music and Musical Research.” Acta Musicologica 3, no. 1 (1931): 5 – 8. Flechet, Anaїs. “Le Conseil International de la musique et la politique musicale de l’Unesco (1945 – 1975).” Relations internationales, no. 156 (2013): 53 – 71. Fleischer, Rasmus. “Protecting the Musicians and/or the Record Industry? On the History of ‘Neighboring Rights’ and the Role of Fascist Italy.” Queen Mary Journal of Intellectual Property 5, no. 3 (2015): 327 – 343. Hirschhausen, Ulrike von, and Kiran Klaus Patel. “Europeanization in History: An Introduction.” In Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches, edited by Martin Conway and Kiran Klaus Patel, 1 – 18. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Jakobi, Ruth, and Simone Dudt. “Extra! Exchange Traditions—On the Project.” In Music in Motion: Diversity and Dialogue in Europe, edited by Bernd Clausen, Ursula Hemetek, Eva Sæther, and the European Music Council, 11 – 13. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. Lommers, Suzanne. Europe—on Air: Interwar Projects for Radio Broadcasting. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Salamon, Lester M., and Helmut K. Anheier. “Towards a Common Classification.” In Defining the Non-Profit Sector: A Cross-National Analysis, edited by idem, 51 – 100. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Shreffler, Anne C. “The International Society for Contemporary Music and Its Political Context (Prague, 1935).” In Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, 58 – 92. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Sibille, Christiane. Harmony Must Dominate the World: Internationale Organisationen und Musik in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Bern: Diplomatische Dokumente der Schweiz, 2016. Vuletic, Dean. “The Intervision Song Contest: A Commercial and Pan-European Alternative to the Eurovision Song Contest.” In Eastern European Popular Music in a Transnational Context, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Zsolt Györi, 173 – 190. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Further Reading Calligaro, Oriane. “From ‘European Cultural Heritage’ to ‘Cultural Diversity’? The Changing Core Values of European Cultural Policy.” Politique européenne, no. 45 (2014): 60 – 85. Conway, Martin, and Kiran Klaus Patel, eds. Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Ducci, Annamaria. “Europe and the Artistic Patrimony of the Interwar Period: The International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations.” In Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917 – 1957, edited by Mark Hewitson and Matthew D’Auria, 227 – 242. New York: Berghahn, 2012. Häfeli, Anton. Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik: Ihre Geschichte von 1922 bis zur Gegenwart. Zürich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1982. Geiger, Friedrich. “Musikhistorische Kartographie.” In Musikkulturgeschichte Heute: Historische Musikwissenschaft an der Universität Hamburg, edited by idem, 165 – 178. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009. Henrich-Franke, Christian. “Creating Transnationality Through an International Organization?” Media History 16, no. 1 (2010): 67 – 81. Laqua, Daniel. “Exhibiting, Encountering and Studying Music in Interwar Europe: Between National and International Community.” European Studies 32 (2014): 207 – 223. Paulmann, Johannes, and Martin H. Geyer, eds. The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rogan, Bjarne. “Popular Culture and International Cooperation in the 1930s: CIAP and the League of Nations.” In Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations, edited by Madeleine Herren, 175 – 185. Heidelberg: Springer, 2014. Sibille, Christiane. “The Politics of Music in International Organizations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century.” New Global Studies 10, no. 3 (2016): 253 – 281. Sluga, Glenda, and Patricia Clavin. “Rethinking the History of Internationalism.” In Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by idem, 3 – 14. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Taylor, Timothy D. Music in the World: Selected Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
List of Contributors Michel Abesser is Lecturer of Modern and East European History at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His research interests include late Soviet culture, music, and media, organized crime in state socialism, and economic history of the Russian Empire. He published a book on jazz in the Soviet Union after 1953, Den Jazz sowjetisch machen: Kulturelle Leitbilder, Musikmarkt und Distinktion zwischen 1953 und 1970 (Köln: Böhlau, 2018). He is currently working on a history of interethnic economic relations between Armenians, Russians, and Cossacks in the lower Don region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. E-mail: [email protected]. Celia Applegate is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She studies the culture, society, and politics of modern Germany, with particular interest in the history of music, nationalism, and national identity. Her recent publications include The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) and a chapter on Mendelssohn and Droysen in Rethinking Mendelssohn, ed. Benedict Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). E-mail: [email protected]. Myriam Chimènes is a musicologist and directrice de recherche émérite au CNRS (IReMus, Paris). She specializes in the social history of music and works on the functioning of musical life (public policies, patronage, music and society, music and politics) in France between 1870 and 1970. Recent publications include her book La Musique à Paris sous l’Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 2013) as well as the chapter “Proust auditeur de musique dans les salons parisiens,” in Musiques de Proust, ed. Cécile Leblanc, Françoise Leriche, and Nathalie Mauriac (Paris: Hermann, 2020). E-mail: [email protected]. Simon Frith is an Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include the sociology of music and live music. Together with Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster, he recently published The History of Live Music in Britain since 1950, Volume 1: From Dance Hall to the 100 Club (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013) and Volume 2: From Hyde Park to the Hacienda (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). He is also the author of the article “Remembrance of Things Past: Marxism and the Study of Popular Music,” Twentieth Century Music 16, no. 1 (2019), and the chapter “Writing about Popular Music,” in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). E-mail: [email protected]. Friedrich Geiger is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Music and Theater in Munich. His research focuses on the music history of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, antiquity and jazz, and in particular music in dictatorships. A book on musical life in Italy under German occupation, Die Jahre der Besatzung: Deutsch-italienische Musikbeziehungen 1943 bis 1945, is forthcoming with Waxmann in 2021. E-mail: [email protected]. Rachel Anne Gillett is an Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University. She lectures in cultural history and writes about race, popular culture, and empire. She focuses on the French Empire but her research interests range from Marvel movies, to early jazz, to
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rugby. Her writing appears in blogs and magazines as well as in academic literature, and she can be heard on Unsettling Knowledge, a podcast about how empire shaped European societies. Her new book, released in January 2021 by Oxford University Press, is entitled At Home in Our Sounds: Race, Music, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris. E-mail: [email protected]. Jeff Hayton is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wichita State University. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on popular culture, rock ’n’ roll and German history. His first book, Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany, will appear with Oxford University Press in 2021. E-mail: [email protected]. Frank Hentschel is Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Cologne. His research areas encompass medieval music and music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including film music. In particular, he is focusing on social, political, and ideological meanings of music. Among his recent publications are the anthology Historische Musikwissenschaft: Gegenstand, Geschichte, Methodik (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2019) and the chapter “Ein musikhistoriographischer Sonderweg? Probleme mit Dahlhaus’ Geschichtstheorie,” in Carl Dahlhaus’ Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte: Eine Re-Lektüre, ed. Friedrich Geiger and Tobias Janz (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016). E-mail: [email protected]. Bob van der Linden (PhD, University of Amsterdam, 2004) is a historian of modern South Asia, with a special interest in music. Among his publications are Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (Delhi: Manohar, 2008), Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave, 2013), and Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). He was a writing fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen (Germany) and is currently a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms. E-mail: [email protected] Morten Michelsen is a popular music scholar and Professor of Musicology at Aarhus University. His research interests include popular music and mediation, music radio, sound studies, historical radio studies, questions of taste and music criticism, and music historiography. From 2013 to 2018, he led the research project “A Century of Radio and Music in Denmark” (cc.au.dk/ramund/) and contributed to other research projects concerned with radio. Among his recent publications are three anthologies on music radio, including Tunes for All? Music on Danish Radio (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2018) and Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). E-mail: [email protected]. Klaus Nathaus is Professor of Western Contemporary History at the University of Oslo. He is a social historian who specializes in the history of contemporary popular culture. Among his publications are the anthology Made in Europe: The Production of Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2014) and the two-part article “Why ‘Pop’ Changed and How it Mattered,” published on H-Soz-Kult and Soziopolis, August 2018. With James Nott, he currently edits an anthology on the history of interwar social dancing around the world (forthcoming with Manchester University Press, 2021). E-mail: [email protected].
List of Contributors
441
James Nott is Lecturer in British History at the University of St Andrews. He is a social and cultural historian specializing in twentieth-century culture and society. He pioneered the social and cultural history of social dancing in Britain and his latest monograph was the first history of dance halls in Britain. He is the author of Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918 – 1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a second history of popular music in interwar Britain and on anti-Soviet propaganda in twentieth-century British popular culture. With Klaus Nathaus, he currently edits an anthology on the history of interwar social dancing around the world (forthcoming with Manchester University Press, 2021). E-mail: [email protected]. Marc Perrenoud is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in the sociology of work at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. After having worked as a professional bass player, he has been conducting research on artistic labor, craftsmanship, and service relations, with a focus on “ordinary artists.” He recently published Vivre de la musique? Enquête sur les musician.ne.s et leurs carrières en Suisse romande (2012 – 2016) (with Pierre Bataille, Lausanne: Antipodes, 2019), “Ordinary Artists: From paradox to paradigm,” special issue, Biens symboliques/Symbolic Goods, no. 1 (2017), and “Da atipico a paradigmatico? Il lavoro artistico nelle società capitaliste contemporanee,” special issue, Sociologia del Lavoro, no. 157 (2020). E-mail: [email protected]. Friedemann Pestel is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Freiburg. His research interests include musical mobility, infrastructures of classical musical life, and the relations of music and politics from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He is currently working on a global history of orchestral touring in the twentieth century. He recently published “‘Special Years’? The Vienna Philharmonic, Baldur von Schirach, and Nazi Cultural Politics in Vienna,” Musical Quarterly 102, no. 2 – 3 (2019) and the chapter “Global Trajectories and National Representation: German and Austrian Orchestras Touring Latin America in the 1960s,” in Trayectorias: Music between Latin America and Europe 1945 – 1970, ed. Daniela Fugellie et al. (Berlin: Iberoamerikanisches Institut, 2019). E-mail: [email protected]. Martin Rempe is a historian and Lecturer at the University of Konstanz. He is currently Fellow of the DFG Heisenberg Program and specializes in the history of music and in the history of European-African relations. Recent publications include his book on the history of the music profession in Germany, Kunst, Spiel, Arbeit: Musikerleben in Deutschland, 1850 bis 1960 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020) and the article “Cultural Brokers in Uniform: The Global Rise of Military Musicians and Their Music,” Itinerario 41, no. 2 (2017). E-mail: [email protected]. Julia Sneeringer is Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center/City University of New York. Her research interests include the social history of popular music in twentieth-century Germany, youth culture, and port cities, particularly Hamburg. She is the author of A Social History of Early Rock ’n’ Roll in Germany: Hamburg from Burlesque to the Beatles, 1956 – 1969 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) and Winning Women’s Votes: Propaganda
442
List of Contributors
and Politics in Weimar Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). E-mail: [email protected]. Ulrik Volgsten is Professor of Musicology at Örebro University. His research is concerned with musical communication in different media. In addition to the conceptual history of Western music (composer, work, listener) and musical aesthetics, an important area of research has been the role of vitality affects in music, which Volgsten has pioneered and developed in a number of publications since the late 1990s. Recent publications include “A Technology and Its Vicissitudes: Playing the Gramophone in Sweden 1903 – 1945,” Popular Music 38, no. 2 (2019), and “Between Critic and Public: Listening to the Musical Work in Stockholm during the Long 19th Century,” Swedish Journal of Music Research 97, no. 1 (2015). E-mail: [email protected]. Hans Weisethaunet is Professor of Music in the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. He has published widely in ethnomusicology, popular music studies, jazz, and on music criticism. His areas of expertise include the cultural study of music in the Nordic countries, Nepal, and New Orleans, USA. His recent publications include the chapters “Escaping Nordic musical exoticism?,” in The Nature of Nordic Music, ed. Tim Howell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), and “Roots, Routes, and Cosmopolitanism: David Lindley Meets Harding Hank,” in The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, ed. Fabian Holt and AnttiVille Kärje (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). E-mail: [email protected].
Index A Hard Day’s Night, 248, 356 Aaltonen, Juhani, 180. See also free jazz ABBA, 252, 271, 295, 362 Abbey Road Studios, 197 absolute music, 11, 36, 173 accordion, 59, 64, 75, 89, 215; orchestra, 82, 99 acoustics, 7, 52, 157, 190, 192–196, 200– 202, 205, 245, 290, 293, 305; spatial, 199 Adé, King Sunny, 410 Adler, Guido, 105 Adorno, Theodor W., 37, 174, 175, 201, 243, 244 AEG (Anschutz Entertainment Group), 148, 152, 161 AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), 195 aesthetics, 37, 39, 43, 48, 54, 63, 68, 80, 88, 98, 109, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 185, 218, 220, 222, 244, 245, 247, 285, 288, 289, 293, 303, 307, 313, 314, 316, 320, 360, 362, 401; autonomy, 35, 48; radio, 226; Western, 412 aesthetic conventions, 196; divides, 10, 418; experience, 309, 310; judgments, 10, 13, 199 African-American culture, 33, 47, 48, 179, 238, 373; music, 22, 35, 43, 178, 184, 201, 241, 249, 253, 260, 316, 319, 321, 328, 352, 372, 375–377 African music, 385–387, 394, 403 Afro-Brazilian musical styles, 404 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 158 AKM. See collecting societies Albania, 217, 223 Albarn, Damon, 347 Albeniz, Isaac, 129 Alfvén, Hugo, 307 Algeria, 401 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 172–174. See also music criticism https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110651966-022
Allgemeiner Deutscher Tanzlehrerverband (ADTV), 262 amateur ensembles, 84, 86, 87 amateur music, 18, 79–83, 85, 86, 88–92, 95–98 amateur music-making, amateuring, 79–98, 117; in musical hierarchy, 80, 90, 98; in rock and pop, 84 Americanization, 9, 22, 113, 146, 152, 169, 308, 321, 360 American Federation of Musicians. See musicians’ unions amplifiers, 62, 67 amplifying techniques, 68, 157, 194, 243, 270, 276, 410 Amsterdam, 178, 216, 270, 376 Andersen, Mogens, 223 Ansermet, Ernest, 140, 177 anthem, 359; national, 308, 309; of the FRG, 309; of the GDR, 3, 4, 309; of Europe, 3, 417, 434; UEFA Champions League Anthem, 417 anti-Semitism, 51, 174, 177, 312, 316 Apostol, Alexei, 85 appropriation, musical, 8, 22, 23, 321, 330, 336, 371–374, 378, 383, 384, 387, 388 Arab music, 386, 400, 401, 409 Arbeiter-Sängerbund (Worker-Singers’ Union, ASB), 83. See also amateur music Argentina, 274, 339 Aristotle, 171, 304, 320 Armstrong, Louis, 47, 242, 352, 376, 377 Arnold, Billy, 132 art market, 125 art music, 11, 12, 16, 20, 21, 33–35, 63, 96, 105, 114, 146, 215, 223, 228, 235, 421, 425; Asian, 400; contemporary, 422; European, 5, 207, 423; non-European, 394, 398, 401, 403, 405, 407, 412. See also New Music art worlds, 13, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 70, 71 artistic critique, 72; freedom, 422; production, 60, 73, 106, 108
444
Index
A&R (artists and repertoire) manager, 93, 271 artists, avant-garde, 362, 379; cabaret, 63; artist or entertainer, 69; artist or laborer, 65; pop musicians as, 71, 72, 119, 308, 311; performing, 69, 73, 337; role of patrons for, 125–142; role of salons for, 125, 127–130; solo, 268, 291, 347 artwork, 12, 42–45, 125; concept of, 35, 44; devaluation of, 42, 44, 47, 48, 55, 201 Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 339 Asia, 107, 158, 190, 193, 198, 206, 214, 394, 399, 403, 404, 406, 426, 435; Central, 398, 400, 402; East, 15, 393, 396, 400, 403; Southeast, 407 Astruc, Gabriel, 131 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 398 atonal music, 43, 47, 110, 316 Attali, Jacques, 201 audience research, 215, 222, 225 audiences, 4, 8, 9, 13, 15, 20, 40, 59, 62, 71–73, 91, 92, 95, 97, 121, 128, 130, 131, 136–138, 147–150, 156, 159, 163, 169, 170, 195, 198, 201, 212, 214, 217, 218, 227, 229, 235, 240, 242, 244, 245, 246, 248–252, 258, 271, 291, 311–316, 325–328, 330, 331, 335–337, 342, 348, 364, 372, 373, 375, 377, 378, 382, 385– 387, 388, 398, 403, 405, 407, 410, 411, 413, 424, 425, 428, 434; classical, 127, 149, 157; mainstream, 239, 270; mass, 311, 362; rock, 249, 251, 319; silent, 239; target, 328, 333; urban, 237; white, 252; working- and middle-class, 243 Audio Engineering Society, 198, 202 Augustine, 172 Australia, 40, 225, 274, 423 Austria, 15, 64, 75, 85, 105, 110, 111, 120, 155, 173, 216, 217, 222, 223, 239, 249, 307, 332, 340, 350, 422, 430 authentic music, 10, 95, 178, 373, 394, 402, 409 authenticity, 20, 71, 181, 183, 192, 204, 228, 401; in rock music, 246, 250, 252; in traditional musics, 427
autonomy aesthetics, 35 avant-garde, 36, 38, 136, 422; American, 169; artistic, 37, 128, 135; contemporary, 176, 180; French, 204; musical, 3, 208, 221, 223 Avraamov, Arseny, Symphony of Sirens, 39 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 318 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 118, 133, 134, 153, 172, 307, 308 Baez, Joan, 360 Baker, Eric, 152 Baker, Josephine, 239, 373, 376, 377, 380 Balakirev, Milii, 85 Balkans, 16, 216 Balla, Giacomo, 260 Ballets Russes, 126, 128, 131, 132 ballrooms, 246, 258, 261 Baltic states, “Singing Revolution”, 359 Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, 335 Bangladesh, national anthem, 396 Barber, Chris, 180 Barber, Samuel, 371 Barcelona, 351; Conservatory, 130 Barenboim, Daniel, 341 Barenboim-Said Foundation, 341 Bärenreiter, 162 Bargeld, Blixa, 44 Barnum, P. T., 147 Barron, Bebe, 40 Barron, Louis, 40 Bartók, Béla, 16, 33, 63, 140, 141, 201, 398, 401, 402, 423 Baum, Alfred, 431 Baumann, Bommi, 249 Bayreuth Festival, 109, 111, 128, 139, 340 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 79, 80, 114, 115, 213–223; big band, 227; Dance Orchestra, 223, 264; Music Magazine, 175; Symphonie Orchestra, 217, 224 Beach Boys, 203 Beatlemania, 21, 23, 247, 248, 355, 360 Beatles, The, 46, 52, 59, 169, 181, 185, 203, 245–249, 293, 356, 357, 359, 360, 372, 383, 410 Beaumont, Count Étienne de, 128, 132, 133
Index
Becce, Giuseppe, 49 Bechet, Sidney, 177, 179 Beckett, Samuel, 37 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 39, 43, 153, 307, 308, 310, 317, 318, 329, 422; Eroica Symphony, 173, 325; Fifth Symphony, 173, 318; Ninth Symphony, 206, 417; Ode to Joy as European anthem, 3, 417, 434 Beijing, 338, 395; 2008 Olympic Games, 393, 403, 412 Bekker, Paul, 174, 175, 310 Belarus, 217, 223 Belgium, 53, 64, 67, 91, 150, 245, 247, 261, 337 Belle Époque, 130, 350 Benjamin, Walter, 200 Berendt, Joachim-Ernst, 180 Berg, Alban, 43, 132 Berger, Heinrich (Henry), 396, 397 Berio, Luciano, 40, 44, 46, 48, 68, 140, 224 Berkeley, Lennox, 135 Berlin, 9, 40, 116, 148, 152, 162, 193, 194, 207, 227, 236, 239, 243, 260, 270, 333, 374, 350, 352, 353; East, 253; West, 274, 361, 362, 376, 427 Berlin Philharmonic, 109, 149, 325, 333, 336, 337, 338; Digital Concert Hall, 150 Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 174 Berliner, Emile, 192, 193 Berlioz, Hector, 133, 172 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), 15, 155, 431, 432 Bernstein, Leonard, 340 Berry, Chuck, 245 Biermann, Wolf, 356–358 big bands, 68, 114, 223, 227, 241, 242 Björk, 170, 298 Björling, Jussi, 291 Black Atlantic, music of, 180, 403–405, 409 black music, 249, 374, 375, 380, 385. See also blues, hip hop, jazz, soul, blues, R&B Blackboard Jungle (1955), 245, 359 Blair, Tony, 119
445
Bliss, Mildred, 141 Bliss, Robert Wood, 141 Bloch, Ernst, 311 blues, 8, 21, 61, 170, 180, 181, 245, 360, 373, 375, 404, 408, 409 Blumenthal, Cecil, 140 Blumlein, Alan, 194 Bocquillon Wilhem, Guillaume-Louis, 86 Boney M., 271 BOOM Festival, Yugoslavia, 313 Boosey and Hawkes, 162, 163 Boulanger, Nadia, 111, 128, 175 Boulez, Pierre, 44, 125, 138, 140, 176, 224 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 236, 328 Bourget, Ernest, 149, 154 Bowie, David, 251, 253 Boyer, Lucienne, 287 Braccioforte, Luigi. See Armstrong, Louis Brahms, Johannes, 134, 285, 305 Bramall, Brian, 433 Brâncuşi, Constantin, 135 Braque, Georges, 133, 135 brass band movement, 64, 84, 85 brass bands, marching bands, 79, 81–86, 96–98, 433 Brassed Off! (1996), 97 Brassens, Georges, 360 Brazil, 33, 274, 409, 421, 423 Brazilian music, 404, 411. See also AfroBrazilian music Breil, Josef Carl, 50 Brel, Jacques, 360 Briggs, Arthur, 377 Brindis de Salas Garrido, Claudio José, 399 Britain. See Great Britain British Musicians’ Union. See musicians’ unions Britten, Tony, 417 broadcasting, 9, 13, 23, 70, 79, 114, 149, 424; companies, 38; orchestras, 67; programs, 96; radio, 194, 201, 211–230, 264, 308, 311, 352, 405, 424, 425, 428, 429, 431; stations, 20, 180, 221, 332, 431–433; unions, 94 brokers, cultural, 331, 333–335, 371, 373, 384, 400 Brötzmann, Peter, 179
446
Index
Brown, James, 52 Bryan, Alfred, 347 Buarque, Chico, 411 Budapest, 237, 253, 364; clubs, 355, 356; Editio Musica, 162 Buenos Aires, 339, 405 Bulgaria, 217, 223, 319, 355 Bullimore, Tony, 252 BUMA. See collecting societies Buñuel, Luis, 135, 136 Burchill, Julie, 183 Burtt, Ben, 50 Busch, Ernst, 351 Busch, Fritz, 139 Busoni, Ferruccio, 53 Bussemer, Thymian, 303 Butlers, 356 Butt, Clara, 399 Cage, John, 39, 40, 47, 403 Cai Yuanpei, 396 Cairo, 400; Opera house, 396 Calmettes, André, 49 Camondo, Isaac de, 132 Can, 362 Cannes, 376 canon, 11, 36, 43, 118, 176, 182; of Western classical music, 12, 163, 171, 200, 201, 410; socialist, 204, 205; “canon of prohibitions”, 37, 41 canonization, 170, 173 capital, cultural, 247 capitalism, 13, 145, 313, 361, 365, 424; American, 312; artistic critique of, 72; conflict between capitalism and communism, 16; global, 239, 259, 371; globalizing dynamic of, 146 car radio, 295 Caribbean, 405, 407, 409 Carlos, Walter, 264 Carter, Benny, 380 Carter, Elliott, 140, 175 Caruso, Enrico, 156, 189, 191, 203, 283, 290, 291, 399 Casals, Pablo, 128, 137, 140 Casani, Santos, 265 cassette player, recorder, 295
cassette tape, 51, 71, 95, 157, 198, 294, 296, 358, 364, 410. See also sound storage media Castle, Irene, 375 Castle, Vernon, 375 Cavalieri, Lina, 129 Celan, Paul, 37 censorship, 8, 14, 17, 19, 303–321, 328, 350, 352, 353, 357 Chagall, Marc, 135 chanson, 126, 244, 287, 353, 360, 380, 409 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine, 230, 417 Chausson, Ernest, 131 Chevalier, Maurice, 353 Chigi Saracini, Guido, 139 Chile, 65, 274 chimurenga, 409, 410 China, 191, 381, 393, 396, 403, 411, 412; Chinese Central Philharmonic, 338; conservatories, 395; music, 395, 398, 402, 403; Shanghai Conservatory of Music (1927), 396, 398 Chineseness, 393, 412 Chocolate Kiddies, 239, 352 choirs, 15, 36, 39, 196, 216, 223, 238, 351; amateur, 3, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 96–98; contests, 87, 88, 92, 97; male-voice, 79, 83, 87 Chopin, Frédéric, 47, 128, 426 Chou, Jay, 411, 412 Christie, John, 139 Churchill, Winston, 318 cinema, 4, 49, 62, 65, 67, 93, 94, 97, 157, 158, 193, 194, 237, 259, 263–265, 271, 350, 352, 356, 359 cinema musicians, 4, 67 civilization, 236, 427; criticism, 281, 283, 289; European, 352; Western, 105, 178 Clapton, Eric, 362 Clarke, David, 37 Clash, The, 363 classical music, 4, 11, 12, 20, 38, 46, 54, 63, 67, 70, 72, 126, 149, 156, 157, 163, 171, 175, 176, 184, 193, 196, 197, 201–203, 205, 219, 221, 224, 225, 227–229, 235, 236, 240, 241, 249, 250, 282, 285, 286, 288, 291–293, 296, 297, 313, 326, 327,
Index
342; European, 162, 179, 202, 207, 352, 393, 394, 400–405, 410–412, 426, 428; French, 379; Indian, 427; Western, 12, 171, 338 classicization, 400 Clemenceau, Paul, 130 Cochran, Eddie, 246 Cocteau, Jean, 51, 132, 136, 377, 379 Cohn, Nik, 170, 181 Coleman, Ornette, 176 Coleman, Ray, 181 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 129 collage techniques, 20, 46–49, 55 collecting societies: Bureau voor Muziek-Auteursrecht (BUMA), 155; Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonsetzer (GDT), 155, 157; Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger (AKM), 119, 120, 155; Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte (GEMA), 155; Performing Right Society, 155; Phonographic Performance Limited, 157, 433; Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), 155; Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE), 155; Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique (SACEM), 154, 155 Cologne, 40, 51, 68, 87, 152, 204. See also Westdeutscher Rundfunk colonial powers, 23, 213, 220, 305, 426 colonialism, 22, 230, 305, 394, 396, 409; Dutch, 381, 384 Colyer, Ken, 180 Combelle, Alix, 380 commercial music, 8, 11, 79, 81, 91–98, 237, 373, 374. See also popular music commercialization, 91, 271, 273, 341, 354; of radio, 18, 226 communication, 150, 200, 291, 292; mass, 303, 304, 314–316, 326; social, 235 communication technology, 371 communism, 16, 235, 253, 254, 357–359, 422 community music movement, 90 community singing, 8, 88, 89, 96
447
community-building function of music, 241, 309, 311, 313. See also integration Community Singers’ Association, 89 composers, 3, 4, 9, 10, 12, 16, 33–56, 60, 62, 74, 84–86, 88, 96, 105, 111, 117, 119, 126, 128–137, 139, 140, 153, 154, 159, 171, 172, 175, 176, 195, 201, 203, 206, 214, 218, 224, 228, 285, 305–309, 311–313, 315, 318, 340, 354, 375, 378, 394, 397, 401, 402, 417, 422, 423, 426, 429, 431, 434; avant-garde, 204, 350; canon of relevant, 36; classical, 377, 404; European, 15, 177; “genius”, 11, 13, 20, 174, 179; non-European, 34, 393, 398, 403, 421; of art music, 16, 33, 96, 207; Soviet, 316, 334, 398; women, 35 composition, 5, 39, 42, 51–53, 63, 89, 108, 129, 156, 174, 175, 306, 377, 421; classical, 196, 206, 207, 384, 402; “nonprofessional”, 204; practices, 3, 16, 34, 35, 37, 40, 44, 46–51, 53–56; principles of, 105 concepts of music, 20, 38, 40, 55, 171, 180, 192, 212, 236, 341, 421, 428; European, 5, 16; internationalist, 175; premodern, 172. See also musicking concert agencies, 148, 205, 333, 334; halls, 63, 110, 113, 120, 128, 130, 132, 141, 150, 203, 214, 228, 239, 242, 245, 305, 309, 332, 335, 337, 361 concerts, public, 109, 127, 128, 130–132, 217, 218, 334; salon, 128, 129 Concord Music Publishing, 162 conductors, 62, 79, 83, 85, 111, 121, 139, 140, 159, 175, 177, 203, 207, 217, 218, 223, 224, 227, 228, 285, 313, 333, 337, 339, 340, 341, 422; female, 72 Congress on Arab Music, Cairo (1932), 400 connections, 6, 15, 171, 180, 211, 332; European, 418; global, 181, 265; transnational, 24, 97 consumers, 95, 113, 157, 160, 191, 192, 236, 238, 244, 339, 349, 361, 417 Cook, Will Marion, 352 Cooper, Opal, 376
448
Index
cooperation, intellectual, 425, 426, 453; international, 418, 419, 429 Copland, Aaron, 175 Copyright Act (1956), UK, 70 copyright, as legal concept, 153–155; different understanding of, 155; law, 20, 48, 154, 431; regimes, 23, 24, 153; rules, 24, 146. See also Berne Convention; Rome Convention; property, intellectual cosmopolitanism, 177, 235, 245, 264, 312, 353 Count Basie Orchestra, 52 counterculture, 44, 91, 313; as artistic critique of capitalism, 72 Countess of Béarn (Martine de Béhague), 131 Coward, Sir Henry, 378 Crawdaddy! (1966), 169 Creamfield festivals, 274 Creem (1969), 169 Croatia, Republic of, 121 crooning, 287, 382 Cros, Charles, 193 cross-cultural interaction, 54, 381, 385, 413 CTS Eventim AG, 152 Cuban music, 399, 405 Culshaw, John, 202 cultural “ambassadors”, 180, 227, 327, 330, 335, 337, 340 Curwen, John, 84 Czechoslovakia, 92, 170, 176, 196, 207, 248, 249, 253, 274, 308, 356–358, 421, 430, 432 d’Erlanger, Rudolph, 401 d’Indy, Vincent, 129, 131 Dadaism, 36, 42–44, 46, 47, 307 Dalí, Salvador, 135, 136 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 132, 140, 316 dance academies, 257; bands, 216, 223, 263, 264, 268; clubs, 24, 269; halls, 62, 96, 148, 159, 257, 259–261, 263, 266–269, 274, 286, 405; music, 150, 177, 178, 215, 216, 249, 257–259, 261, 263–265, 268, 273, 273, 353, 357, 377; musicians, 60, 74; styles, 4, 257, 352, 376, 386; teachers, 259, 262, 265, 275
dances: “animal” dances, 238, 257; boogiewoogie, 354; Charleston, 352, 376; foxtrot, 157, 257, 260, 262, 281, 352, 380; paso doble, 59; polka, 59, 60; ragtime, 15, 259, 260, 404; tango, 9, 15, 59, 170, 205, 257, 259, 405; twist, 268, 355, 384; waltz, 59, 148, 242, 258, 262 dancing, ballroom, 148, 262, 265, 268; couple, 258, 262, 267, 268, 270, 275; public, 240, 241, 258, 259, 266, 267; social, 22, 237, 238, 257–267, 276; solo, 267, 268; venues, 261, 272 Daniélou, Alain, 427 Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, 37, 224, 426 Dawbarn, Bob, 169 de Chirico, Giorgio, 135 de Falla, Manuel, 129, 134, 135, 141 de Freitas Branco, Luís, 306 de Fretes, George, 408 de Gaulle, Charles, 106 Debussy, Claude, 16, 22, 53, 63, 129–131, 177, 377 decolonization, 22, 23, 244, 381, 435 Degenhardt, Franz Josef, 360 Delaunay, Charles, 378 Deleuze, Gilles, 170 democracy, cultural, 93 Denmark, 93, 217, 218, 221, 222, 225–227, 262, 325 Denon, 198 Dent, Edward, 422, 423 Deutsch de la Meurthe, Henri, 132 Deutsch, Friederich. See Dorian, Frederick Deutsch, Max, 105 Deutscher Arbeiter-Sängerbund (German Worker Singers’ Association, DAS), 83. See also amateur music Deutscher Musikrat (German Music Council), 117 Deutscher Sängerbund (German Singers’ Union, DSB), 87, 88, 91, 96. See also amateur music Deutschlandsender, 164 Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend (1964), 224, 248 Dezerter, 358
Index
Diaghilev, Serge, 111, 131, 132 difference, cultural, 107, 177 digital audio broadcasting (DAB), 225 digital recording, 145, 192, 198, 206, 272; technology, 160, 161, 197, 198, 202, 206; ticketing, 152. See also ticket sales market digitalization, 160, 161, 192, 197, 198, 202, 206 digitization, 75, 171, 199, 226 diplomacy, cultural, 8, 23, 325–330, 332, 333, 336, 338, 340, 418, 422 disco, 181, 182, 249, 258, 269, 270, 274, 275, 362, 363; as mainstream culture, 252, 271, 272 distinction, social, 20, 37, 239, 245 DJ, 16, 47, 212, 269–275 Doctrine of Ethos, 303, 304, 317 Dodebski, famille, 130 Dolmatovsky, Yevgeniy, 315 domestic music, 84, 89, 201 Donaueschinger Musiktage, 36, 175, 224 Donegan, Lonnie, 93 Donizetti, Gaetano, 397 Donizetti, Giuseppe, 397 Doors, The, 52, 185 Dorian, Frederick, 105, 106 Dreigroschenoper, 136 Dresden Staatskapelle, 336 drugs, drug taking, 73, 252, 257, 270, 272, 274–276 Dubrovnik Summer Festival, 121 Dukas, Paul, 129 Duncan, Isadora, 130 Duscombs, Claude, 59 Dutilleux, Henri, 140 Dylan, Bob, 153, 169, 184, 185, 245, 360, 410 East Indies, Dutch, 408, 423 Eastern Bloc, 72, 117, 207, 208, 214, 221, 224, 229, 340, 349, 354, 355, 358, 432, 433, 435; cultural canon, 205; defections of Eastern Bloc artists, 339, 340; official vs. unofficial culture, 205, 356, 357. See also Eastern Europe Ebert, Carl, 139
449
EBU. See European Broadcasting Union Eco, Umberto, 43, 44 Edison, Thomas, 16, 146, 156, 284; phonograph, 155, 189, 192, 193, 283, 290, 398, 400 Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, 290 Edition Peters, 162 education, Bildung, 36, 116; bourgeois, 64; musical, 8, 18, 36, 55, 87, 88, 96, 97, 114–116, 120, 138, 215, 216, 304, 395, 398; public, 115 EFA. See European Festivals Association Egypt, 58, 384, 401, 424 Egyptian music, 385; cinema music, 407 Ehmann, Wilhelm, 310 Eilish, Billie, 189, 191, 192 Eimert, Herbert, 68 Einstürzende Neubauten, 40 Eisenstein, Sergei, 49 Eisler, Hanns, 3, 4, 309, 350, 351 Ekyan, Andre, 380 electronic music, 40, 150, 162, 176, 192, 204, 224, 250, 272 Ellington, Duke, 178, 242, 377; Duke Ellington Orchestra, 52 Elliott, Bill, 175, 178 Emerick, Geoffrey E., 203 EMI. See record companies employment, 19, 61, 63, 67, 70, 73, 109, 148, 149, 157; conditions, 64, 66; contracts, 62, 216, 217, 263; full, 267, 268 Enescu, George, 129 Engl, Joseph, 194 England, 52, 64, 89, 115, 139, 246, 272, 273, 421; Tudor England, 14 Enlightenment, 11, 37, 106, 111, 112, 116 entanglements, 325, 341, 433. See also connections entartete Musik, degenerate music, 177, 372 entertainment, 70, 73, 110, 114, 120, 157, 158, 213, 215, 216, 220, 221, 239, 241, 244, 265 246, 283, 330, 336, 351; commercial, 62, 64, 148, 182; “lowbrow”, 66; mass, 237; popular, 63, 145, 237; urban, 8, 148; entertainment vs. edification, 237
450
Index
entertainment corporations, 161; industries, 61, 151, 257, 276; musical, 3, 11, 15, 20, 62, 177, 222, 269, 275 Ephrussi, Maurice, 130 equal temperament tuning, 393, 394, 401, 404–406, 412–414 Erdmann, Hans, 49 Ernst, Max, 135 ethnic music, 21, 411 ethnomusicology, 61, 413, 423, 427 Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE), 111 Europe, James Reese, 351, 375, 377 European Broadcasting Union (EBU), 24, 92, 224, 226–228, 230, 417, 424, 432, 433 European Commission, 340 European Cultural Capital, 9, 118 European Economic Community (EEC), 425 European Federation of Young Choirs (1963), 91 European Festivals Association (EFA), 111 European integration, 5, 7, 106, 342 European Jazz Federation, 180 “European” music, 5, 6, 9, 14, 20, 22, 33, 34, 53, 111, 112, 120, 169, 304, 384, 388, 394–400, 405, 407–409, 411–413, 417, 418, 421, 427, 435; canon of, 201; globalization of, 399, 413; interactions with other cultures, 14, 169, 394; musical heritage, 204, 207, 249, 305; music traditions, 386, 421; non-European, 4, 5, 16, 39, 326, 412, 427 European Music Council. See International Music Council European Music Festival Association (1952), 425, 426 European Union, EU, 20, 24, 33, 110, 112, 118, 155, 226, 340–342, 388, 417, 426, 434, 435 Europeanization, musical, 5, 6, 24, 417, 418, 419, 421, 425, 426, 429, 432–435 Europeanness, 6, 226, 228, 378, 394, 412, 418 Eurovision agreement (1957), 433 Eurovision Song Contest, 225, 250, 251, 385– 387, 425; (2019), 371, 384, 387. See
also European Broadcasting Union; Intervision Song Contest Evans, Bill, 68 exchanges, commercial, 334; intercultural, 53–55, 184, 208, 427; musical, 374, 375, 388; program, 230, 425 experience, musical, 21, 145–147, 163, 170, 269, 311, 357, 413 experimental music, 37, 53, 68, 223, 228, 249, 315 expressionism, 36, 43 fado, 21, 406 Fairuz, 401, 409. See also music, Arab Fall, The, 363 fandom, fans, 93, 161, 235, 238, 242, 245– 248, 250–253, 272, 319, 347, 354–357, 359, 361, 362 Farian, Frank, 271 Farmer, Henry George, 401 Farrar, Geraldine, 129, 130 Farre, William, 85 fascism, 236, 240, 241, 353, 421, 422; fight against, 351, 352, 365 Fauré, Gabriel, 129, 131, 134 Feather, Leonard, 177–179 Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), 51, 126, 308 Federation of British Musical Competition Festivals (1921), 79, 80, 87 fees, 59, 65, 68, 73, 75, 114, 130, 135, 147, 151, 152, 154, 155, 214, 224, 330, 333, 334, 431, 433 feelings, 9, 173, 241, 244, 246, 247, 249, 275, 276, 291, 292, 295, 296, 310, 311, 315, 394; concert, 288; national, 307; of belonging, 303, 309, 310 Feiler, Dror, 40 Fender, Leo, 71 Fenton, John William, 396 Ferré, Léo, 361 festivals, 18, 36, 59, 73, 87, 90, 96, 108– 112, 116, 118, 120, 121, 147, 160, 224, 248, 249, 274, 309, 313, 331, 332, 340, 341, 359, 360, 362, 363, 372, 421, 426, 428
Index
Festival of Folk Music (Festiwal Muzyki Ludowej), Poland, 90 Fête de la Musique, 90 film music, 4, 39, 49, 50, 51, 55, 67, 157, 228; Indian, 406–408 FIM. See International Federation of Musicians Finland, 85, 86, 119, 120, 191, 216, 261, 307 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 375 Fleischer, Oskar, 419 Floh de Cologne, 250 Florence, 257, 261, 269; Conservatory, 139 Fluxus, 24, 44, 179 folk music, 8, 12, 21, 55, 84, 85, 88, 89, 94, 185, 215, 216, 314, 329, 334, 401–403, 418, 421, 424, 426, 427; research, 403, 423 folk revival, 351, 360 folk songs, 84, 308, 314, 360, 396, 398, 402, 412, 423 folklore, 193, 200, 201, 314, 316, 336; studies, 374 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 33 Forsell, John, 283 foxtrot. See dances Françaix, Jean, 135 France, 15, 44, 59, 63–67, 69, 73, 75, 86, 96, 105–108, 111, 155, 162, 172, 175, 178, 179, 185, 190, 191, 206, 217, 221, 222, 226, 239, 244, 245, 249, 259, 261, 267, 271, 273, 325, 329, 333, 336, 337, 353, 359–362, 377, 385, 421, 431; colonies, 200; musical patronage in, 125– 141; opera tradition, 305 Franck, César, 131 Franco, Francisco, 351 Franco regime, 311, 335 Franklin, Aretha, 170 free jazz, 179, 180, 362 freedom of expression, 112, 262, 268 Freund, Marya, 129 Frühbeck de Burgos, Rafael, 311, 312 Fugs, the, 356 funding, private, 19; public, 18, 73, 138, 331, 332, 341; state, 96, 105–121, 126, 138, 223, 332, 333. See also patronage; sponsorship
451
Fürnberg, Louis, 311 Fürstner, Otto, 333 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 140, 206 futurism, 35, 36, 39 Gaisberg, Fred (Frederick William), 156, 189, 190, 192, 193, 200 Gall, France, 360 gamelan music, Indonesia, 22, 381, 383, 407 game music, 55, 228 Garbarek, Jan, 180 Garden, Mary, 129 Garvey, Marcus, 409 gay club culture, 252; disco scene, 270, 273 GDR. See German Democratic Republic GDT. See collecting societies GEMA. See collecting societies Genoa, 257, 261 Gerigk, Herbert, 312, 313, 421 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 3, 51, 118, 196, 207, 253, 308, 329, 356 German Singers’ Association, 96 Germany, East, 69, 70, 90, 118, 146, 170, 183, 21, 224, 248, 253, 355–358 Germany, Nazi (German Reich), 90, 108, 109, 116, 177, 195, 310, 312, 316, 317, 318, 328, 333, 334, 337, 340, 365, 398, 421; Reich Chamber of Music, 310, 317, 318 Germany, West, 3, 61, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 93, 94, 146, 183, 221, 223, 243–245, 249–251, 271, 339, 357, 359, 360, 362 Gershwin, George, 177, 404 Gerstel, Alice, 239 Giacometti, Alberto, 135, 136 Giannini, Amadeo, 431, 432 Giddings, John, 161 Gilroy, Paul, 180, 403 Glass, Philip, 54 Glinka, Mikhail, 307, 315 global history, 5, 372, 412 globalization, 17, 21–24, 35, 53, 90, 161, 371, 372, 378, 383, 387, 426, 435; musical, 9, 10, 13, 54, 55, 332, 399, 400, 410 glocalization, 371, 374, 375, 377, 378, 380, 388 Glock, William, 223 Glyndebourne Opera Festival, 139
452
Index
Gnecchi-Soldo, Organtino, 395 Goebbels, Joseph, 116, 241, 264, 306, 309, 317, 318 Goffin, Robert, 178 Gökalp, Ziya, 398 Golden Earring, 250 Goodman, Benny, 338 Gore, Martin, 253 gospel, 239, 375 Gould, Glenn, 203 gramophone, 62, 127, 155, 156, 189, 212, 261, 263, 264, 281, 282, 286–289, 294, 296, 298, 305; concerts, 283, 284, 290; industry, 200; records, 192, 193, 203, 285, 400, 405; sales, 191, 265, 240 Gramophone, 175, 177, 189, 284 Gramophone Company, 156, 193, 400 Grapelli, Stéphane, 378 Grateful Dead, 251 Great Britain, 65, 67, 84, 86, 91, 93, 98, 114, 118, 148, 154, 157, 158, 160, 162, 169, 173, 183, 185, 194, 206, 235, 241, 251, 259, 264, 265, 272, 274, 282, 305, 313, 318, 359, 360, 362–364, 377, 431; dancing in, 260–263, 265, 268; immigrants in, 252; rock in, 269, 271; skiffle in, 245, 246 Great Depression, 109, 240, 351, 353 Greffulhe, Countess Élisabeth, 128, 132, 133, 134, 139, 141 Griffith, David Wark, 50 Grillo, Frank “Machito”, 405 Groupe des Six, Group of Six, 51, 132 groupe Jeune France (Young France group), 126, 132 Grundig, Germany, 198 Guattari, Félix, 170 guitars, electric, 62, 68, 71, 247, 406, 409, 410; slide guitar, 381, 383; steel guitar, Hawaiian, 235, 407, 408 Guller, Youra, 137 “gypsy” music, 84, 85, 88, 89, 378, 398, 407 habitus, intellectual, 37, 38 Habsburg monarchy, 333 Haddy, Arthur, 195
Hahn, Reynaldo, 134 Haley, Bill, 181, 245, 319, 354, 359 Halffter, Cristóbal, 311 Hall, Henry, 264 Hallyday, Johnny, 246, 359, 380 Hamburg, 148, 353, 359; Elbphilharmonie, 110; St. Pauli, 237, 238, 245, 383 Hammersmith Apollo, 152 Hammond, John, 177 Handel, George Frederick, 317, 417 Hanoi, Opera house, 396 Hanslick, Eduard, 173 happenings, 44 Hardy, Françoise, 360 Harlem Hellfighters Band, 375, 377 Harrison, George, 54 Haskil, Clara, 129, 137, 140 Hawaiian music, 381–383, 397, 407 Hawaiian steel guitar, 235, 407, 408 Hawkins, Coleman, 377, 380 heavy metal, 23, 251, 382, 410 Heimann, Carl, 268 Heißer Sommer (1968), 248 Helsinki, 83, 85 Henderson, Fletcher, 178 Hendrix, Jimi, 47, 249, 356, 410 Henning, Bardo, 309 Henry, Pierre, 204 Henze, Hans Werner, 140 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 172 heritage, 382, 393; cultural, 61, 105, 112, 115, 208, 249, 305, 306, 315, 379, 428; European, 111, 204, 207; immaterial, 423; musical, 204, 207, 249, 305, 306, 401, 427; national, 70, 113, 360 Herrmann, Bernard, 50 Heuss, Alfred, 174 hierarchy, hierarchies, 100, 159, 184, 190, 203, 227; classical, 20; cultural, 9, 11, 207, 217, 228; musical, 4, 20, 62, 80, 90, 191, 198, 223; social, 220, 247 high art, 384 high culture, 37, 43, 145, 214, 227; “high” vs. “low”, 10, 11, 47, 182, 212, 213, 215, 216, 221, 224, 228, 229; high vs. mass, 47; high vs. popular, 113 high fidelity, hi-fi, 243, 282, 293, 294
Index
Hindemith, Paul, 132, 140, 175, 177, 398, 401 hip hop, 22, 47, 49, 95, 162, 170, 183, 253, 371, 373, 385, 386, 387 Hitchcock, Alfred, 50 Hitler, Adolf, 109, 241, 307, 313, 340, 431 Hobsbawm, Eric, 16, 17, 92 Hodeir, André, 178 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 173 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 37 Honegger, Arthur, 60, 140, 175 Horkheimer, Max, 174 Hornbostel, Erich Moritz von, 401 Horowitz, Vladimir, 129 Horthy, Miklós, 340 Hot Club de France, 242, 352, 378, 380 hot swing, 241, 242 house music, 272, 274 Hungary, 16, 307, 340, 354–358, 420, 430 Huppertz, Gottfried, 49 Hurok, Sol, 332 Huxley, Aldous, 136 hybridity, musical, 380, 381, 388, 405, 409, 410 Hylton, Jack, 377 Ibiza, 24, 273 IBU. See International Broadcasting Union Iceland, 298, 307, 328 identity, 36, 195, 203, 235, 242, 244, 257, 270, 282, 284, 289, 296, 298, 311, 388, 409; cultural, 384, 385; European, 24, 33, 385; national, 4, 11, 238, 247, 372, 384 identity politics, 176 IFMC. See International Folk Music Council IFPI. See International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Illés, 356, 357 imperialism, 17, 22, 53, 305, 327, 354; cultural, 248, 338 impresario, 93, 108, 128, 131 improvisation, 34, 43, 49, 179, 201, 260, 275, 352, 354, 377, 400, 401 India, 191, 332, 336, 381, 396, 400, 403, 405, 408, 426 Indian art music, 407, 426; film music, 406, 407; music, 53, 54, 200, 201, 427
453
indigenous music, 12, 357, 358, 360, 395, 396 Indo-rock, 371, 373, 381–384, 387 Indonesia, 235, 381, 382, 384, 406–408, 410, 411. See also kroncong Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), 40, 176, 204. See also electronic music institutionalization, 98, 419 instruments, electric, 68, 204, 245, 247, 381, 406, 409, 410; electronic, 39, 40, 198 integration, 303, 304, 358; musical, 418, 419; social, 64, 80, 100, 106; socioeconomic, 433. See also European integration Intergast, 333 International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 184 International Brigades, 351 International Broadcasting Union (IBU), 219, 230, 424, 425 International Bureau for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI), 432. See also Bern convention International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, 429 International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), 422, 423 International Confederation of Musicians, 420 International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), 431 International Federation of Musicians (FIM), 430, 432–434 International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 157, 431–433 International Folk Music Council (IFMC), 425– 427 International Institute for Comparative Music Studies, 427 International Labour Organization (ILO), 430– 434 International Music Council (IMC), 117, 425– 428, 435; European Regional Group, 426, 428; renamed European Music Council, 24, 428. See also UNESCO International Musical Society, 419–421
454
Index
International Musicians’ Union (IMU), 430 International Musicological Society (IMS), 422, 425, 427; Acta Musicologica, 422 International Committee of the Red Cross, 419 international organizations, 9, 14, 230, 417– 435 International Radio and Television Organization. See Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision (OIRT) International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), 421, 422, 425, 426 International Society for New Music, 307 International Youth Foundation, 340 Internationale, The, 351, 361, 393 internationalism, 364, 418, 422 Intervision Song Contest, 225, 425. See also Eurovision Song Contest; OIRT Iraq, 401; American invasion, 347, 349 Ireland, 91, 216, 267 Iron Curtain, 8, 23, 69, 92, 98, 105, 139, 204, 248, 334, 335, 339, 358, 425, 435 ISCM. See International Society for Contemporary Music Isle of Wight Festival, 313 Israel, 225, 274, 325, 341, 387, 393, 426 Istanbul, 239, 397 Italy, 15, 39, 64, 75, 109, 111, 139, 140, 172, 182, 245, 249, 257, 261, 262, 267, 269, 271, 273, 305, 307, 310, 311, 328, 341, 351, 384, 385, 420, 430; fascist, 108, 340, 352, 421, 431 Jackson, Jesse, 347 Jackson, Michael, 253, 410 Jakoby, Richard, 117 Jamaica, 246, 252, 409, 410 jamming, 373, 376 Japan, 34, 40, 72, 197, 198, 206, 207, 224, 332, 381, 382, 393–398, 403, 405, 407, 410; national music, 398; school song movement in, 396; Tokyo Academy of Music, 396 Japanese imperial court music (gagaku), 400 Jarry, Alfred, 47 Jazz Age, 352
jazz: as a glocal form, 375, 377, 380; as black music, 374, 375, 385; as “primitive” music, 178, 352, 378, 384, 394; as signifier of race, 375; bands, 327, 332, 375; clubs, 60, 71, 93, 380; criticism, 176–181; “Europeanized” styles of, 378; fans, 92, 93, 179, 242, 354; impact of, 375–377; magazines, 180; spread of, 43, 53, 239, 405; subculture, 353; symphonic, 239, 352; underground, 353, 380 Jazz Forum, 180 Jazz-Tango, 377 Jean Paul. See Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich Jefferson Airplane, 249 Jefferson, Tony, 184 Jerring, Sven, 287 Jiang Qing, 393 Joel, Billy, 340, 358 Johnny Strikes up the Band, 352 Jolivet, André, 132 Jones, Max, 178. See also jazz criticism Jonny spielt auf, 372. See also Johnny Strikes up the Band jukebox, 94, 158, 243, 246, 268, 271, 355 Jurgenson, Boris Petrovich, 85 Kafanas musicians, 72 Kahn, Otto Hermann, 132 Kappel, Vagn, 218 Karadzhov, Yordan, 319 Karajan, Herbert von, 203, 206 Kaufman, Philip, 50 Kealy, Edward, 203 Kegel, Herbert, 223 Keith Prowse, 151 Keith, Robert, 151 Kekuku, Joseph, 407 Keller, Greta, 287, 290–292 Kelly, Owen, 91 Kent, Nick, 182 Kessler, Harry Graf, 333 Kestenberg, Leo, 87, 116 Keynes, John Maynard, 114 Keynes, Milton, 80, 95 Khe, Tran van, 427 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 316
Index
Khrushchev, Nikita, 354 Khubov, Georgii, 89 King Crimson, 362 Klee, Paul, 135 Kolkata, Opera house, 396 Komintern, 362 Kondō, Kōji, 50 Korea, 34, 224, 393, 396 Korner, Alexis, 180 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 4, 51 Koschmider, Bruno, 246 Kraftwerk, 362 Kraus, Egon, 427 Kraus, Peter, 359 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich, 53 Krautrock, 183, 250, 362 Kreisler, Fritz, 399 Kremer, Gidon, 339 Krenek, Ernst, 352, 377 kroncong, 23, 235, 381–383, 405–408 Kryl, Karel, 357 Kubelik, Jan, 129 Kubelík, Rafael, 339 Kubrick, Stanley, 50 Kulikowska, Magdalena, 120 Kunst, Jaap, 423 Kuti, Fela Anikulapu, 410 L’assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), 49 labor market for musicians, 59, 62, 64, 68, 73, 420, 430 labor movement 64, 83, 238, 311, 350, 360 Lachmann, Robert, 401 Lajtha, Laszlo, 423 Lalo, Édouard, 131 Lamperez, Julius “Papa Cairo”, 408 Landowska, Wanda, 129, 134 Lang Lang, 393, 394, 412 Lang, Fritz, 49 Lang, Jack, 73 Latin America, 22, 34, 214, 327, 399, 403, 406–409, 423, 432 Laurens, Henri, 135 Le Bargy, Charles, 49 League of Nations, 219, 422, 426, 435; International Commission of Popular Arts, 423; International Committee on Intel-
455
lectual Cooperation (ICIC), 424, 429; International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), 422, 423 Led Zeppelin, 52, 250 Lee, Everett S., 329 Leifs, Jón, 307 Leipzig, 15, 51, 118, 172, 218, 223, 248, 355, 356, 420; Gewandhaus Orchestra, 329, 334, 336 leisure, 17, 79, 82, 89, 147, 148, 238, 248, 264, 267, 268, 270, 372; industry, 258, 259, 273; leisure time, 237, 258 Lemaire, Alfred Jean-Baptiste, 396 Lennon, John, 71, 181 Leo XIII, Pope, 140 Levitan, Yuri, 195 Lewis, John, 68 licensing, 9, 153–155, 249, 267, 334, 429 Lieberberg, Marek, 148 Ligeti, György, 39, 377 Lind, Jenny, 147, 156 Lipatti, Dinu, 129, 134, 140 Lipchitz, Jacques, 135 LiquidSeats, 152 listening, 21, 23, 42, 71, 81, 127, 157, 170, 175, 177, 179, 185, 225, 229, 230, 236, 243, 257, 269, 309, 353–355, 377, 378, 385, 400, 422; collective, 292; contemplative, 13; passive, 4, 89, 91, 95, 288; solitary, 10, 14, 16, 20, 281–298; to radio, 89, 226; active musicians vs. passive listeners, 4, 90, 92, 98, 288 listening booths, 289 Liszt, Franz, 156, 305, 306, 397 Little Richard, 359 Live Aid, 364 live music, 60, 62, 66, 67, 70, 74, 148, 150, 157, 160, 161, 201, 204, 237, 242, 243, 257, 263, 269, 421, 434; business, 67, 152; economy, 149, 429; on radio, 211– 213, 218, 222–225, 228, 229 Live Nation, 146, 148 Live Nation Entertainment, 152, 161 Liverpool, 94, 239, 273 living room, modern, 214, 281, 288, 289, 293, 295, 297, 298. See also salon; listening, solitary
456
Index
Livingstone, Ken, 347 localization, 371, 387 Lomax, Alan, 61 London, 9, 68, 79, 80, 86, 114, 148, 149, 151, 156, 172, 175, 177, 181, 193, 194, 207, 236, 257, 263, 269, 270, 273, 341, 347, 362, 377, 419–421, 431, 433 Louis XIV, 107, 110, 126, 305 Love and Peace Festival, 313 Love Parade, 274 LP (long-playing) record. See sound storage media Lucerne Festival, 340 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 106, 126 Lynch, David, 50 Lynn, Vera, 241 Lyotard, Jean-François, 47 Maciunas, George, 44 Maderna, Bruno, 68, 224 Madonna, 158, 387 Madrid, 311, 335 Maffay, Peter, 271 Mahler, Gustav, Second Symphony, 46; Fifth Symphony, 339; Ninth Symphony, 43, 318 Mahmood (Alessandro Mahmoud), 384–387 mainstream music, 10, 90, 94, 182, 215, 239, 246, 247, 250, 252, 271, 313, 358, 360, 362 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 132 Malraux, André, 105 Malta, Republic of, 314 Manuela (Doris Inge Wegener), 94 Mao Zedong, 393 Marclay, Christian, 47 Marcus, Greil, 170, 185 Marcuse, Herbert, 174 market economy, 148, 163 marketing, 23, 151, 156, 156, 159, 161, 162, 177, 243, 284, 289, 332, 340, 373, 410, 428 Markevitch, Igor, 111, 132, 134, 135, 136, 140 Martin, Denis-Constant, 409 Martin, Frank, 140 Martin, George, 52, 202, 203 Martinů, Bohuslav, 140
Marx, Adolf Bernhard, 174 Mashina Vremeni, 356, 358 Mason, Luther Whiting, 397 mass media, 19, 240, 245, 264, 315, 410, 412 mass singing, 89, 90 mass song, 89, 311 Massenet, Jules, 131 Massolle, Joseph, 194 Masson, Georges, 135 Masur, Kurt, 339 Mattheson, Johann, 172 Matuska, Waldemar, 357 McCartney, Paul, 61 Mecca dance halls, 148, 268 mechanical music, 222, 284–286, 293, 297 mediatization, 211, 212, 215 Mehta, Zubin, 54 Meisel, Edmund, 49 Melba, Nellie, 399 Melodie und Rhythmus, 183 Melody Maker, 169, 177, 178, 181, 183, 184, 263, 377 Menuhin, Yehudi, 54 Mercury, Freddie, 273 Merzbow (Masami Akita), 40 Messager, André, 129 Messiaen, Olivier, 39, 132, 175 Metropolis (1927), 49 Mexico, 33, 274, 423 Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz”, 180 Michael, George, 273 microphone singers, 292, 294. See also crooning microphone, 52, 56, 67, 73, 157, 196, 199, 203, 290; condenser, 189, 194; electric, 194, 287, 293, 297; magnetic, 68; ribbon, 67 microtones, 53 Middle East, 327, 341, 385, 386 migration studies, 330 migration, 6, 23, 54, 145, 246, 372, 377, 380–382, 385, 388; musicians’ labor, 24; postcolonial, 251 Milan, 40, 68, 162, 189, 192, 207, 224, 227, 257, 261, 264, 269, 364, 384, 420; La Scala, 109
Index
Milhaud, Darius, 132–135, 177, 377 military bands, 84, 107, 381, 396 Miller, Karl, 374 Ministry of Sound, 273, 274 minorities, 22, 239, 241, 242, 428 Miró, Joan, 135 missionaries, 15, 396. See also indigenous music missionary schools, 395 Misty In Roots, 363 Mitchell, Joni, 294 Mitterand, François, 108 mobility, musical, 325, 329, 332, 334, 335, 339, 434 mobilization, 304, 430; cultural, 326; musical, 109; through music, 319; political, 86, 97, 317. See also musical protest mood regulation, 281, 282, 289 Moreau, Henry, 350 Morocco, 225, 401 Moroder, Giorgio, 252 Morrison, Van, 246 Morton, Jelly Roll, 178 Moscow, 196, 316, 354, 358; conservatory, 89 Mosoly, 358 Moss Empires, 148 Ms Dynamite, 347 Mullin, John, 195 Munich, 116, 252, 269; Opera Festival, 111 Murray, Charles Shaar, 182 Music Austria, 119 music agents, 325, 332–334, 342 music competitions, 79, 83, 86, 87, 92, 93, 225 music consumption, 9, 12, 90, 238, 431; popular, 355; public, 243; social shift in, 201 music business, 3, 9, 10, 12, 13, 20, 62, 67, 70, 85, 94, 146, 152, 155, 156, 158, 160–163, 271, 326, 332, 335, 429 music criticism, 10, 11, 13–15, 20, 105, 169– 185, 207, 318, 378, 421 music industry, 17, 20, 21, 68, 74, 94, 117, 121, 132, 146, 154, 160, 177, 178, 182, 189, 199, 229, 244, 251, 257, 258, 265, 272, 350, 352, 361, 405, 417, 419, 427;
457
American, 22, 169; global, 23, 271, 400; popular, 106, 118, 119, 183, 264, 271, 410 music journalism, 4, 400 music market, 16, 152, 155, 159, 161 music policy, 13, 82, 126, 215, 315 music producer, 236, 244 music publisher, 84, 95, 119, 154, 156 158, 159, 162, 163, 263, 264, 271, 333 music reformers, 396, 400, 401 music therapy, 296 music instruments, manufacturer of, 72, 84, 85, 95, 156, 198, 261, 394 music magazines, 169, 171–173, 175, 180, 183, 184, 250, 377, 378 music of resistance, 373 Music Sales Corporation, 162 musical ambassadors, 327, 330, 335, 337, 340 musical diplomacy, 8, 19, 325–342 musical modernity, 307, 308; European, 320 musical patronage, 10, 13, 19, 21, 38, 109, 110, 125–141, 396 musical populism, 315, 374 musical protest, 347–350, 359, 361, 362, 365 Musical Times, 79, 173 musicians, amateur, 13, 15, 17, 64, 66, 79– 88, 90–98, 109, 127, 141, 153, 260, 347; ordinary, 59–61, 64, 66, 67, 72– 74, 76; performing, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 70, 72–74, 158, 429; professional, 4, 11, 13, 59–62, 65, 67, 70, 73, 80, 81, 85, 90, 92–98, 109, 117, 127–129, 140, 148, 153, 347; amateurs vs. professionals, 92, 100 musicians’ unions, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 158, 271, 332, 420, 430; American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 75, 420, 430; British Musicians’ Union, 65, 430, 433; Fédération des artistes musiciens de France, 65; Fédération générale du Spectacle, 65, 430; International Musicians’ Union (IMU), 430; International Federation of Musicians (FIM), 430, 432–434; Portuguese Musicians’ Class Association (ACMP), 65; Russian Associ-
458
Index
ation of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM), 88, 89; Toonkunstenaarsbond, Netherlands, 430 musicking, concept of, 4, 6, 11, 13, 235, 328, 349 Musikexpress, 183 musique concrète, 40, 46, 204 Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu, 46 Mussolini, Benito, 108, 109, 307, 431 Mussorgsky, Modest, 315 Nabokov, Nicolas, 135, 136 Namenlos, 358 Nascimento, Milton, 411 national associations, 15, 86–88 national broadcasting corporations: Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), 220; BBC World Service, 214; Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC), 220; Danmarks Radio, 218, 223, 225; National Public Radio (NPR), USA, 220; National Broadcasting Company (NBC), USA, 220; Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), 222; Polskiego Radia, 224; Radio France, 67; Radio Luxembourg, 221, 243; Radio Moscow, 214; Radiodiffusion Française, 224; Radio Verkehrs AG (RAVAG), Austria, 216 National Council of Social Service, Britain, 79 National Democratic Party of Germany, 362 National Fascist Union of Musicians, 108 National Front, British, 362, 363 National Socialism. See Germany, Nazi nationalism, 8, 12, 19, 24, 171, 173, 74, 177, 307, 352, 374, 412, 423, 425; musical, 421 nation-building, 8, 11, 213, 214, 217 nation-state, 6, 18, 19, 107, 119, 325, 326, 385, 419 Negativland, 48 neoliberalism, 19, 118, 225, 228, 365 Netherlands, 23, 74, 91, 106, 112, 113, 222, 223, 227, 250, 261, 262, 271, 313, 371, 381–383, 387, 406, 408 Nettl, Bruno, 413 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 172, 174
Neumann, Georg, 194 Neve, Rupert, 197 New Journalism, 181 New Music (Neue Musik), New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), 307 new wave, 71 New York, 15, 39, 44, 47, 134, 176, 185, 198, 202, 220, 252, 286, 405, 421; Metropolitan Opera, 149 nightclubs, 242, 246, 248, 267, 274, 353, 354, 356, 359, 407 Nijinska, Bronislava, 136 Noailles, Charles de, 132, 135, 136, 141 Noailles, Marie-Laure de, 132, 134–136, 141 noise, 38–41, 218; music, 39–41 Nono, Luigi, 362 Norström, Vitalis, 283 North Africa, 53, 200, 374, 375, 381 North African musical influences, 385–387 Norway, 73, 90, 91, 178, 217, 307, 325 nostalgia, 240, 244, 250 notation, 22, 84, 153, 171, 351, 394, 396, 398, 400, 401; standard, 4, 95; systems, 201 Nüll, Edwin von der, 318 O’Connell, Finneas, 189 O’Montis, Paul, 287 Ōga, Norio, 206 Ohnesorg, Benno, 361 OIRT. See Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision Oliver, Vic, 318 Olympic, 356 opera houses, 36, 109, 120, 149, 309, 331, 354, 396, 428 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), 109 orchestras: chamber, 117; classical, 61, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75, 195, 243, 334; radio, 66, 69, 216, 223, 227; radio symphony, 213, 216–218, 220, 223, 224, 227–230; symphony, 19, 59, 70, 74, 75, 113, 117, 216, 217, 224, 227, 327, 332, 393, 400; theater, 117 Organisation Internationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision (OIRT), 92, 225 Oriental music, 400, 420,
Index
Orphéon, 86 Osaka, 426 Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 175 Oswald, John, 47, 48 Otto, Natalino, 352 Ottoman empire, 397, 398 Pacine, Paul, 243 Paganini, Niccolò, 156 palais de dance. See dance hall Palestine Symphony Orchestra, 340 Panassié, Hugues, 178, 378 Papen, Franz von, 241 Paris, 9, 24, 40, 68, 126, 129, 149, 176, 178, 204; café concerts, 63, 148, 237–239, 243, 262, 269, 325, 329, 347, 350, 352, 353, 402, 420, 422, 423, 430; “city of music”, 108; Conservatory, 126, 130, 399; jazz in, 371, 372, 375, 377, 378, 380, 381, 383, 387, 405; Opéra National de Paris, 108, 126, 138; Orchestre de Paris, 132, 138, 139, 339; Philharmonie de Paris, 138; salons, 129, 130, 134– 136, 140, 141; 1889 World Exhibition, 53, 419; 1968 riots, 361 Parry, Charles Hubert Hastings, 394 Pasdeloup, Jules, 131 Pastré, Countess Lily, 137 patronage, aristocratic, 139; civic, 112; private, 19; state, 111, 117. See also musical patronage Paul, Les, 195 payment, wages, 60, 66, 67, 69, 87, 130, 147, 154, 155, 258, 430, 431, 433. See also fees; musicians’ unions Payne, Jack, 264 Pecci, Anna Laetitia (Countess Pecci-Blunt), 140 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 38, 224 pentatonicism, 398, 400, 402, 403, 412 percussion, 79, 141, 216, 259, 270, 305, 382 Pereire brothers, 131 performers rights, 70, 431. See also Rome Convention performing arts, 105, 112, 115, 330 Performing Right Society (PRS). See collecting societies
459
Perm, 84 Permanent Council for International Cooperation of Composers, 421 Pfleumer, Fritz, 194 philanthropy, 19, 125, 341 Philippines, 332, 381 Philips, 71, 157, 198, 206 Phonographic Performance Limited, 157, 433 phonography, 283, 285 Piaf, Edith, 55, 353 piano manufacturer, 394 Piantadosi, Al, 347 Picabia, Francis, 377 Picasso, Pablo, 133 Pink Floyd, 52, 169, 253, 410 Pinkpop Festival, 313 Plant, Robert, 250 Plastic People of the Universe, 253, 358 Plato, 172, 304, 320 plunderphonics, 48 Poland, 75, 90, 117, 170, 180, 224, 248, 249, 274, 307, 349, 354, 355, 358, 430 policy, cultural, 9, 10, 24, 80, 88, 91, 96, 98, 105, 108, 113, 119, 137, 141, 150, 176, 195, 229, 248, 313, 321, 329, 340 Polignac, Marie-Blanche de, 130, 134 political economy of music, 145, 153, 331, 429 Polke, Sigmar, 42 Pollini, Maurizio, 140 pop culture, 8, 235, 242 pop music, 21, 23, 62, 71, 72, 119, 197, 205, 244–249, 294, 313, 321, 380, 386, 427; breakthrough of, 62, 71; industry, 183, 271; live, 269 pop-rockization, 409, 410, 413 popular music, 85, 89, 91, 93, 96, 362, 410, 425 popular music channels, 222, 225; industry, 106, 118, 119, 264, 410 Portugal, 65, 220, 226, 306, 307, 385, 419, 420, 426 Portzamparc, Christian de, 108 Postman, Neil, 303 Pousseur, Henri, 44
460
Index
Prague, 239, 253, 335, 356, 423, 424; jazz club, 355; Philharmonic Orchestra, 335; Prague Spring, 357 Presley, Elvis, 52, 169, 245, 354, 359, 381 Primitives, The, 356 Prince, 170 Prokofiev, Sergei, 129, 132, 313, 334 promoters, 95, 129, 148–152, 161, 190, 245, 337, 359, 417 promotional state, 119 propaganda, musical, 10, 304, 307, 320 property, intellectual, 153, 157, 158, 432. See also copyright property rights, 145, 146, 152, 153, 155; intellectual, 15, 153 protest songs, 254, 357, 360. See also musical protest provincialization, 206, 426–428 Prowse, William (Keith Prowse), 151 Prussia, 87, 115, 116, 174 public service principle, 213, 219 public service radio, 211, 213, 215, 220, 222, 224 public sphere, 327, 332; bourgeois, 172; musical, 418 Puccini, Giacomo, 129 Puente, Tito, 405 Puhdys, 357 punk, 8, 23, 33, 41, 44, 71, 95, 146, 162, 171, 181, 182, 204, 251–253, 362, 363, 365, 410; bands, 358, 363 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 173 Quatro, Suzi, 251 R&B (rhythm and blues), 180, 181, 246–249, 251, 410, 411 Raabe, Peter, 318 Race, Steve, 169 racial, 179, 241, 247, 269, 352, 364, 374, 394; distinction, 10, 362, 378; essentialism, 246; equality, 372; prejudice, 328, 379; segregation, 178 racism, 33, 171, 178, 247, 251, 321, 327, 362–364; scientific, 374 radio symphony orchestras. See orchestras
radio, magazines, 214, 215, 219, 264; producer, 218, 287; programming, 157, 248; recorder, 294; stations, 62, 66, 67, 88, 195, 226, 291, 354, 424 radiofication, 212, 216 ragtime, 15, 259, 260, 404 Raitt, Bonnie, 358 rap, 73, 80, 95, 146, 385, 410, 411 Rastafari movement, 362, 409, 410 Ratcliffe, Hardie, 433 rave(s), 95, 162, 258, 272–275; mega raves, 273 Ravel, Maurice, 129–131, 134, 177, 377 record companies: RCA Victor, US, 200; Columbia Records, Britain, 194; Columbia Records, US, 191, 200; Decca Records, Britain, 157, 191, 433; Deutsche Grammophon, Germany, 163, 191, 193, 203, 264; EMI (Electric and Musical Industries), Britain, 157, 191, 202, 334, 433; Folkway Records, US, 351; Lindström Corporation, Germany, 91, 194, 207, 264; Melodiya, USSR, 334, 359; Mille Plateaux, Germany, 38; Pathé, France, 191, 200, 207, 377; Pathéfon, Sweden, 284, 290; RCA Victor, US, 191, 200; Topic Records, Britain, 360 record industry, 74, 76, 130, 156–160, 265, 271, 292, 432; player, 66, 155–157, 243, 244, 286, 355. See also recording industry recording culture, 190, 195, 197 recording, electrical, 66, 67, 145, 157, 189, 194, 199, 202, 287, 298; electronic, 284, 290 recording industry, 9, 16, 20, 22, 23, 67, 74, 159, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 202, 204, 206, 268, 269, 271, 431, 432, 434; studio, 4, 62, 67, 192, 193, 195–200, 203, 204, 206, 361, 430 Reduta Jazz Club, 355 Reed, Lou, 250 Reesen, Emil, 218 reggae, 170, 252, 362, 364, 409–411 Regina, Elis, 411 Reinhardt, Django, 376, 378, 380 Reinhart, Werner, 140, 141
Index
Reith, John, 114, 215. See also BBC representation, 36, 206, 304, 305, 338, 348, 411; national, 19, 308; of cultural superiority, 196, 307. See also propaganda, musical reproduction rights, 429, 431. See also record industry; secondary market; Rome convention Respighi, Ottorino, 139 Revue du Jazz, 377 Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 172 Revue musicale, 175 Revueltas, Silvestre, 33 rhythm and blues. See R&B Ricci, Matteo, 395 Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, 172 Richter, Sviatoslav, 334 Rieti, Vittorio, 137, 140 Riffer Music, 74 right to culture, 106 Rihm, Wolfgang, 140 Riley, Terry, 176 Rilke, Reiner Maria, 140 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreyevich, 315 Rio de Janeiro, 405; Opera house, 396 Ritchie-Calder, Baron, 426 Robinson, Tom, 363 Rochlitz, Friedrich, 172 rock ‘n’ roll, 9, 22, 68, 71, 73, 94, 95, 146, 160, 169, 185, 244, 245, 246, 319, 354, 355, 359, 360, 381–383, 409, 410 Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement, 362– 365. See also musical protest; punk; reggae Rock Around the Clock (1956), 359 rock journalism, 169, 185, 250 rock music, 35, 96, 156, 162, 169, 250, 308, 314, 329, 356, 360; as a form of art, 182; as oppositional politics, 361; business, 12; mobilization potential of, 319; musicians, 94, 100, 253 Rolling Stone, 169, 182, 183. See also music magazines; rock journalism Rolling Stones, 52, 169, 181, 248, 249, 356, 361, 410 Romania, 16, 274, 355, 419 Romanov, Aleksei, 312
461
Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations, 157, 432, 433 Rootzén, Kajsa, 285, 287, 291, 292 Rosenberg, Alfred, 312, 317 Roskilde Festival, 313 Rostropovich, Mstislav, 203 Rothschild, Henri de, 132 Rothschild, Paul, 185 Rougemont, Denis, 111, 425. See also European Festivals Association (EFA) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 172, 320 Rózsa, Miklós, 3, 51 Rubinstein, Arthur, 129 Russel, George, 67 Russia, 39, 84, 89, 90, 98, 173, 195, 200, 213, 264, 274, 307, 332, 355, 396, 398 Russolo, Luigi, 39 Sablon, Jean, 287 SACEM. See collecting societies Sacher, Maja, 140 Sacher, Paul, 140, 141 Sachs, Curt, 401 Said, Edward, 341 Saint-Marceaux, Marguerite de, 129, 130 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 49, 53, 131 salons, 24, 82, 127–130, 132, 134, 135, 137, 215, 216, 283, 288–290 Salzburg Festival, 110, 139, 340 Sandberg, Sven-Olof, 287, 290–292 Sanremo Music Festival, 384, 385 Santana, Carlos, 358 Sargeant, Winthrop, 178 Satie, Erik, 42, 63, 133–135, 377 Saturday Night Fever, 181, 271. See also disco culture Sauguet, Henri, 133, 135, 136 Saygun, Ahmad Adnan, 402 scales, 53, 201, 332, 342, 394, 401, 407, 414 Scheibe, Johan Adolph, 172 Scherchen, Hermann, 140 Schiller, Friedrich, 172, 417 Schlippenbach, Alexander von, 179 Schmitt, Florent, 132 Schnittke, Alfred, 47, 48
462
Index
Schoeck, Othmar, 140 Schönberg, Arnold, 3, 16, 36, 43, 105, 132, 350 Schott, 162, 163 Schreier, Peter, 339 Schubert, Franz, 292 Schulhoff, Erwin, 42, 43 Schulz-Köhn, Dietrich, 93 Schumann, Robert, 172 Scotland, 115, 272 Scott de Martinville, Edouard-Léon, 193 secessionists, 36, 38 secondary market of recorded music, 429 Seeger, Pete, 360 Seiffert, Max, 419 self-identification, 282 self-organization, 20, 82, 93, 202. See also amateur music self-technology, 294–296; listening as, 292, 297; music as, 283, 288, 290 semiprofessionals, 64–66, 97, 263. See also amateur musicians Serenade concerts, 132, 136, 140 serious music, 63, 68, 71, 72, 95, 155, 163, 239, 282; serious vs. popular music, 59, 61, 64, 71 Sex Pistols, 363 SGAE. See collecting societies Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 249, 293 Shankar, Ravi, 54 Shaw, George Bernard, 173 sheet music, 11, 15, 84, 85, 137, 145, 153, 156, 162, 237 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 47, 307, 308, 315, 334; Song of the Forests, 315; The Bright Brook op. 39, 307 Shūji, Isawa, 396, 397 SIAE. See collecting societies Sibelius, Jean, 307 Siccardi, Honorio, 421 Sienna, 139, 140 sign language music translation, 387 Signal, 319 silent film, 49; piano accompaniment, 67, 80 Silvester, Victor, 264 Simon, Paul, Graceland (1986), 54
Sinding, Christian, 307 Singer, Winnaretta (Princess Edmond de Polignac), 131, 132, 134, 135, 141 singers, 15, 63, 69, 70, 83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 114, 154, 156, 200, 203, 207, 248, 271, 284, 292, 294, 351, 373, 375, 433; female, 237, 247, 360; opera, 193; rock, 357 singer-songwriter, 294, 356, 360 Sissle, Noble, 375 skiffle, 81, 93–95, 180, 245, 246 Skrewdriver, 363 Slovenia, 223 Small Faces, The, 169 Smith, Willie “the Lion”, 377 snobbism, 127, 128, 131, 136, 138 sociability, 83, 126, 128; upper-class, 19; urban, 62. See also salons social control, 17, 86, 97 socialism, 63, 75, 108, 205, 316, 350, 355, 365; “real-existing”, 356, 358 socialist bloc. See Eastern Bloc Soft Machine, 169 Sokorski, Włodzimierz, 117 Solidaritätslied, 3, 351 sonic experimentation, 362 Sony, 160, 161, 198, 206, 207, 208; Sony Walkman, 16, 282, 295, 296, 362 soul, 22, 272, 406, 410, 411 sound engineers, 159, 192, 194, 199, 200, 203, 206 sound-engineering profession, 198 sound storage media, 423, 428; 45rpm single, 169, 185, 243; 78rpm disc, 192, 194; compact disc (CD), 51, 54, 157, 160, 161, 198, 206, 410; magnetic tape, 194, 296; vinyl record, long-playing (LP), 160, 197, 201–203, 243, 293, 355; wax cylinder, 189–193 sound, homogenization of, 201; reproduction of, 190, 200, 201, 212, 285, 289, 290, 293, 400, 429, 431; stereophonic, 157, 194, 197, 202, 293; technology, 157, 276, 293 sound film, 4, 49, 50, 67, 240, 263, 320, 400, 410, 430
Index
sound recording, 13, 16, 189–208, 410; history of, 189, 190; technological innovations, 20, 155, 240, 293 sounds, dissonant, 315, 350 soundscapes, 204, 362 South Africa, 54, 274, 403 South America. See Latin America Southern Syncopated Orchestra, 177, 179, 352 Soviet Russia, 90, 318 Soviet Union, 108, 117, 205, 214, 265, 311, 315, 327, 355–357, 424 space, private, 141, 237, 254; public, 63, 107, 141, 237, 254, 276, 281, 297, 356 Spain, 64, 83, 86, 96, 155, 162, 217, 220, 223, 251, 261, 274, 306, 307, 349, 360, 385, 412, 419; cafés cantantes, 237; International Brigades, 351 Specials, The, 363, 364 Spielberg, Steven, 50 spirituals, 375, 410 Spitz, Bob, 185 sponsorship, 10, 139, 148, 227, 273, 274, 326, 341; corporate, 19, 126, 138, 141; state, 11, 325, 328, 330, 332, 335, 336 Sprague Coolidge, Elizabeth, 141 Springsteen, Bruce, 253 Stalin, Joseph, 108, 195, 204, 307, 308, 312, 315, 316, 353, 354 standardization, 240, 244, 423; in music, 22, 409, 413 state control, 196, 214, 236, 304, 327, 372 Steel Pulse, 363 Steel, John, 93 Steele, Tommy, 94, 359 Steiner, Max, 51 Stengel, Theo, 312 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 40, 44, 204, 223, 224, 362 Stockholm, 148, 221, 282, 283, 287–291 Stoiber, Edmund, 309 storage systems. See sound storage media Strauss, Johann, 47 Strauss, Richard, 140, 333, 421 Stravinsky, Igor, 43, 63, 128, 129, 132–135, 140, 141, 175, 177, 350, 377; Serenade in A (1925), 203
463
streaming, 149, 160, 297, 429 street art, 110, 111 string instruments, 216, 306, 382, 383, 401 string orchestra, 82, 283, 385; quartet, 36, 312 StubHub, 152. See also LiquidSeats Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 43 Studio di Fonologia Musicale, 40 Studio für elektronische Musik, 40, 204 subcultures, 9, 95, 242, 246, 247, 249, 251, 253, 271, 405 Summer, Donna, 252 superiority, cultural, 307, 338; Soviet cultural, 196; musical, 5, 21, 34; national, 11; of German music, 110 surrealism, 36, 46 Suslov, Mikhail, 315 Süverkrüp, Dieter, 360 Sweden, 91, 112, 221, 222, 250, 262, 267, 282, 284, 287, 289, 292, 295, 307, 325, 420; jazz in, 178; popular music industry, 119; salong, 283, 288, 290; Spotify, 160 swing, 241, 242, 269, 352–354, 377, 378, 380, 382 Swingjugend, 8, 242, 353 Switzerland, 74, 75, 87, 91, 139, 140, 152, 333, 337 symbolism, 36, 225 symphonic music, 51, 217, 223, 227, 238 symphony orchestras. See orchestras syncopation, 239, 260, 352, 354, 364, 375, 377, 380, 382, 383, 404 Tag der Hausmusik (Day of Domestic Music) (1932), 91 Tagore, Rabindranath, 396 Tailleferre, Germaine, 135 Taiwan, 393, 396, 411 Takemitsu, Toru, 403 Tan Dun, 403, 412 Tangerine Dream, 362 tango. See dances tape recorder, 40, 67, 193, 195, 197, 205, 212, 296 Tbilisi Rock Festival, 359
464
Index
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 307, 315, 334; Symphonie Pathétique, 284 Tcherepnin, Alexander, 398 Telefunken, 194, 195, 198, 203 television, 49, 67, 129, 150, 157, 158, 217, 222, 248, 253, 271, 311, 320, 337, 357, 361, 383, 385, 410, 428, 429, 433; Chinese, 412; Turkish, 403 Tennstedt, Klaus, 339 Teppaz, 71 Tetrazzini, Luisa, 283 Tézenas, Suzanne, 137 theater, 69, 88, 109, 113, 115, 139, 242, 250, 263; Broadway, 15; Düsseldorf, 44; ticket, 238; orchestras, 116, 117; Parisian, 350; political, 361; Weimar, 351 Thienhaus, Erich, 201 Thompson, Hunter S., 181 Thompson, Virgil, 175 Threepenny Opera, 352 ticketing, 150, 152 Ticketmaster, 151, 152 Tielman Brothers, 23, 381–384 Tin Pan Alley, New York, 15, 408 Tomorrowland, 150 Ton Steine Scherben, 250, 362 tonal harmony, 350 tonic sol-fa, 84, 95 Tonmeister, 201, 202. See also sound engineer Toscanini, Arturo, 109, 285, 340 tourism, cultural, 118, 121 traditional music, 159, 400, 403, 413, 423, 427, 428 Trenet, Charles, 353 TRIPS. See Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Tunisia, 401, 427 Turin, 257, 261 Turkey, 401, 403, 424; Ankara State Conservatory, 398; national music, 398, 402 U2, 48, 170 Ukraine, 14, 84, 111, 196, 26; Chervona Ruta festival, 359 Ulbricht, Walter, 356
Umm Kulthūm, 385, 401. See also Arab, Egyptian music underground, 170, 183, 241, 250, 253, 270– 272, 274, 353, 356, 357, 380 unemployment, 69, 251, 432, 433 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 23, 425–428, 432, 434, 435 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 262, 266. See also Soviet Union Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 106. See also right to culture Universal Music Group, 162. See also music publisher Universal Postal Union (1874), 419 USA, art institutions, 105; Cultural Presentations Program, 327, 338; music industry, impact on Europe, 22, 34, 146, 182, 206, 207, 242, 244, 245, 375; music radio, 225, 226. See also Americanization; jazz Valentine, Penny, 183 value(s), aesthetic, 13, 285, 412; educational, 127; market, 125, 145, 154, 161; intrinsic, 11, 18, 65, 285; musical, 4, 65, 80, 147, 156, 229; political, 241, 348; use value, 153 van der Laan, Medy, 106 Varèse, Edgar, 38, 132 Vartan, Sylvie, 360 Veloso, Caetano, 411 Venice, 135, 257; Biennale, 111 Verband der Deutschen Tonmeister, 202. See also Audio Engineering Society Verdi, Giuseppe, 307; Ernani, 193 Viagogo, 152. See also ticketing Victor Talking Machine Company, 265, 290, 400 Vienna, 9, 105, 119, 148, 149, 173, 207, 216, 218, 237, 270, 350, 420, 428, 430; Court Opera, 110, 116; Philharmonic, 332, 336, 337 Vietnam War, protest against, 249, 361 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 33, 132, 404, 421 Vincent, Gene, 246 Viñes, Ricardo, 129, 130
Index
visual arts, 46, 125, 135, 361 Vivaldi, Antonio, 307 Vogt, Hans, 194 Voice Crack, 40 Volksempfänger. See radio Vysotsky, Vladimir, 205, 356 Wader, Hannes, 360 Wagner, Richard, 39, 50, 128, 131, 133, 134, 173–175, 202, 317 Waller, Fats (Thomas Wright Waller), 377 waltz. See dances Wang Guangqi, 396 Warsaw, 180, 224, 248, 356 wax cylinder, 189, 190, 192, 193 WDR. See Westdeutscher Rundfunk Webern, Anton, 105, 140 Weill, Kurt, 132, 135, 136, 218, 352, 377 Weimar Republic, 88, 90, 116, 174, 239, 351 Weinberg, Mieczysław, 316 Weingartner, Felix (von) 337, 422, 423 Weintraub Syncopators, 352 Welch, Chris, 169, 181 West European Union of Singers, 91 Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 40, 68, 224. See also national broadcasting corporations Western music, 34, 54, 174, 326, 338, 393, 396, 397, 400, 413 Whiteman, Paul, 178, 239, 352, 377 Who, The, 169, 170, 361 Wiener, Jean, 135 Williams, Hank, 408 Williams, John, 50 Williams, Richard, 178 Wilson, Brian, 203 Wilson, Harold, 114 wind bands, 82, 86, 96, 109 Wings, 362 Wolf Brothers, 239 Wolfe, Bernhard, 180 women, as singers, 69, 237, 247, 286, 360, 406; as composers, 35; dancing, 21, 94, 241, 242, 259, 266, 267; emancipation
465
of, 72, 259; in classical orchestras, 72; musicians, 15, 162, 251, 339; position in society, 127, 259, 269 Wonder, Stevie, 273 Wooding, Sam, 239, 352 Woodstock Festival (1969), 253, 313 workers’ movement. See labor movement working class, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 108, 237, 246, 249, 251, 258, 259, 267, 268, 351 working conditions of musicians, 63, 65, 66, 75, 420, 430. See also labor market World Championships in ballroom dancing, 262 World Heritage Convention, 427 world music, 24, 54, 180, 183, 228, 395, 413 written music, 34, 145, 153, 171. See also composition Xenakis, Iannis, 39, 176 Xian Xinghai, 393 Xiao Youmei, 396 Yellow River Cantata, 393 Yellow River Piano Concerto, 393, 403 Yes, 362 Yes, We Have No Bananas, 239 yé-yé, 244, 360, 384 youth culture, 8, 184, 242, 248, 410. See also counterculture; pop music Youth Music Movement, 90, 91 Youth orchestras: European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO), 24, 340; West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, 340, 341 Yugoslavia, 68, 72, 223, 313, 407, 430 Zaderatsky, Vsevolod, 312 Zappa, Frank, 169, 250, 293 zazous, 242, 353 Zeitlin, Denny, 50 Zender, Hans, 224 Zhdanov, Andrei, 315, 318 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois, 48 Zorn, John, 47 Zuckmayer, Eduard, 398