Recomposing German Music: Politics And Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin

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BRILL, 2005 - Social Science - 354 pages
"Recomposing German Music" illuminates the tangled relationship between music and politics in 20th-century Germany. Focusing on the reconstruction and division of Berlin's musical community after 1945, author Elizabeth Janik demonstrates how military occupation and Cold War rivalry transformed the city's elite musical institutions. Berlin became a crucible for competing interpretations of German musical tradition. Cultural authorities in East and West Berlin disputed the social authority responsible for defining and upholding musical standards, the appropriate relationship between art and the state, the definition of musical progress, and finally, the nature and purpose of music itself. This study is an important contribution to the social history of 20th-century music and the comparative cultural history of the two Cold War Germanys.
 

Contents

Chapter One 19thCentury Berlin and the Invention
1
Music
31
Chapter Three National Socialism and Exile
59
Reconstruction
81
Chapter Five The Golden Hunger Years 194647
125
Music in
169
Chapter Seven Two Germanys Two Musical Traditions
209
Chapter Eight Musical and Political Walls 19511965
247
Chapter Nine Reinventing Tradition 19651990
275
Appendix
305
Bibliography
323
Index
341
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About the author (2005)

Elizabeth Janik, Ph.D. (2001) in History, Georgetown University, is Adjunct Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

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