Invisible Republic: Music, Avant-Gardes, Counterculture (original) (raw)
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Beyond the Crisis of Avant-garde in Music
The Crisis in the Humanities: Transdisciplinary Solutions, 2016
In this paper, the potentials that Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of transculturality bares for re-examination of discourses on musical avant-garde and its survival after its crisis will be examined. Contributions by musicologists Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman and Max Paddison are taken into account. Concept of avant-garde of local type by Veselinović-Hofman proves valuable for examination of different approaches to the concepts of avant-garde and its understanding in contemporary music, with the emphasis on its radical line, which Paddison proposes.
The Inter-, Trans- and Postnationality of the Historical Avant-Garde. Introduction
Groningen studies in cultural change, 2013
Art and literature existed long before the nation. Yet, when the nation conquered European political thought and cultural practice in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, art and literature in their modern shape soon became inextricably bound to the nation. Moreover, as in Herder and Hegel, art and literature became the sublime manifestations of the nation, with national poets serving as the ultimate spokespeople of the nation, national painters creating icons of national virtue and national history and architects refurnishing the proclaimed national habitat in an assumedly national style. As interand transnationality were obvious features of the historical avant-garde, acknowledged in the common labelling of the avant-garde as ‘international’ or ‘European’, it is often presented as a development which ran against the national grain. The avant-garde indeed possessed an international structure as a transnational network of artists from many different countries. In p...
2021
East Central European Center is pleased to host a webinar series on interwar art and culture. This series focuses on artists from East Central Europe whose art practices and contributions to various local and international avant-gardes have attracted less or no critical attention within Modernism Studies. The avant-garde demand for crossing aesthetic boundaries within the domain of everyday life does not necessarily nullify the modernist right of art to its autonomy, but seeks to understand art as a practice accessible to all and based on the belief in its power to fundamentally change and improve social conditions. The avant-garde replaced the modernist perception of the uniqueness of the work of art that yields aesthetic pleasure isolated from practical life, with the direct call for “Art into life!” The repercussion of efforts to abolish the distance between art and life is characterized, above all, by the fact that we no longer speak of avant-garde texts or objects in the categories of literary work or aesthetic artwork, but in the categories of literary, or rather, avant-garde manifestations. The East Central Vanguard webinar series is devoted to an investigation of artists from East Central Europe whose lives and art practices deserve to be credited amongst such avant-garde manifestations. FEBRUARY 23, 2021 Off the Page: In Search of the Romanian Avant-Garde Outside its Publications. Alexandra Chiriac (Metropolitan Museum of Art) MARCH 16, 2021 Katarzyna Kobro and Debora Vogel as “Composers of Space”. Michalina Kmiecik (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) MARCH 23, 2021 Many Masks: The Radical Politics and Performance of Míra Holzbachová. Meghan Forbes (Metropolitan Museum of Art) MARCH 30, 2021 Radical Women: Jolán Simon and Other Female Artists in Hungarian Avant-Garde Periodicals. Gábor Dobó (Kassák Museum – Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest) APRIL 6, 2021 The Zenithist Woman. Žarka Svirčev (Institute for Literature and Arts, Belgrade)
Transcultural Engagement in Protest Music as a Method of Scene -Zapruder World
Zapruder World, 2023
In activism, music plays a crucial role in disturbing oppressive spaces, actors, and institutions. Activists credit the communicative function of music to create solidarity among different people at demonstrations 1. Music has a specific value in this space. On the one hand, music makes possible pleasurable bodily experiences. On the other hand, the tapestry of music and chants in the activist setting enable the formation of an imagined stage that can be elevated or on street level. From that stage, the desired political encounter can take place, can be seen, and experienced together. The stage is crucial in the activist dramaturgy. As part of that, music helps create a scene in which the political struggle can come into existence visibly and audibly. The musical coulisse sets in motion a dialogue between audience and performers. This dialogue is felt bodily, but the method in which the dialogue is staged also reveals that there is a political function assigned to music. Music is supposed to encourage and enable the audience to recognize ways in which injustices can be called attention to and unmasked creatively and collectively. This way of using music shows the audience how injustices work to sustain themselves. Music serves to unveil the theatricality of the phenomenological world, and with that seeks to encourage action from the audience. Jacques Rancière’s has discussed this method of unveiling as the “method of scene” 2. This paper investigates such methods through the example of musically assisted anti-right-wing activism that has been taking place in the city of Dresden, Germany via the work of the brass collective Banda Comunale. The methods of scene that musicians use in this protest setting are the focus of this paper and specific attention will be paid to the role that transcultural engagement takes. Banda Comunale has been active in musical street activism since 2001 but became the prominent opponent to the right-wing-movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) that took hold of the city of Dresden in 2015. When thousands of Pegida supporters marched the city’s streets, calling for anti-immigration policies and a removal of supportive measures for migrants from Syria, Banda Comunale played international brass classics to recode the city’s sonic tapestry and sonically drown out right-wing chants. The function of the music was to use the cultural heritage with which the band associated the newly settled residents to demonstrate that the people from Syria and other places in the Global South had a right to establish a home in Dresden. Banda Comunale’s music in the streets and on stages throughout the city came to symbolize the possibility of arriving and making a life for oneself in the city despite strong and growing resistance from right-wing groups. My contribution draws on my 2017-20 ethnographic study of the ensemble that revealed Banda Comunale deeply engaged in aesthetic debates on multiculturalism and transnational connections in music to fuel the band’s visibility as a blueprint for social integration through music and music as a pathway to the right to belong. In this paper, I argue that understanding Banda Comunale’s musical aesthetic through looking at the band’s dramaturgy in protest encounters reveals how the band’s music unveils right-wing propaganda, and how it stages transcultural music to give migrants and refugees the opportunity to be seen and heard in political terms. Along with this critical reflection, I provide narrative map via www.soundofheimat.wordpress.com that tracks the transformative process of Banda Comunale’s music in relation to the ever-changing political landscape in Dresden.
Configurations of Transnationalism in East-Central European Avant-Gardes
Revista Transilvania, 2019
Following the developments in the field of transnational studies and World Literature, the present study addresses the idea that, rather than comparing the different materializations of East-Central European literature with Western literature in a way that enforces an inherent power structure between the two elements, one should turn his attention to the neighboring literatures of the former and set aside the dominant discourse related to the latter. The historical avant-garde represents an important case in this respect. The presence of Jewish writers, the existence of several catalyzing cultural centers (France, Germany), and the occurrences of spatial displacements of authors from within these avant-gardes, as well as ideological affinities are factors that have consolidated a form of interliterary communication between the East-Central European avant-gardes that could provide a very strong case study in regard to early transnational dialogues between marginal national literatures. Drawing from what Tötösy de Zepetnek called “inbetween peripherality” and the most recent discussions revolving around the inherent internationality of the avant-garde movements, my paper seeks to adapt recent theories to the aforementioned geoliterary space and motivate why the avant-gardes belonging to this space are critical to the explanation of early transnational communications in the modern European culture.
Invisible republics and secret histories: A politics of music
Cultural Values, 2000
How does music -or any cultural artefact -assume significance for those who encounter it? Why does one sound or image come to matter, while others are overlooked or forgotten? The answer is not to be found in the sounds alone, but in the context and conditions in which they are heard. This article explores this argument by considering the case of The Anthology of American Folk Music, a set of recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, which has exercised an extraordinary power over popular music since its release in 1952. Using the arguments expounded by Robert Cantwell and Greil Marcus, and pointing to the uses of music in establishing national identities and mobilising social movements, the article argues for an understanding of music's significance that links social experience, aesthetic pleasure and political values.
The article discusses the dissensual ontology of the Greek popular musician-poetsinger YiannisAngelakas and the emergence of 'counterpublics', as theorized by Michael Warner, in the regime of musical performance. It focuses upon an ethnographically-grounded discussion of the ongoing successful remediations of the song “De horas pouthena” (You don't fit anywhere), which are explored as sensibilities of disagreement disputing the 'distribution of the sensible' in Jacques Rancière's terms. “De horas pouthena” voices a self-exiled form of subjectification regulated within and against the crisis of democracy―an ontology of “not-fitting-in” materializing utopian notions of civility within the affective economies of its punkrock aesthetics. Angelakas' musical dissensus is also discursively explored in the memory-work of his life-story relationally produced in the context of the ethnographic encounter. Τhe discussion is further elaborated through the discussion of the song 'Airetiko' (Heretic) and the performative emergence of affective counterpublics objecting disciplinary mechanisms of subjectification in the public sphere.