Abstracts

Abstracts in alphabetical order by last name, subject to change

Phil Bohlman, Chicago/Hannover
Vergessen und Vergessen und Vergessen – Counterhistories of Memory and Loss, East and West 

The counterpoint of enjoinders to forget and not to forget frames the historical longue durée of East and West narrated by twentieth-century song in Berlin. The workers returning to Berlin to claim a utopian “world that belonged to them” in the concluding scene of the 1932 film, Kuhle Wampe, together sing “Vorwärts, und nicht Vergessen,” in Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht’s “Solidarity Song.” Sixty years later, the Cold War Berlin collapses into dystopia in the final act of Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s 1989/1990 radio play, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, as the hip-hop band, We Wear the Crown, intones, “Vergessen und Vergessen und Vergessen.” If music historiography employs many different approaches and methods to return to the past through memory and remembrance, I turn to the ways in which forgetting contradicts, inverts, and even erases the contested worlds of utopian and dystopian pasts in East and West Berlin. My focus will be on the ways in which musical genre and practice were dislodged from history in the West (for example, folk song and folk music in the West, which many believed sustained the destructive force of nationalism). In the East, forgetting generated narratives of victimhood in the past (for example, the claim that the silencing of Jewish music and Jewish communities was the responsibility of a past Germany). The case studies upon which I build this keynote will largely come from the many decades of my own research on Jewish music and Jewish history in Central Europe broadly and in both Berlins specifically. My approaches will be historical and ethnographic, with analytical readings of archival and recorded collections, among them Wolfgang Steinitz’s canonic folk song volumes, the search for East and West in Yiddish folk song, and the modern chronicle of forgetting, Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

Francesca Cassio, Hofstra University New York
The Dhrupad Collections at the Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin: an Archive Bridging Past and Present, East and West 

In this paper, the presenter examines the Dhrupad collections preserved at the Media Department of the Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin (EMB), introducing the recent acquisition of ancient manuscripts belonging to one of the oldest families of hereditary musicians from India. Practiced in devotional and secular contexts, dhrupad is a pre-colonial genre of South Asian music that laid the ground for the modern Indian system. Dhrupad became obsolete in the 19th century and remained in practice only among a few families of hereditary musicians, until the French musicologist Alain Daniélou revived the genre through a series of concerts and recordings held in (West) Berlin in the 1960’s. These events and materials gave the start to the International Institute of Traditional Music (IITM), making Berlin an important site in Europe for the history and dissemination of dhrupad. More recently, other prestigious collections of dhrupad recordings and manuscripts were added to the body of Danielou’s archival materials, through donations by two well-known Western dhrupad musicians, Peter Pannke and Amelia Cuni. In 2023, the EMB acquired over twenty musical diaries from a renowned family of dhrupad musicians dating to the 18th century.  Aware of the perishable condition of these materials, the last artist who inherited them wished to donate his ancestors’ diaries to an international institution that could preserve, digitize, and make them available to scholars and practitioners. With these four dhrupad collections, the EMB hosts today the only archive with original documentation of dhrupad traditions across centuries and South Asia. The Dhrupad archive at the EMB re-creates in fact a complete system, which not only contributes to remap the history of dhrupad in India and the West, but also serves South Asian diasporas in Europe reconnecting them with the musical culture of origin. 

Linda Cimardi, Universität Halle
The IICMSD and live music from Asia in West Berlin: international networks, cosmopolitan aspirations and Cold War intersections

The two institutes established, and initially led, by French musicologist Alain Daniélou in Berlin (IICMSD: 1963) and in Venice (IISMC: 1967) collaborated closely from the 1960s till the 1980s, before the restructuring of the Berlin institute that became IITM. Their various activities embraced research and documentation of non-European musics in the field, publications of volumes as well as of the journal the World of Music, record releases, organization of conferences, coordination of a festival association, and concert planning. While Berlin was the center where most publications and record releases were planned and prepared, Venice was the operational pole for organizing concerts, festivals, and conferences. However, since its first years of activity, the IICMSD also hosted conferences and concerts and later facilitated the performances of artists and troupes from Asia in Berlin, who toured Europe thanks to the festival network established by the GIICSC (Groupe Interculturel d’Information et Coordination pour les Spectacles et les Concerts), an association of festival directors based at the Venice institute.

Focusing on the period 1963-1976, this paper looks at the concerts organized by the IICMSD at its headquarters and the shows hosted by festivals in Berlin for which the IICMSD acted as a mediator. Through extensive archival research in Berlin and Venice as well as interviews, the live music events facilitated by the IICMSD in Berlin are analytically presented and discussed in their role in showing the cosmopolitan orientation of the institute during the Cold War and displaying a peculiar aesthetic vision of world music.

Christina Dörfling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Tape Culture and Popular Music Studies (East). Collecting practices and DIY-archiving at HU Berlin  

In 1981 the Research Center for Popular Music (Forschungszentrum populäre Musik) was founded at the Humboldt University Berlin and thus gave popular music studies an institutional framework for the first time in Germany. Discursively, this was preceded by a specific understanding of "bourgeois" music research, as had been established at the institute since 1959 under the direction of Georg Knepler. In addition, as early as the 1970s, a sub-collection of popular music from non-socialist countries was established and gradually expanded. This collection consisted largely of DIY tape recordings, which were systematically incorporated into the institute's own phonotheque. Among other things, the collecting practice was characterized by the transfer of private music sourcing strategies and distribution mechanisms into a university context, as well as, for example, technical equipment with high-quality tape recorders.

Drawing upon archival findings and oral history interviews, the talk traces the (collection)history of Western rock and pop music at HU Berlin and puts it in dialog with the structure and agenda of the Research Center for Popular Music in the 1980s. In discussing the question of how private collecting strategies and practices significantly shaped popular music studies in East Berlin, particular attention is paid to the role of tape culture in its epistemic entanglements, which can be identified and described here.

Kanav Gupta, King’s College London
The Dāgar-Daniélou Files: Examining the tedium of Hindustani music’s “global cultural flows”, c.1965–c.1980         

Alain Daniélou and Nasir Aminuddin Dagar (of the Senior-Dagar brothers fame) exchanged numerous letters between c.1965–c.1979. Several Indian classical musicians corresponded regularly with Daniélou, then at the helm of the institutes in Berlin and Venice. Presently the letters are housed at the Alain Daniélou Archives, Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The access to institutional support in Europe and his position as a trusted consultant-expert on global cultural projects reinforced Daniélou’s renown as a connoisseur/historian of music in India. He came to be considered as an important intercessor between India and the West, particularly among musicians seeking global renown in the wake of Ravi Shankar's international career. Given its policy of political “non-alignment” during the cold war, the relevance of India’s cultural forms as a point of international contact had grown. Unsurprisingly, the leitmotif of the Dagar-Daniélou letters remains the organisation of concerts tours in Europe. However, considerable cultural nuance percolated the epistolary surface, ensuring that these letters have aged into richly-layered cultural documents that illuminate, among other things, the unseemly outlines of the grand project of Hindustani music’s internationalisation. Besides revealing the red-tape informing international tours, these letters also contain traces of the fraught international relations of the time. In one remarkable letter, for example, Dagar instructed Daniélou to exclude from his itinerary countries on unfriendly terms with India. A firm believer in his music as an emblem and instrument of peace, he refused, with uncharacteristic forthrightness in another letter, to perform in Israel because of the conflict in that region.

The Dagar-Daniélou letters challenge Appadurai’s benevolent metaphor of “flow” (1990), through which he ascribed, perhaps inadvertently, a universality to culture, and its ability – even inevitability – to transcend terrestrial borders. The letters also challenge the idea of “cultural flows”, testing it against the specific historical moment of the cold war, as well against as the tedium of logistical processes marked by delays, cancellations and postponements, that undergird the internationalisation of Hindustani music in Europe. 

Dennis Hopp, Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
“Changing the System”:  Das Metamusik-Festival 1974 in Berlin

Vom 27. September bis zum 20. Oktober 1974 waren die Nationalgalerie und die benachbarte Matthäuskirche in Berlin-West Schauplatz des Metamusik-Festivals 1. Veranstaltet wurde die Konzertreihe von den Berliner Festspielen und dem Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. Programmleiter Walter Bachauer zufolge sollte das Festival “Querlinien über der Weltmusik” aufzeigen. So traten im Rahmen der Konzerte sowohl zeitgenössische Komponisten und Musikformationen aus Europa und den USA wie auch Musiker aus verschiedenen Ländern Asiens auf. Das Interesse von Seiten des Publikums und der Medien an den Veranstaltungen war groß. Zudem gingen vom Metamusik-Festival 1 wichtige Impulse, nicht zuletzt auch für die beiden folgenden Ausgaben des Events in den Jahren 1976 und 1978 aus.

Ziel des Referats ist, anhand von ausgewählten Bild- und Klangbeispielen des Metamusik-Festivals 1 von 1974 die Vielfalt der dargebotenen Musik vorzustellen. Darüber hinaus soll unter anderem der im Titel der Konzertreihe enthaltene und nicht eindeutig anmutende “Meta”-Begriff vor dem Hintergrund der von Walter Bachauer zum Ausdruck gebrachten Philosophie der verbindenden “Querlinien” näher beleuchtet werden. Des Weiteren werden Rezeption und Wirkung des Festivals erörtert.

Sydney Hutchinson, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Cooperating over the Wall: Kurt Reinhard, Erich Stockmann, and the Berlin Phonogram Archive in the Cold War 

The erection of the Berlin Wall in November of 1961 gave the separation between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and particularly between the two Germanies, an enduring symbol. It also concretized the division of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which had been separated by the Second World War, in a seemingly insurmountable way. But while the Wall made cross-border academic collaborations considerably more difficult, it did not prevent them entirely. This paper relies on underresearched primary sources to relate and contextualize the extraordinary story of how two ethnomusicologists were able to bring together a large part of the cylinder collections of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, even as the geopolitical situation surrounding them grew ever more tense. From 1966-67, Kurt Reinhard, then head of the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the Ethnomusicology Department of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin, and Erich Stockmann, an academic employee of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and caretaker of the archival recordings returned by the Soviets, succeeded in exchanging and copying over 5000 cylinder recordings and their documentation in spite of a litany of political and financial difficulties. Their collaboration illuminates a little-known aspect of the history of this foundational archive, while raising important questions about ethnomusicology’s own political history and the roles the Cold War played in the discipline’s formation. 

Dorit M. Klebe
Three Choirs founded 1973 in East/West Berlin which performed in West- and East Berlin (1973–1981) 

After the end of WWII, two German states FRG and GDR were founded in 1949 which followed in part different musical-cultural trajectories. Some of the choir associations that were founded before WWII or 1933 tried to continue their work in the Federal Republic of Germany. A revival of, for example, workers' choirs and a corresponding umbrella organization was no longer possible in both German states due to cultural change. Initially, choirs in the Federal Republic of Germany typically maintained contact with choirs in the GDR, an exchange which ebbed away after 1956.

In 1973 three new choirs were founded in East/West Berlin, some of which saw themselves in the tradition of the workers' singers movement; two of them still exist today. (1) The Veteran Choir “Ernst-Busch” (VEB). (2) The Hanns-Eisler-Choir Berlin (H-E-CB). 3) The Turkish Workers' Choir West Berlin – Batıberlin İşçi Korosu (BİK) being the first workers' choir founded outside Turkey.

In my paper, I briefly introduce the three choirs covering in particular the period between 1975–1981. As a researcher in Urban Ethnomusicology and as a contemporary witness, I attended individual or joint performances by them in East and West Berlin, such as a 1975 concert by BİK as part of “25 Years of Berliner Festwochen” at the Bethanienhaus in Berlin-Kreuzberg or the 1977 concert of BİK and H-E-CB in the Audimax of the Technical University (TU) in Berlin and 11th Festival of Political Song, East Berlin in 1981 with the VE-B and BİK.

Musical genres and repertoire formations are determined for each of the three choirs. A characteristic musical example is analyzed per choir with regard to its formal song text structure, musical settings, its metro-rhythmic basic principles, melodic-harmonic basic formulas.

Harm Langenkamp, Amsterdam University of the Arts
Whose Island of Freedom? Conception and Reception of the Ford Foundation’s Investments in West-Berlin’s Musico-Cultural Infrastructure, 1961-1966

Just weeks after Berliners had woken up to the sight of a wall dividing their city, Joseph Slater, Assistant Secretary of State in the then-recently installed Kennedy administration, advised both his superiors and his former employer, Shepard Stone at the Ford Foundation, to administer a multi-million dollar injection into programs aimed at fostering US-German exchange and strengthening West-Berlin’s educational, scientific, and cultural infrastructure. In the months thereafter, plans for these investments were elaborated by Willy Brandt’s cultural advisor, Nicolas Nabokov, who saw his chance to realize a permanent institutional basis for the cosmopolitan network of music professionals he had been building in his former capacity as secretary-general of the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Drawing from the archives of a wide range of state, private, and semi-private actors (the Ford Foundation in particular), this paper will first detail how private and state interests on both sides of the Atlantic converged into the creation of the Artists-in-Residence Program and the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation (two key initiatives in Nabokov’s plans), and then show how, as time progressed, the cosmopolitan agenda underlying these initiatives ran increasingly into conflict with local interests, leading some critics to wonder to whom the “island of freedom” actually belonged. Notwithstanding this criticism, almost 65 years after their conception, these fruits from the Cold War competition stand as the gateways to a global stage that until then had been mostly reserved for artists from the former colonizing powers.

Thomas MacMillan, Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung
The Rise and Fall of Popular Music in the Berliner Philharmonie between 1963-1990 

Of all performance spaces, the classical concert hall comes with particular prestige. However, as the data collected from the Staatliche Institut für Musikforschung’s “Archive of Concert Life” reveals (specifically, the Berlin concert guide series Führer durch die Konzertsäle Berlins), it is not only classical ensembles and orchestras that perform in such places. For example, alongside its typical programming, the Berliner Philharmonie has regularly hosted a wide range of non-classical musical acts: these include jazz legends such as Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald; annual flamenco guitar festivals; Indian classical music; and even Schlager singers such as Udo Jürgens and Freddy Quinn.

Why is concert programming in such formal spaces limited to certain genres and not others? And what does concert programme curation tell us about socio-cultural attitudes more broadly? This paper presents data charting the rise and subsequent decline of popular music at the Philharmonie, while attempting to answer such questions.

Nazan Maksudyan, Centre Marc Bloch Berlin
Decolonization of Migration in Divided Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Artistic Representations of Migrant Subjectivities in the 1970s

While the global wave of decolonization and post-colonial critique in the 1960s and 70s exploded the critical engagement of western European societies with their colonial and imperial past (Hamon & Rotman 1987, 1988), it also had a direct impact on the critical apprehension of migration (Gezen 2019; Alkan & Maksudyan 2023). The social and economic plight of migrant communities in European metropoles were interpreted under this light as an extension of a longer history of colonialism. Decolonized problematization of migration also resonated in the realm of art and cultural production. This was both through the anti-colonial engagement of intellectuals with New Left sensibilities in the “host countries”, but more importantly through the creation of artistic support programs to invite and involve artists from “migrant sending countries”. Berliner Künstlerprogramm’s invitations after 1973 to artists from the top five migrant sending countries, such as Turkey, Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia to come to West Berlin, delineates an interesting pattern. Focusing specifically on the residencies of Füruzan (1975-76, literature), Vlassis Caniaris (1973-76, visual arts), and “Videobase” - with Anna Lajolo, Guido Lombardi, Alfredo Leonardi (1975, video arts), the paper will discuss the production of aestheticized forms and cultural practices that renegotiated, challenged, and disrupted the top down representations and imaginations of migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. I argue that native artists were invited to find new ways of representing their country and compatriots in “another light”, as well as to be instrumental in building ties with the migrant communities, potentially facilitating their better integration into the society. The initiatives of these invited artists to build further networks with artists and intellectuals in East Berlin underline their further mediating role in the attempt to shorten the distance between two Berlins. On another level, the similarities in the thematic and methodological approach of the works of "Videobase," Caniaris, and Füruzan, invite us to think further about the entangled and dialogical nature of artistic production in Berlin in the 1970s. 

Christian Sibille, ETH Zürich

Music in a changing world. Perspectives on the institutional networks of the International Music Council during the Cold War

Since its foundation, the International Music Council (IMC) has been integrated into a network of international organizations, national committees, individuals and thematically similar initiatives. The lecture attempts to analyze the IICMSD as part of this network and argues that the diversity of stakeholders operating in the context of the IMC helped to open up pluralistic spheres of action in the political landscape of the Cold War.

Shin-Hyang Yun, Berlin
Berliner Schaffensorte des Exilkomponisten Isang Yun und Ethnografie einer unsichtbaren Mauer 

Zu den repräsentativen Musikerpersönlichkeiten für die Grenzfigur im geteilten Berlin kann der Exilkomponist Isang Yun aus dem geteilten Korea gezählt werden. Anhand einiger seiner Schaffens- bzw. Wirkungsorte untersucht dieser Beitrag die Ethnografie einer ‚unsichtbaren Mauer‘ hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang. Nimmt man die Biografie von Yun in den Blick, so fällt auf, dass Yun im Jahr 1963 - im Gründungsjahr des IITM in West-Berlin - über Ost-Berlin Pyeongyang besuchte. Dass Yun aufgrund dieser Nordkorea-Reise in die Ost-Berliner Affäre (1967) involviert war, ist im Öffentlichen wie in der Yun-Forschung bekannt. Besonders kennzeichnend ist es, dass Yun im Jahr 1964 auf Einladung der Ford Foundation zur Composer Residency von Freiburg über Köln nach Berlin zurückkehrte und sein erstes Musiktheater Traum des Liu Tung (1965) von diesem Programm unterstützt wurde.

Mein Beitrag geht zunächst auf den Einbürgerungsprozess Yuns in die Wahlheimat Berlin und seine Schaffens- bzw. Wirkungsorte nach der Freilassung vom Seouler Gefängnis (1967-1969) ein. Im Mittelpunkt des Beitrages stehen die Entstehungsgeschichte der Musiktheaterwerke und sein wichtiger Schaffensort Kladower Wohnhaus, in das er im Jahr 1973 nach der Uraufführung des letzten Musiktheaters Sim-Tjeong (1972) einzog. Neben den Konzertprogrammen der Berliner Festspiele und Philharmonie in West-Berlin gibt der Beitrag auch ein Einblick in die Reihe Kammermusik im Gespräch (1966-1988) der Komischen Oper in Ost-Berlin, in der die Kammerwerke von Yun aufgeführt wurden (Interview mit S. Matthus, Juli 2016). Schließlich möchte der Beitrag über die Ethnografie einer ‚unsichtbaren Mauer‘ (Shin-Hyang Yun: Kultur Korea, 2018, 67) im geteilten Berlin jener Zeit diskutieren.

Susanne Ziegler, Berlin
Ethnomusicology in Berlin around 1989 – Meeting Point of East and West  

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 led to more cooperation between and better understanding of ethnomusicologists from the Eastern as well as the Western world. Around 1989, Berlin became an important international meeting point which was made possible through the efforts of the different ethnomusicological institutions in the Eastern and Western part of the city.

After the end of WWII one ethnomusicological centre had developed in East Berlin at Humboldt University and the German Academy of Sciences, another one in West Berlin with the Institute for Comparative Ethnomusicology of the Free University, the Phonogramm-Archiv/Ethnomusicological Department at the in the Ethnological Museum and the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation (IICMSD). The presentation discusses these institutions, their activities and relationships before and after 1989.