"Judging Performance, Performing Judgments: Race and Performance in Weimar Germany" (Current Musicology, 2013) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2019
When African American concert singers began to perform German lieder in central Europe in the 1920s, white German and Austrian listeners were astounded by the veracity and conviction of their performances. How had they managed to sing like Germans? This article argues that black performances of German music challenged audiences' definitions of blackness, whiteness, and German music during the transatlantic Jazz Age in interwar central Europe. Upon hearing black performers masterfully sing lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and others, audiences were compelled to consider whether German national identity was contingent upon whiteness. Some listeners chose to call black concert singers “Negroes with white souls,” associating German music with whiteness by extension. Others insisted that the singer had sounded black and therefore un-German. Race was ultimately the filter through which people interpreted these performances of the Austro-German musical canon. This article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates how and when audiences began to associate classical music with whiteness. Simultaneously, it offers a musicological intervention in contemporary discourses that still operate under the assumption that it is impossible to be both black and German.
Jonathan O. Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany
The Germanic Review, 2017
Despite the open-ended argument it proposes, on the “broad and unpredictable exchange and dialogue between Germany and America around jazz” (2), Jonathan Wipplinger’s treatment of such encounters in the Weimar Republic tackles a thorny nexus of cultural studies, race and gender theory, Frankfurt School critique, and reception history. Each chapter focuses on a specific dialogic node from the post–World War I period to the early National Socialist era, illuminating cross-cultural tensions from Berlin cabaret to symphonic jazz and the idiosyncratic novels it inspired. This book sets out to enrich existing scholarship, mainly in German, that has neglected the context, performance, and reception of Weimar- era jazz. Because the more culturally grounded New Musicology (as opposed to the earlier, scrupulously score-bound approach) has been late in coming to German studies, interdisciplinary scholars such as Pamela Painter and Celia Applegate are working to fill gaps in musical-historical understanding; Wipplinger’s project adds the much-needed perspective of race in German–American jazz encounters.
The Jazz Republic examines jazz music and the jazz artists who shaped Germany's exposure to this African American art form from 1919 through 1933. Jonathan O. Wipplinger explores the history of jazz in Germany as well as the roles that music, race (especially Blackness), and America played in German culture and follows the debate over jazz through the fourteen years of Germany's first democracy. He explores visiting jazz musicians including the African American Sam Wooding and the white American Paul Whiteman and how their performances were received by German critics and artists. The Jazz Republic also engages with the meaning of jazz in debates over changing gender norms and jazz's status between paradigms of high and low culture. By looking at German translations of Langston Hughes's poetry, as well as Theodor W. Adorno's controversial rejection of jazz in light of racial persecution, Wipplinger examines how jazz came to be part of German cultural production more broadly in both the US and Germany, in the early 1930s. Using a wide array of sources from newspapers, modernist and popular journals, as well as items from the music press, this work intervenes in the debate over the German encounter with jazz by arguing that the music was no mere "symbol" of Weimar's modernism and modernity. Rather than reflecting intra-German and/or European debates, it suggests that jazz and its practitioners, African American, white American, Afro-European, German and otherwise, shaped Weimar culture in a central way.
Bourgeois Musical Culture in Germany: A Critical Social History
1969
David Gramit has written a well-researched and highly informative study exposing the ideological assumptions of German musical culture during the early nineteenth century. The importance of the book lies primarily in its examination of the “place” of nineteenthcentury German music in current scholarship. It uncovers the values that contributed to forming the idea of “high” art music which not only remained unchallenged at the center of the musicological canon well through the twentieth century, but also represents that which many consider to be “classical music” or “art music” today. Notions such as universal appeal and the autonomy of instrumental music, the essential role of music as part of Bildung, and the perceived superiority of German music are carefully examined and viewed critically from a new perspective. Although the re-evaluation of the musicological canon and traditional musicological methodology has featured prominently in scholarship during the past two decades, Grami...