Theme

Cosmopolitan, International, Global: Music, Archives and Politics in East and West Berlin since 1963

As a city divided between two systems and spheres of cultural influence, Berlin played a special role in the Cold War. How did music researchers, music archives and other institutions in Berlin understand their roles in the struggle between global superpowers as it played out on their doorsteps? How are ethnomusicological institutions, such as the International Institute for Traditional Music (IITM), linked with cultural politics, on the one hand, and music programming (festivals, concerts etc.) in Berlin on the other?

After the Wall was built, the question of the international integration of the competing German states became more acute. A cultural-political competition for dominance in international music studies emerged, which was reflected both institutionally and discursively. On the Western side, state-funded institutions such as the IITM and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Artists-in-Residence Program emerged in this field of tension to support traditional and non-Western music and its study, while in the East, ethnomusicological research took place under the auspices of institutions like Humboldt University and the German Academy of Sciences.

The conference 

The conference explores several aspects of cultural politics in the divided city of Berlin. It considers factors which influenced the research paradigms, methods, fieldwork geographies and discourses of ethnomusicology in both East and West Berlin, how formal and informal collaborations came about, and how the interface to music-making and concert programming (world music, international political and protest song, contemporary music) functioned. It looks at how researchers in East Berlin exchanged with colleagues from the West through common publications and international research organizations (International Folk Music Council, UNESCO, IMC, etc), as well as how the Cold War divided research infrastructures and collections such as the Phonogramm-Archiv and Lautarchiv, creating complications for the continuation of the comparative music research (Vergleichende Musikforschung) agenda which had formed those collections in the early 20th century. It also pays special attention to the IITM, which operated in West Berlin from 1963 to 1994 in a cultural-policy environment strongly marked by the East-West conflict.

The IITM is significant for its role in Cold War cultural politics as well as for the history of ethnomusicology in Berlin. It was founded in West Berlin in 1963 by the French Indologist, music researcher and composer Alain Danielou (1907-1994) using funds from the Ford Foundation possibly provided by the CIA (L.Cimardi). Following on the heels of the Berlin Wall’s construction (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the IITM’s founding coincided with a peak of the Cold War conflict, while its closure in 1994 has sometimes been linked to the political context of German reunification. Today, the IITM’s holdings belong to the Media Department of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst; since 2021, they have been stored in part in the Humboldt Forum.

Cosmopolitan, International, Global

This conference aims to provide new perspectives on music, cultural policy, and the IITM (and other Berlin institutions) by integrating fields that have more typically been studied separately and by illuminating political, disciplinary and personal entanglements that have been widely overlooked. The IITM's work will not only be seen in the context of ethnomusicology and activities in West Berlin. Instead, the conference tries to broaden the scope and also look at other fields such as contemporary music and to seriously consider music programming in East Berlin. In the past, concentration on one side of the Wall has too often caused interactions, parallels and divergent developments to be overlooked.

The conference subtitle emphasizes this attempt to bridge the gap by evoking the differing political orientations: cosmopolitanism ranked high in the West, but was banned in the East, which instead upheld the banner of internationalism. While cosmopolitanism emphasized similarities of taste and experience between urban intellectual and cultural elites globally, internationalism implied the solidarity of the working class and of all progressive forces around the world, although mobility and travel were heavily restricted. Global indicates processes that exceeded these classifications and formed a shared, yet distinct reality for researchers and practitioners in the East and West.

Just as the subtitle mentions three orientations without attempting to fuse them, so too does the conference avoid offering a single coherent perspective. Instead, it invites participants to experiment with new approaches and more holistic perspectives – as well as to consider aspects and fragments that do not yet add up to a bigger picture. The Berlin meeting is a follow-up to a symposium held in 2019 in Venice, where in 1969 Daniélou founded an institution similar to the IITM. Like the earlier symposium, the current conference experiments with a slightly unusual format: In addition to regular academic sessions, we also include a concert and public roundtables with eye witnesses (Zeitzeugen) who participated in the events first hand. The conference also includes several workshops for interested Ph.D. and master students to engage in their own research on related topics, as well as for more advanced researchers to engage with new topics, materials, and methods.