Sound Matters

by Alter, Nora M.; Koepnick, Lutz; Koepnick, Alter

• ISBN13: 9781571814364
• ISBN10: 1571814361
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-11-15
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body." This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Mattersinvestigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Sound Matters	1	(32)
Nora M. Alter
Lutz Koepnick
Part I: Sound Nation?
Hegemony through Harmony: German Identity, Music, and Enlightenment around 1800	33	(16)
Nicholas Vazsonyi
Mahler contra Wagner: The Third Symphony and the Political Legacy of Romanticism	49	(16)
Carl Niekerk
Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an Acoustic Experience	65	(14)
Frank Trommler
Part II: Dissonant Visions
The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe	79	(12)
Nora M. Alter
Sound Money: Aural Strategies in Rolf Thiele's The Girl Rosemarie	91	(13)
Hester Baer
The Castrato's Voices: Word and Flesh in Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons	104	(13)
Brigitte Peucker
Part III: Sounds of Silence
Benjamin's Silence	117	(13)
Lutz Koepnick
Deafening Sound and Troubling Silence in Volker Schlondorff's Die Blechtrommel	130	(12)
Elizabeth C. Hamilton
Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann	142	(13)
Christopher Jones
Part IV: Translating Sound
Broadcasting Wagner: Transmission, Dissemination, Translation	155	(16)
Thomas F. Cohen
Sounds Familiar? Nina Simone's Performances of Brecht/Weill Songs	171	(12)
Russell A. Berman
Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany	183	(14)
Richard Langston
The Music That Lola Ran To	197	(20)
Caryl Flinn
Part V: Memory, Music, and the Postmodern
``Heiner Muller vertonen'': Heiner Goebbels and the Music of Postmodern Memory	217	(11)
David Barnett
The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in Stockhausen's Hymnen	228	(14)
Larson Powell
Notes on Contributors	242	(3)
Index	245