Sound Matters

Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-1-57181-436-4
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, 266 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

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 Matters investigate 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Alter, Nora M.

Koepnick, Lutz

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sound Matters

Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick

PART I: SOUND NATION?

Chapter 1. Hegemony through Harmony: German Identity, Music, and Enlightenment around 1800

Nicholas Vazsonyi

Chapter 2. Mahler contra Wagner: The Third Symphony and the Political Legacy of Romanticism

Carl Niekerk

Chapter 3. Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an Acoustic Experience

Frank Trommler

PART II: DISSONANT VISIONS

Chapter 4. The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe

Nora M. Alter

Chapter 5. Sound Money: Aural Strategies in Rolf Thiele’s The Girl Rosemarie

Hester Baer

Chapter 6. The Castrato’s Voices: Word and Flesh in Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons

Brigitte Peucker

PART III: SOUNDS OF SILENCE

Chapter 7. Benjamin’s Silence

Lutz Koepnick

Chapter 8. Deafening Sound and Troubling Silence in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel

Elizabeth C. Hamilton

Chapter 9. Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann

Christopher Jones

PART IV: TRANSLATING SOUND

Chapter 10. Broadcasting Wagner: Transmission, Dissemination, Translation

Thomas F. Cohen

Chapter 11. Sounds Familiar? Nina Simone’s Performances of Brecht/Weill Songs

Russell A. Berman

Chapter 12. Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany

Richard Langston

Chapter 13. The Music That Lola Ran To

Caryl Flinn

PART V: MEMORY, MUSIC, AND THE POSTMODERN

Chapter 14. “Heiner Müller vertonen”: Heiner Goebbels and the Music of Postmodern Memory

David Barnett

Chapter 15. The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in Stockhausen’s Hymnen

Larson Powell

Notes on Contributors

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Koepnick, Lutz
Lutz Koepnick is Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (The University of Nebraska Press, 1999), for which he received the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2000; and of Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994). His next book, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood, will be published this fall by the University of California Press. He is currently working on a project, "Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture."

Alter, Nora M.
Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana UP, 1996) and Projecting History: German Non-Fiction Film 1967-2000, (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has published articles in New German Critique, The Germanic Review, Cultural Critique, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and contributed essays to Beyond 1989, Imperialism and Theatre and Triangulated Visions. She is currently working on a project on the "The Essay Film."

Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana UP, 1996) and Projecting History: German Non-Fiction Film 1967-2000, (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has published articles in New German Critique, The Germanic Review, Cultural Critique, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and contributed essays to Beyond 1989, Imperialism and Theatre and Triangulated Visions. She is currently working on a project on the "The Essay Film."