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“The Most German of the Arts:”Archives and Networks of Musicology

Camilla Bork João Romão

Kommentar

"To this day, the legend of the Germans as 'the people of music' lives on worldwide." So introduces historian Pamela Potter her book that serves as inspiration for this seminar title, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (1998). Potter shows how musicology as a discipline was strongly linked to nationalism. In particular, Potter focuses on the Nazi networks of musicology and how they remained active after 1945. One example of such continuities is the Department of Musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin, one of the founding departments of the university in 1948, where Adam Adrio (1901-1973), a former member of the Nazi party, headed the institute until his retirement in 1966.

In this seminar, we will use the case of Adam Adrio to reflect on broader aspects of music historiography, including how to critically engage with institutional memory. We will begin by tracing the history of our department by following the historical traces we can find in the basement of our institute's library. We will also reflect on the politics of Adrio's music research, linking it to a Berlin-based network of church music scholars and musicians who were associated with Nazi ideology. We will also visit other archives and collections, such as the music collection of the Akademie der Künste or the sound archives of the Phonogrammarchiv at the Humboldt-Forum, where we will work with selected materials. Through this hands-on approach to music history, you will be invited to reflect on the politics of specific collecting strategies and classification systems, as well as the role of archives as spaces for systematizing knowledge about music and sound. More broadly, we will consider questions such as how to write a music history that is self-critical, acknowledging that the formation of specific musical canons and discourses about them is the result of ideology. We will also reflect on how to write music history in times of globalization, migration, and political upheaval. Schließen