Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture PDF
Preview Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture
SOUNDMATTERS S M OUND ATTERS Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture Y Edited by Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick h h B Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD Published in 2004 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2004 Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick First paperback printed in 2005 Reprinted in 2006 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sound matters : essays on the acoustics of modern German culture / edited by Nora M. Alter & Lutz Koepnick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-436-1 (alk. paper) 1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Sound. 3. Music—Social aspects—Germany. 4. Music—Acoustics and physics. I. Alter, Nora M., date–. II. Koepnick, Lutz P. (Lutz Peter) ML3845.S6835 2004 780'.943—dc22 2003063625 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper 1-57181-437-X paperback CONTENTS Y Acknowledgments vii Introduction:Sound Matters 1 Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick Part I: Sound Nation? 1. Hegemony through Harmony: German Identity, Music, and Enlightenment around 1800 33 Nicholas Vazsonyi 2. Mahler contra Wagner: The Third Symphonyand the Political Legacy of Romanticism 49 Carl Niekerk 3. Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an Acoustic Experience 65 Frank Trommler Part II: Dissonant Visions 4. The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe 79 Nora M. Alter 5. Sound Money: Aural Strategies in Rolf Thiele’s The Girl Rosemarie 91 Hester Baer 6. The Castrato’s Voices: Word and Flesh in Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons 104 Brigitte Peucker v vi Contents Part III: Sounds of Silence 7. Benjamin’s Silence 117 Lutz Koepnick 8. Deafening Sound and Troubling Silence in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel 130 Elizabeth C. Hamilton 9. Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann 142 Christopher Jones Part IV: Translating Sound 10. Broadcasting Wagner: Transmission, Dissemination, Translation 155 Thomas F. Cohen 11. Sounds Familiar? Nina Simone’s Performances of Brecht/Weill Songs 171 Russell A. Berman 12. Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany 183 Richard Langston 13. The Music That Lola Ran To 197 Caryl Flinn Part V: Memory, Music, and the Postmodern 14. “Heiner Müller vertonen”: Heiner Goebbels and the Music of Postmodern Memory 217 David Barnett 15. The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in Stockhausen’s Hymnen 228 Larson Powell Notes on Contributors 242 Index 245 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Y The editors would like to acknowledge the University of Florida Scholar- ship Enhancement Fund, the Graduate School of the University of Florida, and the Graduate School of Washington University in St. Louis for their generosity, which facilitated the research, organization, and edit- ing for this project. In addition, the editors would like to extend their thanks to all of the contributors in this volume, who provided original and exciting texts with which to work. Thanks also go to Alexander Alberro, Keith Bullivant, Gerd Gemün- den, Sander Gilman, Anton Kaes, and Eric Rentschler for their encour- agement and support for this project, and to the anonymous readers at Berghahn Books for their helpful comments on the entire manuscript. We are indebted to Leah Chizek, Gwyneth Cliver, and Patience Gray- bill for their help in editing individual contributions and preparing the manuscript for publication. We would like to express our gratitude to the entire staff at Berghahn Books and in particular to Shawn Kendrick for her careful copyediting and typesetting of the manuscript. Last but not least, thanks go to Marion Berghahn for her support of this project. NORAALTER LUTZKOEPNICK vii INTRODUCTION Sound Matters Y Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick I First published in 1992, Rick Altman’s Sound Theory: Sound Practice and Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde broke new ground in cultural studies.1 Both volumes, by investigating the role of the acoustic across a broad spectrum of genres and media, spearheaded a virtual explosion of work on sound that took place during the second half of the 1990s. Adecade after Alt- man’s and Kahn and Whitehead’s anthologies, sound has come to figure today as a viable space of critical exploration, a productive register of social and cultural analysis in various academic disciplines. One often hears that we live in an age dominated, and even overwhelmed, by the visual image. But we merely need to close our eyes for a moment to real- ize just how much sound matters in late modernity as well—to those involved in scholarly writing as much as to those participating in the arena of cultural production itself. In the area of film and media studies, the examination of sound has become one of the primary fields of interest and analysis. Numerous recent monographs have drawn attention to the manifold ways in which filmic music, noise, and dialogue can shape cinematic meaning and direct the viewer’s perception.2Additionally, sound itself has been thematized in recent years by a number of filmmakers who have sought to increase our awareness of the acoustic dimension of the medium. German director Wim Wenders, for instance, in his 1994 Lisbon Story,centers the entire nar- rative on the efforts of a soundman, Philip Winter, to produce a soundtrack Notes for this section begin on page 27.
The list of books you might like
