Music, Longing and Belonging : Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm [1 ed.] 9781443869492, 9781443848305

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Music, Longing and Belonging

Music, Longing and Belonging: Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm

Edited by

Magdalena Waligórska

Music, Longing and Belonging: Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm, Edited by Magdalena Waligórska This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Magdalena Waligórska and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4830-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4830-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii List of Tables .............................................................................................. ix Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Music and the Boundaries of (Non)Belonging Magdalena Waligórska Part One: Performing the Self, Performing the Other Chapter One ............................................................................................... 12 Sing With Us, Spend Like Us! Images of Consumption in East European Musical Films during the Cold War War Oksana Sarkisova Chapter Two....................................................................................................... 28 Performing Cosmopolitanism: Gogol Bordello and the Global Underdogs Ana Sobral Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 48 The North as the Self and the Other: Scandinavian Composers’ Symphonies in German Concert Halls around 1900 Katharine Leiska Part Two: Music and Transnational Identities Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 64 Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and the Aesthetics of Pan-Africanism Mario Dunkel

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Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 82 The Mediterranean Style: From Pan-Semitism to Israeli Nationalism Tal Soker Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 94 “Between the Jigs and the Reels (in Cyberspace)”: Investigating an Irish Traditional Music Online Community Ailbhe Kenny Part Three: Music, Diaspora and Displacement Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 114 Opera as Social Agent: Fostering Italian Identity at the Metropolitan Opera House During the Early Years of Giulio Gatti-Casazza’s Management (1908-1910) Davide Ceriani Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 135 Manuel M. Ponce’s canciones in New York: Mexican Musical Identity and the Mexico Vogue Christina Taylor Gibson Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 157 Longing for Belonging in Forced Migration: Musical Recollections of Germans from the Bohemian Lands Ulrike Präger Part Four: Music and Gendered Identity Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 176 “Ya l’babour, ya mon amour”: Raï, Rap and the Desire to Escape Heidrun Friese Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 202 “As It Echoes South and North”: Girls and Boys Singing Identity into the National Landscape Josephine Hoegaerts About the Authors ................................................................................... 222

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 3-1: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 1st movement bars 1–4 ................... 54 Figure 3-2: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 1st movement, bars 59–62 .............. 55 Figure 3-3: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 2nd movement, bars 53–67 ............ 56 Figure 6-1: The OAIM logo ....................................................................................... 100 Figure 6-2: An OAIM Facebook post ........................................................................ 101 Figure 6-3: Screenshot of the OAIM cybersession .................................................... 102 Figure 8-1: M. Ponce “Estrellita” ............................................................................... 137 Figure 8-2: The principal melody to the canción “Me he de comer un durazno” ................................................................. 139 Figure 8-3: Balada Mexicana (Opening) ................................................................... 139 Figure 8-4: Photograph of Mojica, 1929 .................................................................... 143 Figure 9-1: Christine Rösch at the Sudeten-German meeting, 2011 .......................... 158

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List of Illustrations

Figure 9-2: Folksong “Blüh nur, blüh mein Sommerkorn” ................................. 160 Figure 9-3: Sudeten Germans living in Czechoslovakia in 1930. ....................... 162 Figure 9-4: Music notated from memory by Karl Kugler Sen. for the first rehearsals of expelled Sudeten Germans in Geretsried ...... 165 Figure 9-5: Performance of the “Geschwister Gromes” in 1949 ......................... 166 Figure 9-6: Performance of the Adalbert-Stifter Gruppe in 1956. ...................... 166 Figure 9-7: Justine Schüssel (born in 1922), 19th July 2010................................ 167

LIST OF TABLES

Table 7-1 Italian Immigration to the United States, 1861-1920............................... 134 Table 7-2 Italians Living in New York City, 1860-1920 ......................................... 134 Table 10-1 Interactive Translations/Annotation Table .............................................. 197

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea for this collection of essays was born during the conference “Music and Imagined Communities”, which took place in 2011 at the European University Institute in Florence. The symposium was part of a research project entitled “Europe and Beyond: Transfers, Networks and Markets for Musical Theatre in Modern Europe”, which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the European University Institute, and coordinated by Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Philipp Ther. The book could not have been published without the generous support of the European University Institute in Florence. The authors are also indebted to copyeditor James Ari Liebkowsky for his thorough and dedicated work as well as to Rachel Harland for proofreading parts of the manuscript and Bernd Fiedler for his help in the editing process. The editor also wishes to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for facilitating her research stay in Germany, during which time the work on this volume was completed.

INTRODUCTION MUSIC AND THE BOUNDARIES OF (NON)BELONGING MAGDALENA WALIGÓRSKA

In Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1978), the British playwright pushes the boundaries of genre to make a poignant commentary about music and identity. Combining Theatre of the Absurd with symphonic music (performed live by a full, on-stage orchestra), Stoppard’s play suggests that music can both mirror the complexities of our inner selves and provoke alienation. Set in a Soviet psychiatric hospital and featuring two cellmates—a political dissident on a hunger strike and a mental patient under the delusion that he is conducting an orchestra—the play portrays collective musical practices as unable to imbue the members of a society undergoing atomisation with a lasting sense of social belonging. Even if Stoppard, in the words of one of his protagonists, proclaims that “we all have some musician in us” (Stoppard 1978, 17), music in his vision of the world fails as social glue. Yet music is perhaps the medium most commonly instrumentalised in the service of the grand narratives that underpin collective identities. However, its ability to evoke human emotion is a double-edged sword. Musical experience can promote a sense of belonging and reinforce boundaries between social groups. It can also feed disaffection and create spaces of alterity. With contributions from musicologists, ethnomusicologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary scholars, this book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on how different modes of musical sociability—from opera performances to collective singing and Internet fan communities—inspire “imagined communities” (Anderson 2006) that not only transcend national borders, but also challenge the boundaries between the collective self and the Other. While the relationship between music and nationhood has been widely researched, few comparative and transnational studies on music and

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Introduction

identity exist.1 This collection of essays addresses this gap by exploring forms of musical belonging not bound by national identity. Music is shown to be a unique medium of desire, providing audiences with opportunities for manifold, fluid self-expression through the art of others. A second main focus is the negotiation of musical identity in the context of appropriation and displacement. A key argument emerging from the collection as a whole is that the medium not only channels an experience of belonging during social and political upheaval, but can also induce its opposite—non-belonging, detachment and dissent. Although the relationship between music and identity-building has occupied generations of scholars, musicologists and sociologists are by no means agreed on how, if at all, music affects collective identity. Structuralist sociologists, for example, believed that artistic forms such as music were ritualized manners in the expression of group identities, and that preferences for a certain kind of music reflected ethnic background. Constructivists later reinterpreted this link between music and identity, with Bourdieu and de Certeau defining social performance as a practice in which meanings are generated and negotiated, and this analytical framework was widely adopted within musicology. No longer understood as an automatic reflection of the innermost self, music has been ascribed a role in the very shaping of the self. Musicologist Martin Stokes has posited that music plays this role in identity building by providing the “means by which people recognize identities and places, and the boundaries that separate them” (Stokes 1994, 5). By stimulating collective memories and delimiting symbolic spaces, music “offers a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective” (Frith 2004, 109-110). We can therefore conceive of music both as a sort of semiotic system that allows us to communicate our group affiliation to others and as a space within which this very affiliation can be created. Simon Frith notes that music “constructs our sense of identity through the direct experiences it offers the body, time and sociability, experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginary cultural narratives” (Frith 1996, 124). The fact that musical experience both encodes these “imaginary cultural narratives” and provides us with opportunities to perform our social identities in public renders music a particularly powerful medium of identity negotiation, such that, according to Stokes, “[t]he musical event ... evokes and organizes collective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and 1

Notable exceptions include Stokes (1994); Bohlman (2004); Berger and Del Negro (2004); Frith (2004); Bohlman (2008).

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simplicity unmatched by any other social activity” (Stokes 1994, 3, italics mine). The role of music in maintaining group boundaries lies also in the fact that it offers, as ethnomusicologist Philip V. Bohlman has put it, a “symbolic system to convey the exotic and the other” (Bohlman 2000, 189). Music “magnifies otherness” (ibid.) allowing us to either define our collective identity in opposition to the feared and despised Other or build the soundscape of our unity around positively regarded external models. The roles played by music of the Other as a catalyst in the process of self-definition are shown to be complex and manifold in the following essays. Ana Sobral analyses the figure of “the Gypsy” in the music of Gogol Bordello, which becomes a surface onto which contemporary urban audiences can project their own visions of subversive cosmopolitan counterculture. Katharine Leiska’s essay on the North as topos in German symphonic music shows that fascination with the Other in music can in fact marginalise the actual music of the Other. The role of the “imagined community of the North” in Germany’s early twentieth century narrative of their own cultural superiority left no room for actual Scandinavian symphonic music itself. In Mario Dunkel’s investigation of early jazz, the perception of “Otherness” in music is shown to be fluid and subject to constant negotiation. Today’s musical Other may well prove to be tomorrow’s mainstream. Regardless of whether we understand music as reflecting our inner selves or in fact shaping it, transcultural music experience, in which one group appropriates the music of the other, poses a serious challenge to both the structuralist and constructivist models of the relationship between music and identity. The structuralist approach fails to explain which identity, if any, is expressed when members of one group perform the music of another. Following the constructivist model, on the other hand, every instance of musical appropriation would necessarily lead to bonding with the outgroup whose music we borrow and whose “imaginary cultural narrative” (Frith 1996, 124) we immerse ourselves in. British sociomusicologist Simon Frith has countered these conceptual problems by suggesting that music can also generate non-identity, especially given the fact that one of the conditions of identification via music was the “experience of music as something which can be possessed” (Frith 2004, 41). But what happens when music cannot be truly “possessed” because it belongs to someone else? Eric Lott addresses this question in his study of blackface minstrel shows in the United States, finding that cross-racial impersonation was a site of very complex ethnic and class identification processes. He suggests that blackface shows

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Introduction

performed by white actors, including by Irish immigrants, were a means of “displaced immigrant self-expression”. Blending cultural elements originating both from the black community and other ethnic groups, the minstrel show was a genre through which white performers communicated their own values, anxieties and inter-ethnic solidarity or hostility. “The blackface performer”, writes Lott, “is in effect a perfect metaphor for one’s culture’s ventriloquial self-expression through the art forms of someone else’s” (Lott 1993, 92). Impersonating the Other in the musical realm proves a means of indirectly narrating the self, self-representation from behind a mask. The tension between appropriated means of expression and the preexisting identities of the performers/audiences is also the concern of Born and Hesmondhalgh, who propose a model of musically generated identities that is a synthesis of the structuralist and the constructivist approach. They propose that “[s]ociocultural identities are not simply constructed in music”, but that “there are ‘prior’ identities that come to be embodied dynamically in musical cultures, which then also form the reproduction of those identities—no passive processes of reflection” (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2001, 31-2). Born and Hesmondhalgh introduce the idealtypical distinction between uses of music that “prefigure” or “reproduce” already existing socio-cultural identities and “musically imagined communities”, which are forms of barely imaginary identification. Crosscultural music experience belongs in this framework to the realm of “desire” or “fantasy”. Thanks to its hyperconnotative character, with its power to prompt emotional association, imaginary evocation and abstraction, music is a unique vehicle of cross-cultural longing. “Psychic tourism”, fuelled by the exoticism inferred by the music of the Other is one example of this potential (ibid., 32). However, the latter is by no means an unambiguous phenomenon. It may be motivated by curiosity and pleasure-seeking, rather than a wish to partake in the culture of the other. Although Born and Hesmondhalgh do not exclude the possibility of musical tourism ultimately leading to a “real” identification, they do not explain how the tourist can merge with what they call the “ontologically prior” community (ibid., 36). In an analysis of diasporic music, Negus and Roman-Velazquez are even more sceptical of the relationship between musical experience and identity formation. The authors argue that diasporic culture is not simply “carried” from one place to another but created anew in different locations and under new circumstances. Hence, ownership and authorship become complex issues, defying essentialist notions of ethnic music (i.e., as owned by one particular ethnic group). According to the authors, co-construction

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of diasporic music by artists from the outside of the diaspora calls for a “less determinist” approach to music and identity (Negus and RomanVelazquez 2002, 138). This point is underlined by several of the following essays. As Ana Sobral’s essay on “gypsy punk” shows, diasporic music not only undergoes hybridization, as internationally successful bands blend elements of Roma music with other styles, but also risks appropriation as an aural metaphor of the liminal and the subversive in contexts far removed from the music’s community of origin. This kind of instrumentalisation, argues Christina Taylor Gibson, is by no means a solely contemporary phenomenon. Analysing the popularity of Mexican folk music during the 1920s Mexican Vogue, when diasporic Mexican culture enjoyed widespread, mainstream popularity in the USA, she points out that Mexican canciones not only drew popular acclaim, but that outstanding musicians who were not Mexican themselves, such as Jascha Heifetz, began performing the genre. However, the context in which this co-creation of diasporic music by “outsiders” takes place is not always sentimental or nostalgic. As Ulrike Präger and Heidrun Friese demonstrate in their essays, labour and forced migration provide a particularly dynamic setting for musical appropriation. Präger, in her essay on the musical practice of Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945, notes that music which, in the aftermath of forced migration, served as “anthem of imagined belonging”, with time came to be appropriated by the host communities. Documenting the music of migrants from the Maghreb crossing the Mediterranean, Friese likewise shows how musical manifestos of group identity re-used and re-interpreted images of illegal immigration circulating in the European mass media. As both Friese and the essay of Ailbhe Kenny on virtual musical communities illustrate, new technological devices and modes of communication further extend the possibilities of consuming, participating in, and co-creating traditional folk genres. Given the growing impact of hybridisation and the increasingly blurred boundaries of ethnic music, can we risk suggesting that ethnic music’s power to generate a sense of belonging has diminished proportionally? “The labelling of people”, warn Negus and Roman-Velazquez, “is not the same as the creative acts of those people” (ibid., 139). And participation in a collective musical practice does not always have to entail identification. Negus and Roman-Velazquez propose that the act of playing or listening to music might in fact be totally irrelevant to the identity of the participants. “Why should purchasing, listening to, or dancing with the same piece of music imply a profound sense of belonging to and

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Introduction

participation in the creation of a scene, subculture, genre culture, or imagined community?”, the authors ask. Music can also instil “a clear lack of belonging”. As globalization accelerates appropriation and allows multiple interpretations of music, the consumption of music could just as easily generate “disaffiliation, ambivalence, ... [and] disengagement”. In some cases, music can even evoke anomie, a sensation of distance, estrangement and a feeling of not being part of the group who is “into” the music (ibid., 141-142). The category “lack of belonging” coined by Negus and RomanVelazquez begs the question of the degree to which “disaffiliation” and “anomie” are sustainable states. Would failure to fully identify with the music of the Others instead reinforce identification with one’s own group? Präger and Friese answer this question by showing how a perceived “lack of belonging” in a host society triggers the emergence of alternative “musically imagined communities”. Moreover, given the multidimensional character of an individual’s identity (which comprises not only national belonging, but categories like ethnicity, gender and class), can the feeling of detachment be ever complete? In other words, is it not possible that a given genre of music might evoke a sense of lack of belonging on one level (e.g. ethnicity), but at the same time offer channels for identification on other levels (e.g. class)? Kenny’s investigation into virtual platforms for music learning suggests that participants who do not identify with Irish folk music on the level of ethnicity develop other means of connecting to the cyber-community of musicians studied in the essay. In the light of postmodern definitions of identity as fluid and multiple, we may indeed need to allow for more nuanced relationships with music than only complete affiliation or disaffiliation.

Organization of the Book The essays have been organized into four sections. The first section focuses on music as a realm of cultural appropriation. Here, the focus is on the fascination with, and instrumentalisation of, “otherness” in music as a tool of introspection. The second section examines the role of music in the development of supranational and transnational communities. In the third section, the focus is on diaspora and displacement, particularly the role of music in community-building prior to, during and following (forced) migration. Finally, the fourth section looks at music as a medium of negotiating gendered identities. In the book’s opening section, Oksana Sarkisova analyses the resistance to and appropriation of “Western” models of consumer culture

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and popular entertainment in Soviet, Czech, and Hungarian musical films of the Cold War period, highlighting the paradoxical and somewhat selfcontradictory attempts by “Eastern Bloc” music producers to compete with the unparalleled popularity of Western musicals and to exploit the genre as a medium for propaganda. Ana Sobral, in a study of Manhattan punk band Gogol Bordello, also analyses the twentieth century schism between Europe’s “East” and “West” through the prism of the contemporary transnational music scene. Focusing on the figure of Eugene Hütz, the charismatic Ukraine-born leader of Gogol Bordello, and analysing the allusions to Roma culture, migration and displacement in the band’s oeuvre, she examines the appeal of minority/immigrant identities in global musical counterculture. The category of “cosmopolitan hero” that she convincingly proposes in her essay highlights the extent to which the persona of the immigrant musician constructed by bands like Gogol Bordello taps into the expectations, desires and cultural codes of Western audiences, who adopt the music of the Other as a “vehicle of oppositional thinking”. Focusing on Scandinavian symphonic music at the turn of the twentieth century, Katharine Leiska presents another crucial European construct of the Other—that of the North. Teasing out the ambiguities of Scandinavian symphonies portraying a mythical pan-Germanic past and examining the music’s reception in Germany, she traces the emergence of a “Northern Other” that both inspired and challenged the hegemony of the German compositional tradition. The second section investigates the role of music in the formation of supranational identities and musical communities that transcend national borders. Mario Dunkel’s chapter examines pan-African aesthetics across two generations of jazz musicians, using the works of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus as case studies. By comparing the treatment of race relations and African American identity in the works of the two musicians, Dunkel shows how the very different political and social backdrops to the struggle for racial equality during the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent Civil Rights Movement influenced representations of political self-awareness and identity in jazz music. Tal Soker addresses an equally charged political moment, examining the development of “Mediterranean Style” art music by Zionist musicians as part of a wider nation-building process in the years preceding and directly after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Initially embracing “pan-Semitic syncretism”, the musical style was intended to anchor the national identity of the aspirant state in the ancient heritage of the “East”, albeit an “East” as envisaged from the European Orientalist

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Introduction

perspective of immigrant composers. Soker traces the rise and ultimate decline of the musical style against the history of Israel, showing how it transformed in response to the fissures in the imagined collective identity exposed by the granting of official statehood and immigration by nonEuropean Jews. The focus of Ailbhe Kenny’s essay is a contemporary transnational “musically imagined community”, in the form of a commercial e-learning platform that provides online courses in Irish folk music. Kenny demonstrates how virtual musical communities reinvent the forms of participation in traditionally relatively hermetic communities of belonging. Analysing the emergence of new patterns of musically-mediated belonging accompanying the rise of new media, Kenny also points to the importance of spatial rootedness in negotiating the authority and authenticity of a virtual music school. The medium of music, however, not only forges “imagined communities” that transcend nation-state borders, but also sustains group identity among the displaced and (forced) migrants. The essays collected in the third section of this book investigate how music articulates, alleviates and is fed by the experience of migration. Davide Ceriani looks at how performances of operas by Verdi and Franchetti at the New York Metropolitan Opera in the early twentieth century tapped into the Italian immigrant community’s nostalgia for their country of origin and provided an outlet for public displays of ethnic pride. The popularity of the performances with both Italian immigrants and the wider community not only strengthened communal bonds within the USA’s rapidly growing Italian diaspora, but conveyed a positive image of italianità to the American public. Similarly, Christina Taylor Gibson demonstrates how the popularity of Mexican canciones among American urban audiences during the 1920s Mexican Vogue improved the nation’s image of Mexico. The performances of canciones in the country’s most prestigious concert venues boosted “musical nationalism” by gathering an enthusiastic audience of Latino immigrants and established musical representation of mexicanidad and Mexican folklore in the American mainstream. Ulrike Präger examines the role music has played in the SudetenGerman community subsequent to their expulsion from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia after the Second World War. Here, the categories of “diaspora”, “home country” and “national belonging” prove particularly blurry. Analysing how music can encode nostalgia and loss of homeland, Präger takes a diachronic approach to pinpoint the ways in which diasporic music becomes reinvented over time to reflect the changing needs of the community, ongoing assimilation and altered political context.

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But while music may be used to articulate a wish of return, it can also express the desire for escape. This collection’s final section opens with an essay by Heidrun Friese on the music of unsanctioned immigration to Europe by young men from the Maghreb region, known as the harga movement. The movement’s raï and rap music not only communicates group identity and dignity, but also serves as sonic protest against social, political and economic exclusion, while videos documenting and commemorating the harrowing journeys translate the experience into a self-assertion of (gendered) identity. While Friese’s chapter on raï music introduces us to the intersections between ethnic and gendered identity, Josephine Hoegaerts takes a closer look at music as a tool in the negotiation of masculinity and femininity, as demonstrated by the Belgian education system’s approach to school excursions in the nineteenth century. Her analysis of the sing-alongs that were an essential component of these outings delineates how group singing served to instil and promote patriotism and traditional gender roles.

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The present volume, looking at musical activities in the context of appropriation and displacement, sheds light on music both as a semiotic system which encodes “imaginary cultural narratives” and as a social activity which enables its participants to negotiate their identities. Music as a “code” of communication not only provides a “language” that is recognizable within a group, but also constantly references the Other, be it as an object of admiration or one of criticism. Thus, for example, Gogol Bordello creates western music that looks to Roma culture for inspiration, while the harga movement creates its music videos as self-assertive manifestos which subversively re-use images of migration produced by Europeans. Exchange between the core and its margins, creative appropriation and translation thus define music’s capacity as a semiotic system. As new technologies expand the modes of musical interaction and migration leaves a mark on ethnic music, enabling its co-creation by outgroup members, “musically imagined communities” become more transient and more contingent, but also less bound by national boundaries. So even if “we all have some musician in us”, musical constellations in which we play are definitely not limited to a single (imaginary) orchestra.

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Reference list Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Berger, Harris M. and Giovanna P. Del Negro. 2004. Identity and everyday life: Essays in the study of folklore, music, and popular culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Bohlman, Philip V. 2000. Composing the cantorate: Westernising Europe's other within. In Western music and its others: Difference, representation and appropriation in music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 187-212. Berkeley: University of California Press. —. 2004. The music of European nationalism: Cultural identity and modern history. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. —. 2008. Jewish music and modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Born, Georgina and David Hesmondhalgh. 2001. Introduction. In Western music and its others: Difference, representation and appropriation in music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 1-58. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frith, Simon, ed. 2004. Music and identity: Popular music: Critical concepts in media and cultural studies, vol. IV. London: Routledge. —. 1996. Music and identity. In Questions of cultural identity, ed. S. Hall and P. du Gay, 108-127. London: Sage. Lott, Eric. 1993. Love and theft: Blackface minstrelsy and the American working class. New York: OUP. Negus, Keith and Patria Roman-Velazquez. 2002. Belonging and detachment: Musical experience and the limits of identity. Poetics 30 (1):133-145. Stokes, Martin. 1994. Introduction: Ethnicity, identity and music. In Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place, ed. M. Stokes, 1-27. Oxford: Berg. —. ed. 1994. Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place. Oxford: Berg. Stoppard, Tom. 1978. Every good boy deserves favour and Professional faul. London: Faber & Faber.

PART ONE PERFORMING THE SELF, PERFORMING THE OTHER

CHAPTER ONE SING WITH US, SPEND LIKE US! IMAGES OF CONSUMPTION IN EAST EUROPEAN MUSICAL FILMS DURING THE COLD WAR OKSANA SARKISOVA

In 1925, avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov compared the seductive pleasures of consumerism with the Soviet-style consumption of the industrializing economy, making an ironic address to an imaginary audience of Soviet small clerks and “bohemians” in his diary: Female underwear or a tractor? This is how we should have titled the film we are currently making. The necessity of the foreign trade monopoly can best be proven ex adverso. Were it not for the foreign state monopoly, then the habits, tastes and practices of bourgeoisie would penetrate through to us with top hats, bras, pornographic journals, perfume, make-up, foxtrot and the rest…What is more important to us? The foreign trade monopoly—to export what is most important for us and not to import useless things. Import of agricultural machines, tractors, presses, and instruments instead of monocles and condoms. (Vertov 1925, 87-88)

The opposition between pleasure and utility was to haunt the Soviet economy for the following 65 years (Fitzpatrick et al. 1991; Hessler 2004). During the Cold War era, the Soviet Union and its satellites struggled to contain the ideal of luxury with rational utilitarian design, while “Western” popular culture presented socialist subjects as suffering from consumerist deprivation. In 1957, the US film director Rouben Mamoulin exploited this imagery in his musical Silk Stockings, a remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s acclaimed Ninotchka (1939), in which a drab and ascetic female Communist agent is seduced by Western consumer objects while on a mission in Paris. His film portrayed an ideologically polarized world in rich colours and using lavish choreography, with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as adversaries drawn together under the irresistible spell of

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French luxury goods. The piece, not surprisingly, outraged Soviet critics, who called it a “cheap, vulgar portrayal of Soviet tourists to Paris. Not only poorly dressed, they were even depicted as knowing nothing about ‘ordinary silk stockings’” (quoted in Gorsuch 2011, 168). The critic’s indignation reveals an important change underway in socialist societies: as competition with the “capitalist West” intensified, consumerist interests began coming to the fore. Recent scholarship has challenged long-established views on everyday socialist culture as driven exclusively by “need, command, and shortage” (Crowley and Reid 2010, 9). David Crowley and Susan E. Reid argued that leisure and luxury did play an important role under Communism, both as “a privilege reserved for an elite which … maintained social hierarchies and relationships of domination; and … a safety valve or palliative that served to maintain the status quo” (ibid., 12-13). Mark Landsman, whose work focuses on the German Federal Republic, has noted the existence of “[t]he central tension … [which] arose from the confluence of an emerging, mass consumer society in the West and the crucial, destabilizing role of consumer dissatisfaction in the East” (Landsman 2005, 2). Studying the Cold War through the prism of consumption, thus, significantly reshapes our understanding of the period, which was marked not only by isolationism, but also by ongoing transfer and exchange between two adversary camps. Cinema offers a rich ground for researching the entangled relationship of consumption and ideology and revisiting the Cold War cultural politics from new methodological perspectives. Studying the variants of mediatized consumption and consumers’ roles in cinema highlights both regional patterns and local contextual differences in visualizing socialist consumers. Re-evaluating Silk Stockings, film critic Robin Wood in 1975 claimed that the film’s straightforward ideological impulses are reinforced by an underlying assumption that “certain fundamental drives and needs … are not ideological but universal” (Altman 1981, 64). Cultural theorist Rick Altman sees in the musical “a repository for displaced consideration of actions and thoughts forbidden by society” (ibid., 197). Although he was referring specifically to Hollywood productions, Altman’s observation holds true more broadly. The musical’s double power to reinforce social models and offer subversive ideological alternatives renders it a fascinating resource for analyzing both dominant ideologies and the “place where that system may be threatened” (ibid., 197). The US musical film emerged in the late 1920s—early 1930s, a rather late addition to film genres, and quickly became popular on both sides of the Atlantic as “a quintessential form of popular diversion in America and

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around the world” (Barrios 1995, 4). Although the Eastern bloc’s cultural industry sought to differentiate its musicals from those of the West, the genre of musical film inherited and further amplified this inherent duality of Hollywood musicals. The often foregrounded motifs of material success and high living standard in “Western” musicals posed a serious challenge for Communist regimes, despite limited access to these and other foreign cultural products in Eastern European markets due to state control over the distribution (Shaw and Youngblood 2010; Castillo 2010). Party functionaries in charge of cultural affairs sought to appropriate all forms of artistic expression, including entertainment, while also subjecting them to ideological supervision. The Soviet Union had already developed an institutional infrastructure to control and censor “light entertainment” genres in the 1920s, and the model was later exported, with different degrees of success, throughout the Soviet bloc (Stites 1992; Vowinckel et al. 2012). The role of the “soft power” of popular culture in the Cold War remains contested. Historian Walter Hixson argues that it was American “cultural infiltration” that made Soviet citizens aware of Western alternatives, leading to the eventual collapse of Communism (Hixson 1996). In contrast, Anne E. Gorsuch takes “a less triumphalist approach, emphasizing the importance of Soviet agency over Western, specifically American cultural penetration”. In her analysis of Soviet tourism, she notes that: Soviet citizens did not learn about jazz only via illicit listening to radio broadcasts or from watching foreign movies: soft jazz served as the soundtrack to popular homegrown Soviet films. It was not only that ‘Western’ differences could be tolerated, but that some of these differences were made acceptably, and even officially, Soviet (Gorsuch 2011, 169).

Although contemporary research on socialist consumer culture shows an abundance and wide range of popular entertainment genres in Sovietdominated Eastern Europe, functionaries repeatedly bemoaned the lack of “correct” socialist realist entertainment, especially comedies. In the immediate post-WWII context, the Soviet Minister of Cinematography, Ivan Bolshakov, wrote to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Andrei Zhdanov, about the “insufficient number of comedies”. “At present“, he reported on January 8th 1948, “we have taken all steps towards increasing the number of comedies, attracting a broad circle of authors” (Bolshakov [n.d.]). In other words, to borrow a punchline from a popular 1950s Soviet musical film, “laughing was a serious matter”.

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The increasing attention given to this serious matter also had serious implications. Both the plots and the soundtracks of musical films were expected to follow to the ideal of “socialist” entertainment. Reviewing the Hungarian operetta, The State Department Store in 1952, at the height of Stalinism, Hungarian writer Béla Illés saw laughter itself as an ideological weapon: This comedy is a victory over aristocracy, victory over those who want to appropriate laughter in order to hinder progress, and we would like to forge a weapon from it [laughter] (quoted in János 1986, 6).

In the remainder of this chapter, I analyse the mediated representation of consumption in Eastern Europe during the 1950-60s, as portrayed in three popular musical films produced in the Soviet bloc: The State Department Store / Állami Áruház (Hungary, 1953), A Girl with a Guitar / Devushka s gitaroi (USSR, 1958) and A Lady on the Rails / Dáma na kolejích (Czechoslovakia, 1966). I look at how musical comedies addressed the mounting tensions of emerging mass consumer societies in Eastern Europe. Did Eastern European musical films compete with “Western” consumer culture? How was a specifically “socialist” consumer represented in film? What were the gender roles and expectations of socialist consumers? Could East European musical comedies offer attractive consumerist models that differed from those in Hollywood productions? I argue that popular musicals were not only indicative of the ongoing changes in social and economic policies, but helped shape socialist subjects’ sensitivities to the matters of everyday consumption and offered a variety of gender roles to the viewers. From the 1950s onwards, musical films constituted an arena for Cold War cultural competition, while at the same time providing a space, in which questions of the expected patterns of socialist consumer behaviour were addressed.

The Joys of Consumption: The State Department Store (Hungary, 1953) The State Department Store is based on a successful eponymous operetta directed by Éva Márkus and András Mikó, which premiered in Budapest in 1952. The film, directed by Viktor Gertler, with a script by Tibor Barabás and Szilárd Darvas, camera by Ottó Forgács, music by János Kerekes, lyrics by Szilárd Darvas and Iván Szenes, remained faithful to the original play, including only minor modifications. Gertler was an established director, who, after gaining experience in Austria, France, and

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Germany, made a number of successful comedies in Hungary in the 1930s. Released in 1953, The State Department Store reached blockbuster status, with over 2.5 million viewers (Varga 2008, 81). The success of the film outlasted the 1952 theatre performance and made it included in the recent anthology of 303 Hungarian Films You Should See Before You Die (Barotányi et al. 2007, 32). In the script, traditional operetta elements are refashioned to meet the political requirements of the time. The casting played no small part in its success. Starring the pre-WWII stars Kálmán Latabár and Ida Turay, it established a sense of continuity with interwar commercial Hungarian releases. The State Department Store features Feri Kocsis (Miklós Gábor) as a fresh Communist graduate. Starting his job in a state department store, he is assigned to the women’s clothing section, where he becomes involved in a dispute with the attractive young dress designer Ilonka (Zsuzsa Petress) about the season’s dress designs. In a narrative aside, the men’s and women’s clothing sections enter a socialist sales competition, with the salesmen Dániel (Kálmán Latabár) and Klinkó (Tivadar Horváth) not only competing to make the most sales, but also to win the heart of their colleague Boriska (Ida Turay). Klinkó’s pretentious ineptness is pitched against Dániel’s talent as a salesman. Despite his manager Dancs’ (Lajos Mányai) economizing policy, Feri introduces a new approach to clothes design and marketing, after which he is appointed the new manager. However, despite winning the respect of the store’s oldest staff, he has to rally against the intrigue orchestrated by Dancs. Spreading gossip that a monetary reform is about to be introduced, he persuades his friends, all “wrecks of the old regime”, to spend all their savings, which triggers a mass shopping frenzy. Even when it seems that perhaps the store, overrun with excited buyers, will sell out, Feri refuses to close the store, insisting that “the goods will arrive on time”. The plot is resolved with the trucks delivering the goods, while police arrive to arrest the former manager and his “clique”. The setting of this unusual musical, the state department store, can be read as a microcosm of the new socialist society, in which a culture of mass consumption emerges with increasing prosperity and popular aspirations. The plot alludes to the late 1951 and early 1952 Hungarian "shopping panic" sparked by the leaking of information about the new forint bills and rumours about the possible devaluation of the currency (Anon. 1952a; Anon. 1952b; Anon. 1952c). The incident had exposed the public’s distrust of the state-run economy and had further undermined the already shaky credibility of the socialist state. Reflecting the anxieties of Hungarian society, the musical also lauded the stability of peaceful

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everyday life, the reestablishment of continuity with pre-WWII values, and the unification of different social classes in an act of regulated and state-facilitated consumption. Unusually for the Stalinist era and in stark contrast with the actual economic scarcity of the early 1950s, arguments about fashion and marketing drive the narrative. The personal conflict between Ilonka and Feri is about the design of women’s dresses, which in Feri’s opinion should be more decorative and attractive. In the film’s conflict between the utilitarian and the decorative, the latter argument holds sway, shown by customers voting with their wallets. The conflict exemplifies the differing gender roles, as the seemingly emancipated female subordinates herself to the masculine authority of Feri as her boss and as a boyfriend. In the comic sales competition fusing the old approach to sales with new consumerism proves to be the ticket for success. As if anticipating the demise of monumental and political Stalinist cinema, The State Department Store focused on the “scared, accused, and scolded petit-bourgeois who gained his 5 minutes of screen-time” (Kelecsényi 2003). As one film critic put it, the director produced a work that heralded the political changes to come: As if already at a January 1953 premiere he knew that only half a year later the country would change its prime minister and for a short time it would again be possible to think and do things for which earlier one would be punished (Kelecsényi 2003).

The soundtrack for the film was composed by János Kerekes, who worked with the well-known poets, humourists, and songwriters Szilárd Darvas and Iván Szenes, which ensured the popularity of the songs. For example, “My grandson will become a man”, a lullaby sung by the department store’s elderly accountant, reflected widespread hopes for a better life after the war and proved an instant hit (Veress 2005, 503).1 The plot of the film is a peculiar mix of late-Stalinist schematism and a (re)emerging interest in everyday life. The main narrative of both operettas and musical films—trouble in love—is replaced with a generational and class conflict between a young party cadre and an established bureaucrat, who is later revealed to be an enemy-in-disguise. No less important than the change of elites is the motif of the co-opting and reintegration of the 1

Kerekes took private music lessons with Leo Weiner and in 1933 graduated as conductor from the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. From 1936 to 1957 he was conductor at the Budapest Opera, after which he took a position as music editor at Hungarian TV.

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old-regime petit-bourgeoisie, specialists and craftsmen willing to cooperate with the new regime socialist system, as demonstrated by the characters of Kálmán Latabár (Dániel) and Kamill Feleki (Glauziusz, the elderly accountant). In the context of late Stalinism, the motif of the enemy features prominently and contributes to an unexpected narrative twist in the last third of the film, in which a group of saboteurs and speculators, organized by the ousted director, attempt to disrupt the store’s operation. The State Department Store was produced during a radical decline in film production in Hungary and other Eastern European countries. Between 1950 and 1952, Hungary’s film industry produced 18 films, an exceptionally low number compared to the output of the previous two decades. Due to the scarcity of output, each newly released film came under close scrutiny. An anonymous editorial stating the position of the authorities was published in the leading daily Szabad Nép shortly after the premiere (February 5, 1953). The article suggested the film narrated “the struggle of self-conscious workers”—an interpretation that changed after the death of Stalin. Later reviews, in the Russian-language Pravda and in the Hungarian Magyar Nemzet, referred to it as “a film about so-called ‘small people,’ who are real people building a new life without noise and fuss” (quoted in Bujdosó 1986, 118). The film’s plot is riddled with unresolved internal contradictions: the department store management is supposed to simultaneously promote the “economizing” policy and expand in-house production of new fashion items; to increase sales while abandoning the “capitalist” assertive selling style. The director of the store faces his hardest challenge when the public, in the grip of mass hysteria, rushes to buy everything available in the store. Unrestrained shopping emerges both as a "socialist right" and an act of political treason. As response to the latter, the security police intervene, arresting Dancs and his friends for inciting the mass frenzy. The "alien clique" faces criminal charges for triggering the behaviour that the ideologically loyal masses are encouraged to indulge in. These contradictions remain unresolved in the film, just as they were unresolved within the socialist economy and ideology, which argued in favour of “rational consumption” while at the same time establishing the category of “luxury” goods (Merkel 2010). Despite the unbridled consumption, presented as an indicator of the new political regime’s health, the film is clearly “anti-capitalist”. Yet while positioning the United States as an ideological enemy, the success of the film was due in no small part to Gertler’s experience with Universal Studios and Germany’s UFA (Universum Film AG) during the interwar

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period.2 The State Department Store portrays true socialism as a reliable flow of goods and continuous consumption. This utopian vision is underscored by the background images of a rebuilt, intact post-WWII Budapest, using documentary texture and the highly selective footage to provide an idyllic setting and ensure the film’s lasting appeal.

All Flags are Welcome: A Girl with Guitar (Soviet Union, 1958) Vertov’s manifesto on “rational” consumption, cited above, was adopted as official state policy during the early Soviet years, establishing long-term negative attitudes towards consumption and its visual representation in film. Sociologist Jukka Gronow points out the consistency of Stalin’s economic policy, consolidated throughout the 1930s, which “did not waste precious foreign currency on the import of food or consumer goods” (Gronow 2003, 3), but sought to regulate the production of consumer goods and generate Soviet-style abundance domestically. As Catriona Kelly, Vadim Volkov, and later Jukka Gronow emphasized, early Soviet consumption culture was rooted in the concept of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), which was actively promoted from the second half of the 1930s as a new socialist way of life (Kelly and Volkov 1998; Gronow 2003, 147). The concept of kul’turnost’, as Randall puts it: envisioned a modern, rational, and hygienic retail environment where employees provided consumers with attentive and friendly customer service, new retail amenities and services, creative displays, and a wide variety of goods (Randall 2008, 39).

Following the death of Stalin, countries in Eastern Europe began to actively increase international contacts and recruit supporters of socialism abroad. One of the paths to improving the image of socialism both in the region and beyond the Iron Curtain was to overcome the perception of economic backwardness and shortage of material goods along with permitting increasing openness and cross-border contacts. An example of this policy could be found in a popular 1958 Soviet musical film, A Girl with a Guitar, which sought to refashion the Soviet Union as a country abundant in products and culture by projecting the concept of kul’turnost’ in the area of consumption. 2

It is interesting to note that after the death of Stalin Gertler went on to make one of the first films which clearly departed from the rigid socialist realist prescriptions marking the beginning of the de-Stalinization of cinema in Hungary.

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The film’s setting is Moscow’s International Youth and Students’ Festival in summer 1957, which was part of a policy of controlled openness, designed as a large-scale ideological investment to improve the international image of the Soviet regime (Richmond 2003; Koivunen 2011). The two-week festival was attended by 34,000 foreign and 60,000 Soviet delegates, and had a profound impact on Soviet society. As Yale Richmond puts it: [t]he tens of thousands of Soviet youth who attended the festival were infected with the youth styles of the West—jeans, jazz, boogie-woogie, rock and roll, and free speech—and the Soviet Union was never the same again (Richmond 2003, 11).

Featuring the young rising star Lyudmila Gurchenko, A Girl with a Guitar was the Soviet Union’s tenth most popular film in 1958 and was viewed by over 31.9 million people. The film was directed by the veteran filmmaker Alexander Feinzimmer, who had studied with Vsevolod Pudovkin in the 1920s and had previously worked mainly on dramas and revolutionary biopics. In 1934, he had directed an early sound comedy, Lieutenant Kizhe, based on Yuri Tynianov’s novel and accompanied by music composed by Sergei Prokofiev. A Girl with a Guitar capitalized on the earlier success of Gurchenko in Carnival Night /Karnaval’naia noch, directed by Eldar Riazanov in 1956. In the latter film, building on the preWWII tradition of musical comedies by Grigory Alexandrov, Riazanov cast the famous comedian Igor’ Il'inskii, and presented Gurchenko as the “new Lyubov’ Orlova“, a Soviet musical comedy star of the 1930s. Paying homage to a popular musical comedy Volga-Volga (dir. Grigory Alexandrov, 1938), Carnival Night used the proven formula of a backstage musical, using the New Year concert preparations as a narrative frame and inserting numerous musical numbers. In the words of film scholar David MacFadyen, the premiere of this film in the immediate post-Stalinist context “christened this ‘new period’ and its novel attitudes to both song and happiness” (MacFadyen 2003, 52). While both Volga-Volga and Carnival Night were biting satires on humourless Soviet bureaucrats, A Girl with Guitar centred on a young, gifted sales assistant. The script, written by Boris Laskin and Vladimir Poliakov, introduced an important new setting for the musical comedy: the music shop, presented as a space of both commerce and culture. The plot centres on the relationship between the sales assistant Tanya (Lyudmila Gurchenko) and young composer Korzhikov (Vladimir Gusev). The latter develops a more nuanced style of composition on the diplomatic advice of the cultivated young saleswoman Tanya. Meanwhile, the shop director

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(Mikhail Zharov) fears losing his top salesperson and tries to sabotage the budding romance. While the music shop staff rehearses for an international concert, Tanya prepares for an acting audition, which allows for musical numbers throughout the film and the ideological “repackaging” of the Soviet Union as an attractive cultural centre. The central character of an attractive and sophisticated sales assistant counters the negative depiction of trade and commerce in the early Soviet films, in which the few salespeople and entrepreneurs were presented as traitors and enemies of the regime, or—at best—as selfish and greedy individuals. That the sheet music store’s salesperson is a woman was fitting at a time when the Soviet retail workforce was being feminized, which, as Amy E. Randall convincingly demonstrates, “came to symbolize the remaking of the retail system” and “had important implications not only for the incipient ‘socialist’ trade system but also for the Soviet project as a whole” as early as in the 1930s (Randall 2008, 68-69). The musical film rehabilitates the shop as setting by “upgrading” it from a commercial site to a site of culture. The shop is portrayed as a microcosm of Soviet society, envisioned as youthful, modern, and resounding with the latest jazz hits.3 With her wasp waist emphasized by a stylish uniform, Gurchenko embodies the ideal culturally savvy saleswoman, equally at ease advising customers about Polish and Romanian hits, which she performs in Russian, while issuing bills to star-struck customers. The movie makes a point of lending “high” and “popular” culture equal status, showing the saleswoman advising on both the latest popular songs and classical music with equal competence, emphasizing the cultural openness and hipness of Soviet consumers. As the film progresses, the shop becomes a stage for concerts and international encounters, making Soviet retail a utopian space within global consumer culture.

Desires Imagined and Real: A Lady on the Rails (Czechoslovakia, 1966) In their classical form, musicals end when marriage begins. According to Rick Altman, in Hollywood musicals: [o]nly through the agency of a mystic state, marriage, may the musical’s opposites be reconciled. By convention, in Western narrative, marriage is

3

The setting reappears in Walking the Streets of Moscow (1964, director Georgi Danelia) and other “Thaw” films, rehabilitating the field of commerce demonized in the 1920s.

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Chapter One that beyond which there is no more; it arrests discourse and projects narrative into an undifferentiated ‘happily ever after’ (Altman 1981,197).

In contrast, Eastern European musical films ventured beyond the mystic caesura of marriage and, moreover, portrayed gender as closely intertwined with consumption, as the third case study shows. A Lady on the Rails is from a slightly later period than the two films discussed above and is a product of a different context—that of the emerging Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s. In 1964 the first successful Czechoslovak musical The Hop Pickers (Starci na chmelu) was released. Directed by Ladislav Rychman, it centres on generational conflict, described by Mira and Antonin Liehm as the “confrontation of middle-aged hypocrisy with the honesty of youth” (Liehm and Liehm 1980, 295). The script was written by Vratislav Blažek, a gifted satirist, who worked for the Theatre of Satire in Prague (from 1958 - Theatre ABC) until emigrating from Czechoslovakia in 1968. While addressing the “ideologically correct” questions of moral principles, the movie’s setting was the harvesting of hops for Pilsner beer. According to Josef Skvorecky, the film was: a fresh and fast moving entertainment, full of rock music with Blažek’s excellent lyrics. The songs reached such popularity among the young people of Czechoslovakia that their aesthetic and philosophical impetus became comparable to the effect of the best songs by the Beatles. The film turned into a manifesto of the young generation, which later supported Dubþek, because the leader emphasized the questions of human character (Skvorecky 1971, 53-54).

Ladislav Rychman’s next musical comedy, A Lady on the Rails, narrated the story of tram driver Marie Kuþerová (JiĜina Bohdalová). Marie spots her husband (Radoslav Brzobohatý) on a date with a pretty blond (Libuše Geprtová) during a shift. What follows is a comic spiral of revenge, with Marie withdrawing all the family savings from the bank and indulging in an unbridled spending spree in the most fashionable stores and spas in town. Her adventures are accompanied by “a finger-snapping score that incorporated jazz, big beat, and modern opera, while also featuring the latest hip 1960s fashions” (Bren 2010, 178). Marie’s subversive crusade for emancipation is played out with an ironic modality set by the genre’s conventions and the loop-like plot, in the end returning the heroine to the beginning of the story. The film fuses features of Czech New Wave cinema with mainstream musical conventions. With her femininity challenged by the slim blonde, Marie, dressed in a

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shapeless uniform coat that downplays her sexuality, realizes that her socialist, working mother identity is shaken to the core. She attempts to regain her self-esteem with the help of the fashion and beauty industry. As Paulina Bren emphasizes, however, Marie’s transformation “does not begin in a state-run department store with empty shelves but in a modern couturier’s showroom where immaculately dressed, bourgeois-looking women of all ages sit commenting on the live models that parade among them showing off the latest designer fashions” (Bren 2010, 178). In the 1960s, state department stores, still present in the films of the 1950s as centres of socialist consumption, are no longer anyone’s dream destination. With an ambiguity of a fantasy, never drawing a clear-cut line between the cinematic “reality” and a tangible “dream-world”, the film juxtaposes two economic models, namely, that of prudent and restrained consumption, which, following the principle of “to everybody according to their needs”, postpones pleasure and gratification, with its counterpole, the world of luxury, immediate and unrestrained indulgence in conspicuous consumption which remains an ironically bracketed world of a utopian desire. The genre conventions of a musical allowed A Lady on the Rails not only to subvert the official attitude towards “socialist consumption”, but also to question the assumptions underlying society’s concept of femininity and the distribution of gender roles under socialism. Marie, realizing and asserting her personal needs, addresses the plight of females in the anthem-like “Be strong, women!”, which she performs at the transportation workers’ annual ball (the Czech pun is lost in translation— “Zmužte se ženy!” literally means “be men-like, women!”). She appeals to her “sisters-in-arms” to resist oppressive gender expectations, and the response is compassion and empathy. The subsequent series of changes, including Marie's break-up with her husband, whom she delivers unconscious to his lover, and her own affair with a grotesquely masculine boxer (František Peterka), transforms Marie into an emancipated and independent woman taking control of her own destiny. At the same time, the film’s dance scenes at a day spa and a fashion show, which use ornamental choreography of female bodies, provide an ironic commentary on the new constraints imposed by consumer goods and services. The visualized embodiments of gender expectations, which lure the heroine into a sexualized world of consumption, remain a refined visual parody quoting and subverting the conventions of Hollywood musicals, resulting in a peculiar “socialist” version of camp aesthetics. The emancipated socialist consumer, however, remained but a dream.

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Conclusions In one of his essays on so-called “trophy” cinema—referring to German and American films confiscated at the end of the WWII from Germany by the Soviet authorities and released in the film-starved Soviet Union in the 1950s—Joseph Brodsky wrote that “[t]he Tarzan series … did more for de-Stalinization than all Khruschev’s speeches at the 20th Party Congress and after” (Brodsky 1995). Indeed, the power of cinema to shape identities and tastes has been widely used and analysed. The three case studies in this essay were chosen to highlight the plurality of the musical’s functions in socialist popular culture across the region. By providing an unusual medium for addressing issues of consumption both in terms of the growing needs and expectations of socialist consumers and as an escapist fantasy world of unfulfilled desires, musicals gave shape to new expectations, challenged conventional gender roles, offered new behaviour patterns, and facilitated comic relief while addressing pressing matters within an attractive and wide-reaching framework of popular entertainment. Despite the popularity of the genre and established formulae of success, Eastern European film industries were hit hard when entering open competition with their former “ideological enemy” after the liberalization of film markets. In the absence of alternative cultural and genre models, Eastern European releases, including musical cinema, had difficulty competing at the box office with the steady stream of longdesired products of Western pop culture. While post-1989 musicals hardly matched the popularity of their earlier counterparts, the musical films of the 1950-60s remain texture-rich examples from a period of thorough cultural and socio-economic transformation within Eastern European societies, which paved the way for the integration of socialist consumers into the global culture of mass entertainment.

Reference list Anon. 1952a. Change in forint banknotes? 2 January 1952. Open Society Archives at Central European University. HU OSA 300-1-2-13361. http://www.osaarchivum.org/greenfield/repository/osa:9ed3158f-8d3749b0-9341-645cddd8f86d. Anon. 1952b. New banknotes to be issued. 8 February 1952. Open Society Archives at Central European University. HU OSA 300-1-2-15255. http://www.osaarchivum.org/greenfield/repository/osa:08443635-e35f42b1-93f7-066ab51c7b28.

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Anon. 1952c. Preparations for devaluation of forint?, 8 February 1952. Open Society Archives at Central European University. HU OSA 3001-2-15254. http://www.osaarchivum.org/greenfield/repository/osa:6c4ccf77-bcb146ff-bb46-7c6e55735523. Altman, Rick, ed. 1981. Genre: The musical. London: Routledge. Barotányi, Zoltán, Endre B. Bojtár, Erzsébet Bori, István Bundula et al., eds. 2007. 303 Magyar Film amit látnod kell mielĘtt meghalsz. Budapest: Gabo. Barrios, Richard. 1995. A song in the dark: The birth of the musical film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bolshakov, Ivan. n.d. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) fond 17, opis’ 125, delo 574, list 229. Bren, Paulina and Mary Neuburger, eds. 2012. Communism unwrapped: Consumption in cold war Eastern Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2010. Women on the verge of desire: Women, work, and consumption in Socialist Czechoslovakia. In Pleasures in socialism: Leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, 177195. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. Spoils of war. In On grief and reason, 3-21. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bujdosó, DezsĘ. 1986. Az Állami Áruház címĦ film ideológiája. In Állami Áruház tanulmányok. Budapest: Müvelödéskutató Intézet. Castillo, Greg. 2010. Cold War on the home front: The soft power of midcentury design. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crowley, David and Susan E. Reid, eds. 2010. Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites, eds. 1991. Russia in the era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet society and culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gorsuch, Anne E. 2011. All this is your world: Soviet tourism at home and abroad after Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gronow, Jukka. 2003. Caviar with champagne: Common luxury and the ideals of the good life in Stalin's Russia. Oxford: Berg. Hessler, Julie. 2004. A social history of Soviet trade: Trade policy, retail practices, and consumption, 1917-1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Hixson, Walter L. 1996. Parting the curtain: Propaganda, culture, and the Cold War. New York: St. Martin's Press.

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Kelecsényi, Lászlo. 2003. Csak egy kis emlék. Filmkultúra 2003. http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2003/articles/essays/kisemlek.hu.html. Kelly, Catriona and Vadim Volkov. 1998. Directed desires: Kul’turnost’ and consumption. In Constructing Russian culture in the age of revolution, 1881-1940, ed. Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, 291313. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koivunen, Pia. 2011. Overcoming Cold War boundaries at the world youth festivals. In Reassessing Cold War Europe, ed. Sari AutioSarasmo and Katalin Miklóssy, 175-192. Milton Park: Routledge. Landsman, Mark. 2005. Dictatorship and demand: The politics of consumerism in East Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liehm, Mira and Antonín J. Liehm. 1980. The most important art: Eastern European film after 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. MacFadyen, David. 2003. The sad comedy of Eldar Riazanov: An introduction to Russia's most popular filmmaker. Montreal: McGillQueen's University Press. Merkel, Ina. 2010. Luxury in Socialism. In Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc, ed. David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, 53-70. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Randall, Amy E. 2008. The Soviet dream world of retail trade and consumption in the 1930s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. RegĘs, János. 1986. Állami Áruház 1952-1977. In Állami Áruház tanulmányok. Budapest: Müvelödéskutató Intézet. Richmond, Yale. 2003. Cultural exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Shaw, Tony and Denise J. Youngblood. 2010. Cinematic Cold War: the American and Soviet struggle for hearts and minds. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Skvorecky, Josef. 1971. All the bright young men and women: A personal history of the Czech cinema, trans. Michael Schonberg. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates. Stites, Richard. 1992. Russian popular culture: Entertainment and society since 1900. PhD diss. University of Cambridge. Varga, Balázs. 2008. Filmirányitás, gyártástörténet és politika Magyarországon 1957-1963. PhD Dissertation manuscript. Budapest. Veress, József ed. 2005. Magyar Filmlexicon, Vol. 1. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum. Vertov, Dziga. 1925. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), fond 2091, opis’ 2, delo, 235, listy 87-88.

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Vowinckel, Annette, Marcus M. Payk and Thomas Lindenberger, eds. 2012. Cold War cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European societies. New York: Berghahn Books.

CHAPTER TWO PERFORMING COSMOPOLITANISM: GOGOL BORDELLO AND THE GLOBAL UNDERDOGS ANA SOBRAL

Introduction: Narrative and Performance in Pop Music A longstanding narrative in the popular music industry is that of the struggling artist’s path to stardom. The artist starts out with few fans, but with a unique style based on genuine talent and/or experience. As time passes, the music’s authenticity strikes a chord (pun intended) with more and more people. The songs, including the lyrics, are adopted by individuals and/or a community as a reflection of their own (often profound) feeling. The artist is catapulted to fame. At this point, so the narrative goes, the chances that the artist forsakes authenticity for ongoing commercial success increase. Either way, the artist has secured their place in pop history, perhaps even in broader social and cultural history, and inspires other struggling artists. Although this narrative has remained more or less unchanged since the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, historical contingency supplies the details. For this reason, more than a few pop stars are seen as embodying a particular time and place. Enter the migrant musician, a figure with its own particular narrative, which has been attracting increasing attention since the late 1990s. Here, the artist relocates from the Other (usually Eastern or Southern cultures) to the West, the haven of pop. Most migrant music has two defining features. Firstly, it mixes elements from the country of origin and the host culture, resulting in a syncretic sound, sometimes referred to as “hybrid”1; 1

Cf. Robert J. C. Young’s chapter on “Hybridity” in Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction which uses the example of raï music (a combination of traditional Arabic music forms with “elements of Western rock, disco, and jazz,

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secondly, the lyrics often focus on the musician’s experience as an immigrant or refugee and the marginalization that belonging to a minority group brings. The songs are interpreted as an expression of the performers’ struggle to find a place in the host society without renouncing their roots. In this narrative, the migrant musicians triumph by transcending national and cultural boundaries and creating a “global” community of listeners. The usage of the term “narrative” is central here. The biographies of many migrant musicians easily lend themselves to narrativization. Because the lyrics emphasize the musician’s own purported personal struggle, their oeuvre comes to resemble a serialized tale of hardships faced and vanquished. From song to song or even album to album, fans can follow the artist’s path from the margins of society to the very generous space reserved for celebrities in public consciousness. Migrant musicians generally stress the moment of arrival and conflict with the new culture. Quite often they present a more activist facet as well: the lyrics engage with practices of exclusion and abuse that go beyond the performers’ individual experiences and that are connected with their community or involve other groups experiencing similar problems. This role as advocate of the oppressed likely contributes to the transnational appeal of migrant music. However, not only the lyrics express this narrative. The musician as performer portrays a character, or more accurately a persona, in a performance carried beyond the stage and recorded music. Parallel to lyrics, interviews constitute an important source of first-person narration. Newspaper articles, magazine features and album reviews develop a thirdperson narration that complements the first by giving the impression of a more objective account. Finally, the musicians’ participation as protagonists in documentaries and films mixes first and third-person narration in which the music itself augments the portrayal. The (auto)biographical nature of migrant music and the implied authenticity amplify the narrative dimension of popular music. While the biography of the migrant musician is undoubtedly viewed as unusual by Western audiences, its recounting in songs, autobiographic accounts and interviews is not unguarded, but instead carefully edited to meet the dictates of the discourse surrounding the genre. This biographic construct becomes part of the promotional machine, giving shape to the

and West African music, together with songs from further afield such as Latin America and Bollywood”) as an illustrative case (Young 2003, 71). See also Nabeel Zuberi’s discussion of hybridity in British Asian music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century (Zuberi 2001, 186-197).

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public self experienced by the audience through music and the media and ultimately influencing how the music itself is received. The musician as celebrity and subject of public interest is a unique feature of the popular music industry. It sees popular music transcend the realm of aesthetic performance, which generally takes the form of staged events in clearly defined settings.2 However, as the private and public selves of popular music artists merge in the public sphere, popular music can more accurately be described as a type of social performance. As the cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander observes, “social action in complex societies so often is ritual-like because it remains performative. The social conditions that gave rise to theatre also gave rise to post-ritual forms of symbolic action” (Alexander 2006, 58). According to Alexander, a key aim in both aesthetic and social performance is achieving “seamless fusion” between the performance and the message, such that the boundary between the real and the staged becomes blurred. Furthermore, every performance essentially feeds on shared memories and myths, which performers exploit in allusions, references and quoted material. In migrant music, the narrative of struggle and triumph straddles two or more cultures. Migrant musicians draw the attention of audiences, the recording industry and the media precisely because they address the West as outsiders. Their position as intermediaries between cultures not only enhances their visibility in the West but is also a key tool in global marketing. Because music is today almost always marketed across many different countries, achieving such seamless fusion between the real and the staged is complicated by the need for a “global” common denominator. At the same time, the musicians need to differentiate themselves from other performers, which accentuates the distinctiveness of the musician’s persona. The attempt to juggle familiarity with originality in an increasingly globalized culture is a key element of migrant music. New York City-based multicultural band Gogol Bordello has a distinctive sound that mixes Western punk rock with Eastern European folk and traditional Roma music. Eugene Hütz, a Ukrainian immigrant of Roma background and the band’s singer, lyricist and composer, coins their brand of sound as “gypsy punk”. As frontman of an 8-musician ensemble that also includes people of Russian, Israeli, Ethiopian, Ecuadorian, Hong Kong and US background, Hütz has constructed the main narrative of

2

Cf. Richard Baumann’s definition of performance as “an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of communication, framed in a special way and put on display for an audience” (Bauman 1989, 262).

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Gogol Bordello around the figure of the nomadic, transnational artist challenging national and cultural boundaries. A distinctive trait of Gogol Bordello is their strong cosmopolitan flair. By definition, cosmopolitanism implies the capacity to adapt to different cultures in the world “without feeling at home in any of these local environments” (Giesen 2010, 175). Gogol Bordello’s mixture of musical styles and languages of their lyrics (English, Russian, Romani, Spanish), as well as their self-presentation as roving musicians suggests that they are not only able but also willing to remain both detached from any specific place, language and culture while at the same time being connected to all cultures at once. Even their status as immigrants is not limited to the USA—as Eugene Hütz’s recent move from New York to Rio de Janeiro illustrates. Of the many bands that could be understood as migrant musicians, Gogol Bordello is perhaps the most cosmopolitan.

The Cosmopolitan Hero As a representative of modern cosmopolitanism, Hütz’s artistic persona reveals many parallels to the figure of Diogenes of Sinope (412 or 404 BCE–323 BCE), who not only coined the term “cosmopolitan” (literally “citizen of the universe”) but also remains the most famous philosopher of the ancient Greek school of Cynicism. Before addressing the influence of Diogenes’ proto-cosmopolitanism, it is helpful to briefly dwell on his philosophy, as traces of it can also be found in the lyrics and performances of Gogol Bordello. The term “Cynic” derives from the Greek word for “dog” (kuon) and denotes the penchant of Diogenes and his followers for provocative behaviour. Behaving like a “dog” included sleeping in the street, having virtually no possessions and even performing natural functions in public. This shameless attitude was intended to highlight the natural inclinations of humans, thus challenging the ancient Greek system of belief, which was based on a hierarchic division between gods, humans and animals (See Stade 2007, 284). The act of subverting beliefs and questioning authority was very much at the centre of the Cynic way of life. One of the most quoted slogans by Diogenes is “deface the coinage”, which the political scientist John Christian Laursen reads as “a metaphor for rejection of social customs and institutions” (Laursen 2009, 470). A similar reading of Cynicism has been proposed by Michel Foucault, who labels Diogenes and the Cynics “parrhesiastes” or speakers of the truth. Translating their philosophy into public intervention, the Cynics practiced three fundamental forms of parrhesia: critical oratory, scandalous behaviour

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and provocative dialogue, which aimed to highlight the contradictions inherent within the dominant discourse. For Foucault this marks the beginning of political activism and the critical tradition in the West (See Foucault 2001, 120; Laursen 2009, 474). This interpretation of Cynicism seems to be at odds with the current widespread use of the term “cynical” as a designation for manipulative and hypocritical behaviour—i.e., the opposite of truth-speaking. Hence in his work Critique of Cynical Reason, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk differentiates between “Cynicism” and “Kynicism”: while the first retains the current, negative connotation of embittered, calculating hypocrisy, the latter is directly linked to Diogenes and his followers, and is described as a subversive movement that challenged the discourse of power in classical Athens. According to Sloterdijk, traces of that original Kynicism can still be found in modern Western culture—though in rapidly decreasing amounts. In the carnival celebrations, the universities and the bohemian subcultures, Sloterdijk identifies spaces where a “limited release” from hierarchically ordered systems and social mores has been achieved through a non-conformist attitude that retains the cheeky subversiveness promoted by Diogenes (Sloterdijk 1988, 117). The references to the carnivalesque and the bohemian build a useful bridge to Gogol Bordello. The “punk” in “gypsy-punk” places the band squarely within a cultural and musical tradition defined by its nonconformity and its individualism, which are, it should be noted, read as signs of authenticity. The figure of the “dog” as an individual who chooses to live on the margins of society to maintain his freedom and (global) mobility has become established in the imaginary of Gogol Bordello’s lyrics: And as we’re crossing border after border We realize the difference is none It’s underdogzoo and if you want it You always have to make your own fun (Gogol Bordello 2002) And it seems like I ran and ran Through the garbage and quicksand And after being checked for fleas And barricades of embassies I would never wanna be young again! (Gogol Bordello 2005) I think we all know: That be it punk, hip-hop, be it a reggae sound It is all connected through The Gypsy part of town

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Let’s go! It’s the underdog world strike! (Gogol Bordello 2005)

The concept of “kynos” is easily recognized in the above lines, and is also closely connected to other leitmotivs explored below, such as the biography of Hütz’s persona and the celebration of marginal cultures. The status of “underdog”, inferior by definition, becomes emancipatory. Such performative acts have remained a popular strategy of individuals and groups seeking to delegitimize power. The transposition of meaning has played a defining role in punk—in Subculture: the Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige describes the cut-and-paste fashion and art of the punk movement as a form of “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (Hebdige 1979, 105). Similarly, the nonconformity expressed by the puns, irony and hyperbole in Gogol Bordello’s music speaks to (at least to some extent) disaffected audiences. The philosophical tradition of Cynicism is further reflected by the aesthetics of Eugene Hütz’s artistic persona, which mixes punk DIY, Eastern European and gypsy styles—most notably, his moustache, sported as an expression of masculine pride,3 and Hütz’s flamboyant, provocative on-stage sexuality. In their live performances and other visual media (music videos, photography, film), Gogol Bordello emphasise the body as a source of identity and resistance. While this is true for most Western pop music, Gogol Bordello like to mix their message with exaggerated theatricality, humour and (orchestrated) chaos, which can be seen as carnivalesque elements. Most importantly, these performances always carry an aura of “otherness” because of the diverse backgrounds of the band members and, above all, the exotic persona constructed by Hütz.4

3

The decision to wear a moustache could be read as a parody of masculine pride. However, given the performer’s Roma background and his strong emphasis on his “otherness” (in a Western cultural context), it seems more likely that Hütz regards the moustache as a symbol not only of masculinity but, most importantly, of his cultural roots. 4 A clear example of the spread of Hütz’s artistic persona beyond the confines of the music and lyrics is his role in Filth and Wisdom (2008), Madonna’s directorial debut, in which Hütz portrays a Ukrainian immigrant in London who works as a male dominatrix while trying to get his punk band (Gogol Bordello) noticed. The boundaries between alleged reality (i.e. Hütz’s persona) and fiction (the character he plays in the film) are completely blurred. The film is primarily a promotional vehicle for Gogol Bordello. Interestingly, as the title already suggests, here too the “underdog” aspect of Hütz’s persona/character plays a prominent role. Several scenes feature Hütz’s character speaking directly to the camera about the meaning of life, which largely echo the ideas attributed to Diogenes of Sinope.

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This leads us to the second major influence of Cynicism on Gogol Bordello, namely the concept of cosmopolitanism. By defining themselves as “cosmopolitans” or citizens of the universe, the ancient Greek Cynics called into question the right of the Greek metropolis to bestow “citizenship”, and thus membership in the community (and, by implication, exclude others). According to this philosophy, “the world belongs equally to all its inhabitants, who concomitantly belong to the whole world” (Adlam et al. 2011, 3). To understand the impact of this expression, it is useful to briefly refer to the context in which Diogenes lived. In his History of Cynicism, Donald Dudley notes that security, or more precisely, the lack of it, was a burning issue in the Hellenistic world of fifth century BCE, with the Mediterranean a hunting ground for pirates, who would not only capture ships, but also sell their crews into slavery. Moreover, at this time, exile constituted a standard form of punishment affecting even—or particularly—people in high positions of political power. Dudley concludes: Exile, slavery, loss of home and possessions, are the frequent burthen of the Cynic diatribe; … it should not be forgotten that they were dealing with what their audiences felt as very real terrors, and that they were performing a valuable service in showing that even these could be surmounted (Dudley 1937, x).

Cosmopolitanism in the original sense intended by the Cynics highlighted the disparity between the value system of the state and civil society, on the one hand, and the universal laws of nature, on the other. By choosing to live as “dogs”, on the margins of society, the Cynics emphasized their practice of “autarkeia”, that is, self-sufficiency or independence. Leading a radically simple life that reduced them to a subhuman status in the eyes of their contemporaries was for the Cynics the only assurance of happiness, because it inoculated them against the twists and turns of fate, against hierarchical dependencies and—most importantly—against attachment to a particular place or society. The concept of cosmopolitanism has evolved beyond its beginnings as a subversive provocation within the particular political context of classical Greece to serve today as a model for peaceful, just coexistence between different peoples and cultures that are politically and economically interdependent. As such, modern-day cosmopolitanism is often upheld as the answer to the problems commonly associated with globalization at the level of government: mass migration and the gradual dissolution of nationstate borders, the need for universal standards of justice and human rights, the creation of supra-national institutions and legislation to monitor both

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commercial organizations (within a global economy) and nation-states. In their introduction to The Cosmopolitanism Reader, Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held define cosmopolitanism as “both a moral and a political project” (Brown and Held 2010, 2). While the moral dimension comprises the common rights and duties of humans worldwide, the political realm— also termed “institutional cosmopolitanism”—concerns itself with “implementing” these moral principles. As a multicultural band, Gogol Bordello can be read as promoting the moral aspect of cosmopolitanism, especially in their celebration of cultural interconnection and cooperation across borders. The frequent emphasis on border-crossing in their lyrics directly speaks to an audience aware of the growing porousness of national boundaries. At the same time, Hütz’s persona and lyrics actually emphasize the original notion of cosmopolitanism as understood and practiced by Diogenes. This is evident in lines such as: “I want to walk this Earth like it is mine”, “And if the country we invented will fall from grace/ I guess we’ll have to fly away in our own space”, “I am a Wonderlust King / I stay on the run”, “And the path ahead that’s long will get me in the end where I belong”.5 What we see here is not so much a celebration of global networks but rather a vehement rejection of a narrow sense of belonging attached to a concrete place. The Cynic brand of cosmopolitanism can be said to have an ongoing appeal to society’s outsiders, whether forced or voluntary, because it turns their placelessness into an asset. Precisely this is highlighted by Gogol Bordello. The figure of Diogenes and the anecdotes and practices surrounding his school of Cynicism are employed by Eugene Hütz as a common denominator that connects the performer with a heterogeneous audience. Regardless of whether they are familiar with Diogenes, most audiences will recognize the brand of nonconformism and cosmopolitism of Diogenes because so much of it has seeped into bohemian subcultures such as punk. As for Hütz himself, the ironic line “I know it all from Diogenes to the Foucault [pendulum]” from “Start Wearing Purple”, one of his biggest hits, leaves little doubt that he has some familiarity with the character. Not unlike the mythical Greek figure, the line ridicules the high value assigned to knowledge in a song, whose lyrics celebrate madness: “All your sanity and wits will all vanish, I promise / It’s just a question of time” (Gogol Bordello 1999).

5

From the songs “Tribal Connection” (2007), “Think Locally, Fuck Globally” (2005), “Wonderlust King” (2007), “Last One Goes the Hope” (2010), respectively.

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Constructing a Modern-day Cosmopolitan Persona The basic narrative of Eugene Hütz’s persona, in which he develops his cosmopolitan flair, is repeated in countless articles—from underground magazines and websites to major newspapers and news corporations such as the New York Times, Time, The Independent, or the BBC. The following extract from a 2005 article by Dorian Linskey in The Guardian is a typical example: Hutz [sic] grew up in Kiev when it was still part of the Soviet Union. His father was Russian and his mother Roma, but until he was 15, his Gypsy heritage was a family secret. … When the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded in 1985 [sic], he was evacuated to the Carpathian mountains in western Ukraine, where he met his mother’s family and finally discovered his Roma roots. … Hutz’s family left Ukraine in 1989, during communism’s last gasp, and spent three years shunting between European countries waiting for permission to enter the US.

In this narrative, Chernobyl represents a turning point in the persona’s experience. The life-threatening experience brings about a crucial transformation in the protagonist’s identity. According to Joseph Campbell’s (1968) classic theory of the universal heroic myth, this would be the stage at which the persona actually acquires the qualities of a hero, as he crosses a boundary beyond which he must face a set of crucial challenges for his development and eventual triumph. The failure of the socialist project and the collapse of the Soviet Union dovetail with the recovery of the persona’s roots and hence his true identity. Chernobyl features as part of a transnational collective memory, a first inkling of our global interconnectedness, marking the rise of what Ulrich Beck has termed the “world risk society”. It remains a cornerstone in discussions of science, technology and the environment. Beck associates this awareness of risk with the need for a cosmopolitan project that can help us deal more responsibly with global catastrophes such as nuclear meltdown (cf. Beck 1999, 16). Hütz’s emphasis on Chernobyl in interviews can be interpreted similarly: it not only plays to the listeners’ sense of powerlessness but also echoes public suspicion of nation-states, governments and institutions that endanger their own population in the name of abstract political or economic interests. As citizens of the world, we all share a common fate and the Hütz persona becomes an embodiment of that fate.

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Other central elements of this narrative include the restlessness of the persona, who travels great distances, and his drawn-out liminal existence.6 Having renounced their Ukrainian citizenship and unable to emigrate to the USA, the persona and his family move into a state of exception that Giorgio Agamben (1998) has defined as “bare life”. This adds pathos to the narrative because it highlights the fragile situation of the persona: stuck between nation states, he experiences an enforced illegality that automatically denies him many of the rights of citizenship. In the cultural imaginary constructed around the current phase of globalization, these references are especially effective because they evoke on-going debates about immigration in Western nations. As Nikos Papastergiadis notes, the Western media have produced highly ambivalent “stereotypical images of the stranger” (Papastergiadis 1999, 14). Immigrants and refugees are routinely presented as people desperately in need of help, but also as potential parasites who threaten to destabilize the host society. They are therefore the main target of populist and nationalist movements seeking to retain an imagined cultural “purity”. As is typical of Hütz’s Cynicism, the song lyrics translate these experiences into allusions and anecdotes that question the legitimacy of immigration authorities: Do you have sex maniacs or schizophreniacs Or astrophysicists in your family? Was my grandma anti-anti? Was my grandpa bounty-bounty? They asked in embassy (Gogol Bordello 2007) Upon arriving to the melting pot I get pencilled in as a goddamn white Now that I am categorized Officers get me naturalized (Gogol Bordello 2005) But by accident of some kind divine dispensation I ended up being a walking United Nation And I survive even fucking radiation (Gogol Bordello 2005)

6

First introduced by Victor Turner (1979) in an analysis of rituals, the term “liminality” in performance studies describes the suspension, challenge and playful transformation of social norms based on the performer’s in-between position. More broadly, it can refer to an individual’s or group’s position on the interstices of recognized roles and identities – as, for example, in the case of illegal immigrants and refugees (see Malkki 1995).

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The humorous tone also accentuates the heroic qualities of the lyrics’ persona: no matter the situation, he always finds a way out, leading to a sense of grandiosity. This is another common theme in interviews and articles. Again from the 2005 article in The Guardian, Hütz discusses his Roma roots as follows: I’m a half-breed so it’s not like I’m dark-skinned to give me away. What gave me away was I always did my own thing and I always won. I would always wonder why I was not like anybody else at my school.

The persona’s gypsy background is turned into his key identity marker. Nonconformity is presented as an inherited personality trait, an “otherness” characteristic of his Roma origins, which can also be interpreted as a type of modern fatalism. Although he may not have known or understood it, the hero was already destined to perform great deeds, which becomes evident in the statement: “I always did my own thing and I always won”. Above all, this also provides a solution to the hero’s struggle for a sense of belonging that is based in nationalism. The persona’s alliance with the Roma allows him to explore the liminal position from a completely different angle. What appears to be a disadvantage is turned into the very source of the hero’s ultimate success and into the most important element of the projection of a global community. Yet, in typical hybrid fashion, Eugene Hütz and Gogol Bordello also transcend Roma culture by infusing other cultural references into their music, lyrics and performances. Rather than remaining within the rich folkloric tradition of his people, Hütz celebrates cultural “contamination” as a means of interconnecting people around the world.7

Marginality, Music and the Global Counterculture Eugene Hütz’s emphasis on Roma culture and his band’s adoption of the gypsies as a badge of identity and a source of musical innovation goes beyond the songwriter’s ethnic background. The word “gypsy” automatically

7

It should be noted that in Ukraine as well as in the rest of the world the term “contamination” has become strongly associated with the Chernobyl disaster. Still today there are ongoing reports about the “contaminated areas” around the reactor. Given his background, it is safe to presume that Hütz is applying the term to the fusion of cultures in an ironic way, once again stressing the subversive and apparently dangerous effect of Gogol Bordello’s music.

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evokes associations to nomads8 and underdogs. Bernhard Streck defines the gypsy culture as a “culture of in-between spaces”, existing on the periphery but also alongside mainstream societies while resisting integration. A defining feature of in-between spaces is ambiguity: because only insiders have full access, other observers such as state authorities, intellectuals, artists and the media rely on vague associations based to varying extents on the limited contact between the dominant culture and the in-between culture, on the one hand, and pure imagination, on the other. Groups existing alongside rather than within an established society—with its relatively fixed hierarchies—become a source of anxiety to the mainstream. According to Streck, modernity cannot accommodate the in-between, because “the world from the perspective of civil society is perceived as a unified space” (Streck 2008, 28). The “shock” of contact with gypsies is provoked by the isolationism and fiercely defended autonomy of gypsy communities, which challenge the moral universalism of modernity. This has contributed significantly to the dominant image of gypsies, who have become one of the most recognizable embodiments of the Other in the European imaginary. As Kirsten von Hagen notes, the culture and literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe established the figure of the—often female—gypsy as a surface on which processes of inclusion and exclusion, self-definition and definition of outsiders are not only projected, but also negotiated and modified. The gypsy has become a “hybrid figure that always generates new meanings… [and] is used in situations of social, political or linguistic change in order to mark the precise point of rupture” (von Hagen 2009, 16, translation mine). A sense of rupture is also articulated by Gogol Bordello, whose representation of gypsy culture remains ambiguous. For example, their lyrics contradict the image of gypsies as eternal outsiders, but also reassert the stereotype of gypsies as practitioners of magic. Typically, their lyrics present the gypsy figure as a trickster, who challenges and subverts meanings. Their music centres on the transformative effects of gypsy culture on the West: You love our music but you hate our guts We know all about you 8

Gypsy communities themselves identify with their nomadic image, as evidenced by the Roma Union’s initiative to adopt the traditional song “Gelem, gelem”, meaning “I have departed, I have departed”, as the Roma national anthem (see Lorenz 2008, 99). Hence, the recurring themes of movement and departure in Gogol Bordello’s songs could be interpreted as an invocation of the gypsy “spirit”.

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Chapter Two You know nothing about us Opportunities for me is a red carpet to hell But I’m a Roma wunderkind I’m gonna break the spell (Gogol Bordello 2010) When the trickster starts a-walking He sends the whole world askew Just when you think it’s all through It’s just the birth of something new (Gogol Bordello 2004) Sally was a fifteen-year-old girl from Nebraska Gypsies were passing through her little town They dropped something on the road She picked it up— And cultural revolution right away began! (Gogol Bordello 2005)

The lyrics’ allusions to invasion toy with dominant society’s deeply rooted fear of gypsies as dangerous.9 Gogol Bordello’s lyrics turn the tables on the dominant discourse: the West is portrayed as a stagnant culture, sorely in need of the revitalisation that the nomadic underdogs will inject. Music not only bridges the divide between the dominant culture and the in-between culture, but can itself be a vehicle of change. As Speck highlights, the arts have been the only domain in which gypsy families have found a socially sanctioned means of subsistence in the host societies of Europe and the USA.10 As a self-appointed representative of the Roma, 9

In a 2011 essay for Le Monde, the French philosopher Andre Glucksmann notes that European culture has for centuries recycled haunting images of gypsies as beggars and thieves, who spread disease and snatch children. That these stereotypes persist is demonstrated by a survey of Eastern Europeans conducted by the Los Angeles Times after the fall of the Iron Curtain. 80 percent of the interviewed Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and Poles agreed with the statement that gypsies were an “incarnation of the diabolic other”. 10 See also Theresa Lorenz’s (2008) helpful differentiation between three types of musical performance practiced by the gypsies. Lorenz identifies a “lived culture” within gypsy communities, in which music plays an integral role in rituals and celebrations. Largely inaccessible to non-gypsies, the performances have little similarity to “popular entertainment music”. The second type is “displayed culture”, such as music performed in artistic settings with a clearly defined separation between musician and audience. The professionalization inherent in this form of musical performance can lead musicians to grow distant from their gypsy communities. Finally, “entertainment music” inhabits the space between the first two performance types. It is particularly central in gypsy culture as a means to earn a living and is also the most documented of the three. Most, if not all, of Gogol Bordello’s referencing, citing and adaptation of gypsy music derives from

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Eugene Hütz has often promoted traditional gypsy music by playing with folk bands. However, the Gogol Bordello project maintains a strict focus on hybridisation. Moreover, the cosmopolitanism portrayed by the band and the music places gypsies at the forefront of a truly global culture that celebrates difference and on-going “amalgamation”—as the recent song “Trans-Continental Hustle” puts it: Iglesia de la calle transcontinentau Cigano urbano maracatu rurau We gonna build new kind of globalizer … And may the sound of our contaminated beat Sweep all the purists off their feet … Contamination Amalgamation Cross-pollination Is on its way (Gogol Bordello 2010)

By enacting what it communicates, the multilingual lyrics can be considered a performative speech act as defined by J.L. Austin (1975). The multilingualism of Gogol Bordello’s lyrics forms an important aspect of the band’s cosmopolitanism. Even if the listener does not understand the words, the foreignness and even exoticism signified carries louder than the literal meaning of the lyrics. Playing with language by misspelling, mispronouncing and inventing words is a further key artistic device employed by Hütz. On the one hand, the lyrics amplify the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. On the other hand, the playful decoupling of signifier and signified treats language as an elastic medium and hints at an idealized realm, in which communication is possible without a dominant language such as English— instead, the act of communication itself should produce the language out of a mélange of different idioms. Of course, the abstract nature of the band’s music also promotes communication not tethered to the rigidity of language. And yet, the music on its own without the lyrics would not produce the same notion of cosmopolitanism explored in this article. The “urban gypsy” (cigano urbano) portrayed in the lyrics and by Hütz on- and off-stage, has much in common with the bohemian, another figure from society’s margins celebrated in Gogol Bordello’s work. Although the name originally referred exclusively to the Romani of Bohemia, in the “entertainment music”. Although Eugene Hütz’s persona is presented as a gypsy, his upbringing surely limited his exposure to “lived culture”. This alone suggests an “accurate” portrayal of gypsy culture in Gogol Bordello’s music is difficult, if not impossible.

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nineteenth century it was extended to Parisian artists leading hedonistic and “vagabond” lifestyles (von Hagen 2009, 15). Since then, bohemianism has become synonymous with nonconformism and creativity. In Gogol Bordello’s artistry, urban bohemianism brings the gypsy spirit of the Hütz persona to other forms of cultural resistance in popular music, such as punk rock, hip hop and reggae. As is the case for the band’s gypsy-influenced sounds, they employ the musical styles to recycle the notion of music as a vehicle for oppositional thinking, rather than (mere) entertainment. Although popular music has always served as a vehicle of political expression, in Western culture this aspect was particularly emphasized in the 1960s, when rock musicians and their lyrics were considered as representatives of a rebellious generation, especially in the USA and Western Europe, as young people marched on the streets to oppose the Vietnam war, for example.11 There is more than a touch of the 1960s in Gogol Bordello’s performances. Although a self-declared punk, his long hair, moustache and colourful folkloric outfits are more reminiscent of the hippy era, a fact often pointed out in features and reviews. The band’s sound also draws heavily on (Eastern European) folk music, evoking the late 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-roots movement in alternative communities. Finally, the lyrics’ emphasis on community, collective resistance and transcendence recreate the mood of the counterculture. As with the Diogenes myth and the memory of Chernobyl, these allusions to the 1960s speak to audiences regardless of race and nations. Especially in the USA and Western Europe, countless memoirs, films, documentaries, exhibitions, newspaper and journal editorials have ensured that the decade is remembered as the extraordinary moment when youthful ideals were channelled into collective action—against racism, colonialism, the Vietnam War, homophobia, and the oppression of women. By portraying themselves as custodians of that spirit of resistance, Gogol Bordello have written themselves into a long-standing Western tradition of youthful idealism and rebellion. However, the counterculture spirit celebrated by Gogol Bordello is not (just) nostalgic. The band engages with the present day, which is seeing a revival of 1960s ideals, albeit adapted to a new world. As described by Frank Lechner and John Boli (2005), a “global counterculture” emerged in the 1990s, which actively seeks to reform global capitalism and promotes the interests of marginalised groups and ethnic minorities around the world. Rather than a transnational, grassroots movement, Lechner and Boli define it as a loose amalgamation of many different movements. While the 11

See for example Osterhammel and Petersson (2007, 104).

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new global counterculture can be regarded as an extension of the 1960s era—which also focused strongly on transnational and transcultural cooperation—only after the Cold War did the revival of these ideals become truly global, as the foci of protest in the West turned to other areas of the world. Unofficially founded during the World Social Forum in Brazil in 1992 as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, the global counterculture actively promotes visions of a “different world”, in which political priorities are set not by the economy but by concerns for the environment, immigration, women’s and children’s rights, the preservation of local traditions and a respect for cultural diversity. Although wit and humour rather than direct criticism are Gogol Bordello’s preferred tools, their repertoire includes songs that deal with the direct consequences of global capitalism, especially its consequences for women and migrant workers. These tracks are among the few in which the Hütz persona moves into the background to give voice to a different subject. Here, social criticism is more overtly expressed. In “Zina Marina” the protagonist lures women from Eastern Europe into a life of prostitution in the West: So do you want to be a model, yeah? All you got to do is show up We’ll be leaving soon for breaking ground For there will forever be poverty There’ll forever be cruelty … There’ll forever be all the wretched of the Earth Crawling up round, driven by the last semen drop Factory that makes you, they say it never stops Factory that made me, I know it never stops (Gogol Bordello 2007)

The lyrics of the band’s more recent single, “Immigraniada” speaks for immigrants to the United States who are refused citizenship despite their indispensable role in the labour force. The lyrics acknowledges the ethnic and cultural diversity of the immigrant affected, which is underlined in the music video, in which a succession of individuals of different countries of origin are presented and implicitly identified as true Americans by highlighting the original status of America as a land of immigrants: Frozen eyes, sweaty back My family’s sleeping on a railroad track All my life pack/unpack But man, I got to earn that buck I got to pay representation To be accepted in a nation

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Chapter Two Where after efforts of a hero Welcome, start again from zero. It’s a book of our true stories True stores that can’t be denied It’s more than true, it actually happened— We’re coming rougher every time (Gogol Bordello 2010)

While “Zina Marina” makes explicit references to Marxist philosophy, the video for “Immigraniada” juxtaposes images of people trying to cross the border with the USA’s self-celebration as a nation where anything is possible. The lyrics are unambiguous, intended to resonate with audiences that feel equally outraged by the hypocrisy of an economy based on greed and political system without justice. Here, the ethical dimension of cosmopolitanism is revealed. The lyrics do not speak to Eastern European women tricked into prostitution or illegal immigrants forced to endure inhuman conditions at the US borders, but instead seek to generate empathy in audiences, whose lives are far removed from such hardship. According to Martha Nussbaum, cosmopolitanism essentially articulates a respect for the universal values of “reason and the love of humanity”. Hence, the recognition of “humanity wherever it occurs” ensures empathy and a sense of responsibility that transcend either individual or national interests (Nussbaum 1996, 159). If the bulk of Gogol Bordello’s performance of cosmopolitanism is based on the biographic “accuracy” of the Hütz persona’s narrative, what role does authenticity play when he adopts voices or perspectives unrelated to his experiences? Quite possibly such songs risk failing to produce a seamless fusion in Alexander’s terms: they may appear as inauthentic or fake because the performed script does not blend with the persona. This, in turn, would weaken the emotional impact of the songs. However, as exceptions in the musical repertoire, they actually add to the band’s appeal. The Hütz persona’s experience of similar, if not the same, struggle and marginalization, allows him to extend his performance and alternate between protagonist in and narrator of a personal tale to chronicler of our global era.

Conclusions: Imagining Cosmopolitanism Visitors to Gogol Bordello’s official website can read the band’s “Mission Statement” which expands on their commitment to cosmopolitanism. As handwriting on a scanned piece of crumpled paper, the text highlights the authenticity celebrated in the writing itself. Gogol Bordello promise to create a “neo-optimistic communal movement”

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through their performances. As part of this, they regard the “world’s cultures” not only as providers of “material for endless arts possibilities” but also as a means of creating much needed new “survival energy”. Such hyperbole is indicative of the overall tone of the band’s narrative and performance. The question remains as to the intended audience of such statements— and to what extent their fan base meets the band’s ambition for global impact. In other words: does the attempt to perform cosmopolitanism translate into real-life cosmopolitan music? Gogol Bordello’s performances do not speak to one community alone, and whether illegal immigrants or marginalized gypsies would even be drawn to their sound is questionable. Instead, the band has constructed a largely idealistic cosmopolitan identity, which can be understood as an example of Georgina Born’s (2001) notion of a “musically imagined community”. The imaginary created by Gogol Bordello’s music and by Eugene Hütz’s public persona is based on forms of sociocultural identities and alliances that do not yet exist—whether these are “purely imaginary” or “emergent”, to apply Georgina Born’s distinction, is difficult to gauge. However, it can be said that their promotion of cosmopolitanism as a project that cuts across national boundaries and ethnic background is squarely turned towards the future. In fact, Gogol Bordello’s lyrics could have been lifted straight from Ulrich Beck’s “Cosmopolitan Manifesto”, which states: A new kind of capitalism, a new kind of economy, a new kind of global order, a new kind of society and a new kind of personal life are coming into being, all of which differ from earlier phases of social development. Thus, sociologically and politically, we need a paradigm-shift, a new frame of reference (Beck 1999, 218).

If we agree that popular music is a main source of fantasy projection and wish fulfilment in modern culture, Gogol Bordello are an example par excellence of this paradigm imagined by Beck and can be considered ambassadors of both the hopes and anxieties of our times.

Reference list Adlam, John, Caroline Pelletier and Christopher Scanlon. 2011. ‘A citizen of the world’: Cosmopolitan responses to metropolitan models of social inclusion. http://www.ioe.ac.uk/about/documents/About_Over view /Adlam_J-_Pelletier_C-_Scanlon_C.pdf.

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Agamben, Giorgio. 1988. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. In Social performance: Symbolic action, cultural pragmatics, and ritual, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen and Jason L. Mast. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austin, John L. 1975. How to do things with words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bauman, Richard. 1989. Performance. In International encyclopedia of communications, ed. E. Barnouw, 262-266. New York: Oxford University Press. Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World risk society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David. 2001. Introduction: On difference, representation and appropriation in music. In Western music and its others: Difference, representation and appropriation in music, ed. Born and Hesmondhalgh, 1-58. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brown, Garrett Wallace and David Held. 2010. Editors’ introduction. In The cosmopolitanism reader, ed. Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, 1-14. Cambridge: Polity Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1937. The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dudley, Donald. 1937. A history of cynicism. London: International Literary Agency. Foucault, Michel. 2001. Fearless speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Giesen, Bernhard. 2010. Zwischenlagen: Das Außerordentliche als Grund der sozialen Wirklichkeit. Weilerswist: Vellbrück. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen & Co. Laursen, John Christian. 2009. Cynicism then and now. Iris: European journal of philosophy and public debate, 1 (2):469-482. Lechner, Frank J. and John Boli. 2005. World culture: Origins and consequences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lorenz, Theresa. 2008. Musikkulturen der Zigeuner: Regionale Vielfalt im transnationalen Diskurs. In Roma/Zigeunerkulturen in neuen Perspektiven, ed. Fabian Jacobs and Johannes Ries, 97-118. Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Malkii, Liisa Helena. 1995. Purity and exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Nussbaum, Martha. 1996. Patriotism and cosmopolitanism. In For love of country. London: Beacon Press. Osterhammel, Jürgen and Niels P. Petersson. 2003. Geschichte der Globalisierung: Dimensionen, Prozesse, Epochen. Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2000. The turbulence of migration: Globalization, deterritorialization and hybridity. Oxford: Polity Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1988. Critique of cynical reason, trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stade, Ronald. 2007. Cosmos and polis, past and present. Theory, culture and society 24 (7-8 December):283-285. Streck, Bernhard. 2008. Kultur der Zwischenräume: Grundfragen der Tsiganologie. In Roma/Zigeunerkulturen in neuen Perspektiven, ed. Fabian Jacobs and Johannes Ries. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Turner, Victor. 1979. Process, performance and pilgrimage: A study in comparative symbology. New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company. von Hagen, Kirsten. 2009. Inszenierte Alterität: Zigeunerfiguren in Literatur, Oper und Film. München: Wilhelm Fink. Wallace, Garrett and David Held. 2010. Editors’ introduction to The cosmopolitanism reader. Cambridge: Polity Press. Young, Robert J.C. 2003. Postcolonialism: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuberi, Nabeel. 2001. Sounds English: Transnational popular music. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Discography Gogol Bordello. 1999. Voi-La intruder. Rubric Records. —. 2002. Multi kontra culti vs. irony. Rubric Records. —. 2005. Gypsy punks: Underdog world strike, SideOneDummy Records. —. 2007. Super taranta! SideOneDummy Records. —. 2010. Trans-continental hustle. American Recordings.

CHAPTER THREE THE NORTH AS THE SELF AND THE OTHER: SCANDINAVIAN COMPOSERS’ SYMPHONIES 1 IN GERMAN CONCERT HALLS CIRCA 1900 KATHARINE LEISKA

If Carl Nielsen read the Danish newspaper Nationaltidende on the 14th February 1914, he must have been pleased to come across a report of the performances of his Sinfonia Espansiva in several German cities. For Scandinavian composers at the turn of the twentieth century, having their work performed in Germany meant a formidable boost to their careers. In the Scandinavian countries, popularity with German audiences and critics functioned as a mark of quality, especially as many Scandinavian composers had studied in Germany for some time. It is therefore understandable why Scandinavian composers like Carl Nielsen from Denmark, Hugo Alfvén from Sweden, or Christian Sinding from Norway were eager to appeal to German audiences. In fact, given that many Germans were fascinated by the North, the German Empire offered particularly favourable conditions for the promotion of Scandinavian music. Contemporary Scandinavian literature, for example, was being received with great interest, and some German authors even used Nordicsounding pseudonyms to increase sales of their publications (Zernack 1999, 490). But were Scandinavian composers able to profit from this situation as well? I argue in this chapter that symphonies by Scandinavian composers had a more ambiguous status than literature, art, and even other kinds of music, like songs, for instance, because they were trapped between conflicting contemporary expectations regarding the symphonic genre and the utopian image of the North. That is to say that Scandinavian composers’ works, on the one hand, fitted perfectly well into the idealising 1

This article presents results from my PhD thesis (Leiska 2012).

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German discourse on the North, as they evoked a sense of “the far North”. On the other hand, the symphony was a genre considered essentially German and so, in the eyes of many German music critics of the day, only German composers were capable of writing truly symphonic music. Hence, German audiences could both potentially identify with Scandinavian symphonies and feel alienated by them. That these symphonies were perceived and described as Nordic, however, did not result from the expectations of German audiences alone. At the end of the nineteenth century Scandinavian composers, such as Christian Sinding, created musical “moods” or “atmospheres” that corresponded with the popular topoi of the North. They used a variety of musical devices such as voice leading, melodic, dynamic, or rhythmic aspects to achieve this effect. The formal structure of the works played a crucial role, too, as they drew inspiration from works like Niels W. Gade’s early orchestral pieces (Oechsle 1992). The composers thus actively produced and reproduced a musical imagery of the North, in an attempt to compensate for the decline in traditional approaches to tonality and to offer an alternative approach to modernity.

North versus South I: The Idealised North as a German Utopia When Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the new German Empire embraced a multitude of kingdoms, duchies, free cities, and principalities under one crown. The newly won political unity both intensified on-going discussions and fostered new ideas about the possibility of a “national” German culture—one that would bridge persisting internal gaps and legitimise the young German Empire. In this context, the idea of the northern origin of German culture became an important part of German national identity, especially during the reign of Emperor Wilhelm II (1888-1918). During that time, interest in Scandinavian culture and literature flourished in an unprecedented way (Gentikow 1978, 27). The Emperor himself fuelled the trend by means of his much publicised Nordlandfahrten—annual cruises to the Scandinavian countries, especially to the Norwegian fjords. But if political interest additionally boosted the special attention given to contemporary Scandinavian culture and art, this interest in Scandinavia was, at the same time, very selective and ignored many local social and political conflicts. This was apparent in the very expression Nordland—the

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Northern lands—that subsumed the Scandinavian countries into a seemingly borderless, almost apolitical region.2 The fascination for the North encompassed a wide range of miscellaneous but vague ideas, which often referred to the concept of the Germanic. Thus Nordic mythology was seen as part of a shared heroic tradition that was a part of German as well as of Scandinavian heritage. Indeed, the German fascination for ancient Nordic mythology had already been evident in the eighteenth century, in the writings of authors such as Johann Gottfried Herder. At that time, however, “German” traditions, such as the Nibelungenlied, were thought of as distinct from Nordic texts, such as the writings of Snorri Sturluson. It was, therefore, only later that distinguished German authors like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Wilhelm Grimm laid claim to the Nordic tradition (Zernack 1994, 13-20). In the field of music, it was Richard Wagner who renewed this claim by popularising an arbitrary mixture of different literary traditions as Germanic-Nordic mythology. In the late nineteenth century, composers such as Max von Schillings, along with numerous male choirs with their specific repertoires emerging at that time (Eichner 2005), continued to shape the perception of German heritage as distinctly Nordic and thus independent of—or even superior to—classical antiquity. At the same time, the idea of a Northern Stammverwandtschaft included the belief that elements of the genuine Germanic heritage were best preserved in the Scandinavian cultures. In this respect, utopian qualities were ascribed to the North. It seemed to offer answers to anti-modern concerns, as (re-) connecting with the Nordic past was deemed the best way towards an allegedly “healthier” future—one which, following Peter Gay, we might label an “anti-modern modernity” (Gay 2008).3 Scandinavia’s natural environment was a crucial topos. The idealised Scandinavia was primarily characterised by its sublime nature: rugged landscape and harsh climate. This sublime nature supposedly served as a protective barrier against civilisation—preserving an authentic and original Nordic heritage. In this way, the North represented a genuine and sustainable model of life.

2 3

For a short overview of German images of the North see Göttsch-Elten (2001). Gay uses the term “anti-modern modernists” (see 2008, 397, 401 and 409).

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Scandinavian Symphonies in German Concert Halls circa 1900 When performed in German concert halls, Scandinavian composers’ symphonies evoked the perceptions of the North sketched above. German critics acclaimed most of these symphonies as specifically Nordic, either by explicitly labelling the work as “Nordic”, or by referring to the popular topoi of the North.4 Here I will restrict myself mainly to texts regarding Christian Sinding and his first symphony op. 21 in D minor and will sketch out important strands in the reception of the work. What is more, I will discuss to what extent the symphony lends itself to being received as “Nordic”. Interestingly, only few texts referred to any musical aspects of this work. Most critics limited themselves to invoking Nordic landscapes or attributing an abstract Nordic character to the music, even though they referred to just one specific musical work. For example, the influential German musicologist and writer, Hermann Kretzschmar, stated: The symphony shows its Nordic roots in idiosyncratic melodic phrases, just like those much beloved by Svendsen5, and in time changes; but mainly in the composer’s way of feeling and thinking, which emanates from the music.6 (Kretzschmar 1898, 432, my translation)

German topoi of the North is a recurring feature in many reviews of Sinding’s symphony from the turn of the century. The concept of unspoiled nature plays a central role here. Scandinavian music that is described as Nordic is first and foremost assumed to be intimately connected with the particular landscape of the Northern countries—both sublime and powerful. The music critic Otto Lessmann wrote in 1895: The second movement [of Sinding’s symphony op. 21] contains a section in which three solo violins separate from the string section and move 4

For a more elaborate analysis of German texts on Scandinavian music see my PhD dissertation: Skandinavische Musik in Deutschland um 1900. Symphonien von Christian Sinding, Victor Bendix und Carl Nielsen zwischen Gattungstradition und Nord-Imagines (forthcoming). 5 Johann Severin Svendsen (1840–1911) was a renowned Norwegian composer. His most famous orchestral works date back to the 1860s and 1870s. 6 In the original: “Die nordische Abkunft zeigt die Sinfonie in eigenthümlichen Melodiewendungen, denselben die auch Svendsen liebt, und im Taktwechsel; hauptsächlich aber in dem Fühlen und Denken des Componisten, das aus der Musik spricht.”

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Chapter Three gently up and down in broken chords, while the woodwind and horns continue the thematic thread and violins, violas and cellos add soft chordal triplets, which sound like the mysterious murmuring of waves: one cannot imagine the sight of a fjord at midnight, bathed in silvery moonlight, more wonderfully expressed in sound.7 (Lessmann 1895, 549, my translation)

Another recurrent theme in German reviews and essays is the description of Nordic music as sublime and melancholic. Nordic music’s alleged success in expressing unity of nature, Volksgeist, and culture is often highlighted. A passage from the Musikalisches ConversationsLexikon, one of the most influential dictionaries of that time edited by Wilhelm Mendel and August Reissmann, illustrates this well: Scandinavia’s geographic location, so distant from the cradle of civilisation and under a sky whose long winter evenings bring the people together in communal work and communal amusement around the convivial hearth, has perhaps done more than the tenacious conservatism of the national character to preserve, with rare fidelity, numerous reminiscences of times long gone by in songs and tales.8 (Ravn 1883, 551, my translation)

It is obvious that the discussion about the music of Scandinavian composers cannot be separated from the general discourse on the North at that time. Nor can it be isolated from the discussion of the symphony as a genre. German responses to Scandinavian symphonies with regard to their musical value were heterogeneous. One of the very few German authors to recommend Nordic music by Scandinavian composers as a model even for German composers was Walter Niemann, who highlighted the alleged capacity of this music to unify nature, music, and Volksgeist (Niemann 7

In the original: “Da ist im zweiten Satz eine Stelle, in der drei Soloviolinen sich von dem übrigen Streicherchor trennen und dreistimmig in gebrochenen Akkorden leise auf- und niederwogen, während Holzbläser und Hörner den thematischen Faden fortspinnen und Violinen, Bratschen und Violoncelli in leisen akkordischen Triolen, wie in geheimnißvollem Wellengemurmel dazu erklingen: man kann sich den Eindruck, den der mitternächtige Anblick des von silbernem Mondschein überglänzten Fjords hervorbringen muß, wundervoller in Tönen nicht ausgedrückt denken.” 8 In the original: “Die geographische Lage der skandinavischen Länder, fern von dem Ursprunge der Civilisation und unter einem Himmelsstriche, wo die langen Winterabende die Bevölkerung zu gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit und gemeinschaftlicher Zerstreuung um den geselligen Heerd [sic] sammeln, hat vielleicht in noch höherem Grade als der zähe Konservatismus des Volkscharakters dazu beigetragen, zahlreiche Erinnerungen längst verschwundener Zeiten bei den nordischen Völkern mit seltener Treue im Singen und Sagen zu bewahren.”

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1909, 12). The one and only text that considers a Scandinavian Nordic symphony superior to contemporary German works is a portrait of Christian Sinding by Willy Pastor, a prominent figure in the German Völkische Bewegung,9 who goes so far as to name Beethoven as a predecessor to Sinding (Pastor 1894). However, for most German music critics, this was an unthinkable proposition. More often, the “northerness” of Scandinavian symphonies was attributed to their national character. That meant that they were not discussed in relation to (allegedly universal) German symphonic works, and thus did not have a lasting impact on the symphonic discourse in Germany, other than as national works on the sideline of music history.

At the Merger of Construction and Perception: the North in Music The discourse on the North as sublime and melancholic was generated not only by German cultural magazines. The works of Scandinavian composers likewise contributed to this vision of the North. Sinding’s symphony is a case in point. In Germany, the work was performed several times in the 1890s. And, as I have already argued, it was believed to exhibit a particular Nordic character. To state that Sinding’s symphony contributed to a certain notion of the North in no way assumes that the music represents an ahistorical Northern “substance”. Instead, I think of the symphony as a historically conditioned construct that emerges from a fusion of symphonic traditions and contemporary ideas about the North. Sinding was, of course, aware of the German imagery of the North, as he had studied in Germany for several years. Yet, by attempting to transcend the dominant topoi of the North, he also realised that those topoi offered him nothing less than the possibility of writing a proper symphony and addressing structural problems that followed from the challenging of tonality around 1900. Sinding found a possible solution in setting a higher value on musical “moods” or “atmospheres”. For an adequate analysis of Sinding’s symphony one must, therefore, consider contemporary expectations and knowledge of both the North and the symphonic genre, as well as the knowledge of music that had earlier been perceived as Nordic. 9

Völkische Bewegung dates back to the turn of the twentieth century and subsumes a heterogeneous and incoherent conglomeration of different beliefs and ideas, loosely connected by a desire for alternative forms of cultural identification and social cohesion, rooted in the idea of common racial and/or cultural ancestry (Puschner et al. 1999).

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The symphony’s first theme with its head-motif (Fig. 3-1, bar 1) both activates the symphonic process and references the North. It appears in each of the four movements, having a notable impact on the whole work and creating a cyclic form. The declining head-motif consists of the scale’s eighth/first, seventh, and fifth degrees. In principle, the motif can be used as part of a major or a minor scale, depending on whether the tonic keynote is followed by a minor or a major second. The missing tone, the scale’s sixth degree, opens the motif up for a “natural” as well as a “melodic” minor scale. I will not go into detail, but only mention that Sinding uses both the motif’s minor and its major form, and that he taps into the full potential of the motif’s harmonic freedom throughout the work. Sinding even uses the head-motif to introduce D major and bring the symphony to an end. In the finale’s coda (bar 326) the motif has moved within the scale. It no longer begins on the tonic but on D major’s sixth degree. Strictly speaking, it has lost its identity. It has now become the major scale’s natural part and, losing its harmonic ambiguity, it loses its dynamic qualities as well.

Figure 3-1: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 1st movement, bars 1–4.

While it constitutes one of the most important dynamic factors of the symphony, the motif also links the work to the idea of the North. In its diatonic structure, the motif corresponds to a musical figure that later came to be labelled as Edvard Grieg’s melodic trademark (Schjelderup-Ebbe 1961, 65). At the turn of the twentieth century, the figure was already known in Germany and associated with Scandinavian folk music in general (see Friedhof 1912, 62). Thus, the first theme’s head-motif could be classified as a Nordic feature. The movement’s bold and quasi-unison beginning seems to confirm this allusion. In combining a seemingly simple compositional structure (unison plus rudimental chordal

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accompaniment) with a large part of the instrumental forces, it evokes a powerful, seemingly archaic atmosphere. At the beginning of the symphony, then, both the allusions to the North and the qualities required to start a symphonic process emerge from the same motif. The first theme provides both musical material of a high potential and a link to the contemporary discourse on the North. Another example, taken from the second movement, also illustrates the close relationship between the work’s symphonic structure and its Nordic character. The second movement, an andante in G minor, can be described as a ternary form—two related sections frame a middle section. In the middle section, the first movement’s second theme reappears. On the one hand, this works as a thematic link that unites the symphony. On the other hand, the theme is introduced into the second movement in a way that really highlights it and marks it as exceptional. In the second movement, it appears as a wistful remembrance and provides the movement with a nostalgic quality. In the first movement, though, the theme fulfils the conventional role of a lyrical contrast to the bold first theme very well (Fig. 3-2). It attracts as little attention as possible as it is not subject to the development and, in the recapitulation, it appears only slightly changed.

Figure 3-2: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 1st movement, bars 59–62.

As the theme enters the second movement it is introduced as standing out from the framing sections—being much lighter and brighter than the passages which surround it.

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One important aspect is the change of instrumentation. The framing sections are scored with subdued instrumental colours, especially in those parts that adjoin the middle section. At the end of the first framing section, higher instruments such as violins, flutes and oboes remain silent. Clarinets, horns and lower strings dominate the timbre. And when the violins start to play a little later (bar 44) they still restrict the passage to a relatively low pitch level. The transition to the middle section begins with a phrase of two bars that first serves as a point of closure (Fig. 3-3, bar 53). During the transition, the instrumentation becomes brighter and the pitch level higher. The woodwinds enter the scene and take the closing gesture an octave higher, undermining the effect of closure. Subsequently, lower instruments such as the bassoons and horns cease to play while flutes and violins raise the phrase yet another octave. Here, the effect of closing is lost completely. The D minor chord in bar 60 is reinterpreted as part of a cadence leading to B flat major. In this way, the beginning of the middle section, for the first time in this movement, establishes a major key.

Figure 3-3: Christian Sinding, symphony op. 21, 2nd movement, bars 53–67.

When this bright atmosphere has opened up, the first movement’s second theme reappears (Fig. 3-3, bar 62). Introduced in this spectacular way, the theme seems to be more than a mere thematic link to the first movement. As the theme enters the movement unexpectedly, its relation to

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the first movement’s less prominent second theme remains concealed. At the same time, when entering the second movement, the theme still sounds familiar, with the passage’s timbre and instrumentation lending it a nostalgic quality. The combination of these two elements—the theme’s unexpected and slightly changed appearance and its orchestration—evoke a sense of remembrance. This and the theme’s simple, songlike structure was probably the reason why Hermann Kretzschmar perceived the theme as being a Nordic Volksweise—a folk song: “It is as if this melody has finally found the sound that was being sought in the previous two themes; but this melody is a folk song” (Kretzschmar 1898, 435). Kretzschmar clearly fails to notice this quality in the first movement, where he does not refer to it as a folk song. The interpretation of the theme as a folk song could be explained by the exceptional position of the middle section, which lends the theme an aura of nostalgia and distinguishes it from the rest of the work. This also does much to explain why the whole movement was perceived as Nordic, and evoked, for Lessmann, a fjord bathed in moonlight. The examples above indicate that the reception of the symphony as a Nordic work was closely related to its symphonic qualities. The main motif of the symphony gains its power by virtue of its ambiguous, seemingly archaic tonal structure. And, in the eyes of its German contemporaries, the work’s most Nordic movement gained its quality through a thematic link that lived up to expectations of symphonic unity. Thus, when investigating the musical (at least the symphonic) North, it is not sufficient to limit the analysis to the search for seemingly folkloristic or archaic details, such as a lowered seventh degree, a plagal cadence, or parallel fifths. Nor can the German perception of Nordic symphonic music be reduced to the mere question of reception. Scandinavian composers were aware of the discourse on the North; but they creatively used it in order to meet the challenges of symphonic writing. Hence, the history of the symphonic genre and the history of the discourse on the North are intertwined and should not be treated separately.

North versus South II: “Northern” Arguments for German Musical Superiority While literary agents enthusiastically imported works by Scandinavian writers, Scandinavian music—especially symphonic works—went against the grain of contemporary ideas of the symphony as an essentially German genre. Bernd Sponheuer has outlined some constitutive aspects of the discursive patterns which determined the understanding of German music

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as superior and which, although established already in the late eighteenth century, remained in place far into the twentieth century. (Sponheuer 2002; cf. Applegate and Potter 2002). According to Sponheuer, two different, but intrinsically linked, concepts dominated the perception of German music at the time: an exclusive and a universal one. German musical thinking centred around a whole series of binary oppositions, which highlighted the basic contrast between (Italian and French) sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) and (German) intellect (Geist). Thus German composition was described as technically solid, thorough (gründlich), and deep. And while these qualities were despised in the early eighteenth century, they were re-evaluated in Romantic aesthetics, which intrinsically tied them to the idea of the “Gothic” and to Johann Sebastian Bach’s (instrumental) works. “Instead of being criticised for its lack of words, affect, and subject and its calculated, pondering, confusing nature”, notes Sponheuer, “the Gothic benefits from a preference for the meta-empirical, mysterious, deeply felt, and unutterable (Unsagbare)” (Sponheuer 2002, 51). It was the alleged sublime quality and genius of German music—that is to say “absolute” music, and in particular the symphonic genre—that, among other things, distinguished it from music that was considered to be merely “beautiful” and “pleasing”. The latter characteristics were, in turn, ascribed to the French and Italian styles, or to what Franz Brendel termed “Romanic” music, which was to serve as a contrast to the “German(ic)” style (Brendel 1852).10 This concept of German music gave rise to another paradigm, which framed German music as potentially all-embracing and universal. With its allegedly sublime, intellectual, and highly reflective character, German music appeared as a vehicle that could enable a synthesis of different musical styles. Thanks to its presumed capacity for abstraction, German music was thus deemed the only music that could integrate other national styles and transcend the very concept of national music. To be sure, Sponheuer presents a hermeneutic abstraction, and I abridge his argumentation even more, inevitably simplifying important details and nuances. However, one can claim with some justification that there is a correspondence between the debate on German music and the German discourse on the North. By means of the dichotomy of Romanic/Germanic, beautiful/sublime, sensual/intellectual, Germany was implicitly identified with the North, and contrasted with the “Romanic” South. By the same token, the supposed superiority of German symphonic music was derived from its “Northern” qualities. The central position of ideas of the North within conceptions of essentially German music 10

The first edition was followed by numerous later editions.

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rendered music from the even farther North inapposite and disturbing. Scandinavian symphonic works could not easily be integrated into narratives of universal—that is to say German—music. For this reason, in spite of an enthusiastic reception of other offerings of Scandinavian culture, Scandinavian symphonies were placed in a non-universal, and thus inferior, national sideline of music history.

Conclusions: The North as the Self and the Other Scandinavian symphonies presented a challenge to the German enthusiasm for the North. In many respects, images of the North were important to the process of negotiating a German national identity. The North served as an idealised space of pristine culture and authenticity, which German culture had reputedly lost and needed to regain. These imagined qualities of the North had a strong impact on contemporary discussions of musical aesthetics and composition techniques. Germany was imagined as the centre of symphonic music. Ascribing Northern qualities to the German music style, and juxtaposing it with the Southern (i.e. Romanic) style, music critics and historians made use of this dichotomy in order to establish German symphonic music’s universal character. In this respect, German symphonic music already represented the Nordic—and, at the same time, universal—ideal. Symphonic music by Scandinavian composers was commonly considered authentic on the national level but not as a profound contribution to the development of universal forms of music. Thereby, the German reception mapped the North as the peripheral other. For this reason, the German perception of the North was inevitably contradictory in that it was constantly oscillating between two poles: the North appeared both as the self and as the other. Scandinavian composers that sought to participate in the development of the symphonic genre found their own ways to deal with the German notion of the imagined community of the North that both included and excluded them. In his first symphony, Sinding consciously drew on Nordic topoi when choosing the central motif of his main theme, with its implicit harmonic consequences and its alleged connection to Scandinavian folk music. He exploited German images of the North, playing with topoi, such as nostalgia. At the same time, using the popular imagery of the North to reach his symphonic goals, Sinding found an original way to write a symphony that met the central requirements of the genre. The “idea of the North” in music was indeed a doubly constructed concept, resting not only upon traditions of German reception of, and the expectations of German

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listeners towards, Scandinavian music, but also on the particular inner logic of these compositions.

Reference list Applegate, Celia and Pamela Potter. 2002. Germans as the “people of music”: Genealogy and identity. In Music and German national identity, ed. ibid., 1-35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brendel, Franz. 1852. Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich. Leipzig: Hinze. Eichner, Barbara. 2005. ‘Was ist deutsch?’ Musical solutions to problems of national identity (1848-c.1900). PhD diss., Jesus College, University of Oxford. Friedhof, B. 1912. Viertes Streichquartett in A-moll von Wilhelm Stenhammar. In I. Schwedisches Musik-Fest unter der Ehrenschutzherrschaft Sr. Exzellenz des Kgl. schwedischen Gesandten und bevollmächtigten Ministers Herrn Grafen Taube in Berlin. Fest-Buch. Dortmund 8. 9. 10. 11. Juni 1912, 55-64. Dortmund: C. L. Krüger. Gay, Peter. 2008. Modernism: The lure of heresy. New York: Norton. Gentikow, Barbara. 1978. Skandinavien als präkapitalistische Idylle: Rezeption gesellschaftskritischer Literatur in deutschen Zeitschriften 1870 bis 1914. Neumünster: Wachholtz. Göttsch-Elten, Silke. 2001. Populäre Bilder vom Norden im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. In Ultima Thule. Bilder des Nordens von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart, ed. Annelore Engel-Braunschmidt, Gerhard Fouquet, Wiebke von Hinden and Inken Schmidt, 123-143. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Kretzschmar, Hermann. 1898. Führer durch den Concertsaal. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Leiska, Katharine. 2012. Skandinavische Musik in Deutschland um 1900. Symphonien von Christian Sinding, Victor Bendix und Carl Nielsen zwischen Gattungstradition und Nord-Imagines. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Lessmann, Otto. 1895. Aus dem Konzertsaal. In Allgemeine MusikZeitung 22:549. Niemann, Walter. 1909. Die Musik Skandinaviens. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. Oechsle, Siegfried. 1992. Symphonik nach Beethoven. Studien zu Schubert, Schumann und Gade. Kassel: Bärenreiter.

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Pastor, Willy. 1894. Christian Sinding. Vossische Zeitung, Sonntagsbeilage no. 27, July 8 and no. 28, July 15. Puschner, Uwe, Walter Schmitz and Justus H. Ulbricht, eds. 1999. Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871–1918. München: Saur. Ravn, Vilhelm Carl. 1883. Skandinavische Musik. In Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon. Ergänzungsband, ed. Hermann Mendel and August Reissmann, 551-576. Berlin: Robert Oppenheim. Schjelderup-Ebbe, Dag. 1961. Neue Ansichten über die früheste Periode Edvard Griegs. In Dansk aarbog for musikforskning 1:61-68. Sponheuer, Bernd. 2002. Reconstructing ideal types of the German in music. In Music and German national identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 36-58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zernack, Julia. 1994. Geschichten aus Thule. Íslendingasögur in Übersetzungen deutscher Germanisten. Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin. —. 1999. Anschauungen vom Norden im deutschen Kaiserreich. In Handbuch zur “Völkischen Bewegung” 1871-1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz and Justus H. Ulbricht, 482-511. München: Saur.

PART TWO MUSIC AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES

CHAPTER FOUR DUKE ELLINGTON, CHARLES MINGUS AND THE AESTHETICS OF PAN-AFRICANISM MARIO DUNKEL

Towards a Pan-African Aesthetics In assessment of the legacy of jazz musicians, a nationalist approach, in which jazz is considered primarily a national heritage, remains powerful. This is unfortunate, as it obfuscates jazz’s colorful past, reducing the music’s transnational heritage to a national dimension. This chapter argues that continuing battles over the national content of jazz are distracting rather than helpful in the analysis of jazz music. Jazz research, due to its focus on jazz’s ostensibly American essence, has tended to ignore the music’s transnational elements to such an extent that obvious contradictions between the transnational and the national often remain unrecognized. For instance, it is seen as unproblematic for prominent jazz historian and musician Wynton Marsalis to first claim that “Moon over Cuba” (which he attributes to Ellington, even though the song was actually written by the Puerto Rican trombonist Juan Tizol) is so beautiful that it transports the listener to Cuba, only to then continue by claiming Ellington’s oeuvre is essentially American (cf. Marsalis and O’Meally 1998, 145), comparing it to an American skyscraper, among other things. The music’s Latin American elements (and maybe origin) tend to be eclipsed. As I will show, Ellington’s writings and his music suggest that his oeuvre in fact oscillates between the national and the outer-national. Ellington’s music was sometimes concerned with the US, but it was similarly, if not more so, concerned with concepts extending beyond the nation. Of these concepts, I investigate the composer’s use of a panAfrican aesthetics. Throughout the history of jazz, African American jazz musicians have composed and performed types of music that their audiences have associated with black, transnational cultures. These references combine to

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a pan-African aesthetics. The term pan-African or pan-Africanism has been used in a variety of ways and needs some explanation. Politically, pan-Africanism is usually understood as the struggle towards a future “black” nation that re-unites all people of African descent. It was most conspicuously promoted by Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) during the 1920s and 1930s. Pan-African aesthetics, however, have to be distinguished from this political position, which they do not necessarily promote. Instead, the reflection of pan-African culture in music serves a variety of political agendas, ranging from black nationalism to the patriotic promotion of a pluralist and democratic United States. In my definition, a given aesthetics cannot be absolute or universal. Aesthetics is instead a relative concept. In reference to its Greek root, aisthanomai, I regard it as the way in which humans perceive things by means of their senses. As the Kantian idea that the aesthetic is “that which pleases the senses” seems limiting, I accentuate the cognitive qualities of aesthetics, following the definition of the American musicologist Nelson Goodman (Goodman 1976). I contend that the ways in which audiences perceive music depends on various socio-historical, cultural, and performative factors that exist outside of the music itself. An investigation of pan-African aesthetics thus has to consider how artists create and perform types of music that their respective audiences perceive as panAfrican, i.e. as suggesting the existence of a transnational or outer-national black culture. Musicians do this through their choice of titles, lyrics, and the use of rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic elements. The perception of pan-African aesthetics (like any other kind of aesthetics) is historically, geographically, and culturally bound to time, space, and audience. A musical element that an all-white American audience during the 1930s regarded as non-US (such as 1930s rumba music or Ellington’s “jungle music”) is not necessarily perceived in the same way by, say, a European audience in the 1950s. What may seem foreign and non-American to US audiences in the 1930s may seem essentially American to European audiences of the 1950s (as for instance Ellington’s “jungle” sounds did). The question whether music has a panAfrican aesthetics can therefore only be answered in relative terms. In my analysis, I investigate music by Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus written for American audiences of the 1940s and 1950s. Here, pan-African aesthetics are defined as musical elements that raciallyintegrated American audiences in particular contexts during the 1940s and 1950s were likely to identify as, firstly, referring to black music (connected to a “black” ethnicity or race) and, secondly, as transnational

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or non-American music. Performed for US audiences, pan-African aesthetics comprise musical elements that to this group signify a black world, which may exist within the US but which also has a place outside of and independently of the latter.

Duke Ellington and Pan-Africa Duke Ellington’s attitudes towards the concept of a transnational black culture are highly ambiguous and illustrate the musician’s conflicting ambitions and feelings. On the one hand, Ellington was highly critical of any kind of categorization. The attack against categorization in general is a major theme of his autobiography Music is My Mistress (Ellington 1976, 38) and evident in his early rejection of the term “jazz”. Ellington never deemed categorization to be a necessary epistemological tool. On the other hand, Ellington repeatedly used categories to describe what he sought to do in his own music. Early in his career, he claimed that he wanted to write “black music”, based on his experience as a black man in the United States (Ellington 1993b, 112). The categorization of music according to racial categories remained a powerful model for Ellington to define musical achievement. “[U]ntil the time comes when the colored race takes its own music seriously”, he said, “Negro music will remain unheard and for the most part unearthed” (Cohen 2011, 239). The musical renegotiation of categories, their deconstruction and re-construction, became an elementary part of his musical practice. Until the 1930s, those elements in jazz that are commonly referred to as Latin American today were often regarded as stemming from European roots, and thus as implicitly white. In 1938, Jelly “Roll” Morton famously spoke of his music’s “Spanish tinge”—a term that clearly “whitened” and Europeanized Latin American musical elements—during a period when the quality of jazz was widely ranked along a racio-cultural axiology (Lomax 1973, 62). In his autobiography, Morton mentions his use of “French” and “Spanish” songs, ignoring the hybrid character of the types of music he was exposed to in New Orleans and thereby “whitening” the concept of jazz. According to Morton, French music was an important source for his art and the “Spanish tinge” an indispensable element of jazz music generally (Lomax 1973). With the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of a more Afrocentric form of jazz criticism during the 1930s (such as in the writings of John Hammond, Leonard Feather, Charles Edward Smith, Marshall W. Stearns), the controversial nature of debates on the importance of African cultures and their impact on the present increased exponentially (Gennari

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2006). Advocates of African and African American cultures increasingly challenged the dominant narrative of white cultural superiority, more and more successfully promoting an Afrocentric counter-narrative. However, the idea that cultural influences from the Caribbean islands were in fact European (Spanish or French) in origin remained powerful well into the 1940s. Duke Ellington was one of the first musicians to undermine this raciocultural hierarchy. As a well-educated son of a black middle-class family in Washington D.C., Ellington had always been interested in African American history, to which he had been exposed early in his life. During Ellington’s childhood, Washington D.C. had an active African American intellectual community. The Washington environment provided Ellington with history teachers who were knowledgeable in African American history and demanded that African Americans be proud of their African heritage. The city’s African American music scene was well-educated and skilled in both classical music and jazz (Tucker 1991). Early in his career, Ellington sought to do for music what the writers of the Harlem Renaissance were doing for African American literature. He wanted to create a proud, black art that would be appreciated beyond the borders of African American communities: In his first article published in 1931, he stated, “what is being done by Countee Cullen and others in literature is overdue in music” (Ellington 1993a, 49). Ellington’s music has often been described as being primarily concerned with African Americans rather than with pan-African cultures. Graham Lock says that “Ellington himself never showed the slightest interest in Garveyism and its “back to Africa” philosophy; instead … he was concerned almost exclusively with the Negro in America, both in the past and the future” (Lock 2000, 83). As I will show below, Lock underestimates Ellington’s concern with the transnational character of black cultures. Many of Ellington’s compositions would remain incomprehensible if regarded solely from this US-centric perspective. Ellington’s idea of the transnational character of black cultures was shaped by both his education in Washington DC and personal encounters with musicians from the Caribbean in the music scene, most notably trombonist Juan Tizol. The Puerto Rican musician, who joined Ellington’s band in 1929, wrote and contributed to numerous compositions that were bought and performed by Ellington and his band, such as “Caravan”, “Moon over Cuba”, “Perdido”, or “Bakiff”. Ellington, an eclectic experimenter, soon made Latin American elements hallmarks of his own style, even incorporating them into his ambitious 57-minute opus Black, Brown and Beige.

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In early 1943, Ellington finally completed a project first conceived in 1930 to depict the history of African Americans in the United States in music (Tucker 1993, 69). The Carnegie Hall performance of Black, Brown and Beige on January 23, offered a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro” (Ellington 1976, 181) and was an early peak in Ellington’s development of politically charged music that was geared towards challenging racial stereotypes rather than reaffirming them, as he had often been forced to do under the label “jungle music” in the past. In the 1920s, Ellington had still been confined to the policy of the Cotton Club that offered “jungle music” to an exclusively white audience. The music was performed by an all-African American cast that had to black-up and enact primitive and nostalgic scenes from exotic “jungles” and the rural South. For such a historically conscious musician as Ellington, being forced to misrepresent black cultures to white audiences served as an additional incentive to attack and amend these stereotypical images later in his career. With the first Carnegie Hall concert, Ellington had arrived at what for him was a historical moment. For the first time, as the highlight of an official one-week celebration of his twentieth year in show business, he could present a musical history of African Americans in America’s most prestigious concert hall. Black, Brown and Beige traced the history of African Americans from slavery through the Revolutionary War to the present, emphasizing their contribution to the success of the United States. On the one hand, its message was clearly patriotic: African Americans had supported the United States in the past, and they would continue to do so now, during the Second World War. Ellington makes sure that no one misses this point when he announces that the colors named in the piece’s title represented the colors red, white, and blue. On the other hand, Ellington’s music re-defines the United States as an essentially pluralist nation, shaped not merely by white people, but equally by African Americans, who were however disrespected and condescended by the country they had always supported unconditionally (Cohen 2004, 1019). Ellington incorporated Latin American musical elements into this patriotic narrative. Although when moderating his first Carnegie Hall concert Ellington refers to the piece as “the salute to the West Indian influence”, he is more explicit in the moderation of his second Carnegie Hall concert on December 11, 1943 (Ellington 2010), in which “West Indian Influence” is the first piece of a series of excerpts from Black, Brown and Beige. Ellington introduces the composition as a tribute to the heroic contribution of 700 Haitian soldiers to the defense of the city of Savannah in the Revolutionary War. “This particular sketch is one that we

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dedicate to the 700 Negroes who came from Haiti to save Savannah during the Revolutionary War, and so we call it ‘The West Indian Influence’” (Ellington, 2001). Ellington’s mention of this detail is remarkable in itself. Historians had ignored the 1779 contribution of black soldiers to the French and American armies in the Siege of Savannah for more than a century, until the 1899 publication of Theophilus G. Steward’s seminal article “How the Black St. Domingo Legion Saved the Patriot Army in the Siege of Savannah, 1779” (Clark 1980, 356-7). An African American amateur historian, Steward was one of the first black authors to rewrite the nation’s history from a non-white perspective. While the exact degree to which Haitian soldiers contributed to the American-French side of the Revolutionary War remains contested (Clark 1980, 366), it is undoubted that in the twentieth century, their patriotic commitment to the American cause became part of an African American counter-narrative to dominant racist interpretations of the American past. As Ellington said in a 1941 speech held to African American churchgoers in Los Angeles, African Americans were “the injection, the shot in the arm, that has kept America … alive” (Ellington 1993c, 147). Black, Brown and Beige explicitly supported this narrative, as Ellington claimed in his moderation of his second Carnegie Hall concert: It “represents an awfully long and very important story … and I don’t think too many are familiar with this story” (Ellington 2001). The inclusion of the story of the Haitian soldiers fighting to defend the United States into Black, Brown and Beige is part of a strategy that operates on various levels simultaneously. First, “West Indian Influence” suggests the existence of a black cultural world that reaches beyond the United States and transcends the country’s national boundaries. By embedding the piece in a history of African Americans through the medium of music, Ellington was clearly pointing out the music’s African background and legacy. Ellington’s black cultural world of Black, Brown and Beige is complex and multi-faceted. Second, the musical “sketch” implied that people of African descent all over the world were and had always been loyal to the United States. Rather than being a threat to the nation’s integrity, they represented its backbone. The idealization of their patriotism, however, was accompanied by an unspoken, implicit message in the concert’s programmatic concept, namely, that the United States was fundamentally African American in character. This is made obvious through the accentuation of elements that Ellington re-appropriated as recognizably black, such as popular Latin American musical characteristics in “West Indian Influence”. Moreover, these elements later intermingle with musical elements that were previously considered

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African American, such as blues tonality and blues riffs. The piece attributes Morton’s “Spanish tinge”, the former Eurocentric denomination of Latin American music, to Haitian slaves and their contribution to the defense of Savannah. Thereby, Ellington reframed Latin American music as black rather than white, transvaluating it as pan-African and providing an example of the heterogeneity of black artistic invention and achievement. “West Indian Influence” is a musical hybrid. While the beginning four bars are reminiscent of commercial 1930s’ and 1940s’ rumba dance music, the turn towards riffs and blues tonality from the fifth bar in the form of an oscillation between rumba and swing heralds a more experimental side. In the last variation of the main theme, the melody (which maintains its rumba character) is accompanied by a heavily swinging walking bass. The piece ends with a swing beat and repeated chord anticipations by the reed section, which mark the ultimate transition from ostensibly “West Indian” elements to recognizably American swing music. For a portrait of the heroic contribution to a violent battle of the Revolutionary War, “West Indian Influence” sounds remarkably smooth and catchy. The pedal point section, in which the bass repeats the same note on every single beat, is the only part that may express a moderate degree of aggression or furor. Apart from that, the piece remains largely lighthearted and jocund. As a part of Black, Brown and Beige, “West Indian Influence” draws an idyllic picture of pan-African diversity, portraying Ellington’s vision of black cultures eager to live in harmony with white America as long as the latter lived up to its constitutional promises of equality and democracy. In his writings, Ellington discussed the ways in which pan-African cultures might be interlinked through music. Before ever it reached New Orleans, the original African element had made itself felt in the West Indies, and from there it branched off in two directions. In one case, it went to the Latin-American countries, where it picked up Spanish and Portuguese influences that resulted in a distinctive Afro-Latin music. The heritage of African drums survived strongly, and a more complex use of percussion instruments—conga drums, bongos, and timbales—is a striking characteristic of this music even today. African rhythms have always been considered the most sophisticated. (Ellington 1976, 416)

However, Ellington was not the first to propose a transvaluation of Latin American musical influences as essentially African. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of Latin American (especially Cuban) orchestras had formed in the United States. Most notably, Machito had

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arrived in New York in 1937. In 1940, the multi-talented Cuban musician formed his legendary orchestra, the Afro-Cubans, who soon earned the respect of most major American jazz musicians. According to John Storm Roberts, “the band essentially redefined New York Latin music, whose leading practitioners had all been white and society-oriented, as a hot, progressive, black music” (Roberts 1999, 101). Their popularity increased throughout the 1940s, even carrying them into Carnegie Hall in 1949. During the late 1940s, the band cooperated with such bebop musicians as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, transforming what was commonly known as light Latin American dance music into a multi-faceted art in its own right. If Ellington’s “West Indian Influence” referenced Latin American music only in the piece’s lighter parts, such as the piano introduction, turning to swing in order to express patriotism in war, five years later, this interpretative approach would not seem plausible anymore, as the image of Latin American music had been transformed during the 1940s (Roberts 1999, 115-9). Even though Ellington did not participate in the Cubop (the blending of bebop with Cuban music) movement of the late 1940s, the concept of pan-African elements in the music of the Americas remained important throughout his career. His next larger work to incorporate elements of black music was the 1956 TV special A Drum is a Woman. The first ideas for Drum had formed in an unfinished follow-up project to Orson Welles’s Jump for Joy during the early 1940s (Cohen 2011, 329). Drum is a bizarre fantasy of the history of jazz. It tells the story of Carribee Joe and his drum, which transmutes into Madam Zajj (the name is a variation of the word “jazz”). Whereas Joe stays in the jungle, Madam Zajj travels to Barbados and the United States. She celebrates Mardi Gras in New Orleans, meets the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden, and participates in the rituals at Congo Square. From New Orleans she continues her travels all over the world and grows ever more sophisticated, meeting new “Joes” wherever she goes, yet always remembering her beloved Caribee Joe. Zajj even goes to the moon and back, but has to remain forever separated from Caribee Joe. Ellington described the story of Drum as an allegory of the history of jazz (Ellington 1976, 191). Thus, after his allegory of the history of African Americans in Black Brown and Beige, he now provided a less earnest version of the history of African American music. In fact, rather than another way of telling the history of jazz, Drum is a parody of conventional jazz historiography. Ellington’s parody mostly works through crass over-simplification and self-evident hyperbole. The first part of the story starts out with polyrhythmic percussion patterns, underlying

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the lyrics “Rhythm came to America from Africa”. These words are repeated over and over again, until they are replaced by the line “Rhythm came to Africa from way back”. Ellington highlights the fatuity of the popular belief that Africa is synonymous with rhythm by exaggerating the myth of jazz’s origins. Towards the end of Part Two, he continues this technique, when the narrator says: “Aha, Madam Zajj. She’s from way back as far back as way back goes. She’s been way out as far out as far out goes”. Contemporary attempts to define jazz in reference to a fixed time or space are ridiculed here. Moreover, Ellington strongly exaggerates primitivism in a scene, in which Carribee Joe’s drum turns into a woman, with the voices in the background fatuously imitating a drum beat, “Rhythm tum ti dum, come from di drum”. The out-of-tune imitation of a flute sound in the background adds to this exaggerated portrayal of ostensible African primitivism. Ellington’s narration further accentuates primitivist ideas: “Joe was in love with the jungle, the virgin jungle, Godmade, and untouched”. In the song “Carribee Joe”, the lyrics continue in a similar fashion: “This intimacy, this exotic luxury is the jungle / And the jungle is virginity”. By pushing the idea of African primitivism to its furthest extremes, Ellington exposes it as a product of human fantasy rather than historic truth. Drum is thus Ellington’s ironic statement on the attempts of (primarily Euro American) writers to define the history of jazz and to answer the question of ownership in jazz. Since the 1930s, jazz historians and critics had been arguing over the true origins of jazz. Did it come from Africa? Or was it invented in the United States? Was the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band the originator of jazz? Or did they appropriate African American folk music? In the early 1950s, the idea that rhythm had come to the United Sates from Africa was widely promoted by a circle of cultural anthropologists around Melville Herskovits, including Alan Merriam and Richard Waterman. Although they advocated the idea of African American cultural achievement based on African “survivals” in African American music, they could not entirely free themselves from the primitive myth of African ferocity, most obvious in their promotion of “African rhythm” (Radano 2000, 23). The Afrocentrism among white American jazz scholars culminated in the publication of Marshall W. Stearns’s standard jazz history The Story of Jazz (1956), which made Merriam and Waterman’s arguments accessible to a larger public. In Drum, Ellington plays with these attempts to define the history of jazz, implying that jazz music is much more elusive than academics suggest. Just like the transmutable Zajj, who keeps on traveling across the globe, jazz can neither be owned nor fixed.

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This reading of Drum as a postmodern deconstruction of dominant narratives, however, may seem to contradict Ellington’s evidently serious interest in the history of African Americans. If Black, Brown and Beige sought to portray the glorious and colorful history of African Americans, then Drum would seem to undermine this effort by ridiculing attempts to narrate the history of African American music. One could even go further and argue that Drum challenges the very conception of pan-African aesthetics. If the idea that rhythm came from Africa to America is merely a fantasy that needs to be parodied, what then is African in African American culture? Does the failure to answer this question imply that, according to Ellington, the idea of a transnational black culture is nonsensical? Indeed, in Drum Ellington deconstructs primitivist theories of African American heritage. However, he does this in order to open the way for a different kind of aesthetics that, instead of attempting a reconstruction of the past, re-invents itself permanently. His music suggests a way of thinking about pan-African cultures that considers the cultures’ complexities rather than reducing them to their heritage of “African rhythms”. Thereby, it opens up new categories to think about pan-African types of music. In his memoirs, Ellington describes jazz as “the combination of team spirit and informality, of academic knowledge and humor” (Ellington 1976, 193). In Drum, Ellington realizes exactly this kind of combination. He had always been known for an inclusive approach to his work, but according to his friend and arranger Billy Strayhorn, Drum involved “the largest hunk of collaboration … in which we just kind of did everything. He wrote lyrics, I wrote lyrics. He wrote music, and I wrote music. He arranged, and I arranged” (Lee 2008). Their collaboration resulted in a humorous, informal variation on an academic “truth”, thereby suggesting an elusive aesthetics of playful, permanent signifying practice that defies simplistic fixations. The first performances of both Black, Brown and Beige and Drum eroded pre-conceived categories. They attacked stereotypes of black ferocity, primitivism, and simplemindedness. However, the means of their attacks and their suggested alternatives for better understanding black culture differed significantly. In contrast to Drum, Black, Brown and Beige aspired to art music’s aura of cultivation, combining ostensibly black Latin American and African American musical elements into a form that was borrowed from European classical music. Drum, on the other hand, subverted stereotypes not by means of open rejection or by referring to the achievements of European music, but rather by exaggerating stereotypical ideas of African American music to such extremes that they become

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ridiculous and implausible. It thereby represents a shift away from the rhetoric of progress on the road to equality towards a much more ironic stance of doubt and subtle resistance.

“To Tell Duke I Loved Him”: From Ellington to Charles Mingus In many ways, Charles Mingus saw himself as inheriting an African American jazz tradition that had been spearheaded by Ellington’s music. Both musicians were excellent instrumentalists and soloists, they turned back to and helped to extend an African American musical tradition, they pushed at the definitions of genre and at the borders of musical conventions in terms of the musical instruments they used, and practiced the art of ambiguity. Their many commonalities led Wolfram Knauer to describe their relationship as “an aesthetic father-and-son relationship”, whose emotional range alternated between such extremes as pubertal rebellion, the son’s emancipatory struggle, and the muttering and frowning of the father on the one hand, and on the other hand the son’s oaths of love and the father’s pride in his son (Knauer 2002, 32, translation mine). For Mingus, Ellington was a role model, not only as a musician, but also on a political (as an advocate of civil rights) and personal (as a spiritual guide) level. Mingus’s adoration went so far that he even mythologized his first encounter with Ellington’s music as an epiphany that caused him to scream and almost “jump … out of the balcony” (Hentoff 1961b, 164; Rustin 2006, 320). The passion for Ellington’s music would continue throughout his life. Mingus said that he had written the score for his 1962 Town Hall concert in order “to tell Duke I loved him” (Rustin 2006, 324), and that he had to be careful not to adopt too much of Ellington’s style for his compositions. In 1972, after a bomb threat at a concert in support of the establishment of an African American studies department at Yale University, Mingus remained on the stage of a now evacuated building to perform Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady”—an act of artistic resistance, but also a tribute to the song’s composer (Pierpont 2010, 96; Cohen 2011, 597-9). Early on, Mingus’s compositions contained Ellingtonian inflections. His penchant for the low sounds of the bass and the trombone, his love of slurring and sound effects, his use of the plunger mute as the sound of the human voice, the orchestral ambitions of his projects, and the eclecticism in the selection of his source material, are all aspects that can be traced back to Ellington (Hentoff 1961a). At the same time, however, Mingus went beyond Ellington’s achievements. In a way, Mingus’s work with his

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Jazz Workshop (his working band from the mid-1950s until 1978) aimed to amalgamate what he saw as two branches of the same tree—bebop and swing—by dovetailing the immediacy and elasticity of bebop with the conceptual grandeur of Ellington’s large-scale projects.

Charles Mingus’s Concept of Blackness However, Mingus’s use of pan-African elements differed from that of Ellington. Whereas Ellington’s musico-social critique was ambiguous and subtle, Mingus’s 1957 composition “Haitian Fight Song” challenged Ellington’s (and any other existing) portrayal of pan-African cultures. His “Haitian Fight Song” was unprecedented music of struggle, anger, and confrontation. Whereas in 1943 Ellington had depicted Haitian soldiers’ heroic support of the United States as a major event in the history of the nation, Mingus’s composition has to be seen as a challenge to this narrative. In contrast to the depiction of Ellington’s support of the US by patriotic Haitian soldiers, he chose to refer to Haiti as an emblem of violent revolt, anger, and race struggle. “Haitian Fight Song,” to begin, could also be called Afro-American Fight Song … My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can’t play it right unless I’m thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution, and how unfair it is. There is sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling: “I told them! I hope somebody heard me”. (Mingus, as quoted in Hentoff 1957)

Mingus never explained why he did not call the composition “AfroAmerican Fight Song”. The song’s musical elements do not reference styles commonly associated with Haiti. In fact, “Haitian Fight Song” was his first recorded composition in seven years to be based on the blues (Priestley 1983, 67). According to Mingus, it was inspired by his childhood experiences, “the kind of folk music I’ve always heard anyway”, and the church music of his childhood district of Watts in Los Angeles (Mingus, as quoted in Hentoff 1957). Possibly Mingus chose the song title to avoid problems with his record label. In 1959, Columbia Records refused to let him record the lyrics of “Fables of Faubus” due to their political contents (Dunkel 2012). “Fables of Faubus” was an attack against racism generally and the policy of Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, in particular, who in 1957 prevented African American children from entering a previously all-white school by force, triggering the Little Rock Crisis. “Haitian Fight Song”, however,

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was eventually recorded for Nesuhi Ertegun’s liberal independent label Atlantic Records. A more likely answer to the question of why Mingus chose the title “Haitian Fight Song” lies in its evocation of a transnational struggle rather than a national one. By rooting the Civil Rights Movement in a 150-yearlong, transnational struggle, the title lends the movement a kind of historical legitimacy. Two years after Brown vs. Board of Education (the Supreme Court decision, which stated that segregated educational facilities were illegal) and a few months after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Mingus’s piece recalled a decisive moment of black victory in the struggle between the races. He therewith rewrote Ellington’s narrative of race collaboration under the American flag from Black, Brown and Beige, turning it into a transnational story of racial struggle and hostility. The work is performed as a medium swing, played at a tempo of about 152 (Mingus 1991, 54). The theme is carried by a driving bass motif, riding on a single g-minor chord for more than two minutes into the composition. The theme’s emphasis is clearly on rhythm rather than harmony. The main bass motif accentuates the second and fourth beat throughout the piece, lending the sound a compelling rhythmic regularity. With this motif as basis, Mingus slowly builds a polyphonic canon consisting of an eight bar-melody that is alternately played by trombone, saxophone and trumpet. The tone repetitions in the triplet motif and its emphasis of the first and third beat add to the composition’s driving character. Dynamically, the band moves, very slowly, but unstoppably, from ppp right after the bass introduction (0:50) to fff towards the end of the theme (2:10), creating an extended crescendo of more than eighty seconds. At the peak of this crescendo, the trumpet uses a plunger halfvalve to imitate a human voice, for a long time resting on the blue note dflat. According to Mingus, the plunger mute was the ideal representation of the human voice: “That’s the human voice …, if the plungers ever leave jazz, I’ll go with them” (Mingus, as quoted in Hentoff 1961a). Indeed, the sound comes amazingly close to that of a human voice,1 reminiscent of an impulsive scream. It is uncanny and haunting, very different from the jauntiness of the plunger mute parts Ellington had written for Black, Brown and Beige. If there is very little or no music left in this song that Mingus’s audiences could identify as “Haitian”, this certainly has to do with the fact that Mingus’s definition of “blackness” at that time was very different 1

In his (otherwise excellent) book on Mingus and the 1960s, Scott Saul builds an introduction around this motif, which he mistakes as coming from Mingus’s passionately screaming voice (Saul 2003, 1-25).

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from Ellington’s. Whereas Ellington was very curious about and open to Latin American music, Mingus felt compelled to demonstrate his black pride by referring to his “ability to swing” as the essential marker of blackness. The Clown was conceptualized as a response to critics and musicians saying that Mingus could not “swing”, a claim that the bass virtuoso felt compelled to refute, as it seemed to threaten his credibility as a black musician. For Mingus, there was an identifiably black way of playing, diametrically opposed to its white counterpart: People who called themselves civilized brought the black man over here and he appeared primitive to them. But think about what we’ve done. We’ve picked up your instruments and created a music, and many of us don’t even know the notes on the horn yet. This shows me that maybe African civilization was far superior to this civilization. We’ve sent great white classical trumpet players into the woodshed to practice and try to play some of the things we’ve created, and they still haven’t been able to. If you wrote it down for a classical trumpet player, he’d never even get started. (Mingus, as quoted in Hentoff 1964, 38)

According to Mingus, the primary element of distinction between white and black musicians (and aesthetics) was “swing”, the way in which musicians rhythmically phrase melodies and chord progressions. He intended “Haitian Fight Song” as an illustration of his ability to swing, thus reaffirming his involvement in an intact, continuous, and idiosyncratic black tradition. Mingus claimed that as a response to “some of the guys [who] had been saying that [he] didn’t swing”, he had left out two “more intricate” pieces, giving preference to more “swinging” compositions instead (Mingus, as quoted in Hentoff 1957). Mingus’s concept of blackness is largely based on the fight against injustice, oppression, and exploitation. His pan-African aesthetics is far from idealizing an African past. Rather, it draws its power from the depiction of endurance and resilience in light of oppression and exploitation. According to Mingus, the legacy of slavery permeated US society in the 1950s and 1960s. African Americans were still largely in a state of servitude, subject to economic exploitation, and destined to live in poverty. The same was true for African American artists who had to cater to an art industry that was dominated by Euro Americans and play what Mingus called “Uncle Tom music” (Mingus, as quoted in Walser 1999, 282).2 Mingus’s music continued the struggle. If, according to Walter 2

Uncle Tom is of course a reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). During the 1940s and 50s, several African American jazz musicians (including Dizzy Gillespie) used the term to refer to fellow African

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Benjamin, the “image of enslaved ancestors” nourishes the struggle of the underprivileged against their oppressors,3 “Haitian Fight Song” kept this image alive, enveloping it in a tradition of resistance and rebellion. It gave the struggle a new acuteness, pulling it from the margins to the center of history and equipping it with a new language of struggle. When one year after the release of “Haitian Fight Song”, Ellington recorded an edited version of Black, Brown and Beige with Mahalia Jackson, he relinquished a few sections of the original composition, including “West Indian Influence”. Ellington never explained exactly why he left out “West Indian Influence”, but it is likely that its Latin American elements already sounded too much like the commercial rumba dance music of the 1940s. Moreover, its message of interracial harmony and African American loyalty to the United States was at odds with his political position during the Civil Rights Movement, which he supported tacitly (Cohen 2011). It is likely that Ellington had changed his mind about his earlier choice to narrate the history of African Americans by referring to musical genres such as rumba that he could only know in their commercialized form. Thus, late in his career, Ellington would yet again change his approach to pan-African music. One important step towards a renewal of his pan-African aesthetics was his collaboration with Charles Mingus and Max Roach on the album Money Jungle (1962). There is nothing left of the ornamented, exotic “West Indian” music of Black, Brown and Beige. Neither does the album try to undermine clichéd images of Africa by means of parody, as did Drum. As the title suggests, it represents Ellington’s reversal of the exotic and humiliating images of Africa and Africans he had to support in his “jungle music” performances at the Cotton Club in the late 1920s, using the term to refer to the chaotic and “uncivilized” world of business and finance. In the song “Fleurette Africaine”, his little African flower finally appears to be freed from the rampant, surrounding jungle. As the French title suggests, it is also freed from American national characteristics. Similar to Mingus’s music during the late 1950s, Ellington’s compositions began to dissociate from the United States’ dominant culture, exploring and pointing to alternative spaces. Over less than twenty years, the use of pan-African aesthetics in jazz music changed fundamentally from the connotations of interracial harmony, American musicians, whose music they thought was geared towards entertaining white people and therewith reminiscent of Uncle Tom’s subservience. Especially Louis Armstrong was a popular target. 3 In German: “das Bild der geknechteten Vorfahren” (Benjamin 2010, 38, translation mine)

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integration, and patriotism in Black Brown and Beige to open confrontation, accusation, parody, and the exploration of alternative spaces of identification in many compositions of the late 1950s. Whereas Charles Mingus’s pan-African aesthetics were charged with fierce anger and aggression, Ellington, in such compositions as Drum, developed a more subtle and playful way of challenging pre-conceived assumptions about pan-Africa, using parody and humor. In their different approaches to panAfrican aesthetics, the two musicians created music that was strongly engaged in a cultural struggle—part of a continuous discourse whose political significance they never doubted. If “West Indian Influence” threatened to minimize racial difference to a matter of sweet rumba music meeting chummy blues riffs, Ellington’s and Mingus’s music of the 1950s grappled with the ways, in which race mattered as a marker of social difference.

Reference list Benjamin, Walter. 2010. Werke und Nachlaß. Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Band 19: Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Clark, George P. 1980. The role of the Haitian volunteers at Savannah in 1779: An attempt at an objective view. Phylon 41 (4):356-366. Cohen, Harvey G. 2004. Duke Ellington and Black, Brown and Beige: The composer as historian at Carnegie Hall. American quarterly 56 (4):1003-1034. —. 2011. Duke Ellington’s America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dunkel, Mario. 2012. Aesthetics of resistance: Charles Mingus and the Civil Rights Movement. Berlin: Lit-Verlag. Ellington, Duke. 1993a. Ellington’s first article: The Duke steps out. In The Duke Ellington reader, ed. Mark Tucker, 46-49. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1993b. Ellington’s response to Lambert. In The Duke Ellington reader, ed. Mark Tucker, 112-113. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1993c. Ellington: “We, too, sing ‘America’”. In The Duke Ellington reader, ed. Mark Tucker, 146-147. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 1976. Music is my mistress. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Gaines, Kevin. 2000. Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, and the cultural politics of race. In Music and the racial imagination, ed.

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Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 585-602. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gennari, John. 2006. Blowin’ hot and cool: Jazz and its critics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1976. Languages of art: An approach to a theory of symbols. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Hentoff, Nat. 1957. Original liner notes to The Clown. Charles Mingus. The Clown. Atlantic Records. —. 1961a. Original liner notes to Mingus. Charles Mingus. Mingus. Candid Records. —. 1961b. The jazz life. New York: Dial Press. —. 1964. The Playboy panel: Jazz—today and tomorrow. Playboy February. 29-31, 34-38, 56, 58, 139-141. Knauer, Wolfram. 2002. Freedom is an illusion: The bond between Duke Ellington and his sometime disciple Charles Mingus. Du: Die Zeitschrift der Kultur 2:32-35. Lee, Bernard. 2008. Liner Notes. In Duke Ellington and his orchestra: A drum is a woman, 933. Jazz Track Records. Lock, Graham. 2000. Blutopia: Visions of the future and revisions of the past in the work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press. Lomax, Alan. 1973. Mister Jelly Roll. The fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz”. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marsalis, Wynton and Robert G. O’Meally. 1998. Duke Ellington: “Music like a big hot pot of good gumbo”. In The jazz cadence of American culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, 143-153. New York: Columbia University Press. Mingus, Charles. 1991. More than a fakebook. New York: Hal Leonard. Priestley, Brian. 1983. Mingus: A critical biography. New York: Da Capo Press. Radano, Ronald and Philip V. Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the racial imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reinhardt, Thomas. 2005. 200 years of forgetting: Hushing up the Haitian Revolution. Journal of black studies 35 (4):246-261. Roberts, John Storm. 1999. The Latin zinge: The impact of LatinAmerican music on the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rustin, Nichole T. 2006. Cante Hondo: Charles Mingus, Nat Hentoff, and jazz racism. Critical sociology 32 (2):309-331.

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Saul, Scott. 2003. Freedom is, freedom ain’t: Jazz and the making of the sixties. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stearns, Marshall W. 1956. The story of jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tucker, Mark. 1991. Ellington: The early years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 1993. The genesis of “Black, Brown and Beige”. In Black music research journal 13, no. 2: 67-86. Walser, Robert, ed. 1998. Keeping time: Readings in jazz history. New York: Oxford University Press.

Discography Ellington, Duke. 2010. 1943a. Carnegie Hall concerts 1943/1947. 8 CD Box Set. Prestige. 0600753232491. CD. —. 2001. Live at Carnegie Hall Dec. 11, 1943. Storyville Records. 1038341. CD. —. 2002. Money jungle. Capitol Records. 723453822729. CD. Mingus, Charles. 1998. The clown. Atlantic Records, 1957. 1260. CD.

CHAPTER FIVE THE MEDITERRANEAN STYLE: FROM PAN-SEMITISM TO ISRAELI NATIONALISM TAL SOKER

The emergence of national musical styles and schools during the Age of Nationalism in nineteenth century Europe is perhaps the clearest example of how music came to be employed in the service of constructing collective identities. The emergence of Israeli art music, which this chapter investigates, illustrates how these European developments reverberated beyond Europe, in a historic context particularly fraught with tension. Israeli art music took shape in a relatively short period of time, covering less than a century. The founding fathers of the new genre, European immigrants to the Middle East, first devoted themselves to the task of creating a new national style in the 1930s and faced a significant challenge in this. To fashion a new musical aesthetics, they renounced their previous compositional methods, just as they had shed their former national identities for the sake of a new nation-building endeavour. The aesthetics they developed solidified into a canon that later composers have consistently referred to and reshaped since Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And just as the nation has been encountering new challenges, the genre of Israeli art music has been in a flux, responding to new social and political challenges. This chapter explores the ways in which Israeli art music has been defined and instrumentalised, and how it accompanied the process of negotiating an Israeli identity. I will begin by sketching the two phases in the history of Israeli art music, corresponding to the period preceding the creation of the state of Israel and that immediately after 1948. The first phase was marked by the arrival of immigrant composers from Europe to Palestine in the wake of the Second World War. The second period covers the generation of composers already born in Palestine, and is characterised

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by mass migration of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries during the 1950s and 1960s, and the resulting rapid changes in the makeup of the Israeli society. While the aesthetics of the first generation of Israeli composers reflected their effort to inscribe their identity within the boundaries of the European vision of the East, not the East itself, the later generation appropriated the aesthetics developed by their predecessors, but altered it to serve the idea of Israel as an ethnic melting-pot. This project implied both the exclusion of certain earlier elements and the inclusion of previously shunned ones. I conclude by bringing in the voices of those who were excluded from this project, namely, immigrants from the Arab and Muslim lands, who were the alleged source of inspiration for the socalled Mediterranean style. In the history of Israeli art music, the Mediterranean style, also referred to as the Eastern-Mediterranean School or Eastern-Mediterraneanism, was initiated by Jewish composers, who were forced to flee Europe in the face of anti-Semitic persecution and settled in Palestine during the 1930s. It is widely considered to be the first uniquely Israeli musical style.1 While the artistic value of the music and the place of this particular style within the grand narratives of twentieth century music have already been analysed by scholars, little research exists on the particular historical conditions and complex social relations that contributed to its emergence. For example, Jehoash Hirshberg considered the Mediterranean style a “myth” consisting of “nothing more than an aggregate of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns and types which were semiotically loaded through their recurrent use in some of the compositions of the 1930s and 1940s” (Hirshberg 1995, 272). However, Hirshberg admits in the same breath that the style gradually came to be recognized as “Israeli music”, noting that, according to a 1976 survey, more than 90 percent of Israelis identified the second movement of Boskovich’s Oboe Concerto as quintessentially “Israeli” (ibid.). The acceptance and canonisation of the Mediterranean style by subsequent generations is most evident in the fact that composers who 1

The term “Mediterranean style” was coined by the critic and amateur musician Max Brod (Brod 1951, 57). Another prominent scholar of the period, who wrote extensively on the subject, was Peter Gradenwitz, who termed the musical style of the latter group of composers as Eastern Mediterraneanism (Gradenwitz 1959, 6091), and more recently, Zvi Keren applied to it the term Eastern-Mediterranean school, now in wide use (Keren 1980, 71). The composers associated with this style were Alexander Uriah Boskovich, Marc Lavry, Paul Ben-Haim, Menachem Aviom, Oedoen Pártos, Max Brod and Yehuda H. Wohl. This musical style, however, should not be confused with the Mediterranean style in Israeli popular music.

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subscribe to its aesthetics are highly represented among the recipients of the most prestigious prizes and honours in Israel, and were holders of key academic positions.2 Alexander Uriah Boskovich (1907-1964), a prominent twentieth century Israeli composer, was instrumental in the emergence of the Mediterranean style. Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Transylvania,3 his education was both liberal and secular.4 During the 1920s, he spent several years in Vienna and Paris, where he trained as a concert pianist and composer before returning to his home town, Cluj, in the early 1930s. Having witnessed the failure of Jewish emancipation and the rise of anti-Semitism, Boskovich distanced himself from the assimilationist tendencies characteristic of Central European Jewry and became interested in East European Jewish folklore. Not unlike other Jewish artists and intellectuals of that period, he began exploring Jewish national identity, questioning the possibility of Jewish emancipation within European culture. As Philip Bohlman put it, the common quest of this generation was to raise “questions of sameness and difference, of community and language”, attempting to “reconcile history with the present” (Bohlman 1992, 206). Under the influence of the German-Jewish intellectual Martin Buber, Boskovich embarked on his own ethnological fieldwork in the Carpathians, the results of which he published in a collection of essays 2

Israeli musicians and orchestras actively promote the musical style by including such pieces in their repertoires; a competition dedicated to the performance of Israeli compositions named after the composer Paul Ben-Haim is held biannually in Israel, and proponents of this movement are among the laureates of the Israel Prize (Oedoen Pártos, 1954; Ben-Haim, 1957; Menachem Avidom, 1961; and Mordechai Seter, 1965) and the Engel Prize. 3 The following biographical sketch is based on the composer’s biography (Hirshberg and Shmueli 1995) and documents available from the composer’s archive in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. A shorter biography in English is available online (Hirshberg 2011). 4 In an autobiographical account delivered on the occasion of the 4th conference of the Institute of Jewish Music in Jerusalem in 1964, Boskovich described his social background and upbringing in the following words: “[W]e were educated in a foreign atmosphere and my mother-tongue is Hungarian. Yiddish was not spoken [in our house] and, as a consequence of my musical upbringing, I was, as one would say, as one of the gentiles” (a partial transcription of Boskovich’s speech in Hebrew is available in Music Center, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, MUS 037/C 14). In his speech, he claimed to have only a superficial acquaintance with and limited knowledge of Judaism, contradicting Hirshberg’s claim that Boskovich “grew up in a highly religious family” (Hirshberg 2011).

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entitled Kelet es Nyugat Kozot (Between the East and the West) (Hirshberg and Shmueli 1995, 245-251). The title of this publication clearly echoed the famous German periodical Ost und West (East and West), dedicated to the cultural exchange between the Western assimilated Jews and their brethren in Eastern Europe, which was published in Berlin between 1901 and 1923. Shortly afterwards, in 1937, Boskovich completed his first substantial work, the Chansons populaires juifs (Popular Jewish Folk Songs).5 The movements of this piece were based on seven Jewish folk melodies, six of them taken from the anthology of Yiddish folk songs, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, published by Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann 1920 in Berlin.6 The following year, Boskovich was invited to visit Palestine on the occasion of the Palestinian première of this work by the Palestine Orchestra and, with the outbreak of the Second World War, decided to postpone his return to Europe indefinitely. In later years, he often claimed that this work saved his life, as his parents, who stayed in Europe, did not survive the war. During his first years in Palestine, Boskovich experienced a second ideological transition, which he explored in his 1945 Semitic Suite7 and developed further in two articles published in the early 1950s (Boskovich 1951 and 1953) and in an unpublished book manuscript.8 In his new manifesto he wrote that the aim of art is to shape forms conditioned by the parameters of time and place. Nevertheless, we may see the process of shaping the form as an objective process, the psychogenic system of which is detached from the parameters of time and place; however, the content of this form must thus be subjective, as it stems indeed from the “where” and “when” of its generator … the process of form shaping is the mathematical reality while its thematic content is the socio-historical reality (Boskovich 1953, 281 translation mine). 5

The composer later changed the title of this piece to “The Golden Chain”. Two versions of this work are available in print: The golden chain suite for piano (TelAviv: Israel Music Institute, 1962c); and The golden chain suite for orchestra (TelAviv: Israel Music Institute, 1962c). 6 Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann (1888-1921) was an enthusiastic collector of Yiddish folk songs and scholar of Yiddish culture, who sought to bridge the gap between Western and Eastern Jewish cultures, especially through music (Aschheim 1982, 116-7 and 207-8; Nemtsov 2009, 83-93). 7 For a survey of the different available versions of the work and its evolution see Hirshberg and Shmueli (1995, 55-66). 8 The book manuscript is now at the composer’s archive in the National Library in Jerusalem and consists of a set of handwritten notebook pages and 170 typescript pages (Music Center, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem MUS 037/C 1,2,4,5,6).

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By that time Boskovich had shifted the centre of his “socio-historical reality” from the East European Jewish Diaspora and the Carpathians to the East. “The East” that Boskovich had in mind while writing these lines was, however, not the one he could have encountered while travelling in his new homeland, but rather the East envisaged by twentieth century German comparative musicologists and portrayed in the works of Curt Sachs, Robert Lachmann, and Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, to which Boskovich often referred in his works.9 For Boskovich, the East was thus the radical other of his Western civilisation—the music of the East was depicted by him as essentially vocal, stagnant, sensual, extroverted and communal, while its occidental counterpart was instrumental, historically progressive, restrained, rational, and the product of personal creativity and genius. Another key aspect of Boskovich’s aesthetics, which manifests his connection to other artistic movements of the period, is the radical secularisation (and nationalisation) of cultural and religious content. Boskovich wished to “unfold the originally unmediated essence of the national heritage which was so often transformed into intangible dried ‘religious’ customs detached from the reality which called them to life” (Boskovich 1953, 286 translation and italics mine). In his unpublished analysis of Mordechai Seter’s Shabat Cantata, Boskovich argues that in contemporary Israeli music the Psalms “return to the static and dynamic landscape into which they were first born” and thus no single religious community can claim them as their own.10 Moreover, in his unpublished book manuscript, he states that the hymn to the Egyptian Sun God, attributed to the ancient Egyptian king Akhenaten, equals the Psalms in its importance for the revival of Hebrew culture, and that Jews consider the latter superior only due to their “inherited idiosyncratic weakness”.11 Such references to “Hebrewness” and “Israeliness” are very prominent in Boskovich’s work. In fact, while the adjectives “Hebrew”, “Israeli”, and “Arab” are always imbued with a positive meaning in his writing, the adjective “Jewish” marks the traits that he expunged from his aesthetics, as belonging to the culture of the Diaspora. This belief in the necessity to overwrite the experience of the Diaspora, and the need to develop a pan-Semitic syncretism were shared by another influential artistic movement of the period, The Young Hebrews, more commonly known as the Canaanite Movement (Diamond 1986). The 9

In his book manuscript, Boskovich goes so far as to condemn the native Arabs of the Middle East for not recognizing the value of the project undertaken by Western musicologists seeking to systematically explore the theory of Arab music. 10 Boskovich’s book manuscript, Notebook 7, p. 115, translation mine. 11 Ibid., p. 114, translation mine.

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movement, which heavily relied on elements in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian art, drew its inspiration from archaeological findings in the Middle East, and a selective usage of Biblical themes. Its followers rejected those identified exclusively with Judaism, showing a clear preference for themes relating to pagan rites and images celebrating the historic supremacy of the Middle-Eastern peoples. The Young Hebrews thus celebrated non-Jewish Biblical mythological characters, such as the anti-heroic Nimrod (Genesis 10:8–12).12 Calling for the widening of the geographical horizons of the Israeli canon to include the people of other religions, such as the Arabs, the Canaanite authors, however, excluded from this canon the Jewish diasporic literature. This juxtaposition of the Hebrew and the diasporic culture reinforced the old Christian dichotomy, which also persists in musicology, which clearly differentiated between the modern Jewry of the European Diaspora and the ancient Hebrew nation. This approach can be traced at least as far back as the writings of the eighteenth century German music historian Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who in his seminal Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (General History of Music) blamed the Jews for forgetting and corrupting the marvellous music of their alleged ancestors, the old Hebrews of biblical times (Forkel 1788, 162). The idea that it is necessary to excavate and revive ancient musical culture to create new Israeli music was later returned to by Jewish musicologists.. At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most prominent of these, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882-1938), often referred to as “the father of Jewish musicology”, initiated a vast comparative study of synagogal cantillations and Jewish folk songs from various Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and North-Africa, searching for the ancient source of all these traditions. In the preface to the Hebrew edition of his Thesaurus of Oriental Hebrew Melodies, dedicated to the music of Yemenite Jews, Idelsohn describes the aims of his project along the lines of the particular national project, in which he was engaged: The study of these melodies is of paramount importance, first and foremost for the elucidation of Hebrew chant next to those of the synagogue and the Church. That is due to the fact that their [the Yemenite Jews’] music was protected from foreign non-Semitic influence, therefore it is HebrewSemitic and it would be possible to deduce from it the fundaments of Hebrew music (Idelsohn 1924, 3). 12

The most notable representation of this character is Yitzhak Danziger’s (19161977) sculpture Nimrod from 1939, which has iconic status in the history of Israeli art.

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Likewise, Boskovich used comparative and reductive methods to research the music of Islamic communities, and the theoretical tradition of ancient Greeks as works of nations who had “direct contact with and influenced the Hebrew music in the past”.13 In this utterly Orientalist perspective, the music of the Orient was seen as preserved in its original antiquated and primitive state, as if the dry winds of the desert spared it the hazards of history (Bohlman 2008, 35-49). Taking Oriental music as a model, Boskovich, along with other Israeli composers, adopted a number of musical devices originating from the Middle East, such as the Oriental instrumental heterophony, the use of parallel dissonances and tone combinations to create the illusion of micro-tonal tuning, the application of tetrachordal tone-structures and modality, the erasure of the melodic leading tone, citations of Arab melodies, recurrent drones and ostinato patterns, the emulation of Arab instruments like the QƗnnjn and Njd (Middle Eastern plucked stringed instruments), the use of flute overtones alluding to the sound of the Ney (ancient Middle Eastern flute), interpolation of dance rhythms (e.g. the Druse Dabka), and the interpolation of improvisational interludes resembling Arab TaqsƯm techniques (Keren 1980, 11-28). Some of the composers subscribing to the Mediterranean aesthetics occasionally combined them with modern techniques. Although Boskovich, in his 1937 article, mentions atonality as a possible source of inspiration for his national project, he was hesitant to follow modernist tendencies himself (Hirshberg and Shmueli 1995, 248-249). Shortly before his untimely death, Boskovich returned to his dialectical model of the 1950s, comprising the objectivity and universality of form alongside the socially conditioned content of the work of art, and advocated the integration of the Gruppentechnik, derived from strict serialism, and the local Mediterranean materials (“séries d'allusions ethniques”) (Boskovich 1964, 42). Other composers, such as Josef Tal, followed a similar path. The Mediterranean style in this form, however, lost its appeal soon after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Following the Holocaust in Europe, the Zionist movement, initially bent on attracting European Jews to Palestine, had to turn to the Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East as a new pool of potential immigrants and a substitute for the loss of European Jewry (Cheitrit 2003, Shenhav 2006). The encounters between European and non-European immigrants led Israeli composers to alter their aesthetics to suit the changing reality. As Yehuda Shenhav points out in his study of these early encounters 13

Boskovich's book manuscript, Notebook 3, p. 17, translation mine.

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between the Zionists and the “Arab Jews”,14 these were anything but the longed-for reunion of old relatives sharing a common ancient past, as depicted by Boskovich and the Canaanites. The atavistic dream of a primordial shared national identity thus collapsed and gave way to a wave of alienation and fear for the existence of the newly created state.15 Threatened by the otherness, or more precisely, by the Arabness of the Oriental Jews, and facing deteriorating relations with the neighbouring Arab countries, the Zionist establishment needed to redefine Israeli national identity. The common cultural background of the Arab Jews and the new enemies of the Zionist project, namely the Palestinian and Arab nations surrounding Israel, rendered them a liminal entity, difficult to absorb into the Zionist program, which had after all been initiated to alleviate the distress of East European Jewry. In addition, the Arab Jews themselves felt less affinity with the goals of Zionism, were less enthusiastic about the arrival of European Zionist emissaries to their countries in the 1940s, and therefore had from the very beginning posed a challenge to the Zionist project. As one of these Jewish European emissaries, who was send to Iraq with the aim of convincing the Jews residing there to immigrate to Palestine, reported: The Jew lives like an Arab. His culture is Arab, he uses Arabic figures of speech, but nevertheless there is something that differentiates. A Jew knows that he is a Jew and that he is “different” from an Arab. To say what makes him different is difficult. Even in the social sense, there is no vast difference. Certainly a Jew is different from a fellah and from a Bedouin, but he is not different from an Arab effendi (in Iraq, city dwellers are

14

The term, developed in Shenhav's work, refers to Jewish immigrants to Israel originating from Arab and Muslim countries. Although the term gained some currency in Israeli academic discourse, it still remains rather controversial in Israeli public discourse (Shenhav 2006, 9). 15 A similar situation in Israeli literature was recently described by Yaron Peleg: “As the conflict with the Arabs escalated during the 1950s and 1960s, the promise of the Canaanites’ fantastic political vision evaporated almost completely and their cultural ideas did not fare any better. A decade after the establishment of the State, the connections of Israelis to the East, to the geographic location of their state, were chiefly military and demographic and very rarely cultural. On the international front, the alignment with France, Germany, and finally with the United States placed Israel firmly in the West; a political position that was eagerly adapted by the European-born leadership of the country. On the domestic front, the cultural and political ties with the West were reflected in the marginalization of Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries by Ashkenazi cultural and political elite”. (Peleg 2005, 135)

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The problem was, therefore, that, in their Eurocentric concepts of nationality, Zionists saw the assimilation of Arab Jews into Israel as a threat to their European Jewish identity and looked for ways to both differentiate themselves from Arab Jews, and to distinguish Arab Jews from the general Arab population. According to Shenhav, the borders of the Israeli national community were thus re-established through a process of the “religionisation” of the Arab Jews (Shenhav 2006, 77-109). The Zionist movement, which had been conceived in opposition to Jewish orthodoxy in the Diaspora and which had embraced progressive secular and nationalistic attitudes, now returned to religion as its main signifier. As a result of this process, the Arab identity of Oriental Jews was de-emphasized and Arab Jews were understood first and foremost as religious Jews. And even if they were still occasionally celebrated for what the Israeli establishment, dominated by European immigrants, saw as exoticism, they were considered as distinct from Arabs due to their Jewish religion and the experience of the Diaspora. This shift from searching for a primordial Israeli identity to embracing the experience of the Diaspora and its consequences, as Shenhav notes, influences contemporary Israeli politics up to the present day. In music, this transition saw a return to traditional religious music as the primary signifier of Israeliness and to the incorporation of Jewish European music previously rejected by Boskovich and others. The works most representative of this change include Noam Sheriff's Akeda (1997), his Sephardic Passion (1992), and Ami Ma’ayani’s Sinfonietta on Popular Hebrew Themes (1982). For example, Ma’ayani’s Sinfonietta includes a movement entitled “Scherzo based on a Kleizmorim Waltz”, a theme that contrasts starkly with Boskovich’s aesthetics. Other movements in the same piece, employing oriental synagogal cantillations from various Jewish Arab communities as their themes, found their way to these compositions not because of their Semitic origin or alleged ancient musical attributes, but merely because they once belonged to Jewish religious practices in the Diaspora. Up to this point, we have seen how the East was instrumentalised and transformed by Israeli composers of European origin. It is important to 16

As time passed, idealistic representations of the authenticity of Arab Jews never completely faded away, but became more and more apologetic in tone (Chetrit 2003, 63).

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note that Israeli art music in the last few decades has been produced and consumed exclusively by people of European origin. Even today, all contemporary Israeli composers listed in the most comprehensive and recent survey compiled by Alice Tischler, were born in Europe, the Americas or Israel (Tischler 2011). The voices originating from the East are silenced and excluded, seemingly requiring the interpretation of the Orientalist to be heard (Said 2003, 21). The unique perspective of Arab Jews is, likewise, absent from contemporary academic discussion about Israeli art music. An exception of sorts is the voice of the Iraqi-born Israeli Eli Amir (1937- ), member of an influential group of Arab Jewish authors, which has become prominent in Israel since the 1970s and whose literary style has often been referred to as sifrut hama'abarah (literature of the transit camp) (Berg 1996, 67). In his novels, Amir often points to the role of music in the construction of self-identity and social boundaries. In his first, partly autobiographical novel, Scapegoat (1983), the first-person narrator Nuri, an Iraqi-born adolescent who immigrates to Israel with his family in the 1950s, attempts to escape the transit camp, in which his family had settled down, to join a kibbutz and enlist in the Israeli army. In order to deny his identity as an Arab Jew and become a “true” Israeli, Nuri distances himself from the Arab music of his childhood and embraces the music he hears in the kibbutz—that of Mozart. A passage of the novel, in which one of Nuri’s tutors from the kibbutz tries to convince him that the transcendence of cultural boundaries is indeed possible, echoes the ambitions of the composers of the Mediterranean style: Immigrant composers from Europe mixed in their compositions the elements of Arab music. ... They tried to combine the modern European scales with the colours of the East (Amir 1983, 111 translation mine).

Amir also describes wider Israeli society’s contempt for Oriental culture and music. When Nuri and his friends organize a party in the kibbutz, one of their tutors scolds them, saying: “What is going on here? ... an Arab coffee house? If you don’t stop howling like wolves, we will have to send your club to the forest, where you all belong”. (Amir 1983, 114 translation mine) *

*

I have attempted to illustrate in this chapter how the aesthetics of the Mediterranean style reflect the ways in which Israeli composers imagined the boundaries of their society. By first expunging the experience of the

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Diaspora and later invoking its memory by interpolating Jewish religious music of the Diaspora into their pieces, composers and musicians expressed their belief that individuals can transcend cultural boundaries, reshape their identities and be transformed into genuine Israelis. Despite the fact that the motif of the East occupied a central position as a cornerstone of the Mediterranean style, the voice of the Arab Jews, constituting a considerable part of Israeli society, was continually marginalized within the development of Israeli national music. The history of the Mediterranean style, therefore, demonstrates not only how music becomes instrumentalised in the service of nationalist projects, but also how it fails to unite people in societies exposed to turbulent demographic and political change.

Reference list Amir, Eli. 1983. Scapegoat. Tel-Aviv: Am-Oved. [in Hebrew]. Aschheim, Steven. 1982. Brothers and strangers. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Berg, Nancy E. 1996. Exile from exile: Israeli writers from Iraq. New York: State University of New York Press. Bohlman, Philip. 1989. “The land where two streams flow”: Music in the German-Jewish community of Israel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 1992. The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine: 1936-1940; Jewish musical life on the eve of World War II. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boskovich, Alexander Uriah. 1951. The problems of music—and the original music in Israel. Orlogin 3 (July):177-187. [in Hebrew]. —. 1953. The problems of original music in Israel. Orlogin 9 (November):280-294. [in Hebrew]. —. 1964. La musique Israelienne contemporaine et les traditions ethniques. Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 16:39-42. Brod, Max. 1951. Israel’s Music. Tel-Aviv: Sefer Press. Cheitrit, Sami Shalom. 2003. The Mizrahi struggle in Israel: Between oppression and liberation, identification and alternative 1938-2003. Tel-Aviv: Am Oved. [in Hebrew]. Diamond, James S. 1986. Homeland or Holy Land?: The “Canaanite” critique of Israel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Forkel, Johann Nikolaus. 1788. Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, Vol. I. Leipzig: Schwickertschen Verlage.

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Gradenwitz, Peter. 1959. Music and musicians in Israel: A comprehensive guide to modern Israeli music. Tel-Aviv: Israeli Music Publications Limited. Hirshberg, Jehoash. 1995. Music in the Jewish community of Palestine 1880-1984: A social history. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 2011. Boskovitch, Alexander Uria. Grove music online. Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/ article/grove/ music/03659. Hirshberg, Jehoash and Herzl Shmueli. 1995. Alexander Uriya Boskovich, his life, his work and his thought. Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House. [in Hebrew]. Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi. 1924. Thesaurus of oriental Hebrew melodies. Vol. I: Songs of the Yemenite Jews. Berlin: Benjamin Harz. [in Hebrew]. Keren, Zvi. 1980. Contemporary Israeli music: Its sources and stylistic development. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press. Nemtsov, Jascha. 2009. Der Zionismus in der Musik: Jüdische Musik und nationale Idee. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Peleg, Yaron. 2005. Orientalism and the Hebrew imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Said, Edward. 2003. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Shenhav, Yehouda. 2006. The Arab Jews: A postcolonial reading of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tischler, Alice. 2011. A descriptive bibliography of art music by Israeli composers. Sterling Heights: Harmonie Park Press.

CHAPTER SIX “BETWEEN THE JIGS AND THE REELS (IN CYBERSPACE)”: INVESTIGATING AN IRISH TRADITIONAL MUSIC ONLINE COMMUNITY AILBHE KENNY

Introduction The evolution of communication technology, mass Internet usage and Web 2.0 has led to the phenomenal growth of online or web communities. The cultural impact of the online community phenomenon is also reflected in a continued redefinition of musical engagement and notions of “musical communities”. This new social media era for music reveals itself in a vast number of ways ranging from purchasing a single on iTunes, to posting a review of the single on a band’s Facebook page, to learning the guitar chords from an online tutorial, to compiling a new version of the single and posting it on YouTube. Whether it is Eric Whitacre conducting a virtual choir of 2050 singers1, or the most recent music novelty act going viral through video sharing, the explosion of musical participation and development of online musical communities that has occurred through the Internet is truly astonishing. This chapter examines one such online musical community through case study research of an Irish traditional music web-based learning platform. Despite the seemingly obvious parallels between face-to-face musical communities and online communities (relating to membership, relationships, identity, participation and shared learning), research into online musical communities is a relatively new field of music research but has gained increased attention in recent years (Kibby 2000; Burnard 2009; 1

See http://www.ericwhitacre.com.

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Karlsen 2010; Partti and Karlsen 2010; Salavuo 2006; Waldron and Veblen 2008; Waldron and Bayley 2012; Waldron 2009, 2011). The case study of an online musical community in this chapter aims to capture a unique window into these continually developing online “musical worlds” (Finnegan 2007). Through an in-depth qualitative investigation of this case, the research explores the online musical community as “imagined”, and being rooted in the genre of Irish traditional music, interrogating issues specifically surrounding identity and “nation-ness” (Anderson 1991). The examination aims to reflect this contemporary, fast-growing environment for musical communities in order to understand how such communities develop practices, form identities, interact, engage and so extend the possibilities for a new form of musical culture.

The “Place” of Online Musical Communities The cultural significance of musical communities can be viewed as being a means of understanding and making sense of the “place” where one exists. There has been an increased focus on local music or community music research examining where music occurs and how it occurs (Pitts 2005; Stokes 1997; Slobin 1993; Finnegan 2007; Duffy 2000; Cottrell 2004; Cohen 1991; Bennett 2000; Higgins 2007). Taking the views of Finnegan (2007) and Pitts (2005), identity formation within the social world where one lives can be considerably enhanced through musical participation within communities. Pitts (2005, 30) maintains that musical participation “contributes to the development of participants’ identities, providing a particular context where their behaviour and social relations may flourish”. Similarly, in her study of amateur music-making in Milton Keynes, Finnegan, who describes this connection within the “musical worlds”, discovered: Musical practice is essentially of society, dependent on and expressed in all kinds of activities and settings…through which people both realise and transcend their social existence. (Finnegan 2007, 32)

The idea of “place” is of particular relevance to this chapter as an online community challenges any sense of a physical context. De Certeau’s views on “place” and “space” are useful for conceptualising such issues. Using an example of a city street, “space” is put forward as place in practice (de Certeau 1984). In this manner, walkers potentially transform a street from a “place” into a “space”. Taking an online music web platform as a place, then, it is the engagement or participation of a collective of users within this online place that creates a space for a

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musical community to develop. Such a view encapsulates what Howard Becker describes as “collective action” within “art worlds”: Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. (Becker 2008, 34)

Exploring the role of print in capitalism, Anderson highlights the role of print technology in creating collective feelings of nationhood, claiming that “print-languages laid the basis for national consciousness” (Anderson 1991). Despite having no physical relationship to each other (akin to online communities), according to Anderson, mass collectives develop into “imagined communities” if they can imagine themselves as “fellow readers” within “united fields of exchange” (Anderson 1991, 44). Bourdieu’s theory of “fields of practice” (2002, 230-231), which Bourdieu argues are the social and economic interactions of aesthetic experience across social classes, provides an interesting perspective on “space”. Bourdieu, who compares “fields of practice” with a sports field, claims: Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions in this space…the space can also be described as a field of forces: in other words, as a set of objective power relations imposed on all who enter this field (Bourdieu 2002, 230).

Taking this view, we could study an online musical community as situated within a social field of play (the web platform) where a number of agents (subscribers and moderators) interact. The online nature of the community studied expands, however, these notions of place, space and field even further. Online communities can be defined, according to Plant (2004, 54), as: a collective group of entities, individuals or organisations that come together either temporarily or permanently through an electronic medium to interact in a common problem or interest space.

The framework of “communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998; Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder 2002) sits quite well in relation to online communities. Wenger, White and Smith argue: Technology extends and reframes how communities organise and express boundaries and relationships, which changes the dynamics of participation, peripherility and legitimacy (Wenger, White, and Smith 2009, 11).

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A “community of practice” (CoP) is characterized by varying levels of shared expertise, fluid membership roles that span from “legitimate peripheral participation” to “expert”, a shared purpose within a domain of knowledge as well as collaborative learning, negotiated goals, shared repertoire and social interaction. Many studies have applied the concept of CoP to analyze online developments as a new form of musical engagement and participation within society (Palloff and Pratt 1999; Ewing 2008; Kibby 2000; Kim 2000; Partti and Karlsen 2010; Plant 2004; Salavuo 2006; Waldron 2009). This new research might, on the face of it, herald a shift away from the study of local musical communities to that of global musical communities. Yet, in her study of a popular musician’s chat page, Kibby finds that “a virtual place … facilitated the belief in a local music community” (Kibby 2000, 100). Furthermore, she argues that the presence of an online place does not automatically translate into a community but that rather, in a similar way to face-to face communities, “communities exist through dialogue; through an exchange of past social history and current social interaction” (Kibby 2000, 91). Two separate studies into the online mikseri.net in Finland (Partti and Karlsen 2010; Salavuo 2006) provide rich insights for this case study research. Taking an ethnographic approach, Partti and Karlsen spent six months collecting data through observation of the activities on the website, as well as collecting data from the message boards in order to compile musical life stories of the members of Mikseri and the way they negotiated individual and collective identities via the site. The findings suggest that “community members use the site, not just to share their music, but also to construct their music-related identities within a web-based reality” (Partti and Karlsen 2010, 374). The study concluded that these “music-related identities” are socially constructed and negotiated within the online music community through shared interest in music practice, peer interaction and learning as well as direct participation in music-making itself. Similarly, Salavuo finds that the idea of a shared domain of knowledge is important in relation to learning within an online community and that the desire to learn music was a primary motivation for members to join: The total knowledge of a community always exceeds that of its individual members. Online communities are usually domain-specific, and expertise is expanded within them. (Salavuo 2006, 255)

An ethnographic approach to the study of online music communities, including the Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM) as researched in this chapter, is also taken up by Janice Waldron (Waldron 2011, 195) who

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found that “intertwining the online with the offline community … serve to contextualize IrTrad [Irish traditional music] for community members geographically distant from Ireland, encouraging communiality and connecting far-flung group members to one another”. Similarly, Waldron’s findings on an online Old Time (North American folk music) community resonate with those of Partti and Karlsen (2010) in that online identities are very similar to offline ones. In doing so, they function under similar norms and rules to create a “habitus” (Bourdieu 1977) through musical, social and cultural practices. Through an examination of an online community within the Irish traditional music genre this chapter also raises questions about Anderson’s theories of “nationhood” or “nation-ness” (Anderson 1991). Taking these theories forward, the research investigates “nation-ness” that reaches beyond the nation-state and, through Internet usage, becomes borderless. This tension between the national and the supra-national resonates with Cohen, who, writing about a distinct “Liverpool sound”, puts forward a claim that: The globalization of cultural forms has been accompanied by a localization of cultural identity and claims to authenticity, resulting in a tension or dialectic between the two trends (Cohen 1994, 133).

In what was arguably an era of “globalization and commodification of Ireland and Irish culture” (Scahill 2009), seen in such international phenomena as Riverdance and Lord of the Dance2, Irish traditional music developed what Slobin describes as an “affinity interculture” internationally (Slobin 1993). In other words, a shared affinity with Ireland and its traditions helped to create a particular collective identity. O’Flynn comments on a modern “renaissance” of Irish traditional music from the 1990s onwards. Riverdance was seen as a pivotal cultural phenomenon in this regard: Irishness itself came to be represented by a combination of sounds, images and movements that were at once contemporary, uniquely Irish and selfconfident … a kind of Irishness-in-your-face. (O'Flynn 2009, 39)

Propelled by marketing forces, a particular collective and arguably imagined brand of Irish national identity or “Irishness-in-your-face” went 2

Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, which premiered in 1994 and 1996 respectively, became highly successful theatrical shows of Irish traditional music and dance, and continue to be performed around the world today.

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global. Taking up De Certeau’s ideas once more, then, Irish traditional music escaped the boundedness of place and ethnicity and was transformed into an essentially new international cultural space. How this cultural space has further shifted to self-fashion a new trans-national identity through the medium of cyberspace and musical participation is of great interest in exploring these issues further.

The Case Study: Investigating the OAIM The Online Academy of Irish Music (www.oaim.ie) is an online Irish traditional music platform which claims: “When you join OAIM, you are joining a rapidly growing, worldwide community of Irish music learners” (OAIM website, 2013). The office is based in County Clare in the south west of Ireland and the website was set up in October 2010 with the help of the Clare Enterprise Board.3 The website is a subscription site where online classroom settings are mediated by video tutorials (featuring over 120 videos at the time of writing) which last anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes. These videos mimic offline Irish traditional music pedagogy where learning is by ear and students learn phrase by phrase through repetition. The site also provides discussion forums for students and tutors while sheet music, MP3 listening files,4 and other relevant resources are offered as supporting materials as well. Non-subscribers can browse the site by becoming registered members and avail themselves of free music lessons as taster type activities. By the end of the data fieldwork period (June 2011), the site offered tuition in the following Irish traditional instruments: fiddle, bouzouki, bodhrán, tin whistle, Irish flute, Irish song, uileann pipes and concertina. The OAIM also had a Facebook page. In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the OAIM, a qualitative case study approach was employed. The activities and interactions of the OAIM were examined over a nine-month fieldwork period (October 2010 – June 2011), during which data was collected from: individual participant logs, OAIM discussion forums and OAIM Facebook posts as well as interviews with the co-founder and two of the tutors. The online dialogue through the OAIM discussion forums and Facebook posts was particularly important in building up a picture of this online music community as this was in the form of group, interactional data. 3 Clare County Enterprise Board is one of 35 government-funded enterprise boards in Ireland which aim to promote and develop small and medium enterprise sectors in regional areas. See: www.clareceb.ie. 4 MP3 is a standard audio format for audio storage where the data is compressed for transfer and playback on digital audio recorders.

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“Nation-ness”: Real or Imagined? The logo for the OAIM projects a dual identity, bridging traditional and contemporary worlds of Irish traditional music. As seen in figure 6-1, traditional Irish music is represented in the Celtic design and tin whistle. Technology and online learning are depicted through the mouse, screen and headphones.

Figure 6-1: The OAIM logo.

As seen from the logo, the OAIM fashions a very distinct identity as an e-learning community for traditional Irish music. The tutors interviewed saw the OAIM as embarking on “unchartered territory” and seeking new directions by teaching Irish traditional music online. Tim commented: “I’d just be interested in new directions that tuition could take in Irish music, I’d always be thinking about what could happen online” (Tim, interview by the author, June 30, 2011). There was a strong sense in all the interviews of approaching, negotiating and developing traditional Irish music tuition in new ways through e-learning. The tutors expressed difficulties associated with such online teaching, mainly regarding the “strangeness” of the lack of direct personal interaction when teaching to a video camera, but also regular frustration at not being able to sort out simple issues such as finger positioning instantly. Despite this, all of the tutors felt that the accessibility the OAIM afforded to high quality Irish traditional music tuition far outweighed such limitations. Ben remarked:

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I think getting lessons directly from someone who is living in Clare is a lot closer to a notional “source” than a lot of people get by Internet or live means outside of Ireland ... if you're living somewhere without access to quality traditional musicians, this is quite close to a direct line to very high quality teachers (Ben, interview by the author, June 22 2011).

Given that the OAIM exists in cyberspace, one is tempted to view such an online learning community as devoid of a physical geographical place. Yet the OAIM intensively promotes a Clare-based, “west of Ireland identity”, which is manifest both in the choice of tutors (see Ben’s comment above) and the images presented on the website and Facebook page. Figure 6-2 below illustrates it clearly. Figure 6-2: OAIM Facebook post5 OAIM: This is a photo taken outside The Online Academy of Irish Music's office in West Co. Clare this afternoon - last stop before New York!

23 like this. Sam: So in your spare time u surf? I am guessing the swells come a bit later in the day? Danny: By the sea ... lucky bastards OAIM: Sam—the waves do get wild around here and it is a hot spot for surfers, however I have yet to try it—tis freezing! I'd be more tempted to try in Australia OAIM: Hey Danny, yes, but you have the mountains! Sam: Cool but dont u have the Gulf stream there? Bet the surfers have 5mm wetsuits tho. In the south close to Antarctic it can get pretty cold too. Not all of Oz is warm tho it was 30C today LOL. 5

Retrieved from OAIM Facebook page, 14 February 2011.

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Chapter Six OAIM: I will post another picture of when the surf is high. Yes, the gulf stream is here but to my toes it still feels rather chilly lol. Audrey: I want to go back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the passage above, we see reactions to a photographic image of west County Clare where the OAIM office is based. The OAIM, in this way, projects a very distinct physical and geographical identity here despite existing in cyberspace. This resonates with O’Flynn’s findings, in which a “rural cultural idyll” represented within Irish music is linked to “the imagery and idealisation of the West” (O’Flynn 2009, 193). These Irish connections and the physical location of the OAIM office in County Clare emerge as critical for the online community’s self-representation. Furthermore, by pointing out in the Facebook post that West Clare is the “last stop before New York” the OAIM makes a clear attempt to connect with its American students, who make up the largest national group among website members and subscribers (35%). The exchange that ensues, centers around comparisons with Australia and comments on surfing, also highlighting OAIM’s global outreach. The collective identity of this online community, then, is trans-national but negotiated in and through the OAIM which is rooted in the local. An OAIM cybersession, which provided Internet streaming to a live Irish traditional music pub session (see figure 6-3 below), was another such attempt to relate e-learning to a physical location.

Figure 6-3: Screenshot of the OAIM cybersession.

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The cybersession captured a characteristic traditional Irish music session, taking place in the casual unrehearsed atmosphere, in the old-style pub setting, with the musicians arranged in an inward-looking circle and using non-verbal communication to coordinate their play. This cybersession, which took place in a public house in the west of Ireland, was streamed live to an audience of thousands. The session featured live performances of Irish traditional music by some of the OAIM course tutors as well as local musicians who joined in. In broadcasting the cybersession, the OAIM sought a global online platform within the local context of a County Clare pub. Kate, the co-founder, commented: our launch was really an embodiment of the traditional session and it was fairly much a session, it wasn't rehearsed … it was massively important because it really on a local level it stated who we are, what we're doing as well as on an international level (Kate, interview by the author, May 27, 2011).

Kate also related that the cybersession served to alleviate some local traditional musicians’ scepticism about online learning of Irish traditional music. She shared: for a long time I was too embarrassed to tell them about it, I'd be out playing sessions and stuff with these local musicians and often I'd sit and listen to the conversation and they're so anti-Internet and this, that and the other and I'd sit there just nodding my head, you know yourself, and now you know the cat has jumped out of the bag and they all know it's me! (Kate, interview by the author, May 27, 2011)

Kate’s remarks attest to a broader tension within the Irish traditional music world regarding attempts to embrace new technologies while trying to retain a distinct indigenous identity—albeit a real or imagined one. The connection to Ireland and the local, however, appeared essential to the OAIM’s identity formation within a genre-specific domain. The question of authenticity when promoting the Irish traditional music genre, with its specific culture, rules and norms, via an online medium was discussed in the interviews. The tutors were quick, however, to dismiss any limited notion of “authentic” teaching practice. Tim commented: it is not better or worse, it’s just different … in the same way that how I learned the pipes from my primary teacher, going up to his house every Monday evening, is different to going into a group and learning with 10 others, is different to not having any lessons at all and learning as you go

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In this way, the tutors felt the OAIM represented a different context in which to learn Irish traditional music but one that did not necessarily replace face-to-face learning. The high quality of the tutors involved was also seen as a strong feature of the OAIM. One tutor, Ben, claimed: “they are going with professionals who are at the cutting edge of their profession” (Ben, interview by the author, June 22, 2011). As well as professional musician status, the tutors were of national and sometimes international standing in the Irish traditional music scene. Delivering a high quality product emerged as all-important to this online music community in building its reputation and standing. The video tutorials of the OAIM are very much rooted in the Irish traditional music style of learning, which is predominantly aural. Tunes and songs are taught phrase by phrase and by ear. The pedagogy of the tutorials is built on such aspects as ornamentation, variation, phrasing and articulation over a full course of 11-14 tutorials based on a repertoire of Irish traditional tunes. The tunes span different Irish traditional modes from a hornpipe to a jig, set dance, slow air and reel.6 Subscribers often point to the benefits of the tutorials coming from Ireland. In his participant log, Irvine writes: I like the idea that the lessons are from Ireland, where else would one go to ITM [Irish traditional music]? I know that there are many people who can teach ITM who don't live in Ireland; however, I just like the idea that my lessons come from Ireland. It's a very subjective and personal thing that currently defies the ability to explain (Irvine, participant log 2).

The “deep attachment” to Irish “nation-ness” (Anderson 1991) here directly points to the “imagined” nature of this connection to Ireland. This resonates deeply with Anderson’s writings on cultural practices which promote “profound emotional legitimacy”, for instance, through singing national anthems, where “the members … will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 1991, 224). In the same way, despite not physically connecting with others, the OAIM facilitates an attachment to Ireland through their online activities. 6

These modes or different types of Irish traditional tunes all have varying time signatures and specific features associated with them. All of the modes have accompanying dances in hard or soft shoes except for the slow air which is not danced to.

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The pedagogical focus on the tradition and culture of the genre was also apparent in comments on the chat forums. The following extracts from the chat forums, for example, highlight the importance of visual learning for two subscribers who used the video tutorials: Paul: Just wanted to let you know how much these lessons are improving my technique. Although i've been playing wooden flute for two years i still consider myself a beginner ... and without realizing it, i was developing some bad habits. Seems like i was spending as much time trying to figure out how to interpret ornamentation from books and write down the “notes” as i was actually playing them!? Since finding you guys, i have stopped writing everything down and instead, will just watch you play slowly through a tune. This has REALLY freed me up ... guess i was making things harder than they had to be. It’s actually fun to practice now. The more i practice, the more fun it is, and the more fun it is the more i play. HaHa. Ray: When i happened to pause a video and noticed you didn't have “little circles” pressed into your finger tips from the tone holes (like i do) i loosened my grip on the flute. (OAIM website, retrieved June 20, 2011)

In the above, we see learners picking up on implicit as well as explicit visual cues which help to improve their playing. For instance, because Ray was able to pause the video tutorial, he noticed that the tutor’s fingertips “didn’t have little circles” and so loosened his flute grip. Paul essentially found fun in practicing with the OAIM when he was “freed up” by abandoning standard notation. The convention of Irish traditional music transmission, then, is being reinforced in the OAIM video tutorials, which encourage oral and aural learning, as is customary in Irish traditional music. This finding resonates with those of Veblen and Waldron who argue that: Irish instrumental music offers a most convenient and portable meme for transmission in emerging media. Each tune is a complete unit, a small and finite form that includes repetition and opportunities for variation within limits. (Waldron and Veblen 2008, 101)

Identity Formation: The Collective and the Individual As the OAIM is an emerging initiative, its founders value the importance of creating an online community through long-term subscriptions and building relationships between tutors and learners. Kate claimed this could be achieved through the tutors’ style of teaching, which encouraged students to find their own playing styles, stating: “we’ve been trying to

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mimic a one-on-one class so you feel like sitting there with your tutor” (Kate, interview by the author, May 27, 2011). In the participant logs gathered, the tutors were described in very positive terms such as “knowledgeable”, “assured”, “nice”, “engaging”, “patient” and “encouraging”. The responses indicated strong tutor leadership and expertise as well as a warm, welcoming manner. One participant commented: Love starting one of Kate’s videos. When the only instruction you've had is by book, a warm, engaging instructor is a vast improvement—makes me want to practice (Andy, participant log 1).

Here there are interesting parallels with Anderson’s writings on “imagined communities”. As this participant pointed out, in contrast with music teaching methodologies which employ inanimate learning resources, within the OAIM relationships with other people were formed via cyberspace (arguably an imagined space). These connections or relationships were further evidenced in the chat forums. In the following excerpt we see an interaction between one learner (Irvine) and tutor (Kate): Irvine: Just introducing myself - I joined a few days ago after having been pointed in this direction by the good folk on The Session. I have been playing mandolin for a good while, so I hope that this will be of some use when making the switch to the fiddle. So far, it seems to be helping fingering obviously, but even the plectrum practice is making the bowing reasonably intuitive - and of course there's plenty of tunes in my nod! I do enjoy playing the mandolin, but it's always a compromise in this music, and it's great just to be making the “right” noises for once—well sort of! Thanks for making the lessons so clear Monica, though I am puzzled how you can see what I am doing because you keep saying “good”! Looking forward to sharing tips and chat from time to time. Kate: Hi Irvine, Glad to hear you are enjoying Monica's lessons. How are you finding the switch from mandolin to the fiddle? I am a flute player, however I would love to learn bouzouki and am going to try and find the time to do Brendan's course 'Bouzouki Basics'. As a melody player, the world of chords is intriguing to say the least. It’s just finding the time needed to devote to a new instrument. (OAIM chat forum, retrieved, May 3, 2011)

There are many indicators here of an attempt at building relationships and connections and so forming an online identity. For instance, we see from Irvine’s post that he has been directed to the OAIM through participation in another online Irish traditional community—The Session.

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Recalling findings in the Partii and Karlsen study (2010), Irvine flags a “music-related identity” on the chat forum, pointing out that he is a member of other Irish traditional music online communities and an experienced player of another instrument. In her reply, Kate initiates an attempt to build a shared understanding with Irvine by expressing the same interest in learning to play new instruments. Turino reminds us that “in realising our own identities, we tend to foreground aspects that are regarded as important by the people around us” (2008, 102). The exchange between Irvine and Kate indicates a desire to find common features between teachers and learners in the OAIM, here in their readiness to set themselves new challenges due to a love of learning music. A further indicator of shared understanding is the joke that Irvine makes about online tuition. This kind of “in-joke” became a regular feature of the interactions on the OAIM forums. According to Wenger, “in-jokes” are a regular feature of cultivating “communities of practice” and one indicator of an emerging “shared repertoire” between participants (Wenger 1998). Ewing (2008, 581) also states that “using jokes and memes is a way for new members to show they understand the culture”. Although the OAIM explicitly aimed to re-create a one-to-one lesson, Ben, as a tutor, felt there were particular differences in the relationships between the students and tutors within the OAIM, commenting that it was based more on “trust” and “investment”: The student self-selects to enroll and controls their own pace, but they are also selecting a teacher and their process and trusting and investing in that process. I think it's an excellent starting point for learning, compared to say “my parents made me do piano” (Ben, interview by the author, June 22, 2011).

The focus on self-directed learning and motivation to join the OAIM suggests parallels with Wenger’s concept of “individual learning trajectories” (Wenger 2010), which emphasises a shift in learning from formal education to “communities of practice” giving participants more agency in their learning through participation. The OAIM is very much an emerging or developing online musical community (having only been established in October 2010). During the research period, it was finding its way, forming an identity as it grew, and that identity was shaped by the users and by the musical and social practices of its members, subscribers and tutors. The advice from subscribers was taken very seriously in adapting the e-learning system of the OAIM. In the chat forums, users could share updates on their progress and request additions to the teaching repertoire. Furthermore, learning

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tools were shaped and built up collectively through the online community as needs arose. For example, the use of MP3 files and notation to support the video tutorials was born from learners’ feedback. For example, one subscriber posted: Regarding sheet music, although I try to get the tunes by ear, which is relatively easy taking into account that you teach them in very short phrases and slowly … I prefer to have the sheet paper at hand! (OAIM chat forum, retrieved, May 23, 2011)

Despite the inclusion of notation as supporting material, however, the practice of learning through oral transmission, though online, remained pivotal, in keeping with the traditional style and culture of the genre. The influence of interaction on the chat forums on learners’ practice was felt to support an inclusive feeling of “we’re in this together” between members. Alice commented: “The enthusiasm of others encourages me to keep at it and learn and delve more deeply into playing the music” (Alice, participant log 2). There was a feel-good factor associated with this building of community through the forum and Lauren shared: “I get support, makes me feel better about my playing” (Lauren, participant log 2). This connection between the members was pointed out often as distinguisghing the collective OAIM identity from other online learning resources. Tim commented: It is trying to combine the lesson with feedback and the forums, trying to create that sense of community, of people coming together that YouTube clips mightn’t have (Tim, interview by the author, June 30, 2011).

In this way, participation could be seen as “a way of learning—of both absorbing and being absorbed in—the culture of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991, 95). This building of a collective musical identity through social interaction referenced “offline” expressions of musical identity that nonetheless were still genre-specific to Irish traditional music, such as relating experiences of attending festivals, new recordings and session experiences. “Offline” musical identities were very apparent in the online forums thanks to user avatars (such as images of instruments or the subscriber actually playing their instrument) and online names (such as “serial instrumentalist” and “quick fiddler”) as well as dialogical interactions. It was evident in the participant logs and chat forums that the learners themselves often saw the OAIM as an addition to previous knowledge and experiences of Irish traditional music. This was sometimes manifested in

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evidence of returning to a lapsed instrument or finding a way into learning another instrument in the same genre. This demonstrated multiple music identities and memberships or a “nexus of multimembership” (Wenger 1998). For instance, many subscribers engaged in other Irish traditional music activities outside the OAIM. These ranged from various social occasions to regular Irish traditional music sessions. For instance, Morris related that he played at social events such as the birthdays of Irish friends who were “active in Irish Dancing” (Morris, participant log 3). Such performances appeared to link directly with a sense of Irish identity and the playing was an extension of that.

Conclusions This research aimed to provide an important window into how one online musical community formed and projected identities, developed relationships, interacted and operated within a distinctive genre in cyberspace. The study examined important socio-cultural theoretical issues which address how online musical communities fashion, negotiate and project music-related identities within their “musical worlds”, where music is seen as “a social force and as key resources for transforming individual subjectivities” (Turino 2008, 234). The findings of this research highlight the importance of extending online learning opportunities where membership and participation are promoted, identities nurtured, relationships developed over time, genrespecific characteristics maintained and structured pedagogical approaches utilised to build online musical communities. The fact that this large collective met in cyberspace extends the medium for such musical communities to a new emerging form of musical participation and engagement within society. In this way, a whole plethora of potential musical communities, whether real or “imagined”, opens up new pathways for musical culture and participation. The choice of an Irish traditional music case study uncovered significant issues regarding the use of emerging technologies within a deeply rooted tradition of music transmission. As Cohen states: The networks of technology that envelop the world and shrink it, supposedly distorting our sense of space and time so successfully, are at the same time rich with the patterns of intersecting group identities, local and historical significance. (Cohen 1994, 133)

Rather than moving away from tradition, the OAIM revealed the importance of retaining core pedagogical approaches of the genre, relying

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largely on a traditional model of “passing-on” Irish traditional music (oral transmission). The fostering of a distinct affinity with Ireland, a physical place (County Clare) and traditional music was also crucial to its members’ sense of belonging and collective identity. Despite being an online community, therefore, this musical community established its own “authenticity”, rooted in tradition and place.

Reference list Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Becker, Howard S. 2008. Art worlds. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular music and youth culture: Music, identity, and place. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2002. Language and symbolic power. 6th ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burnard, Pamela. 2009. Creativity and technology: critical agents of change in the work and lives of music teachers. In Music education with digital technology, ed. J. Finney and P. Burnard, 196-206. London: Continuum. Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock culture in Liverpool: Popular music in the making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1994. Identity, place and the “Liverpool Sound”. In Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place, ed. M. Stokes. Oxford: Berg. Cottrell, Stephen. 2004. Professional music-making in London: Ethnography and experience. Hampshire: Ashgate. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The practice of everyday life, trans. S. Rendall. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Duffy, Michelle. 2000. Lines of drift: Festival participation and performing a sense of place. Popular Music 19 (1):51-64. Ewing, Tom. 2008. Participation cycles and emergent cultures in an online community. International journal of market research 50 (5):575-590. Finnegan, Ruth. 2007. The hidden musicians: Music-making in an English town. 2nd ed. Connecticut: Wesleyen University Press. Higgins, Lee. 2007. Acts of hospitality: The community in community music. Music education research 9 (2):281-292. Karlsen, Sidsel. 2010. BoomTown music education and the need for authenticity: Informal learning put into practice in Swedish post-

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compulsory music education. British journal of music education 27 (1):35-46. Kibby, Marjorie D. 2000. Home on the page: a virtual place of music community. Popular music 19 (1):91-100. Kim, Amy Jo. 2000. Community building on the web. Berkeley: Peachpit Press. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Flynn, John. 2009. The Irishness of Irish music. Surrey: Ashgate. Palloff, Rena and Keith Pratt. 1999. Building learning communities in cyberspace: Effective strategies for the online classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Partti, Heidi and Sidsel Karlsen. 2010. Reconceptualising musical learning: New media, identity and community in music education. Music education research 12 (4):369-382. Pitts, Stephanie. 2005. Valuing musical participation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Plant, Robert. 2004. Online communities. Technology in society 26:51-65. Salavuo, Miikka. 2006. Open and informal online communities as forums of collaborative musical activities and learning. British journal of music education 23 (3):253-271. Scahill, Adrian. 2009. Riverdance: Representing Irish traditional music. New Hibernia review 13 (2):70-76. Slobin, Mark. 1993. Subcultural sounds: Micromusics of the West. New England: Wesleyan University Press. Stokes, Martin, ed. 1997. Ethnicity, identity and music: The musical construction of place. 2nd ed. Oxford: Berg. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as social life: The politics of participation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Waldron, Janice. 2009. Exploring a virtual music “community of practice”: Informal music learning on the Internet. Journal of music, technology and education 2 (2-3):97-112. —. 2011. Conceptual frameworks, theoretical models and the role of YouTube: Investigating informal music learning and teaching in online music community. Journal of Music, Technology and Education 4 (23): 189-200. Waldron, Janice and Kari Veblen. 2008. The medium is the message: cyberspace, community, and music learning in the Irish traditional music virtual community. Journal of music, technology and education 1 (2):99-111. Waldron, Janice and Wayne Bayley. 2012. Music teaching and learning in the Online Academy of Irish Music: An ethnographic and cyber

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ethnographic field study of music, meaning, identitiy and practice in community. In CMA XIII: Transitioning from historical foundations to 21st century global initiatives, ed. Don D. Coffman, 62-66. International Society for Music Education. Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, learning in doing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. Learning for a small planet: a research agenda. http://ewenger.com/research/index.htm. Wenger, Etienne, Nancy White and John D. Smith. 2009. Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities Portland: CPsquare. Wenger, Etienne, Richard McDermott and William Snyder. 2002. Cultivating communities of practice: a guide to managing knowledge. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School.

PART THREE MUSIC, DIASPORA AND DISPLACEMENT

CHAPTER SEVEN OPERA AS SOCIAL AGENT: FOSTERING ITALIAN IDENTITY AT THE METROPOLITAN OPERA HOUSE DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF GIULIO GATTI-CASAZZA’S MANAGEMENT, 1908-1910 DAVIDE CERIANI

Introduction The study of Italian migration to New York City in the early twentieth century has been mainly restricted to the fields of sociology and history. Few studies have taken as their subject the relationship between Italians living in the city and the arts. The handful that have, focus on individual artists—such as composers, singers, conductors, painters—rather than on how they interacted with their community. In the case of opera, biographies and autobiographies of singers are numerous; examples include the baritone Titta Ruffo and the famous tenors Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli (Jackson 1972; Scott 1988; Gargano and Cesarini 1990; Ruffo 1995; Gargano 1997; Inzaghi 2005). However, most of these biographies are anecdotal and do not discuss the impact that these personalities had on New York’s Italian community. The same can be said for more academic biographies, like those on Arturo Toscanini. These works place the conductor at the centre of their narrative but do not explore the impact of his presence in America on US-based Italians (Taubman 1951; Chotzinoff 1956; Boccardi and Labroca 1966; Barblan 1972; Della Corte 1981; Horowitz 1987; Sachs 1995; Toscanini and Sachs 2002; Marchesi 2007). In this essay, I examine how New York’s Italian-language newspapers reviewed the performances of two works by Italian composers at the city’s Metropolitan Opera House (referred to by many as simply the “Met”)

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shortly after the 1908 appointments of the Italian-born Giulio GattiCasazza and Toscanini as general manager and conductor, respectively. These two performances, which I chose for the acclaim they received in the Italian community, were Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (staged during the 1908-1909 season) and Alberto Franchetti’s Germania (staged during the 1909-1910 season). Articles from local Italian-language newspapers show that Italian opera at the Met, as well as the Italian personalities who worked there, played a fundamental role in both shaping and defining the identity of the Italian community in New York during the early twentieth century. In fact, most of these personalities—including singers, costume and set designers, dancers, conductors for both the orchestra and the choir—were not only born and raised in Italy, but also studied and performed there before moving to the United States. Understandably, both their presence in and influence on the productions of these works were met with great enthusiasm from members of the Italian community. If both operas aroused feelings of national pride, they also provoked intense sentiments of nostalgia (in the case of Aida) and patriotism (in the case of Germania). In the case of Aida, the title character’s longing and nostalgia for her lost homeland, Ethiopia, can be read as a metaphor for the situation of Italians living away from their country of origin. In the case of Germania, the battle between the German patriots and Napoleon’s army suggests a parallel with the Italian fight for independence against the Austrians. Among the Italians living in New York, this onstage fight was also reminiscent of the struggle to preserve their identity in real life. These alternative readings not only help us to rethink Aida and Germania, but also show how the members of the Italian community living in New York transfigured the meaning of these two operas in order to better reflect their own experiences in that city in the early twentieth century.

The Performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida on 16th November 1908: Its Meaning and Context On the evening of 16th November 1908, Raimondo Canudo, music critic for New York’s prominent Italian-language newspaper Bollettino della sera, settled into his seat in the orchestra section of the Met. That evening’s performance of Verdi’s Aida marked the opening night of the opera season. Looking at the six plaques located on the upper part of the proscenium arch, Canudo noticed that each of them bore the name of a different composer. This is how he described what he saw in the Bollettino della sera on 17th November 1908:

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Canudo expressed a sentiment felt strongly within New York’s Italian community at the beginning of the twentieth century—the desire to publicly assert their cultural pride in order to achieve social legitimization in their new country. This pride found its expression most notably in opera, as the Met, the Manhattan Opera Company, and numerous minor opera companies regularly performed works by Italian composers. In 1908, the Met became a particular source of Italian pride when it underwent a significant reorganization: the Austrian impresario, Heinrich Conried, was asked to resign, and a new Italian general manager—GattiCasazza—arrived from Milan’s Teatro alla Scala to take his place.2 GattiCasazza brought the conductor Toscanini with him from La Scala. Toscanini was to conduct performances from the Italian and French repertories while the other conductor—Gustav Mahler—was to focus on the German repertory. Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini brought many additional performers and assistants with them from La Scala, reinforcing the Italian presence at the Met. Most of these performers took part in the production of Aida in November 1908, turning it into a veritable triumph for Italy on the Met stage.3 1

This is the original Italian: “Levo gli occhi in alto. Nel grandioso teatro vedo, al di sopra della scena, sei nomi. Al posto d’onore, fra Wagner, Gounod, Beethoven, Gluch [sic], Mozart, leggo a caratteri d’oro: VERDI. Un’intima gioia mi fa sentire più che mai l’orgoglio dell’italianità, specie in quest’ora in cui l’arte italiana così solennemente si afferma in mezzo alle fredde ladies ed ai businessmen d’America”. 2 Heinrich Conried (1855-1909), a Silesian educated in Vienna, had been an actor before starting his career as a theatrical manager. He moved to America in 1878 and quickly became involved in the New York City theatre and music scene (Moses 1916). Giulio Gatti-Casazza (1869-1940) succeeded his father as director of the Teatro Comunale in Ferrara in 1893. In 1898 Gatti-Casazza was appointed director of the Teatro alla Scala, a position he held until 1908 when the Met hired him. For the first two years of his tenure (1908-1910) Gatti-Casazza shared his position with the former tenor Andreas Dippel. From 1910 until 1935 he was the sole general manager of the Met (Gatti-Casazza 1941). 3 This is the complete list of Italians involved in the staging of the Aida performance on 16th November 1908. Giulio Gatti-Casazza (general manager, just arrived from La Scala); Arturo Toscanini (conductor, just arrived from La Scala);

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The arrival of so many Italians at the Met was received with mixed reactions: numerous American music critics, including William J. Henderson, Henry T. Finck, and Edward E. Krehbiel, expressed concern that the Met was going through a process of what they called “Italianization”. For example, in early 1908 Henderson wrote in the New York Sun that “Every sincere lover of operatic art will hope that in the future … the Metropolitan Opera House … will not … [be] committed to the exclusive direction of an impresario whose ideals are altogether Italian” (Henderson 1908). A few weeks later Krehbiel, in the New York Tribune, expressed a fear that so many Italians coming to the Met from La Scala might lead to a performance monopoly of operas owned by the Milanese music publisher Ricordi. Krehbiel hoped that “the change in the character of the repertory … [would] not be the … result of Italian, or, rather, Milanese domination” (Krehbiel 1908). These concerns mirrored a broader social anxiety surrounding the growing number of Italian immigrants in America, and particularly in New York. Italian immigration to the United States reached its peak during the first decade of the twentieth century, with more than two million arrivals.4 In 1906 and 1907, the two years preceding the arrival of Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini at the Met, the wave of Italian immigration to the United States reached an unprecedented high of nearly 300,000 arrivals annually. Between 1900 and 1910, the Italian population in New York City more than doubled, increasing from 145,000 to 340,000.5 Italians quickly became the main target of this anxiety because they arrived in such large numbers and had difficulty integrating with the local population. Americans’ distress over the presence of so many Italians at the Met was matched by an even stronger expression of cultural pride in New York’s Italian community. On learning that Gatti-Casazza had been appointed general manager of the Met, for example, the New York newspaper Il telegrafo issued the following statement on 12th February Francesco Spetrino (conductor – Toscanini’s vice – just arrived from the Vienna Hofoper); Francesco Romei (assistant conductor, just arrived from La Scala); Giulio Setti (conductor of the choirs, just arrived from La Scala); Enrico Caruso (tenor – as Radamès – at the Met since 1903); Antonio Scotti (baritone – as Amonasro – at the Met since 1899); Giulio Rossi (bass – as the Egyptian King – at the Met since 1908); Angelo Badà (tenor – as the Messenger – at the Met since 1908); Gina Torriani (dancer, at the Met since 1908); Mario Sala and Angelo Parravicini (set designers of La Scala); Sartoria teatrale Chiappa (costume designer company from Milan); Gian Placido Centanini (Gatti-Casazza’s personal secretary from La Scala); choir (primarily comprising recently immigrated Italian singers). 4 See Table 7-1, Appendix A. 5 See Table 7-2, ibid.

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1908: “We are delighted that an Italian has been appointed as head of the Metropolitan, because this will be beneficial to our [Italian] art”.6 Other Italian-language newspapers voiced similar sentiments of pride after the 1908 opening night performance of Aida. Giuseppe Gullino wrote in L’araldo italiano on 18th November 1908: Expectations [for the opening night of Aida] were great, immense, and … amidst what might seem just the display of two new personalities … there was also a bit of national pride. It centred around two personas dearest to us, two names that our great art has long smiled on with fortune and success: Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini.7

Another article, which also appeared on 18th November 1908 in Il progresso italo-americano, demonstrates even more explicitly the Italian immigrants’ need to impress the Americans. The article discussed the contribution of Italian performers and the new general manager, and highlighted the American audience’s excited responses to Aida: This year, New York high society was feverishly drawn to the Metropolitan Opera House, to see two giants of the Italian theatrical world: Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who has come to America to show the brilliance with which we stage the operas of our musical geniuses in the greatest artistic temples of our country, and Arturo Toscanini, the “wizard” of orchestra conductors … The feverish anticipation ... could not have been better fulfilled than by the revelation, to the American world, of what the arts of our culture, and our most brilliant masters, are capable of: the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season, most favourably anticipated, could not have delivered anything but a memorable triumph.8 6

The original reads: “Noi vivamente ci compiacciamo che a capo del Metropolitan sia stato assunto un italiano, perché sarà tanto di guadagnato per l’arte nostra”. 7 The original reads: “L’aspettativa [per la prima di Aida] era grande, era immensa e … frammezzo a quello che poteva apparire semplice sfoggio di nuove personali energie … era dopotutto anche po’ d’orgogliosetto [sic] nazionale, che s’imperniava su due nomi nostri carissimi, su due nomi cui la grande arte nostra aveva irradiati da tempo i suoi sorrisi di fortuna e di successo, Gatti-Casazza e Toscanini”. 8 The original reads: “Quest’anno, la grande società newyorchese era febbrilmente attratta al teatro metropolitano dal desiderio di vedere all’opera due giganti del mondo teatrale italiano: Giulio Gatti-Casazza, venuto in America a rivelare la potente genialità con la quale si allestiscono, nei massimi templi artistici della patria nostra, le opere dei nostri geni musicali, e Arturo Toscanini, il ‘mago’ dei direttori d’orchestra … L’attesa febbrile … non poteva esser meglio appagata dalla rivelazione dinanzi al mondo americano, di quel che possano la cultura artistica ed il genio sovrano dei nostri grandi: la ‘première’ della stagione lirica metropolitana,

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Finally, the four most important Italian newspapers of New York commented enthusiastically on the performance of Aida and described at length the excitement that this opera stirred up in New York’s Italian community.9 These newspapers’ comments, along with the previous quotations, show how New York’s Italian press used the success of Italian opera among American audiences as a means of combating negative stereotypes of Italians in America. Italians reacted to these stereotypes by supporting anything—including Italian opera—that could show their culture in a positive light. As literary scholar Robert Viscusi has pointed out, this situation was paradoxical. In America, Italian immigrants “found themselves … far more closely in touch with the culture of Italian nationalism than they ever would have been had they remained in Italy” (Viscusi 2006, 77). The strong attachment that New York’s Italians showed toward the figures and symbols of their homeland reinforces Viscusi’s idea. For instance, when a monument to Verdi was unveiled in New York on 12th October 1906, more than 10,000 people attended the event. According to newspaper reports, members of Italian societies marched from Washington Square to the site of the statue in Sherman Square, between Broadway and West 72nd Street. There, a helium balloon lifted a cloth of red, white, and green—the colours of the Italian flag—from the monument (New York Times, October 13, 1906; New York Tribune, October 13, 1906). This was just one of the many New York events at the turn of the century that were proudly celebrated by the Italian community: lectures were given by Italian scholars, Italian theatrical plays were performed, and other statues were erected in honour of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Dante Alighieri, and, of course, Christopher Columbus. However, these events had limited impact segnata da auspici altissimi, non poteva, dunque, affermarsi che con un trionfo memorabile”. 9 See the following headlines: “La ‘Prima’ alla Metropolitan Opera House / Il trionfo di Caruso, di Gatti-Casazza e di Toscanini / Plebiscito Italofilo della Stampa Americana”, La follia di New York, 17th November 1908 (The opening night at the Metropolitan Opera House / The triumph of Caruso, Gatti-Casazza, and Toscanini / Italophile plebiscite of the American press); “Metropolitan Opera House / Il grandioso avvenimento d’arte italiana”, Bollettino della sera, 17th November 1908 (Metropolitan Opera House / The grand event of Italian art); “L’apertura del Metropolitan Opera House / Serata trionfale”, L’araldo italiano, 18th November 1908 (The opening night at the Metropolitan Opera House / Triumphal evening); “La riapertura della Metropolitan Opera House / Il trionfo di Giulio Gatti-Casazza e di Arturo Toscanini”, Il progresso italo-americano, 18th November 1908 (The reopening of the Metropolitan Opera House / The triumph of Giulio Gatti-Casazza and Arturo Toscanini).

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for various reasons. Theatrical plays, for example, were usually performed in their original language and thus could be appreciated only by the Italian community. Other cultural events, although well attended, did not take place on a regular basis. Italian opera attracted attention because it was performed every night and became a fixture of New York cultural life. The music, universally comprehensible, was supplemented with librettos translated into English so that American audiences could follow the plot. The performers featured were often Italians, some of whom became American opera stars—Caruso being the best known of these singers. For these reasons, opera became the principal means of cultural legitimization of the Italian community in New York.

Alternative Reading(s) of Aida: The Italian Immigrants’ Perspective The performance of Aida not only evoked feelings of pride among the members of the Italian community in New York, but also a longing for their distant homeland. In recent years, a number of scholars have suggested various interpretations of the opera. For example, musicologists Fabrizio Della Seta, Karen Henson, Gilles de Van, and literary scholar Edward Said have demonstrated how Aida’s exoticism is articulated in its text, music, and staging (Della Seta 1991 and 2008; Henson 2000; De Van 1995; Said 1993). Others have interpreted the opera as historical, reading the battle between the Ethiopians and the Egyptians as a metaphor for the long struggle between the Italians and their Austrian oppressors during the Risorgimento period, as historian Paul Robinson suggests (Robinson 2002). These approaches and many others are discussed in Ralph Locke’s article “Aida and nine readings of empire” (Locke 2010). The performance of Aida in 1908 at the Met, for an audience made up at least in part of Italian emigrants, suggests an additional and to date unexplored reading, in which Aida becomes a symbol of geographic and cultural nostalgia. At the beginning of Aida’s Act Three, the title character pines for her country, Ethiopia, which she fears she will never see again. This scene evoked great emotion among the Italian audience at the Met. As the journalist for the Bollettino della sera on 17th November 1908 recounted: “When Aida sings: ‘O patria mia, mai più ti rivedrò,’ (‘Oh my country, never shall I see you again!’) [Emmy] Destinn, with profound yearning in her voice, created an intense emotional response in the Italian immigrant audience. They were transfixed by that song to the last notes of her sad

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reminiscence”.10 The “sad reminiscence” about a distant homeland became one of the principal aspects of the opera for Italians, and certainly the major theme of that act. At first it seems curious that the journalist from the Bollettino della sera decided to quote the line in which Aida mourns the impossibility of returning to her own country, rather than other lines in which she longs to go back to her homeland, or even when she actually decides to flee to Ethiopia. The following lists the passages, in which Aida sings (alone or in duet) at the beginning of Act Three: EXAMPLE 1 AIDA Qui Radamès verrà! Che vorrà dirmi? Io tremo! Ah! Se tu vieni a recarmi, O crudel, l'ultimo addio, Del Nilo i cupi vortici Mi daran tomba e pace forse E pace forse e oblio. O, patria mia, mai più Mai più ti rivedrò! O cieli azzurri, o dolci aure native, Dove sereno il mio mattin brillò O verdi colli, o profumate rive O, patria mia, mai più ti rivedrò! No… no… mai più, mai più! O fresche valli, o queto asil beato Che un dì promesso dall’amor mi fu Or che d’amore il sogno è dileguato O, patria mia, non ti vedrò mai più!

Radamès will come here! What can he want to say to me? I tremble! Ah! If you are coming, O cruel one, to bid me a last farewell, The dark eddies of the Nile Will give me a grave and perhaps peace And perhaps peace and forgetfulness. O my country, never, Never shall I see you again! O blue skies, O gentle native breezes, Where the morning of my life serenely shone O green hills, O perfumed shores O my country, never shall I see you again! No… no… never, never again! O cool valleys, O calm, happy refuge That love promised me one day Now that the dream of love has vanished O my country, I’ll never see you again!

EXAMPLE 2 AMONASRO Rivedrai le foreste imbalsamate, You will see again the aromatic forests, Le fresche valli, i nostri templi d’ôr! The cool valleys, our golden temples!

10

The original reads: “Quando Aida canta: O patria mia, mai più ti rivedrò, la Destinn, con l’espressione profondamente nostalgica del suo canto, diffonde un’emozione eccezionale negli italiani qui immigrati, che quel canto ammalia fino alle ultime note della pietosa reminiscenza”.

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AIDA Rivedrò le foreste imbalsamate! Le fresche valli, i nostri templi d’ôr!

I’ll see again the aromatic forests! The cool valleys, our golden temples!

EXAMPLE 3 AIDA Nella terra avventurata De’ miei padri, il ciel ne attende; Ivi l’aura è imbalsamata, Ivi il suolo è aromi e fior. Fresche valli e verdi prati A noi talamo saranno, Su noi gli astri brilleranno Di più limpido fulgor.

In the blessed land Of my fathers, heaven awaits us; There the air is perfumed, There the earth is aromas and flowers. Cool valleys and green meadows Will be our marriage bed, The stars will shine over us With a clearer radiance.

AIDA AND RADAMÈS Vieni meco, insiem fuggiamo Questa terra di dolor. Vieni meco, t’amo, t’amo! A noi duce fia l’amor.

Come with me, we will flee together From this land of grief. Come with me, I love you, I love you! Love will be our guide.

(Verdi’s Aida, beginning of Act Three. Weaver 1975, 302-305, 310-311). Aida’s mood shifts three times: in the first example, the romanza, she fears never again seeing the “green hills” and the “perfumed shores” of her own country. This is the passage quoted by the journalist of the Bollettino della sera, and his choice of quote is suddenly less curious when we realize this is the sentiment that mirrored the Italian immigrants’ longing for their lost land. In the second example, Aida and her father, Amonasro, perform a duet: Amonasro exhorts his daughter to take action against Amneris, Aida’s rival for the love of Radamès. He evokes memories of Ethiopia and tells Aida that once she defeats Amneris, Aida and Radamès will be able to reign over her lost homeland. Aida, excited by this prospect and overwhelmed by the memories of her own country, sings enthusiastically: “I’ll see again the aromatic forests, the cool valleys, our golden temples”. Not only does Aida show how much she yearns for Ethiopia, but she also considers returning a viable possibility. Finally, in the third example, Aida lauds the beauty of her homeland and resolves to return there with her beloved Radamès. Here, the situation is a clear reversal of what happened in the romanza: Aida does not grieve over the distant homeland that she will never see again. Instead, she imagines her future there with Radamès. Aida compares the beauty of

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Ethiopia to Egypt, her new home forced upon her by her captors, referring to it as a “land of grief” (“questa terra di dolor”). Aida’s shifting moods mirror the diverse attitudes of the Italians who immigrated to America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although some returned to Italy, a few million made the United States their new home.11 Those who remained in America mourned the loss of their homeland and opera became a key mean of expressing this nostalgia. Aida’s line “Oh my country, never shall I see you again!” brought forth a flood of emotions as these Italians identified with Aida’s longing for home. Canudo, the journalist of Bollettino della sera, had himself immigrated to New York from Italy.12 He commented on the Aida performance at the Met by focusing on the verses in which the heroine of the opera expresses her nostalgia for home, rather than her resolution to go back to her own country. Aida the character and Aida the opera epitomized this homesickness in the eyes of Italian immigrants who attended the Met’s opening night performance.

Giulio Gatti-Casazza, the Italian Immigrants, and the Performance of Alberto Franchetti’s Germania at the Met When Gatti-Casazza staged Franchetti’s Germania on 22nd January 1910, every major New York Italian-language newspaper showed an enthusiasm comparable to what Aida had received a little more than one year earlier. The headlines devoted to this opera and its performance filled most of the front pages; the articles, rather than offering critical reviews, unconditionally praised both Franchetti and the performers—once again, most of them Italians.13 However, the music critics had a harder time 11

Massimo Livi-Bacci estimated that between 1881 and 1890, 43.4% of Italians who had immigrated to America went back to Italy. The percentage rose to 47.6% during the following decade and reached the peak of 52.6% in the years between 1901 and 1910 (Livi-Bacci 1961, 7-8, 34-35. This percentage is consistent with the data provided by Beneduce 1911, 96, and by Rossi 1910, 38). Betty Boyd Caroli has estimated that between 1900 and 1914 approximately 1.5 million people returned to Italy (Caroli 1973, 93). 12 Raimondo Canudo was a very popular figure in New York’s Italian community. Apart from his work as a journalist and critic for the Bollettino della sera, he was also editor of the Bulletin of the Order Sons of Italy in America from shortly after his arrival in the United States in 1908 until his death in 1919. His brother, Ricciotto, was also a famous critic and novelist who spent most of his professional life in Paris. 13 This is the complete list of the Italian artists involved with the staging of the American premiere of Germania at the Met. Arturo Toscanini (conductor); Enrico

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demonstrating that Germania was as much of a genuine Italian product as Aida. Franchetti did not have the same Italian “purity” in the eyes of the opera-goers since he had completed his graduate studies in composition in Germany (Ferraresi 1998, 215-218). Franchetti was also a devotee of Wagner and had visited Bayreuth a number of times. Of course, Verdi had spent a considerable amount of time abroad as well; in his case, in France. The results of this experience are reflected in some of his works, such as the revision of I lombardi alla prima Crociata into Jérusalem (1847), Les vêpres siciliennes (1855), and Don Carlos (1867). However, by the early twentieth century Verdi’s music was considered the quintessential expression of Italian opera both in Italy and abroad, and few wanted to highlight his French connections. Since Franchetti could not completely symbolize Italian-ness in music, public attention shifted to Caruso, who sang the lead role of the German patriot Federico Loewe in Germania. During the days preceding the premiere of Germania, the Italianlanguage newspapers encouraged their readers to attend the opening night and the subsequent performances in order to create a pro-Italian atmosphere at the Met. The encouragement to attend this work came not only from the desire to have the Met filled with supporters of Italian opera but also from Gatti-Casazza’s words after his arrival in New York. In an interview with the Bollettino della sera on 20th October 1908 he was asked: “The majority of Italians here are workmen. Will they be able to enjoy our music, even if they are away from their homeland? Will it be possible for all of them to listen to Caruso?” Gatti-Casazza answered: “Did you really think we could have neglected the [Italian] people … who work and need entertainment as well as artistic education? … Prices will be reduced [for them], and the workmen will be able to have the entertainment they deserve”.14 Italians did visit the opera in New York, particularly the Met, around the late 1900s and early 1910s. However, the American press severely Caruso (tenor, as Federico Loewe); Pasquale Amato (baritone, as Carlo Worms); Antonio Pini-Corsi (baritone, as Crisogono); Giulio Rossi (bass, as Giovanni Filippo Palm); Lodovico Nepoti (tenor, as Carlo Teodoro Körner); Paolo Wulman (bass, as Luigi Adolfo Guglielmo Lützow); Edoardo Missiano (bass, as the police chief); Aristide Baracchi (bass, Peters); Rita Barillo (contralto, as a young boy); Mario Sala and Angelo Parravicini (set designers). 14 The original reads: Canudo: “Gl’italiani, qui, sono in massima parte operai. Potranno essi gustare la nostra musica lontani dalla madre patria? Sarà dato a tutti di sentire Caruso?” Gatti-Casazza: “Come? Ha potuto lei pensare che avessimo trascurato il popolo [Italiano] … che lavora e che ha tanto bisogno di svago e di educazione artistica? … I prezzi saranno ridotti e il nostro pubblico operaio potrà divertirsi”.

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stigmatized their attitude and behaviour during the performances. A contribution by John C. Freund that appeared in Musical America in November 1909 under the title “Italians at the Opera” claimed that many members of the Italian community went to the opera primarily to express pride in being an Italian living abroad. Freund wrote: The Italians know only one kind of music, that which is composed and sung by their own people … they are not particularly interested in an opera, or in good music, as such. What they want is “the voice”, and they are so intent upon this that they will deliberately force a singer, if they can, to respond to their plaudits with encores whether he wants or not … The same crowd that comes to hear Caruso or some other great Italian singer is not in evidence on nights when singers of other nationalities appear, or when the best operas of German and French composers are heard. Their point seems to be to assert a certain nationality in music, to identify music with Italy (Freund 1909, 20).

This article shows that the American music critics censured the nationalistic attitude of the Italian community at the opera in New York, judging it as immature and possibly chauvinistic. However, there was some truth to what this article claimed. Caruso, for example, was a real hero for the Italians of New York. For the most part, these Italians were poor and came from southern Italy (Baily 1999, 62, 66). Caruso, a Neapolitan by birth, was also a southerner who had been born into a very poor family; moreover, he was always very friendly and generous to every Italian. These habits endeared him to his compatriots.15 Also, starting in 1899, the US Bureau of Immigration divided Italian immigrants into two groups, northerners and southerners—no other country was subjected to this partition (Gabaccia 2003, 55-56). This artificial division is yet another reason why the Italians of New York felt closer to Caruso than, say, to Toscanini who was from the northern town of Parma. Understandably, Caruso’s pictures in New York’s Italian newspapers while Germania was playing at the Met stood out more than those of Franchetti, Gatti-Casazza, or Toscanini.16 The headlines were also similar 15

Caruso’s friendly attitude toward his compatriots in New York is documented in Gargano and Cesarini 1990, 60-61; Gargano 1997, 60-62, 86; Jackson 1972, 106, 107, 110, 124, 132, 147, 153, 194-195, 208-210, 233-234, 249, 286. 16 See for example the following headline: “Una manifestazione d’italianità / La Germania Domani Sera al Metropolitan / Per un Nuovo Grande Trionfo dell’Arte Italiana in America”, Il giornale italiano, 27th January 1910 (A display of Italianness / Germania tomorrow night at the Metropolitan / A new and great triumph of

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to those that followed the performance of Aida more than one year earlier.17 Terms and expressions such as italianità (Italian-ness) or grande trionfo dell’arte italiana in America (great triumph of the Italian [operatic] art in America) appeared repeatedly.18 Whether or not Germania represented a “triumph” of Italian opera in the United States, it certainly aroused great interest among Franchetti’s compatriots. Germania’s plot, written by the famous librettist Luigi Illica, focuses on the struggle of the German patriots against Napoleon and the French army between 1806 and 1813. After its world premiere at La Scala on 11th March 1902, under Gatti-Casazza and Toscanini, and with Caruso in the role of Federico, Germania drew international recognition with performances in Buenos Aires, Saint Petersburg, London, and many other cities. Caruso recorded the opening aria, “Studenti! Udite, o voi antichi e novi amici!” (Students! Hear, oh you friends old and new!) and the first part of the love duet with Ricke “Ah, vieni qui … No, non chiuder gli occhi vaghi” (Ah, come here … No, do not close your charming eyes) shortly after that opening performance.19 On 14th March 1910, more than one month after the final performance of Germania at the Met, Caruso recorded the same arias for the American market (Bolig 2002, 90; Caruso Jr. and Farkas 1990, 616-617). Although data on record sales is not available, it is reasonable to assume that the popularity of these recordings was fuelled by members of the Italian community who had either attended the performance of Germania at the Met or had heard of it. While American music journalists criticized Germania (John-Brenon 1910; Finck 1910; Ione 1910; Bauer 1910), the Italians used it to celebrate their compatriot performers on stage, their Italian pride and, of course, the composer and the librettist. However, New York-based Italian music critics faced two challenges in their celebration of the composer and the librettist. Firstly, Franchetti’s music was clearly inspired by Richard Wagner (Torchi 1902, 386-387, 417; Manuali 1987/88, 18-29; Ferraresi 1997; Budden 2002; Pepi 2005/2006, 10, 12-15, 20-21). Secondly, the plot Italian art in America). A large picture of Caruso stands above the headline, with two smaller pictures of Gatti-Casazza and Franchetti placed on the right and left. 17 A list of these articles can be found in footnote 9. 18 See for example the following headline: “Questa sera al Metropolitan / Una grande manifestazione d’Italianità / Per la seconda rappresentazione di Germania”, Il giornale italiano, 28th January 1910 (Tonight at the Metropolitan / a great display of Italian-ness / The second performance of Germania). 19 Caruso recorded the pieces in Milan on 11th April 1902. See Bolig 2002, 62-63; Caruso Jr. and Farkas 1990, 607. This was also, incidentally, Caruso’s first recording.

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of Germania was set in Bavaria approximately one century earlier and had nothing to do with Italy. While the newspapers did not deny Wagner’s influence on Franchetti, they described the latter’s music in ways that emphasized its Italian-ness. The critics did this in two ways: firstly, they pointed out that Franchetti had been inspired primarily by Italian composers. Gullino, for instance, cited both Amilcare Ponchielli and Alfredo Catalani. In writing for L’araldo italiano, Gullino claimed that thanks to these connections, Franchetti had been able to keep his musical style “purely Italian … [and] faithful to our ancient traditions” (Gullino 1910). An article in the Bollettino della sera followed the same line of thinking by connecting Franchetti’s music to that of Giacomo Puccini and Pietro Mascagni, the two most famous living opera composers in Italy apart from Franchetti himself (Bollettino, January 25, 1910). The second technique consisted of highlighting the importance of the main arias rather than the presence of the leitmotivs that lend the opera a cohesive structure. The critics primarily focused on Federico’s aria “Studenti! Udite” but they also discussed others sung by Carlo Worms (Federico’s friend) and Ricke (Federico’s fiancée, interpreted by Emmy Destinn). The presence of melodies that were clear and easy to memorize, sung over a relatively straightforward accompaniment was, according to most of these critics, a sign of Franchetti’s adherence to the Italian tradition. Gullino praised this simplicity, since “histrionic, thrown-together bits of harmonic counterpoint [beneath the main melodic line] usually divert the attention from the true theme, which is the one that should stick in the mind, in the heart of the listeners” (Gullino 1910).20 Il progresso italo-americano also discussed the arias of Germania, arguing that over time Franchetti’s style had become “more sincere and melodically more Italian” (Il progresso, 25th January 1910). Other comments echoed these two quotations, to the point that one wonders whether these critics deliberately decided to ignore the obvious references to Wagner’s music or their difficulty in hearing the references stemmed from a lack of exposure to a wider repertoire. Finally, regarding the libretto, the Italian critics of New York offered an alternative reading of Germania’s plot, drawing a parallel between the German fight for freedom against Napoleon and that of the Italians against the Austrians from the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) until the Independence of the Italian Kingdom in 1861. Of course, it is not possible 20

The original reads: “istrionici raffazzonamenti di contrappunti armonici [sotto la linea melodica principale] per lo più distraggono dal tema vero che si vuole fermare nella mente, nel cuore degli uditori”.

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to establish the truth of what the Italian critics claimed in their articles, namely, that the Italian audience attending the performances at the Met were actually inspired by patriotism. Nevertheless, the Italian-language newspapers clearly implied this. Gullino, for example, compared Federico’s words of freedom to the revolutionary nineteenth-century choruses of Verdi. He emphatically stated: Oh! If all our [Italian patriotic] heroes who became enthusiastic before … the choruses of Nabucco and I Lombardi [alla prima crociata] could still listen to Loewe’s invocation “The one who dies for the homeland does not die! He is eternal! He is a saint”; if they could feel again the vibrations in their generous souls [while listening to the verses] “Let us die for Germany” or “Let us die with the sword in hand / under the wing / of our flag”; all of them would scream in front of those miserable critics [who disapproved of Germania] what a fruitful and healthy example is the “anachronism” [of staging a work] so rich with poetry [and based] on homeland and freedom! (Gullino 1910).21

Another article in La follia di New York pointed out that Caruso’s interpretation as one of the leaders of the German revolutionary and antiNapoleonic organization was so intense that the Italian audience was reminded of the acting style of Gustavo Modena, the famous nineteenthcentury Italian patriot and actor whose anti-Austrian ideas saw him exiled from Italy (La follia, January 30, 1910). Other newspapers went even further, advertising Germania as a work that bore clear parallels with the conditions of the Italians in New York. Il progresso italo-americano, for example, claimed that “in spite of its Teutonic subject, Germania is an eminently Italian opera”, but also added that the struggle of these Germans to protect their identity was very similar to the challenges the Italian community had to endure on a daily basis in America (Il progresso, January 26, 1910). Germania, in other words, struck a chord with New York’s Italian community because they considered it a metaphor for their own lives in their adopted homeland.

21

The original reads: “Oh! Se tutti i nostri eroi che si accesero ai … cori del Nabucco e dei Lombardi udir potessero ancora l’invocazione di Loewe ‘Chi muore per la Patria non muore! È eterno! È santo’; se essi potessero riprovare le pulsazioni delle loro anime generose al novo canto ‘Morir per la Germania’ o quell’altro ‘Morir col brando in pugno / sotto le grand’ale / della nostra bandiera’, tutti saprebbero gridar in faccia ai criticuzzi dell’ultim’ora quanto feconde di esempio salutare torni anche l’‘anacronismo’ per la grande poesia della patria e della libertà”.

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Conclusions Opera in New York in the early twentieth century was not only a form of elite entertainment for refined upper class Americans. Members of various ethnic groups also attended performances on a regular basis to show their interest in and support for their nation of origin. In the case of the Italian community, attending operas written and interpreted by their compatriots became a routine to publicly demonstrate feelings of national pride. Emphatically repeated terms such as “triumph”, “victory”, and “Italianità”, which regularly appeared in the reviews, not only illustrate how strongly Italians felt about the operatic repertoire of their own country, but also how they measured its success according to the interest American audiences took in Italian opera. The presence of an Italian general manager and conductor at the helm of the Met certainly reinforced those feelings but, more often, it was Caruso’s success that stirred the patriotism of local Italians. For example, when Canudo in the Bollettino della sera described the final scene of Aida, he was primarily concerned with making sure that this singer would stand out as a symbol of glory for Italy. As he wrote: “And when Caruso, from the depth of the grave, [sang] the final strophe about Aida’s beauty and youth … Italian art enjoyed its ultimate and greatest victory” (Canudo 1908).22 During the period of mass migration to the United States, powerful feelings of nostalgia, patriotism, and pride characterized the social attitude of the newly arrived. For the Italians, music became a key means of channelling feelings of self-legitimization and longing for the distant homeland. Aida’s and Germania’s remarkable receptions represent a wider and far-reaching phenomenon that centres on the symbiotic relationship between Italian opera and the young Italian community of New York in the early twentieth century. Such a relationship calls for further interdisciplinary investigation that will contribute significantly to a deeper understanding of Italian identity through music during this period.

Reference list Anon. 1906. Balloon carried aloft veil of Verdi’s statue. New York Times, October 13. —. 1906. Verdi celebration: Monument unveiled. New York Tribune, 22

The original reads: “E quando poi Caruso, dal fondo della tomba, canta l’ultima strofa alla bellezza e alla giovinezza di Aida … l’arte italiana ha l’ultima e la più forte vittoria”.

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October 13. —. 1908. Gatti-Casazza Direttore del Metropolitan. Il telegrafo, February 12. —. 1908. La ‘Prima’ alla Metropolitan Opera House / Il trionfo di Caruso, di Gatti-Casazza e di Toscanini / Plebiscito italofilo della stampa americana. La follia di New York, November 17. —. 1908. Metropolitan Opera House / Il grandioso avvenimento d’arte italiana. Bollettino della sera, November 17. —. 1908. L’apertura del Metropolitan Opera House / Serata trionfale. L’araldo italiano, November 18. —. 1908. La riapertura della Metropolitan Opera House: Il trionfo di Giulio Gatti-Casazza e di Arturo Toscanini. Il progresso italoamericano, November 18. —. 1910. Germania di Franchetti alla Metropolitan Opera House. Il progresso italo-americano, January 25. —. 1910. La Germania di Franchetti riporta un successo genuino ed indiscutibile. Bollettino della sera, January 25. —. 1910. Germania si replica venerdì. Il progresso italo-americano, January 26. —. 1910. In ricordo della prima rappresentazione di Germania. La follia, January 30. —. 1910. Una manifestazione d’italianità / La Germania domani sera al Metropolitan / Per un nuovo grande trionfo dell’arte italiana in America. Il giornale italiano, January 27. —. 1910. Questa Sera al Metropolitan / Una grande manifestazione d’italianità / Per la seconda rappresentazione di Germania. Il giornale italiano, January 28. Baily, Samuel L. 1999. Immigrants in the land of promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Barblan, Guglielmo. 1972. Toscanini e la Scala. Milan: Edizioni della Scala. Bauer, Emile F. 1910. Germania at the Metropolitan. Musical leader 4 (January 27):10. Beneduce, Alberto. 1911. Saggio di statistica dei rimpatri dalle Americhe. In Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione, Bollettino dell’emigrazione 11:96. Boccardi, Virgilio and Mario Labroca. 1966. Arte di Toscanini. Turin: ERI. Bolig, John R.. 2002. Caruso records: A history and discography. Denver: Mainspring Press. Boyd Caroli, Betty. 1973. Italian repatriation from the United States,

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1900-1914. New York: Center for Migration Studies. Brancaleoni, Chiara. 2004. Germania, dramma lirico di Alberto Franchetti (1902). Per una analisi del libretto e della partitura. Tesi di Laurea: University of Perugia. Budden, Julian. 2002. La musica di Germania. Booklet attached to the CD of Germania, 9-12. Reggio Emilia: Archivio biblioteca del teatro municipale Valli e fondazione ‘I Teatri’ di Reggio Emilia. Canudo, Raimondo. 1908. La Grande stagione al Metropolitan; Intervista col direttore Ing. Gatti-Casazza. Bollettino della sera, October 20. —. 1908. Metropolitan Opera House: Il grandioso avvenimento d’arte italiana. Bollettino della sera, November 17. Caruso Jr., Enrico and Andreas Farkas. 1990. Enrico Caruso: My father and my family. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press. Chotzinoff, Samuel. 1956. Toscanini: An intimate portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. De Van, Gilles. 1995. L’exotisme fin de siècle et le sens du lointain. In Letteratura, musica e teatro al tempo di Ruggero Leoncavallo, ed. Lorenza Guiot and Jürgen Maehder, 103-117. Milan: Sonzogno. Della Corte, Andrea. 1981. Arturo Toscanini. Pordenone: Studio Tesi. Della Seta, Fabrizio. 1991. ‘O cieli azzurri’: Exoticism and dramatic discourse in Aida: Cambridge opera journal 3:1, 49-62. —. 2008. ‘O cieli azzurri’: esotismo e discorso drammatico in Aida. In ‘… non senza pazzia’: Prospettive sul teatro musicale, 47-63. Rome: Carocci. Ferraresi, Alessia. 1997. La questione wagneriana nella teoria giovanile di Ferdinando Fontana librettista e Alberto Franchetti musicista. Horizonte: Italianistische Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaft und Gegenwartsliteratur 2:77-88. —. 1998. Alberto Franchetti: una biografia dalle lettere. Fonti musicali italiane 3:215-232. Finck, Henry T. 1910. A poor opera by a rich man. New York Evening Post, January 24. Freund, John C. 1909. Italians at the opera. Musical America 11, no. 3 (27 November):20. Gabaccia, Donna R. 2003. Race, nation, hyphen: Italian-Americans and American multiculturalism in comparative perspective. In Are Italians white? How race is made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, 44-59. New York and London: Routledge. Gargano, Pietro. 1997. Una vita, una leggenda: Enrico Caruso, il più grande tenore del mondo. Milan: Mondadori. — and Gianni Cesarini. 1990. Caruso: Vita e arte di un grande cantante.

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Milan: Longanesi. Gatti-Casazza, Giulio. 1941. Memories of the opera. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Goehr, Lydia. 2009. Aida and the empire of emotions (Theodore W. Adorno, Edward Said and Alexander Kluge). Current musicology 87:133-159. Gullino, Giuseppe. 1908. L’apertura del Metropolitan Opera House: Serata Trionfale. L’araldo italiano, November 18. —. 1910. Germania di Franchetti al Metropolitan. L’araldo italiano, January 25. Henderson, William. 1908. Topics of a musical week. New York Sun, January 26. Henson, Karen 2000. Exotisme et nationalités: Aida à l’Opéra de Paris. In L’opéra en France et en Italie (1791-1925): Une scène privilégiée d'échanges littéraires et musicaux, ed. Hervé Lacombe, 263-297. Paris: Société Française de Musicologie. Horowitz, Joseph. 1987. Understanding Toscanini: How he became an American culture-god and helped create a new audience for old music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Inzaghi, Luigi. 2005. Beniamino Gigli. Varese: Zecchini editore. Ione 1910. Germania, 22nd January (Matinee). Musical courier 4 (January 26):29. Jackson, Stanley. 1972. Caruso. New York: Stein and Day. Krehbiel, Henry. 1908. Music: The operatic revolution. New York Tribune, February 10. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 1961. L’immigrazione e l’assimilazione degli italiani negli Stati Uniti. Milan: Giuffré. Locke, Ralph. 2010. Aida and nine readings of empire. In Fashion and legacies of nineteenth-century Italian Opera, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Hilary Poriss, 152-175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manuali, Marcello. 1988. Ritratto di un operista italiano di fine secolo: Alberto Franchetti. Tesi di Laurea: University of Bologna. Marchesi, Gustavo. 2007. Toscanini. Milan: Bompiani. Moses, Montrose J. 1916. The life of Heinrich Conried. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. Pepi, Marialuisa. 2005/2006. Asrael: Suggestioni europee di un’opera italiana del tardo Ottocento. Arte, musica, spettacolo: Annali del Dipartimento di storia delle arti e dello spettacolo 6/7, 7-23. Robinson, Paul. 2002. Is Aida an orientalist opera? In Opera, sex, and other vital matters, 123-133. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Rossi, Luigi. 1910. Relazione sui servizi dell’emigrazione per l’anno 1909-1910 presentata al Ministro degli Affari esteri. Rome: Tipografia nazionale di G. Bertero. Ruffo, Titta. 1995. My parabola: The autobiography of Titta Ruffo. Dallas: Baskerville Publisher. Sachs, Harvey. 1995. Toscanini. Rocklin, CA: Prima Pub. Said, Edward. 1993. The empire at work: Verdi’s Aida. In Culture and imperialism, 111-131. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Scott, Michael. 1988. The great Caruso: A biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. St. John-Brenon, Algernon. 1910. Germania given its premiere: New Italian opera produced at Metropolitan with Caruso, Mme. Destinn and Amato. New York Morning Telegraph, January 23. Taubman, Howard. 1951. The maestro: The life of Arturo Toscanini. New York: Simon and Schuster. Torchi, Luigi. 1902. Germania: Dramma lirico in un prologo, due quadri e un epilogo di Luigi Illica. Musica di Alberto Franchetti. Rivista musicale italiana 9, 377-421. Toscanini, Arturo and Harvey Sachs. 2002. The letters of Arturo Toscanini. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Viscusi, Robert. 2006. Buried Caesars, and other secrets of Italian American writing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Weaver, William. 1975. Seven Verdi librettos. New York: Norton & Company.

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Appendix A Table 7-1. Italian immigration to the United States, 1861-1920. Period

Total Immigrants

1861-1870 1871-1880 1881-1890 1891-1900 1901-1910 1911-1920

2,314,824 2,812,191 5,246,613 3,687,564 8,795,386 5,735,811

Italian Immigrants 11,725 55,759 307,309 651,893 2,153,877 1,109,484

Percentage 0.5 2.0 5.9 17.7 24.5 19.3

Table 7-2. Italians living in New York City, 1860-1920. Year 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920

Total Population 813,669 942,292 1,206,999 1,515,301 3,437,202 4,766,833 5,620,048

Italian-born 1,464 2,794 12,223 39,951 145,433 340,765 390,832

Percentage 0.1 0.3 1.0 2.6 4.2 7.1 7.0

Source: Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the land of promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 54, 55, 58. Note: In 1898, New York City—which until that time was comprised of only Manhattan and part of the Bronx—incorporated its neighbouring counties to assume its current boundaries: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Thus, the pre- and post-1900 figures refer to different geographical boundaries in the city.

CHAPTER EIGHT MANUEL M. PONCE’S CANCIONES IN NEW YORK: MEXICAN MUSICAL IDENTITY AND THE MEXICO VOGUE CHRISTINA TAYLOR GIBSON

On March 27, 1916, seventeen days after Francisco “Pancho” Villa invaded Columbus, New Mexico,1 Manuel M. Ponce performed a New York solo piano recital featuring the composer’s most nationalist repertoire, including a selection of Mexican canciones. Initially, the recital was scheduled as the first in a series throughout the U.S.; Ponce hoped to help the Aeolian company sell recent recordings of his music, and to return home with a hefty profit, and a newly minted U.S. reputation (Miranda 1998). Similar performances had garnered praise in Havana, Cuba, and Ponce logically assumed that the U.S. reception would follow suit. Instead, he faced what contemporaries called a “fracaso” (failure).2 Mainstream critics, almost certainly caught up in the anti-Mexican fervor of the period, declared Ponce’s music “pointless and inconsequential” (Anon. 1916, 24) and Ponce’s hoped-for U.S. career crumbled in the recital’s wake. The composer cancelled plans for future performances and 1 Villa’s attack was in retaliation for the U.S. government’s involvement in the Mexican Revolution; most recently, U.S. diplomats sided with Venustiano Carranza’s bid for the presidency. Villa responded by increasing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The most famous incident was that in Columbus, New Mexico, when Villa crossed the border, killing ten civilians and eight soldiers. The U.S. then sent Major General John Pershing and 4,800 troops into Mexico on an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to find and kill Villa. The border skirmishes were documented and exaggerated in the U.S. media, particularly in the widely read daily city newspapers. 2 See the diary of Ponce’s friend, Frederico Gamboa, cited by Miranda (1998, 41).

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returned to Mexico, disillusioned. He never made another attempt to perform or promote his music in the U.S. Musicians and audiences were less easily dissuaded. Over the course of the ensuing decade, the anti-Mexicanist press of the 1910s ebbed, and by the late 1920s, cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were experiencing something scholars have called the “Mexico Vogue” (Delpar 1992). Led by U.S. elites, many of them left-leaning, the Vogue ushered in a period of fascination with Mexican national identity; it has been most closely identified with visual artists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, and with the marketing and sale of Mexican artesenía, but, as I will argue in this paper, it had much broader implications for U.S.Mexican relationships in cultural life. Although existing studies acknowledge that the spirit of exchange fostered during the Vogue can be found in the little magazine Mexican Folkways (1925-1937),3 which included folk music arrangements, and in the career of Carlos Chávez,4 who lived and worked in New York during 1924/25 and 1926-28, few explore the wider effect of the Vogue on musical life. Yet an examination of newspapers from the period reveals that the Vogue was broadly influential. Musicians, particularly those of Mexican descent, began to feature Mexican nationalist folk and art music in their performances, and were acclaimed by audiences and critics for doing so. The way art music life reflected the Vogue environment is perhaps best represented by the reception of Ponce’s canciones in New York; despite the composer’s continued distaste for U.S. musical life, his works began to be among the most-performed and the most popular expressions of Mexican musical identity in that city.

Mexican Nationalism and the canción The appearance of canción repertoire on Vogue-related recitals and concerts should not be surprising. During the most intense years of the Revolution (ca. 1910-1920), the canción became a staple of Mexican nationalist expression. As Ponce described it in his essays, “La canción mexicana” and “La forma de la canción mexicana” (Ponce 1917, 17-26, Ponce 1948, 49-61), the Mexican canción was a short work with a memorable melody and romantic lyrics set in a repetitive binary form. The entire principal melody is presented in the first half of the piece, which begins and ends in the same key. In the second half, there is a brief bridge, 3 4

E.g. Iñiguez (2001). E.g. Saavedra (2001); Stevenson (1981); Saavedra (2002); Saborit (2002).

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followed by the ritornello section of the melody. Then, typically, the first half of the composition is repeated. The subject matter of canción lyrics varies, but most speak of love and many include poetic references to Mexican landscapes. The form, lyrics, and melody of “Estrellita”, one of the handful of newly composed canciones that Ponce wrote (most of the canciones ascribed to him are arrangements of pre-existing melodies) are typical of the repertoire. A brief instrumental introduction presents a modulating and shortened version of the principal melody, followed by the A section in full in F major (see: Figure 8-1). Then there is a brief bridge, modulating to D minor, the repetition of the second half of the A melody, and a “del signo” return. “Estrellita” is, like so many other canciones, a love song; the protagonist sings his adoration to a star, an obvious substitute for a distant and desired lover.5 Most important, as Ponce himself would have noted, is the melody, notable for phrases beginning with conjunct seconds and progressing to leaps of a fifth and then a sixth in the upper register of the voice: The principle melody is stated in full after a six-bar introduction. The accompanying lyrics are: “Estrellita del lejano cielo, que miras mi dolor, que sabes mi sufrir, baja y dime si me quiere un poco porque yo no puedo sin su amor vivir”.6

Figure 8-1: Manuel M. Ponce, “Estrellita”.

As can be seen from the above description and examples, in most technical respects, the lyrics and musical form of the Mexican canción are similar to those found in many art songs and opera arias. Some lyrics, like those of “Estrellita”, are vague about place, but others, such as “A la orilla 5

The mythology surrounding “Estrellita” would have us believe that Ponce wrote the song as a tribute to his wife, Clema. There is, however, no dedication ascribed to recent editions; on the contrary there is a note, “’Estrellita’ NUNCA FUE DEDICADA A NADIE por su autor” (The author never dedicated “’Estrellita’ to anyone). 6 An English translation might read: “Little star of the heavens/ that sees my pain/ that knows my suffering/ descend and tell me if she loves me a little/ because without her love I cannot live”.

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de un palmar” and “China de mi alma”, refer to the Mexican landscape or people. Thus, even in a culturally diverse nation like revolutionary Mexico, most musicians and listeners could find examples within the canción literature that spoke to their own identity. Although canciones had initially been associated with “folk” or “popular” music, starting in 1912 and 1913 Ponce and other musicians began a campaign to make them part of the art music repertoire. In a widely distributed speech given in 1913 titled “La Música y la canción mexicana”, Ponce declared the canción “the soul of the people” and advocated for its use as the basis for a nationalist body of music. For models, Ponce pointed to the work of Glinka, Brahms, Chopin, Schubert, and Grieg (Ponce 1913).7

27 March 1916 Aeolian Hall Recital Works written and performed by Manuel M. Ponce Prelude and Fugue (theme by Handel) Sonata Tragic Prelude (Etude I) Gallant Prelude (Etude VIII) Morire Habemus (Etude IV) Love’s Romance Life Smiles (Etude XII) Plenilunio (Moonlight)

Spinner Song Mazurka XXIII Cuban Rhapsody I Mexican Songs (I, XVII, XIV) Mexican Ballade Mexican Barcarolle Mexican Rhapsody II

The recitals Ponce gave in Havana and New York offered exemplars of the type of elevated composition he had in mind. For example, the Balada Mexicana, which was featured in both performances, demonstrates the clarity and artistry with which Ponce often presented his canción-based melodies, even when transferred to a classical form. This sonata-form work uses two canción melodies as primary and secondary themes. As the examples below demonstrate, the melodies’ clarity is not lost in the settings.

7

Although it was the call for canción composition and performance that Mexican musicians heeded with the most enthusiasm, Saavedra and Miranda argue convincingly that it was really the development of these folk songs into large-form classical compositions for which Ponce wished to advocate.

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Figure 8-2: The principal melody to the canción “Me he de comer un durazno”. An arrangement can be found in Mexican Folkways 6, no. 1.

A similar approach may be found in the two Rapsodía Mexicana pieces and the Tema mexicano variado, both frequently performed in Ponce’s concerts during the decade. Piano arrangements of canciones, presented more plainly, were also staples in his concerts of the period.

Figure 8-3: Ponce opens his Balada Mexicana with the melody to “Me he de comer un durazno”. It is repeated in an octave lower and then developed through measure 95.

Furthermore, Ponce’s words inspired other composers such as Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Mario Talavera, Ignacio Rodriguez Esperón, popularly known as “Tata Nacho”, and others (Saavedra 2001, 22).8 It seemed every young Mexican composer wished to write the perfect canción or canción arrangement, even if interested in pursuing a classical career. For example, some of the earliest compositions by Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas were also canciones. As Leonora Saavedra describes:

8 Mauricio Magdaleno describes this environment in an article about Ponce for El Nacional; reprinted in Miranda (1998, 173-174).

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Chapter Eight Soon it became difficult to distinguish traditional songs from arrangements and newly composed songs, and for fifteen years after Ponce’s first compositions the singing, arranging, composing, and collecting of songs all were forms—in the minds of most people, in fact the only forms—of what passed as musical nationalism (Saavedra 2001, 23).

By 1916, when Ponce gave his ill-fated recital, most Mexicans with even a passing musical knowledge could hum “Marchita el alma”, “A la orilla de un palmar”, “Me he de comer un durazno”, or “Estrellita”; and any musical appeal to national feeling would naturally include a canción or two. Meanwhile, papers like the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune were running daily front-page stories about the terror Villa instilled, and the ongoing hunt to find him in Mexico. Thus, it is not surprising that it appears audiences and critics attending Ponce’s recital were divided along nationalist lines. The negative reaction from U.S. reviewers seems to have been as much about cultural alienation as it was about anything of musical value. One reviewer of New York Herald on March 28, 1916, thinly veiled this emotion under the guise of humor: “Manuel M. Ponce … has invaded New York and made his principal attack yesterday afternoon at a recital in Aeolian Hall”.

Canciones in New York No amount of negative press in New York was capable of quelling Mexican affection for their song literature. The reception of the 1916 Ponce recital effectively silenced the composer’s most esoteric arrangements of canciones—that is, those found in piano works like Balada Mexicana—but new compositions and arrangements for piano and voice remained part of folk, popular, and art music literature throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond. We know that this tradition was transnational, following Mexicans wherever they went, particularly in New York where there were vibrant music publishing and recording industries (Koegel 2006). Scholars studying the careers of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (ibid.), Carlos Curti (ibid.), “Tata Nacho”9 and María Grever (Lee 1994) found that all were composing and performing in New York before 1925. Many of the Mexican compositions composed, published, recorded, and performed in New York before 1925 were dances and songs in Latin forms—similar to works later associated with the “Vogue”. Further evidence of a pre-Vogue Mexican musical culture in New York City can be found in La Prensa, a Spanish language New York 9

See letters to and from Carlos Chávez in Carmona (1989).

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newspaper that reported on large social events hosted by Latin American, Spanish, or Mexican social organizations. The brief descriptions found in La Prensa indicate that some events included music performances by marching bands, dance bands, or classical recitalists. Frequently, music from the native countries of those in attendance was featured.10 Among the Mexican performers mentioned in the pages of La Prensa are the violinist Patricio Castillo (May 2, 1922), the singer Consuelo Escobar de Castro (March 31, 1923), the singer Trina Varela (February, 1923), the pianist and conductor Enrique Torreblanca (May, 2 1922), and the singer J. de Salgado (May 5, 1921). While composer biographies and La Prensa columns give some indication of the variety of musical performance in the Mexican expatriate community of New York during the 1910s, a comprehensive history is difficult to construct. For the most part, this aspect of musical life was not chronicled in mainstream publications such as the New York Times or the New York Herald; nor was it recorded in music specialist magazines such as Musical America or Musical Courier. Yet the evidence is substantial enough to indicate that the negative reception of Ponce’s music and similar hostility toward Mexican-ness in the U.S. press did not quell the popularity of the songs among the Mexican expatriate community in New York. Regardless of the continuity of the tradition, it is clear that canciones were among the first musical expressions of Mexican national identity associated with the Vogue to be performed in major New York recital halls and reviewed in mainstream city newspapers. According to programs printed in the Herald-Tribune and Times, Nina Koshetz sang Ponce’s “Serenade” in her Carnegie Hall appearance (New York Herald Tribune [NYHT] January 15, 1928), Juan Pulido performed “Ya sin tu amor”, (New York Times [NYT] November 18, 1928) Rosalie du Prene sang “Voy a partir” in her concerts (NYT February 8, 1931), and Richard Crooks performed “Marchita el alma” (NYT February 28, 1932). In addition to these non-Mexican singers, at least five Mexican singers of note performed in New York during the period between 1925 and 1932: Rosa Dominguez (Musical America April 21, 1928), Manuel Millet (La Prensa March 7, 1927), Fanny Anitúa, (NYT November 11, 1928) José Mojica (NYT April 17, 1932 and Musical America April 25 1932), and Clarita Sánchez. Dominquez gave a benefit costume recital that included Ponce’s “Estrellita” and Tata Nacho’s “Borrachita”. Millet performed 10

E.g. Una recepción y baile en el club ‘La Luz’. La Prensa, January 3, 1919, 5; “En una fiesta de caridad se pondrá en scena ‘Las Flores’ de los Quintero. La Prensa, May 2, 1922, 1; Baile de flores en el Waldorf-Astoria. La Prensa, May 4, 1922, 2.

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Mexican, Cuban, and South American songs in his first New York appearance. Anitúa, a native of Durango, included Ponce’s “A la orilla de un palmar” on a Carnegie Hall recital. Clarita Sánchez sang Ponce’s canciones in many of her concerts in New York, detailed below. José Mojica only gave one performance in New York, which did not include a canción by Ponce (La Prensa April 13, 1932). However, Mojica did include such works in his concerts in other U.S. cities.11 Moreover, the radio and the gramophone brought many closed studio recordings and distant concerts of Mexican music, including those by Mojica, into New York homes.12 Several canción performers emphasized the Mexican-ness of their concerts by dressing in Mexican or Spanish costumes, advertising the Mexican songs on their programs, or including Mexican and Latin American dancing in performances. Mojica drew attention to his exotic Mexican identity in several of his publicity photos. For example, in one photograph advertising his recitals, Mojica wore a lavish charro outfit, stared off-camera with heavily lined eyes, and held a cigarette in his right hand (Musical Digest, January 1929). Mojica’s stage name for his recitals was “Don José Mojica”, and accounts of the performances report that he routinely wore a traje costume for a concluding section of Mexican serenades. Mojica was one of the most well-known performers giving Mexicanist concerts; similar performances by others proliferated in the late 1920s. For example, David Daca gave a performance that was clearly “Mexicanist” in content: he performed a Pueblo Indian song, two unattributed Mexican folksong arrangements, “Noche Serena” and “El Cefiro”, Yradier’s “La Paloma”, and LaForge’s arrangement of “Estrellita” (NYT Dec. 6, 1925). Anitúa’s Carnegie Hall performance of “A la orilla de un palmar” occurred during a set that also included “Ya soy feliz” by Tata Nacho and “Canción Mixteca” by Avíles (NYT November 11, 1928). A few years earlier, in an interview with La Prensa, Anitúa expressed her continued devotion to Mexico and Mexican culture, despite her frequent travels 11

Mojica made recordings with Edison and Victor; while operatic repertoire predominates on his recordings, often they included Latin American folk songs. Of particular interest: Ponce, “Lejos de ti,” José Mojica, Edison 60049 (master no. 10383-A). 12 For example, see notices about Sueños Españoles, Angelita Loyo, and Los Aztecas in Seccion de Radio. La Prensa, February 8, 1930. Several New York radio broadcasts were announced in the Times: Today’s radio program. NYT, April 2, 1926; The Microphone Will Present. NYT, January 26, 1930; Today on the Radio. NYT January 31, 1930.

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outside the country (La Prensa November 16, 1926). Rosalie du Prene performed a song recital with Julian Huarte and his Argentine Orchestra that included Ponce’s “Estrellita” and “Voy a partir” amidst many Latin American songs and dances (NYT February 8, 1931).

Figure 8-4: Photograph of Mojica printed in Musical Digest, January 1929.

Performers of Mexican music had ardent followers in New York’s Latino community, as conveyed by the detailed reviews and articles found in La Prensa. The newspaper followed the activities of Clarita Sánchez (La Prensa November 4, 1926 and La Prensa, February 14, 1928.), Fanny Anitúa, (La Prensa November 3, 1926; November 5, 1926 and November 16, 1926) and José Mojica (La Prensa April 7, 1932 and April 13, 1932) with devotion. Recitals of singers performing Mexican music were often hosted and funded by organizations within the Latino community. These performers benefited from the proliferation of organizations such as the

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Sociedad Mutualista Mexicana, El Centro Hispano Americano, and El Centro de Amigos during the 1920s.13 Although the Latino community hosted, promoted, and applauded the concerts, support for Mexican musical performances in New York extended beyond it. In addition to Latino social organizations, wealthy New Yorkers without Latino roots were creating groups to promote Mexican culture. For example, the Roerich family, wealthy Russian émigrés, created similar opportunities for Mexican musicians through the foundation of the “Inter-American Group” of the Roerich Society, a concert series that frequently showcased Mexican singers (NYT April 24, 1932; NYHT April 24, 1932; NYT November 13, 1932). Performers featured in the columns of La Prensa also attracted attention from the mainstream press, receiving mention in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Musical America, and Musical Courier. The two case studies below offer windows into the way the Vogue influenced art music performances and their reception. The first focuses on Clarita Sánchez, a young Mexican singer performing a representation of her heritage in song, which garnered her acclaim in both the Spanishlanguage and mainstream New York press. The second study examines the recitals of Jasha Heifetz, the famed Russian-Jewish violin virtuoso, and his performances of the Ponce song “Estrellita”, arguably the most popular work in his 1927/28 concert tours. Both sets of performances represent an about-face from the reception Ponce received in 1916. Unlike Ponce, neither Sánchez or Heifetz struggled to overcome the historical proximity to the Villa invasion, but that difference alone does not account for the acclaim they received for recognizing and capturing the spirit of the Vogue in their performance.

Clarita Sánchez Among performances by Mexican singers in New York during the 1920s, the recitals given by Clarita Sánchez are particularly remarkable because of the frequent and overt references to her Mexican identity in the accompanying mainstream press reports. Unfortunately, there is very little in the press about Sánchez’s biography. According to a New York Herald Tribune article, the singer came to New York in the 1920s to study voice with the former Metropolitan coloratura Marcella Sembrich (NYHT November 17, 1925). The Mexican government funded her lessons, 13

See the “Sociedades Hispanas” page in La Prensa. It appears that the Depression had a particularly devastating affect on such social organizations; mention of such groups nearly disappears after 1929.

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ostensibly in hopes that she would advance a positive image of Mexican culture abroad (Musical America November 28, 1925). By 1923, she was advertised in La Prensa as the “brilliant Mexican soprano lauded in New York” (La Prensa Febraury 1923 [supplement, no day given]). From 1925 to 1932, Sánchez performed at least nine recitals in New York, most of them during the mid-1920s. Like other performers, Sánchez used Ponce’s music to present her national identity. Programs from some of her concerts, printed in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, give us a sense for her repertoire. Among the Ponce compositions and arrangements included on her programs are “A la orilla de un palmar”, “Marchita al alma”, “Las Mañanitas”, “Todo Paso”, “La Pajarera”, and “Estrellita”. Sánchez’s performance identity extended far beyond Ponce’s music and “lo mexicano” in its most restrictive sense; she performed works from throughout the Ibero-American world, accentuating contemporary Spanish music almost as much as Mexican music. Most of her recitals contained a significant section of songs from Spain and Latin America, including works by Falla and Albéniz. Press photos depicted Sánchez in a Spanish mantilla, emphasizing her Hispanic identity. Sánchez furthered her representations of the Latino world through the use of traditional dress in concert. Her costume recitals could be quite elaborate; in one recital, for example, she changed her apparel for each country represented in the program (NYT February 14, 1927). The cultivation of a Pan-Latino identity was not unusual in vocal recitals of Latin American artists during this period. Many other singers performing Ponce’s work at the time presented similar recitals. Ponce’s canciones usually formed part of a Spanish-language group including works from Spain and Latin America.14 Whereas Spanish music had been popular for many years in New York, during the late 1920s, mexicanidad was becoming fashionable as well and, like Sánchez, more performers embraced their Mexican nationality in public. Furthermore, Sánchez’s Hispanist presentation capitalized on stereotypes popularized through Hollywood films, which often presented Mexican “señoritas” dressed in

14 For example, Sophie Braslau’s Carnegie Hall performance of “Estrellita” occurred in a set including work by Falla and Obradors (Concert program, NYT, January 19, 1930, sec. x, p. 10). Lucrezia Bori performed “Estrellita” over the radio alongside Yradier’s “La Paloma,” and Valverde’s “Clavelitos” (The microphone will present, NYT, March 13, 1932, sec. x, p. 10).

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Spanish costumes, emphasizing Spanish influence in Mexico and displaying a female exoticism associated with women from other cultures.15 Nonetheless, Sánchez viewed her performance of Spanish-language songs as an expression of patriotism. When asked by an interviewer why she performed these works, Sánchez said: [those songs] carry in their notes memories of the mountains, of the prairies, and of the distant land where we were born, the songs that our mothers sang to us when we were children, and stay recorded in our hearts; the songs of Mexico, of my homeland.16

From the very first year, Sánchez presented herself to critics as a representative of the Mexican government. Several of her concerts advanced the Mexican cultural diplomacy. One of the Pan-American Union concerts, held in Washington, D.C., but broadcast in New York, featured Sánchez as a soloist (Musical Courier February 11, 1926). During a New York concert, the stage was draped with Mexican, Spanish, and U.S. flags to pay tribute to the Consul General of Mexico and the Consul General of Spain, both in attendance (NYT February 20, 1928). The headlines for reviews of her concerts often included the words “Mexico” or “Mexican”.17 Generally, responses from New York critics toward the Mexican music on Sánchez’s concerts were overwhelmingly positive. Although reviewers varied in their evaluation of the singer, nearly everyone agreed that the sets of Mexican and Spanish folksongs were laudable. She became so recognized for this aspect of her programs that one of the few 15

The depiction of this stereotype in film may originate with Rose of the Rancho (1914). See: Richard (1992, 131). The film was re-made in the 1930s and starred Gladys Swarthout wearing similar costumes. Other films creating a similar image include Buried Treasure (1921) and Girl of the Rio (1931). 16 “‘No, No,—dice—en musica mo hay geografía; me gustan todas las canciones, sean ellas españoles, inglesas o japoneseas: solamente que experimento un gran placer al cantar y dejar oír a mis compatriotas aquellas canciones que traen en sus notas recuerdos de las montañas, de las llanuras y de la tierra lejana donde hemos nacido, las canciones que nuestras madres nos cantaron cuando éramos niños y se quedan grabadas en el corazón; las canciones de Méjico, de mi patria’”. Clara Sánchez: La cantante mejicana, La Prensa, February 15, 1928. All translations by author unless otherwise noted. 17 E.g.: Clarita Sánchez, mexican soprano, gives recital, NYHT, November 17, 1925; mexican soprano in recital, NYHT, November 9, 1926; Clarita Sánchez sings: Mexican soprano displays a voice of beautiful quality at the Gallo, NYT, February 20, 1928.

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disapproving critics, writing for Musical America, referred to her as a “ward” of the Mexican government (Musical America November 13, 1926). Her performances of Ponce’s canciones were considered sufficiently marketable to motivate recordings of Sánchez singing “Estrellita” and “Marchita el Alma” (Laird 2001).

Jascha Heifetz and “Estrellita” Through the efforts of performers such as Sánchez, New York audiences learned more about Mexican culture and the canción tradition that was an integral part of it. Although Mexican folk music gradually became more familiar to New York audiences, only one canción became well-known to mainstream U.S. audiences: Ponce’s “Estrellita”. By 1930 the work was ubiquitous—it was on the radio, in the concert hall, and sold at the local sheet music store. Arrangements of nearly every imaginable variety existed from traditional versions for voice and piano (Ponce 1923, 1927a, 1928a) to those written for trios (Ponce 1927b, 1929a), organ, (Ponce 1928c) band (Ponce 1927c), orchestra (Ponce 1929b), and violin (Ponce 1928b). Moreover it seems “Estrellita” was appropriate for any performing venue—from a Carnegie Hall art music concert to the local radio variety show. As a popular song in its own right, “Estrellita”, unlike other Ponce canciones, was occasionally performed in contexts that offered no reference to national identity. Yet “Estrellita” retained its identification as a Mexican contribution to popular music literature. It appeared as the token Mexican piece on many concerts featuring Latin American, folk, or world music.18 In most concerts “Estrellita” was grouped with other Mexican or Latin American songs, performed in costume, or identified in the program notes as “Mexican”. Covers to “Estrellita” scores often declared it a Mexican serenade, melody, or song, solidifying the connection for those playing it at home (Ponce 1923, 1927a, 1928c). Perhaps the clearest and most interesting uses of “Estrellita” as a vehicle for Vogue-inspired performance were Jascha Heifetz’s concerts of the late 1920s. Heifetz became a U.S. citizen in 1925 after training in his native Russia and establishing a career in Europe. His career is most famous for his near-obsessive attention to technique, as evidenced in his 18 See David Daca listing current programs in detail, NYT, December 6, 1925, sec. x, p.11; Fanny Anitúa listing programs of the week, NYT, November 11, 1928, sec. x, p. 10; Rosalie DuPrene listing programs of the week, NYT, February 8, 1931, sec. x, p. 10; and Lucrezia Bori listing the microphone will present, NYT, March 13, 1932, sec. x, p. 16.

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extraordinary recording portfolio.19 Scholars have paid less attention to Heifetz as an early ambassador for world music and culture; but his tours in the 1920s and their accompanying publicity demonstrate a remarkable openness to and interest in cultural heritage. Heifetz’s performances in Mexico are an excellent example. He first performed his now-famous rendition of “Estrellita” during the last Mexico City concert of his 1927 world tour (December 11, 1927). Some of his most lauded concerts of the world tour occurred in Mexico, where reporters followed his every move, and audiences flooded halls in order to hear him play.20 For the concert in question, Heifetz was requested to play something Mexican in origin. From a book of Mexican folk songs, he chose “Estrellita”, and arranged the simple vocal score into a vehicle to display his virtuosity. The resulting composition was the first of Heifetz’s arrangements for the violin; over subsequent years, he would make many such arrangements. The delicate tribute to Mexican culture, attributed to Ponce in the program, was greeted with wild applause. In response to audience requests, Heifetz repeated the work. Heifetz was known for having a reserved and distant relationship with his fans, but he seemed unusually warm toward his Mexican audiences. In scrapbooks documenting the world tour, Heifetz collected many clippings from Mexican newspapers. For example, in one of the oversize scrapbooks, over twenty pages are dedicated to the Mexico visit, more than any other country visit recorded in the same book.21 An amateur photographer, Heifetz took pictures throughout this tour. Photographs from Mexico, some of them reprinted in music periodicals and newspapers, show Heifetz near famous landmarks (Musical Courier December 22, 1927). In a publicity photo from the same era, Heifetz wore a traditional Mexican traje while playing the violin.22 Heifetz’s emotional connection with Mexican audiences and music was publicized in the U.S. press upon his return. Many profile articles described Mexican audiences throwing hats, jewelry, and flowers on stage in appreciation for the performances.23 In an account of his activities, a reporter for Musical Courier wrote: 19

Mark Katz (2010) points to Heifetz as a prototypical figure in the world of recorded sound. 20 See Appendix B for a list of articles written about Heifetz in Mexico City. 21 Boxes 248, 253, and 254, Heifetz Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The oversize scrapbook referenced here is in Box 248. 22 Boxes 248, 253, and 254, Heifetz Collection, LC. 23 Throwing hats at Heifetz, NYT, December 25, 1927; Jascha Heifetz in recital here after two years absence, New York Review, December 31, 1927; Heifetz,

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But of all gay and exciting and stimulating audiences, the Mexicans are the best. Down there a concert is a riot . . . And when they applaud they do it with all their might and work themselves into a perfect frenzy, which, however quick to start is just as quick to end when the player appears on stage for an encore or another number of the program. (Musical Courier January 5, 1928).

A few weeks after returning to New York, Heifetz began to tour in the U.S., making “Estrellita” a standard work on his programs.24 U.S. audiences and critics, already familiar with the tune, embraced Heifetz’s rendition.25 In 1928, Carl Fischer published Heifetz’s arrangement of “Estrellita”, and in the summer of 1929 a recording of the violinist playing the song became available.26 The images of Mexico and Mexican culture propagated through Heifetz’s publicity and U.S. tours contrast sharply with those found in the periodical literature a decade earlier. For example, although the Musical Courier article quoted above refers to the Heifetz recital as a “riot”, the audience members described in the Musical Courier account were also cultured—they immediately became quiet in deference to a performer of the classical violin. Heifetz’s Mexico was warmhearted and culturally aware, with audiences engaged in the celebration of high art. The heft of Heifetz’s Mexico scrapbook indicates a personal affection for the culture. More importantly, the reception of his performances of “Estrellita” signals a wider cultural shift within the U.S.—one that welcomed positive images of Mexican culture.

Beyond the canción Performances of Ponce canciones in New York hardly represent the totality of the Mexican musical Vogue. In addition to the recitals listed in this article, there were orquesta típica concerts (NYT, March 13, 1928), Jascha. 1928. Around the world with a fiddle. The World Magazine, March 25, 1928, 5; Heifetz returns after two years circling world. New York Tribune [n.d.]. Box 264, Heifetz Collection, LC. 24 For a list of Heifetz performances in which “Estrellita” was listed on the program, see Appendix B. 25 Heifetz stirs audience, NYT, January 30, 1928; New York Concerts, Musical Courier February 2, 1928, 32; Heifetz gets tremendous ovation in violin recital at Mizpah, Syracuse Herald, January 5, 1929; Heifetz gives fine concert, Times Herald (Dallas), April 5, 1929. Box 264, Heifetz Collection, LC. 26 Ponce (1928b); Concert music records, New Yorker, August 25, 1929, Box 264, Heifetz Collection, LC.

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Mexican-themed musical reviews,27 and recitals of all lengths and genres. I can document a handful of private salon performances within the Latino and new music communities (Gibson 2008), surely even many more such events remain undocumented. These private concerts led to public performances for small select audiences, and, a few years later, to symphony-orchestra concerts given by such prominent ensembles as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra.28 Yet, partly because of Ponce’s reception history in New York, and partly because the canción is so intimately tied to Mexican nationalist identity, this repertoire provides a particularly apt starting point for a more complete history of the musical Mexico Vogue. The spirit of Sánchez’s and Heifetz’s recitals, and the critical reception they are accorded marks a drastic change from what one sees over the previous fifteen years. That is, despite their differing ethnic identities, performance styles, and audiences, both artists embraced Mexican cultural symbols, and used them to cultivate an audience inclusive of, but far greater than Mexican expatriates. The spirit of collective cultural appreciation and exchange characterizes the best attributes of the Vogue, and recommends the period and its performance life as one deserving of greater attention and study.

Reference list Anon. 1916. Mexican pianist plays own compositions. Musical America, April 1, 24. Carmona, Gloria, ed. 1989. Epistolario selecto. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Delpar, Helen. 1992. The enormous vogue of things Mexican: Cultural relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

27

Tata Nacho and Miguel Covarrubias collaborated on a “Rancho Mexicano” scene for the Broadway review, The garrick gaities, reviewed in José Juan Tablada, Nueva York de día y de noche, El Universal, May 31, 1925, sec. 1, p. 3. Madison Square Garden hosted a benefit pageant called “Aztec Gold” in 1929, see Delpar, vii. 28 Many of the relevant newspaper clippings were reprinted in Weinstock (1950). Of particular interest is the performance of Ponce’s Chapultepec by the Philadelphia Orchestra: Olin Downes, “Stokowski Gives American Works”, NYT, Nov. 21, 1934.

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Iñiguez, Francisco Javier. 2001. Discursos imaginarios, cultura popular y formación del Estado en ‘Mexican Folkways’. PhD diss., University of California, Irvine. Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing sound: How technology has changed music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Koegel, John. 1920. Compositores Mexicanos y Cubanos en Nueva York, c. 1880–1920. Historia Mexicana 56, no. 2 (Oct.-Dec. 2006):533-602. Laird, Ross ed. 2001. Other non-U.S. recordings and indexes, vol. 4 of Brunswick records: A discography of recordings, 1916-1931. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Lee, María Luísa Rodríguez. 1994. María Grever: poeta y compositora. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica. Miranda, Ricardo. 1998. Manuel M. Ponce: Ensayo sobre su vida y obra. Mexico: Ríos y Raíces. Ponce, Manuel M. 1913. La música y la canción mexicana. Revista de Revistas, December 21, 1913, 17. Reprinted in Diaz Cervantes and Diaz, Genio de Mexico, 175-183. —. 1917. La canción Mexicana. In Cultura 4 (4):17-26. —. 1923. “Estrellita” arranged by Frank La Forge. New York: G. Ricordi and Co. —. 1927a. “Estrellita” arranged by N. Clifford Page. New York: C. Fischer. —. 1927b. “Estrellita” arranged by Edward G. Simon for two violins and piano. New York: C. Fischer. —. 1927c. “Estrellita” arranged by Charles J. Roberts for piano and orchestra. New York: C. Fischer. —. 1928a “Estrellita” arranged by Charles Fonteyn Manney. In Mexican and Spanish songs, 37-39. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company. —. 1928b. “Estrellita” arranged by Jascha Heifetz. New York: C. Fischer. —. 1928c “Estrellita” arranged by Gordon Bach Nevin. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company. —. 1929a. “Estrellita” arranged for violin, cello, and piano. Philadelphia: Theodore Presser Co. —. 1929b. “Estrellita” arranged by Mayhew Lake for modern band. New York: C. Fischer. —. 1948. La Forma de la canción Mexicana. In Nuevos Escritos Musicales, 49-61. Mexico: Editorial Stylo. Richard, Alfred Charles Jr. 1992. The hispanic image on the silver screen. New York: Greenwood Press. Saborit, Antonio. 2002. Mexican Gaities: Chávez en la Babilonia de hierro. In Diálogo de resplandores,139-148.

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Saavedra, Leonora. 2001. Of selves and others: Historiography, ideology, and the politics of modern Mexican music. Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh. —. 2002. Carlos Chávez y la construcción de una alteridad estratégica. In Diálogo de resplendores: Carlos Chávez y Silvestre Revueltas, ed. Yael Bitrán and Ricardo Miranda, 125-136. México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Stevenson, Robert M. 1981. Carlos Chávez’s United States Press Coverage. Inter-American music review 3, no. 2 (SpringSummer):125-131. Taylor Gibson, Christina. 2008. The music of Manuel M. Ponce, Julián Carrillo and Carlos Chávez in New York, 1925-1932. Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland. Weinstock, Herbert, ed. 1950. Carlos Chávez: North American press, 1936-1950. New York: Herbert Barrett.

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Appendix A Selected Reviews of Clarita Sánchez’s Recitals in New York.

April 19, 1925, Carnegie Hall, NYC [not a solo concert] New York concerts. Musical Courier, April 23, 1925, 33. May 23, 1925, International House, NYC Clara Elena Sánchez heard in concert at International House. Musical America, May 30, 1925. Sociedades Hispanas. La Prensa, May 25, 1925. November 16, 1925 Aeolian Hall, NYC Clara Sánchez, Mexican soprano, gives recital. New York Herald Tribune, November 17, 1925. Young Mexican soprano in successful debut. New York Sun, November 17, 1925. January 16, 1926, Pan-American Union, Washington, D.C. [not a solo concert] Washington, D.C. Musical Courier, February 11, 1926, 51. March 24, 1926, Aeolian Hall, NYC New York concerts. Musical Courier, April 1, 1926, 17. News of concerts and recitals. Musical America, April 5, 1926, 22. November 2, 1926, Aeolian Hall, NYC Brock, Helen Ten. De música. La Prensa, November 4, 1926. New York concerts. Musical Courier, November 11, 1926, 18. February 19, 1928, Gallo Theatre, NYC Brock, Helen Ten. De música. La Prensa, February 20, 1928. Clarita Sánchez sings at Gallo Theater. New York Sun, February 20, 1928. Reports of New York concerts. Musical Courier, February 23, 1928, 25. New York concerts and opera: Spanish night by Sánchez. Musical America, March 3, 1928, 31.

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January 20, 1932, Waldorf-Astoria, NYC [not a solo concert] Mid season brings many concerts to New York: Escudero in Waldorf Musicale. Musical America, February 10, 1932. April 30, 1932, Roerich Hall, NYC Music week. Musical Courier, May 7, 1932, 24. Clarita Sánchez aclamada en su recital. La Prensa, May 2, 1932.

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Appendix B Jascha Heifetz: Performances in Mexico, selected reviews and performances of “Estrellita” in New York Performances in Mexico: November 24, 1927, 8:45 p.m., Teatro Arbeu, Mexico City November 27, 1927, 11 a.m., Teatro Arbeu, Mexico City November 30, 1927, 8:45 p.m., Teatro Arbeu, Mexico City December 2, 1927, 8:45 p.m., Teatro Arbeu, Mexico City December 4, 1927, 11 a.m., Teatro Arbeu, Mexico City December 6, 1927, 9 p.m., Teatro Degollado, Guadalajara December 9, 1927, 8:45 p.m., Esperanza Iris, Mexico City December 11, 1927, 11 a.m., Esperanza Iris, Mexico City [1st performance of “Estrellita”] December 13, 1927, 8 p.m. Teatro Independencia, Monterrey Selected Reviews of concerts in Mexico City (and related articles): Barajas, Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Universal, Nov. 25, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Universal, Nov. 28, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Universal, Dec. 2, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Universal, Dec. 3, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Universal, Dec. 5, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. Jascha Heifetz habla a “El Universal”. El Universal, Nov. 25, 1927. Barajas, Manuel. El mago del violin, Jascha Heifetz, llegó a la Capital. El Universal, Mexico City, Nov. 24, 1927. Barros Sierra, José. Nuestras entrevistas con Heifetz, el mago del violin. El Universal Ilustrado, Dec. 1, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Nov. 28, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Dec. 2, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Dec. 3, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Dec. 5, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Dec. 10, 1927. Casares Mz. De A., Manuel. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Dec. 12, 1927. De Caprian, Alfonso. Excelsior entrevista a Heifetz, el notable violinista ruso que está proximo a llegar a Mexico. El Excelsior, Nov. 4, 1927. Domínguez Portas, A. Crónicas musicales. El Excelsior, Nov. 26, 1927.

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Gonzales Peña, Carlos. Oyendo a Heifetz. El Universal, Dec. 4, 1927. Jascha Heifetz, trotamundos y continuador de Paganini. Revista de Revistas, Nov. 20, 1927. La proxima visita a México de Jascha Heifetz. El Excelsior, Nov. 10, 1927. Najar, Mario. Jascha Heifetz, el violinista maravilloso. Revista de Revistas, Dec. 7, 1927. Ortiz de Montellano, Bernardo. La cultura musical en Mexico. El Universal, [n.d.] Pingüino. Comentos de buen humor. El Excelsior, Dec. 8, 1927. Rosales, Hernan. J.Heifetz posee un violin construido en 1742, que vale más de $100,000. El Universal, Dec. 6, 1927. Ruíz, R. Saucedo. Tópicos musicales. Arte, Dec. 1, 1927. Sordine. Jascha Heifetz, el mago. Rotográfico, Nov. 30, 1927. Vendrá a México el más notable joven violinista del mundo—Jascha Heifetz. El Universal [n.d.] Nov. 1927. Selected U.S. Programs Including “Estrellita”: January 27, 1928, 8:15 p.m., Milwaukee, WI January 29, 1928, 3 p.m., Carnegie Hall, New York City [repeated] February 5, 1928, 8:30 p.m., Stanley Music Club, Philadelphia, PA February 7, 1928, Mrs. Wilson-Greene’s Concerts, Washington, D.C. February 11, 1928, Thursday Morning Music Club, Roanoke, VA March 18, 1928, 3:30 p.m., Symphony Hall, Boston, MA [on program and repeated as encore] March 28, 1928, 8:15 p.m. New London, CT April 20, 1928, Irem Temple, Willkes-Barre, PA January 4, 1929, 8:15 p.m., Mizpah Auditorium, Syracuse, NY January 9, 1929, 8:30 p.m., New Music Hall, Cleveland, OH January 18, 1929, Fulton Opera House, Lancaster, PA January 22, 1929, Tuesday Musical Club, Akron, OH January 26, 1929, 2:30 p.m., Carnegie Hall, New York City [encore] February 27, 1929, Hotel Statler Ballroom, Boston Morning Musicales April 18, 1929, 8:15 p.m., Chromatic Concerts Music Hall, Troy, NY March 6, 1929, Lyric Theatre, Knoxville, TN April 4, 1929, Fair Park Auditorium, Dallas, TX April 14, 1929, 2:45 p.m., Curram Theatre, S.F., CA

CHAPTER NINE LONGING FOR BELONGING IN FORCED MIGRATION: MUSICAL RECOLLECTIONS OF GERMANS FROM THE BOHEMIAN LANDS1 ULRIKE PRÄGER

The atmosphere is cheerful at the Sudetendeutschen Volkstanzfest (Sudeten-German folk dance celebration), where people of all ages sing and dance to live music in a large exhibition hall. The majority of the individuals are elderly, between 70 and 90 years old. They are also joined by some of their children and grandchildren, with whom they sing and dance. At first sight one might not be able to discern this event from a traditional Bavarian folk festival. The scene takes place, however, at the official 62nd Sudeten-German meeting in 2011 in Augsburg (Bavaria, Germany). The meeting is aimed at Germans born in the border regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia (these border regions are also termed Sudeten Germany and their inhabitants Sudeten Germans), who were expelled or fled from those regions in the aftermath of World War II and now live in Germany.2 During the Volkstanzfest, I speak to 81-year1

Parts of this paper have been published in Ethnomusicology Review, vol. 16, November 2011. 2 The Sudeten-German meeting is an annual two-day event, which attracted about 20,000 visitors in 2011 (figure quoted by the organizers). It is organized by the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (SL), which was founded in 1950 and officially represents the expelled Sudeten Germans. The SL is frequently criticized by both non-Sudeten Germans and Sudeten Germans for representing conservative political tendencies (for example, as expressed in speeches by politicians at the SudetenGerman meeting) and fostering outdated and partly invented folk traditions. Therefore, many Sudeten Germans distance themselves from the SL. “Although the meeting emphasizes the will for dialogue between Czechs and Germans, critics frequently interpret the meeting as provocation” (Augsburg Wiki, 2006, para. 4).

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old Christine Rösch. She wears traditional clothing from her hometown Neutitschein in the Kuhländchen, a region in the east of today’s Czech Republic, which she was forced to leave in 1946. She comes every year to the meeting in order to reconnect with other Sudeten Germans, celebrate her past, and remember her Heimat through the practice of music and dance.3 Earlier in the day she attended the Sudeten-German Schatzkästlein, a concert where classical music from Sudeten-German composers was performed, and participated in a folk-singing event.

Figure 9-1: Christine Rösch at the Sudeten-German meeting, June 11, 2011.

Music and dance not only allow the elderly individuals in the Bavarian exhibition hall to revisit their pasts and their old or “lost” Heimat, but also give the young a chance to experience the history of their ancestors. While the elderly were born in the border regions of the Bohemian lands, the The first Sudeten-German meeting in 1950 was named “Return our homeland” and saw about 300,000 visitors. The meeting in 2006 was labeled “Expulsion is Genocide—The Right to Freedom Secures the Future”. In contrast, the title of the 2011 meeting was more conciliatory: “Dialogue and Truth—Create the Future”. However, it implied that one still searches for “truth” in the discussion of delinquency in the context of Czech-German history. The 2012 meeting was named “Preserve Origins—Secure the Future”. Although the Sudeten-German meeting carries these contested connotations, it is an opportunity for Sudeten Germans to reunite, remember and recreate their past, and at the same time distinguish themselves from the host society. 3 By Heimat, I refer to the place of one’s origin as expressed through the notion of belonging.

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middle-aged and younger individuals are the second and third generations, respectively, of expelled Sudeten Germans. These past two years, I visited more than 80 Sudeten Germans to investigate how they used music and how this impacted their lives. The participants in this study vividly described their musical practices before the expulsion, the social upheaval and personal challenges of the expulsion, and music’s relevance for social and political integration in their new environment. The music and dance event described in the beginning of this essay is a musical answer to my investigation. The musical practices of the elderly represent the music and dance remembered from their Heimat. The memories stem from events dating back over 65 years and are an expression of their pasts as lived in the present. Expressed in recent musical practices, these memories offer valuable insights into the ways musical recollection generates and shapes social realities. Furthermore, those recollections are essential to the creation of social meaning because representations of the past constitute social groups (Alonso 1988) and reconstruct the individual and collective belonging of the groups’ members. For those born after the expulsion, these same musical practices help them internalize a heritage lived by their elders, which can only be imagined by subsequent generations.

Musical Recollections My interviewees Liesl and Gustl Gromes (and many more Sudeten Germans met during my fieldwork) named the folksong “Blüh nur, blüh mein Sommerkorn”, when I asked for an example of music that they associated with their homeland. This song is one of the many that travelled with the Sudeten Germans, who had to vacate their homes within a few hours and left almost everything behind, to their new environment. The folksong, which originates from the Schönhengstgau in the former Sudetenland, today’s Czech Republic, laments a lost love and the struggle of finding a new one. In the last 60 years, Sudeten Germans repeatedly transferred this sentiment to the loss of their homeland; the folksong was transformed into an “anthem of longing and belonging”.4 The performance of the song during the conversation with Liesl and Gustl spurred further recollections of Sudeten-German history and cultural practices. This supports what 4

The phrase coined by Paul Anderson in his keynote address at the conference Music and imagined communities. Articulations of the self and other, European University Institute, Florence, 28th-29th October, 2011.

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Shelemay (1998) suggests; musical performance conveys and mediates memory.

Figure 9-2: Folksong “Blüh nur, blüh mein Sommerkorn”. Walther Sturm, ed. 1973. Blüh nur, blüh mein Sommerkorn. Aus der klingenden Saat von Walther Hensel. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 25.

In our conversations, the participants negotiated between individual and collective memories. The concept of collective memory, coined by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in 1920, refers to the shared information held in the memories of a group’s individuals. At the same time, groups collectively influence the identity construction and memory of its individual members, because they are produced in social situations (Assmann 2006). Frequently, memories of the times and events in question were not present in my study participants’ immediate consciousness and needed to be reawakened and shaped through conversation. Remembering is therefore an active and controlled process, in which people only remember what they are willing to remember. My participants’ recollections were further shaped by their political, social,

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and psychological needs and emotional condition at the time of the interview. Other factors that have formed the memories of my interviewees over the last 65 years are for example: their receptiveness to collective Sudeten-German memories, age at the time of expulsion, education, individual frame of mind based on the quality of life in the new environment, and the intensity of exchange and conversation that occurred with parents or other in-group members later in life. I see music as a thread that spurs remembrance while leading the interviewee through the story of her or his life. Memory and written history are thereby interwoven, though not always congruent because of the inevitable tension produced between subjective experience and historiography (Assmann 1999). This chapter presents examples of such musical stories and recollections to demonstrate how expelled and dispersed Sudeten Germans bond in symbolic communities, which become a social reality through musical practices. In order to understand these stories, it is necessary to provide some background on Sudeten-German history and the SudetenGermans’ complex relation to the Czech population.

Coexistence and Competition Germans had settled in the barren border regions of the Bohemian lands as early as the twelfth century and quickly built an alliance with Czechs, in which both populations used each other to consolidate their power in Europe. However, a German cultural power soon became prevalent, which created tension between both populations. German culture in the Bohemian lands—which was closely related to imperial Vienna during the Austro-Hungarian Empire—nurtured sophisticated musical practices through coexistence and competition with the Czech population. Bruno Nettl asserts that “at times the Czechs succumbed, as many of them took German as their first language and became culturally German. But mostly they fought back, striving to maintain their Czech ethnicity, and they did this by promulgating their music and also becoming excellent musicians” (2002, 270). By 1945, more than three million Sudeten Germans lived in Prague and in the border regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia, which constituted about 23 percent of Czechoslovakia’s inhabitants (Koch 1998). A distinct Sudeten-German consciousness only developed in the late nineteenth century, when the term “Sudeten German” was established. The term Sudeten German superseded the former politically charged names Deutschböhmen (German-Bohemians) or Deutschmähren (German-

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Moravians). The latter terms implied German superiority and their use was penalized by the Czech Ministry of the Interior after 1918 (Hader and Fuchs, 1998). German institutions were required to add the prefix “Sudeten” to their names, in order to be clearly distinguishable from any institution of Czech origin. The term is further associated with the assumed pro-national socialist attitudes of Germans living in the Sudetenland when this region was annexed to Germany in 1938. Stemming from these problematic times, the term “Sudeten German” is politically and emotionally charged and contested in its contemporary usage.

Figure 9-3: Sudeten Germans (areas marked) living in Czechoslovakia in 1930. Source: Pietsch and Pleticha (2004). This map is an attempt to indicate the Czech/German language borders in Czechoslovakia, but is contested because scholars doubt that the borders were that distinct.

This emerging consciousness in the early twentieth however, not reflected in a distinct Sudeten-German music The music of Sudeten Germans was instead a hybrid of German musical styles frequently combined with Czech

century was, (Koch 1997). Austrian and and German

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folkloric characteristics (Koch 1997).5 Even though Sudeten-German music is not clearly distinct from German music, Sudeten Germans did use music and a certain performance style to distinguish their own identity. When asked about these times and music’s role in it, my participants frequently described the musical practices in their homeland as vital and sophisticated. Even small towns maintained an orchestra, music theatre, and folk music ensembles. Family music-making was usually a formative experience. On long winter nights, when their duties as farmers were not required, the families all met for spinning and other craftwork in one home (to keep the heating costs low) and entertained themselves with music and dance. For example, study participant Gustl Gromes can still sing hundreds of folk songs by heart: “We grew as human beings and we grew together through the music and the texts of the songs”. His sense of identity and home is also expressed more formally by musicologist Hugo Kinzel in the first issue of the Musikblätter der Sudetendeutschen in 1936: “This magazine aspires to have its own, unique character, which is based on a specific Sudeten-German manner and is founded in the Sudeten Germans’ cultural-political situation and historical destinies” (Kinzel 1936, 1, translation mine). Although this perception of a Sudeten-German identity can be seen as typical for its time, it has since substantially changed. Musicologist Rudolf Quoika (1956, 9) argues that a distinct Sudeten-German music and music history is not apparent, for the SudetenGerman “tribe” simply did and does not exist. This notion is today still the subject of heated discussion in circles concerned with Sudeten-German history and culture. Quoika’s assertion is based on the fact that throughout Czech-German history individuals and entire families frequently moved between Czech and German orientations in order to adjust to political developments. Should the Sudeten Germans then be considered a distinct ethnic group? And if so, are they only distinct because of their expulsion? Further difficulties for determining a distinct Sudeten-German history and musical practice lie in the geographical characteristics of the Sudetenland. It is composed of various localities in the Czech border region, separated by mountains. Each Sudeten-German region developed its distinct dialect, ways of life and musical styles. Sudeten Germans have never been a unified “face-to-face community” (Anderson 1983). Their experience parallels what Shelemay (2011) calls a community built through processes of descent, dissent, and, most importantly, of affinity. Sudeten Germans were and are still today connected mainly through shared imaginations and experiences of belonging, exclusion, and longing. .

5

This is due to the close relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Bohemia in the nineteenth century.

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Subsequent to the Munich Agreement in September 1938, the Sudetenland was annexed by Germany, which dissolved the SudetenGerman diaspora and integrated Sudeten Germany into the greater German Reich. After Germany lost the Second World War, the Sudetenland was returned to Czechoslovakia and the expulsion of three million Sudeten Germans began. Families, friends, and neighbours were separated, dispossessed, and expelled, usually to Germany or Austria, where they were assigned to live with local families. The expulsion ended the longstanding, complex, and hybrid relationship between the Germans and the culture of the Slavic-speaking Czechs, along with the large and ancient community of Bohemian Jews, and more distantly the Roma or Gypsies (Nettl 2002).

Common Destiny and Musical Practices The notion of Schicksalsgemeinschaft (community of fate) came to denote the crucial aspect of Sudeten-German identity in the aftermath of the expulsion (Koch 1997). This “new” Sudeten-German bond was frequently reflected in musical practices. After the Allies lifted the assembly ban for expellees in the late 1940s, Sudeten Germans immediately founded choirs and instrumental ensembles. My study participants remember that these musical gatherings revitalized memories of the homeland and reconstructed a personal and collective identity through music while developing a feeling of belonging. Commonly known dances, folk tunes, and art music of Sudeten-German composers, paired with their particular performance style, operated as an essential vehicle for social and cultural expression in the new environment. One such ensemble was founded by Karl Kugler in Geretsried, Bavaria. Geretsried is a town in the south of Munich, which has about 24,000 inhabitants today, the majority of whom are of Sudeten-German descent. After the expulsion, thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland (mainly from Tachau and Graslitz) and other Eastern European countries were housed in empty bunkers and buildings left intact after World War II. Usually, these refugees owned neither music nor instruments. They would build, therefore, provisional instruments from whatever materials were available and notated music from memory. Karl Kugler notated this example.

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Figure 9-4: Music notated from memory by Karl Kugler Sen. for the first rehearsals of expelled Sudeten Germans in Geretsried. Private archive of Karl Kugler Jr.

Karl Kugler’s son, Karl Jr., born in 1926, describes the significance of these early musical activities for Sudeten Germans and their host society in Geretsried: Music gave us confidence. This was essential. We are someone. We are really someone. We are not the “nobodies” that people think we are. We are aware of ourselves. This is essential. (Karl Kugler, interview by the author, July 8, 2011)

Such musicial initiatives laid a foundation for social and political influence on behalf of the Sudeten Germans in Germany. In 1950, the refugees organized themselves and founded the community of Geretsried. The Adalbert-Stifter-Gruppe, founded by Gustl Gromes and his siblings, was another influential musical group. The ensemble went on socalled emergency missions to sites where displaced Sudeten Germans struggled under poor conditions such as economic hardship, social prejudice, and emotional stress caused by the loss of family members, friends, and geographic and material dispossession. The groups brought music and dance that eased the burden of expulsion and sparked memories of “the homeland”.

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Figure 9-5: Performance of the “Geschwister Gromes” in 1949 (later called Adalbert-Stifter-Gruppe), private photo collection of Liesl and Gustl Gromes.

Figure 9-6: Performance of the Adalbert-Stifter-Gruppe in 1956. Gustl Gromes plays the violin on the left. Private photo collection of Liesl and Gustl Gromes.

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According to my interviewees, establishing such groups and performing publicly also problematized Sudeten-German integration. Music for the Sudeten Germans took on both an integrating character for members of a group and an excluding character for non-members. Nettl (2005) asserts that music plays a role in negotiating relationships between unequals, as a way for a dominant group to reinforce its hegemony, or a means for a subordinate population to resist and retaliate at some level. In terms of migration studies, Germans from the Bohemian lands were atypical, because they were not “strangers in strange lands” (Safran 1991, 86). Unlike most displaced populations, they made fewer cultural and linguistic sacrifices. Their language (German) was spoken in the new place and they continued to practice Catholicism as their religion (Safran 1991, 87-8). Despite these broad commonalities, my interviewees revealed that Sudeten-German integration—especially in the beginning—was often difficult. For example, Sudeten Germans spoke different dialects from the ones customary in Germany. The expulsion, however, did eventually initiate cross-cultural dialogues between the host and the migrant population, which eventually merged their musical practices. This is explained by Justine Schüssel:

Figure 9-7: Justine Schüssel (born in 1922). Photo by Ulrike Präger, 19th July 2010. Music making and the opportunity to get over our homesickness was the first motivation to establish those meetings. We were mainly Sudeten Germans and later we mixed with the local people. We had the opportunity to introduce them to our music and our ways of music making, and we

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The Assimilated Diaspora Today, Sudeten Germans meet at various official and unofficial occasions. For example, a number of Sudeten Germans meet once a year for a week in the Bavarian Woods, just across the border of their old hometowns (which they also visit during their stay). They are followers of the Wandervogelbewegung (lit.: migratory bird movement), an antibourgeois youth movement founded in late nineteenth-century Berlin. The members of the movement originally consisted mainly of German middleclass adolescents who resisted the restrictions of society, while aiming to return to nature, music, and freedom. The members spread all over Germany and organized themselves in autonomous groups. The movement, which reached far into the Bohemian lands, was forbidden by the National Socialist Party in 1933, but several associations were re-founded in Germany after the Second World War. Justine Schüssel and her SudetenGerman friends came together in groups affiliated with the Wandervogelbewegung. This past summer over twenty Wandervögel participated in the reunion in Bavaria. The daily program consisted of hiking through their “old” homeland, dancing, and singing. Their musical practices are an example of building and reviving a Sudeten-German community. At the same time these practices revitalize and preserve memories of a long-lost homeland, which uphold an idealized past. Contemporary Sudeten-German identity is a hybrid construction rooted in the “old” Heimat and in the “shifted” refugee identities in the “new” Heimat. The ethnic boundaries between Sudeten Germans and Germans changed slowly but significantly after the expulsion through amalgamation: “the union of two or more groups to form a larger unit which differs from any of the component parts” (Schramm 1979, 5). Germans from the Bohemian lands are now integrated and mostly indistinguishable from the host population. They live in what I call an “assimilated diaspora”, and they emerge out of their environment through, for example, musical performances at unofficial and official Sudeten-German meetings. These meetings not only fuel their “Sudeten-Germanness”, but also celebrate and perpetuate notions of difference and distinctiveness from their host society.

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The Reinvention and Preservation of Traditions Sudeten Germans, whose consciousness of the lost homeland is still prevalent in their lives, demonstrate a continuing desire to preserve their traditions. Although the expulsion fostered the retaining of specificities of the expelled (Schnapper 1999, 235), it frequently requires a reinterpretation and reinvention of culture due to the complex relationships between host and migrant community. In other words, the distressing break of most Sudeten Germans with their past involved an adaptation to a new situation, resulting in the modification of customary traditional practices. This reinterpretation and revitalization of culture happens for Sudeten Germans not only via private events, but also the annual Sudeten-German meeting. Here, Sudeten-German music is practiced informally for everyone to participate, but also in formal performances where cultural practices transform into art objects displayed on stage. Takeyuki Tsuda (2009) argues that, despite nurturing distinct ethnic identities, the assimilation caused a loss of much of the Sudeten-German cultural heritage, including music. My investigations so far confirm that Sudeten-German musical practices change and repertoire is being forgotten. Meanings and arrangements of music are frequently altered in their new environment; for example, anthems of “longing and belonging”, have been frequently adapted as commercial folk pop tunes by the host society. Despite these developments, the Sudeten-German heritage has flourished over the last sixty years through the foundation of private and official institutions. Furthermore, the Sudeten Germans are officially called the Vierter Bayerischer Stamm (fourth Bavarian tribe) and have stood under the protection of the Bavarian government since 1962.6 Of course, for the expelled, the picture is a different one. Music, as connected to their Heimat, only exists in their memories. Many of my interviewees are therefore concerned about a loss of their cultural heritage.

The Remaining Sudeten-German Population in the Czech Republic Not all Sudeten Germans were expelled at the end of World War II. Those living in mixed marriages could choose to either stay or leave. Many skilled Sudeten Germans, such as industrial workers, were forced to stay, although a number of these later emigrated to West Germany. After the 6

The four Bavarian tribes are: Altbayern (Oberbayern, Niederbayern, Oberpfalz), Schwaben, Franken, Sudetendeutsche.

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expulsion, the German cultural heritage in Czechoslovakia “naturally declined and disappeared” (Nettl 2002, 284). Villages with dual names dropped their German forms: Reichenberg changed to Liberec, and surnames of composers with variant name spellings, such as Stamitz, were changed into the Slavic version (Stamec) in order to relate them to the realm of Czech culture (Nettl 2002, 284). In the course of my investigations, I also visited Sudeten Germans and their descendants who remained in Czechoslovakia after World War II. According to my interviewees, singing and speaking in German was frowned on and caused serious disadvantages in daily life. The new conditions required the remaining Sudeten Germans to perfect the Czech language and acquire Czech citizenship—remaining Sudeten Germans had no choice other than to formally “czechify” (Bryant 2002, 685). Especially for the elderly, this necessary identity change often triggered a feeling of displacement and homelessness, similar to that experienced by the expelled and dispersed Sudeten Germans. The desire of the remaining Sudeten Germans to overcome this loss of belonging frequently led to secret singing and dance events in private settings and prompted, for example, Amalie Stonjek and Anna Hartmann in the 1960s to collect, secretly record, and preserve folk songs describing their home, the former Sudetenland. Sudeten Germans of the second and third generations do not usually share these sentiments, though. They are Czech citizens and generally do not speak German or relate to German heritage. After the Velvet Revolution and the overthrow of the Czech government in 1989, the borders to West-Germany and Austria opened and Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections since 1946. Many remaining Sudeten Germans decided to acknowledge their German identity in the Czech Republic and openly display their heritage via musical practice. Alois Galle, one participant in my study, started a Sudeten-German vocal group in 2002 in the region of the Czech Eagle Mountains (Orlické hory). This remote and oftentimes inaccessible region is located in the North Eastern part of the Czech Republic. Galle’s motivation to establish such a cultural association was not only to create a platform for Germans to discover their German identity, speak their mother tongue and re-experience their musical past, but also to “come out” as a separate ethnic group in the Czech Republic. His goal was thus to transform the imperceptible community of remaining Sudeten Germans into a lived and tangible one. Galle states: We speak Czech and are now Czech citizens, but we are still Germans. We want to convince the Czechs that we, the Germans, also live here. We want to show and share how we lived and what we experienced as children; this

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means also to sing the songs of our ancestors. (Alois Galle, interview by the author, July 20, 2011)

In 2010, there were about 20,780 Germans living in the Czech Republic (Czech Statistical Office). These included those that had remained in the Czech Republic after World War II or had moved there after the fall of communism in 1989. Few of the expelled Sudeten Germans returned to their former Heimat. Christine Rösch explains her own decision to stay in Germany in the following way: Life in the Czech Lands after 1989 would have had nothing to do with the life I once left. I only understood several years ago, when I visited my old hometown, that life on the Czechoslovakian side of the Iron Curtain would have been much harder than what we went through after the expulsion (Christine Rösch, interview by the author, June 9, 2010).

Empowerment Most of my interviewees openly discussed the war, expulsion, processes of integration and the role of music in these major occurrences, expressing a sense of empowerment as they shared their life stories, which they enhanced with photographs, music recordings, and diaries, as well as live music making and dancing. The interviews demonstrated an active response by the displaced to their displacement, a response of individuals, whose story has mostly been told only in generalized displacement studies. At the end of my conversation with study participant Gustl Gromes, I asked him to play a piece on his violin that best reflected his perception and memory of Heimat, which, in his understanding, is “multilocal” and embraces both the “old” lost Heimat and a “new” one. I expected him to either play a folksong originating from his “old” Heimat, North Moravia, or a piece that combines the old and new one, such as one of his compositions (which he describes as being influenced by East European musical characteristics). To my surprise, Gustl chose the second movement of Dvorak’s ninth symphony “From the New World”. His choice reflected his understanding of the past Sudeten-German community as one where cultural practices established separate communities, but also where different ethnic groups were able to draw from each other. When Gustl stopped playing, he paused and said: “This music made an impression on me. [pause] We have to thank each other, [pause] the Czechs and the Germans”. *

*

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This study of contemporary Sudeten-German communities and their musical practices examines the role of musical recollection in the construction of social realities and belonging, investigates music’s role in the processes of expulsion, acculturation and assimilation, and facilitates an understanding of how music reflects and reframes these processes. These new frames are constructed by the stories of individuals, which together make up a symbolic community.

Reference list Alonso, Ana Maria. 1988. The effects of truth: Re-presentations of the past and the imagining of community. Journal of historical society 1 (1):33-58. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined communities. London and New York: Verso. Applegate, Celia and Pamela Potter. 2002. Germans as the “People of music”: Genealogy of an identity. In Music and German national identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 1-35. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. München: Verlag C.H. Beck. —. 2007. Geschichte im Gedächtnis: Von der individuellen Erfahrung zur öffentlichen Inszenierung. München: Verlag C.H.Beck. Assmann, Aleida, and Ute Frevert. 1999. Geschichtsvergessenheit– Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Bohlman, Philip V. 2002. Landscape–region–nation–Reich: German folk song in the nexus of national identity. In Music and German national identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 105-127. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity without groups. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bryant, Chad. 2002. Either German or Czech: Fixing nationality in Bohemia and Moravia, 1939-1946. Slavic review 61 (4):683-706. Fendl, Elisabeth. 2002. Zur Ikonographie des Heimwehs. Erinnerungskultur bei Heimatvertriebenen. Referate der Tagung des Johannes-KünzigInstituts für ostdeutsche Volkskunde, 4-6 July, 2001. Hahn, Eva and Hans Henning Hahn. 2004. Die sudetendeutsche völkische Tradition: Ein tschechisches Trauma des 20. Jahrhunderts. In Wann ziehen wir endlich den Schlußstrich? Von der Notwendigkeit

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öffentlicher Erinnerung in Deutschland, Polen und Tschechien, ed. Wolfgang Benz, 29-74. Berlin: Metropol. Hader, Widmar and Josef Fuchs. 1998. Sudetendeutsche Musik. In Lexikon zur Deutschen Musikkultur Böhmen, Mähren, Sudetenschlesien, ed. Widmar Hader, 1404-1409. München: Langen-Müller. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On collective memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger. 1992. The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Katomi, Margaret J. 1994. Music-cultures in contact: Convergences and collisions. Basel: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Kinzel, Hugo. 1936. Einführung. Musikblätter der Sudetendeutschen 1, no. 1:1-3. Koch, Klaus P. 1997. Deutsche Musik in Böhmen, Mähren und Sudetenschlesien. In Deutsche Musik in Ost- und Südosteuropa, ed. Gabriel Adriányi, 17-36. Köln: Böhlau Verlag. —. 1998. Zwanzigstes Jahrhundert. In Lexikon zur Deutschen Musikkultur: Böhmen, Mähren, Sudetenschlesien, ed. Widmar Hader, 1596-1609. München: Langen-Müller. Komma, Karl M. 1960. Das böhmische Musikantentum. Kassel: Johann Philipp Hinnenthal-Verlag. Nettl, Bruno. 2002. Ethnicity and musical identity in the Czech Lands: A group of vignettes. In Music and German national identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 269-287. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nittner, Ernst. 1988. Tausend Jahre deutsch-tschechische Nachbarschaft. München: Institutum Bohemicum. Pietsch, Roland and Heinrich Pleticha, eds. 2004. Sudetendeutscher Heimatatlas. Braunschweig: Ruth Printmedien. Quoika, Rudolf. 1956. Die Musik der Deutschen in Böhmen und Mähren. Berlin: Merseburger. Said, Edward. 2002. Reflections on exile. In Reflections on exile and other essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 173-186. Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora 1 (1):83-99. Scheding, Florian. 2010. “The splinter in your eye”: Uncomfortable legacies and German exile studies. In Music and displacement: Diaspora, mobilities, and dislocations in Europe and beyond, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

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Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2011. Musical communities: Rethinking the collective in music. Journal of the American musicological society 64 (2):349-390. —. 1998. Let jasmine rain down. Song and remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slobin, Mark. 1994. Music in diaspora: The view from Euro-America. Diaspora 3 (3):243-252. Schnapper, Dominique. 1999. From the nation-state to the transnational world: On the mapping and usefulness of diaspora as a concept. Diaspora 8 (3): 225-255. Schramm, Adelaida Reyes. 1979. Ethnic music, the urban area, and ethnomusicology. Sociologus 29:1-17. Sturm, Walther, ed. 1973. Blüh nur, blüh mein Sommerkorn. Aus der klingenden Saat von Walther Hensel. Kassel: Bärenreiter. Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2009. Introduction. In Diasporic homecomings. Ethnic return migration in comparative perspective, ed. Takeyuki Tsuda, 120. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wiskemann, Elizabeth. 1938. Czechs and Germans. A study of the struggle in the historic provinces of Bohemia and Moravia. London: Oxford University Press. Zheng, Su. 2010. Claiming diaspora. Music, transnationalism, and cultural politics in Asian/ Chinese America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART FOUR MUSIC AND GENDERED IDENTITY

CHAPTER TEN “YA L’BABOUR, YA MON AMOUR” RAÏ, RAP AND THE DESIRE TO ESCAPE HEIDRUN FRIESE

Scenario Where has youth gone? Where are the brave ones? The rich gorge themselves The poor work themselves to death The Islamic charlatans show their true face... You can always cry or complain Or flee, but where? —Cheb Khaled El Harba Wayn? Y'al babor y'a mon amour khelejni mel la misere —RimK/113 Reda Taliani Partir loin Dans les civilisations sans bateaux les rêves se tarissent —Michel Foucault

I first met Tarik and his friends in Summer 2009. Our meeting point was a bar in downtown Tunis.1 Although Tunisian watering holes are strictly all-male affairs as a rule, I was slipped in under the radar as a cousin of my friend, a Sicilian expat, who seemed to know every bartender in town and had a keen eye for police informants. Sanction thus granted, I offered beer and cigarettes and we chatted the night away, getting to know 1

This essay is part of The Limits of Hospitality, an ongoing, multi-site research project on undocumented mobility (particularly Lampedusa, mainland Sicily and Tunisia) funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. For a more detailed examination of the historical semantics of hospitality and its tensions, see Friese, (2009a, 2010). For photoessays, see Friese (2007 and 2009b).

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each other’s stories and switching locales as one-by-one the bars closed for the night. None of them had jobs, all lived hand-to-mouth and nous sommes dans la merde finished almost every sentence. Tarik had previously lived with his family—his father worked in a small factory and spent his earnings on other women, as he dismissively added, his disapproval highlighting a lack of filial respect that has only emerged with this new generation, who have very different expectations of life. Although he remained close to his mother and his twelve-year-old brother, Tarik was spending his days waiting for an opportunity to flee to a better life. The previous year, Tarik’s elder brother had gotten tired of waiting. Trusting in his luck and the “beneficence” of some Tunisian Coast Guard, he had attempted the crossing to Lampedusa. Mediterranean waves had washed his body back to Tunisia. Tarik’s eyes welled with tears as he told the story, and he showed me the tattoo he had gotten in memory of his brother and the scars on his arms from the cuts and scratches with which he had marked his pain and grief. And I listened in silence, feeling helpless, since by pure dumb luck I had been born on the other side of the Mediterranean, had the “right” passport, a VISA card and didn’t even have to queue for a visa to visit Tunisia. Despite his crippling grief he remained, like many of his generation in Algeria and Morocco, eager to join the harragas. In Arabic, harga means “burning” or burning one’s papers, and the harragas challenge exclusion and suffering by “burning” for Europe.2 The harga movement has spread like wildfire throughout the Maghreb region, particularly among young men, who undertake the risky enterprise in the hope of a life of dignity and as the only means of escaping personal, social and political oppression. It is a phenomenon that has not been tempered by the demands for democracy, dignity and freedom that spurred the recent revolution in Tunisia. “I would never follow in the steps of my father, who’s working for 100 TD” (around 50 EUR a week), said Tarik. Like his fellow harragas, he expected a good job in Italy, with the car, the DVD player and the plasma TV set. He seemed unaware of the likely reality—at best, picking tomatoes in Sicily or Calabria, at worst, life as a fugitive sans-papiers in France. It’s hard to know what Tarik and his friends thought of me and my interest in stories that were not my own, which moreover included 2

The harga experience is very different to the relentless racism and brutal exploitation faced by people from Sub-Saharan Africa undertaking the same journey.

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illegality. I could almost have been their grandmother; I met no predefined cultural stereotype and was definitely not interested in amour. Our evenings had an almost conspiratorial atmosphere, as if our frank discussion was something illicit.3 But the young men took me at face value and even promised to organize me a copy of Rim-K’s Maghreb United, which I had been searching for fruitlessly in music stores. The evenings with Tarik and his friends returned to me when I got back to my desk after research on Lampedusa’s and mainland Sicily’s border regimes. The memories brought to mind images from Noureddine Lakhmari’s film Casanegra, and mingled with the raï I had taken to listening to. I began surfing raï videos, and came across clips which— sometimes obviously recorded on cell phones—documented the harragas voyaging to Europe in flimsy boats. Conventional fieldwork, the coemplacement and coevalness (Fabian 1983) of place, time and human encounter suddenly extended into infinity as I traced the endless, anonymous links and comments on YouTube, becoming an evolving digital, “distant ethnography”, whose underpinning logic I could not quite fathom.4 Whereas the key role played by digital media during the so-called Arab Spring was much discussed in the media, the rise of harga videos and raï rap songs as a powerful genre has garnered little attention. However cursory searches on YouTube lay bare the social imaginary of a generation that cannot envisage a viable future. Undoubtedly, current academic and political discourse has been unable to come to terms with the intricacies of the harga movement. Firstly, analyses have neglected the role of agency and subjectivity in (un)documented mobility, in favour of the traditional focus on topics such as “sending” and “receiving” countries, and mechanical push-and-pull factors. Secondly, EU political approaches and what can only be described as hallucinant technocratic policies have sought to control mobility (socalled “border management”) in postcolonial contexts. Thirdly, both governmental policy and academic studies have failed to factor in the cultural production and symbolization in the creation of socio-cultural 3

Not without grounds. Earlier chats with fisherman at the port of Sfax had attracted the attention of the local police, which prompted me to caution. I never recorded “tricky” conversations (even if the interviewees had granted permission) and made sure to use a different Internet cafe each day to upload my notes. 4 Nigel Thrift calls this expierence “the technological unconscious” (Thrift 2005), meaning the unknown underlay of information systems that operate in our everyday lives but of which we have no understanding or awareness. For accounts on fieldwork and the Internet, see Hine (2000); Mig@Net (2011); Rogers (2009).

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imaginaires and their crucial contribution to (political) mobilization. As I address first two points elsewhere,5 my focus here will be on cultural production and the articulation of the longing to escape. As a first step, I will briefly sketch the routes of the harragas. As a gendered phenomenon, I will discuss the construction of masculinity and generation gaps. Secondly, I will briefly address the development of raï music as a site of contest and identity politics, as exemplified by the unofficial harragas anthem Partir loin by Rim-K 113/Reda Taliani and amateur harga-clips available on YouTube, and will analyse raï rap in terms of harga imagery.

Harragas and Gender Since the late 1990s, the Sicilian island of Lampedusa has evolved into a European borderland and a key layover for harragas.6 Although most undocumented migrants in Italy arrive by overland routes or at airports and simply stay past their visas, the tiny island close to the Tunisian mainland has become—along with the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla—a symbol of the failure of European migration policies, of technocratic utopias of migration and border management, and the limits of European hospitality. For a couple of years following the 1998/99 bilateral accord between Italy and Tunisia on the re-admission of “illegal” migrants, the majority of undocumented mobility took Libya as its point of departure. The bilateral friendship agreement between Italy and Libya in 2009 proved to only halt this route temporarily (the controversial agreement included detention and the negation of non-refoulement). In Spring 2010 boatpeople were again intercepted close to Lampedusan shores. Between 2000 and 2009, around 111,500 boatpeople managed to near the island.7 In the eight months after 5

Friese (2010); Friese (2011). I prefer the term “mobility” or “transnational mobility” to migration because it does not connotate a particular legal status or the notion of settling. Additionally, “illegality” is, like “citizenship”, a (juridical) concept that regulates relations to the state and the political order (De Genova 2002, 422). Borders, citizenship and legal status contribute to the “production of illegality” (de Genova 2002) and make dayto-day survival strategies necessary. It includes people smuggled across national borders, those who overstay their visas and people who enter into marriages of convenience. The notion is highly problematic—and contested—how could a human be “illegal” and “irregular”? Moreover, smuggling can “be illegal, but licit, or socially accepted”, as de Haas has pointed out (de Haas 2007, 4). 7 I am perfectly aware that numbers do not reflect agency and personal decisions to undertake the voyage. Additionally, statistics are often used politically to deindividualize singularity and to depict mobile people as an undesired “biblical 6

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the Tunisian Revolution in January 2011, Europe saw 55,298 undocumented entries, of which around 27,000 were Tunisian (Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population 2011, 2). “If there is scirocco or libeccio (South/South-West wind) they make it; with maestrale/tramontana (North/North-West wind) they will be wrecked”, Lampedusa’s fishermen told me. Saving people in need is a traditional part of the fishermen’s ethos. But the impulse of ethical demand has been crippled by laws regulating “human trafficking”. Rescuing today can pose a serious threat to financial security, and is now more often left to the Coast Guard (the confiscation of the Cap Anamur in July 2004 and recent legal action against the crew of a Tunisian boat are striking examples). Today, it is not uncommon a fisherman comes across corpses or human limbs and simply tosses them back into the sea—the bureaucracy involved in alerting the authorities can cost days of lost work and earnings. But the fishermen assured me that none would hesitate to help survivors. “Siamo gente di mare” (we are mariners)—they say, “why should I go without? But one cannot leave them to their fate; the relevant authorities have to be called”. It can be a tricky business, especially if the fisherman is working beyond his licensed zone: more than one reported having to take convoluted steps to alert the Coast Guard to the exact position of the shipwrecked without exposing himself to criminal charges. Since 1994 at least 6,166 people have drowned in the Channel of Sicily. Taking this deadly risk is one, often traumatic, dimension of harga. Harga is, firstly, a transgression of rules of exit and entry (leaving the countries of the Maghreb is itself—given EU pressures—“illegal”). However, harga is also defiance against hopelessness, corruption and injustice. It is the “burning” desire to flee and an assertion of the right to mobility. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in fact enshrines mobility as a fundamental human right.8 Nevertheless, the European legal system limits freedom of movement and residency within its borders—in which the Schengen Treaty and the visa system introduced in 1986 play no small part. The legal parameters determine the daily life of “irregular” aliens. Long periods of treading water—including the threat of flood”, or the “human tsunami” as the former Italian Minister of the Interior has put it. 8 Art. 13 categorizes freedom of movement into three separate rights—to leave a country, to return to one’s own country and to have freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Similar EU objectives are expressed in Art. 8a, 1 of the Maastricht Treaty and are reinforced by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997). There is, however, a radical disjuncture between the freedom of exit and the freedom of entry.

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imprisonment, deportation and homelessness—determine the decision of undocumented people to move to countries where possibilities of day-today survival and getting regular papers seem to be more promising. Harga is an almost exclusively male domain.9 This “illegal”, transgressive practice involves risk, decisive rupture and dislocation, in short: a discontinuous state of being. One has to distinguish between harga as a process and the harragas as comprising actors. Economic background and lack of opportunity are certainly significant factors in the decision. However, this does not take into account agency and the variety of personal hopes. Especially young men become entangled in a double bind as, on one hand, they identify with their home country, but cannot realize their aspirations, dreams of freedom or a feeling of personal liberation and come to feel stuck in their country of citizenship. Some are seduced by stories of rich European women and an easy life in the land of plenty. Peer pressure to prove one’s manliness by endeavouring this risky crossing is another factor. Harga has become a rite-of-passage to fulfil— often unrealistic—expectations of a good life in Europe and an eventual return as the prodigal son. Risk is, as Nair (2007) pointed out, a specific feature of modernity and the immediate and overwhelming risk faced by illicit immigrants in their transnational movements cuts through the fabric of late modernity’s culture climate of general risk, speculation or reflexivity and venture, highlighting their own liminality and otherness to the very contexts that they seek to enter (Nair 2007, 67).

However, taking the risk of border crossing is by no means “irrational”. It is a rational challenge to laws that seem unjust and restrict freedom and mobility. Risk and overcoming danger is an inherent characteristic of male self-assertion, subjectivity and dominant cultural representations of male identity. Representations of harga are marked by a dual absence, the absence of death (and negative consequences of the passage) and the absence of women (which is not to say that women do not play a role in decisionmaking or as loved ones abandoned). The imaginary fosters the dominant understanding of masculinity. Male friendship and comradeship play a

9

This is not the case for undocumented mobility from the Sub-Sahara and countries of the Horn of Africa. An Algerian study has found that “54% are beween 18 and 28 years old, 36% are between 29 and 40 .... 80.58% are unmarried, 2.15% have a university degree and 90.5% were jobless” (Labdelaoui 2009, 6).

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decisive role in the initial commitment to border crossing and the subsequent complicated organizational aspects. Harga is a dynamic decision-making process of young men, which cannot be reduced to economics alone. It entails rupture with daily routines and a life without dignity; it entails transgression and risk; it is a key means of establishing an assertive male subjectivity in such social groups. This aspect of harga is nowhere as apparent as in music videos and amateur videos.

Harga, raï and Video Although raï (literally, “opinion” or “point of view”) is an ancient musical tradition, the genre began flourishing in the multicultural, working class neighbourhoods of 1920s and 1930s Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city. Raï was performed in taverns and brothels, cabaret halls and the camps of migrant workers. Female performers (cheikas) played a crucial role in the development of this musical style, which fused andalusi, zendani and melhun, and Bedouin music with Arab, Spanish, African and French musical forms by blending traditional instruments with Western ones.10 Although, on the surface, the lyrics of Raï spoke of lost love, heartbreak, poverty and drunkenness, they transgressed dominant cultural codes and packed a political wallop. In 1930, the centenary of Algeria’s colonization, Huoari Hanani wrote S’hab el baroud (Gens de la poudre), a patriotic song about the virtues and courage of those who resisted the colonial army. In 1983, the lyrics were adapted by Cheb Khaled in his famous refrain “Les gens de la poudre avec leur fusils / Portent les bouches de canon la mèche allumée / Nos chefs ont délibérér et décide´/ Ils sont voulou réalisier ce jour de celebration”. During the war for independence, some raï performers joined the national movement Front de Liberation National (FNL) and called for resistance against French colonial domination. Those that did not flee to Tunis were imprisoned. Even the advent of independence did not prompt the government to reassess its policies—it continued to tightly control performances of raï and banned the music from public broadcast. In the 1970s, the reggae, funk and rock fusion of raï became common ground for Algerian youth, who bypassed the state-sponsored media 10

For an account of so-called world music and raï, see Ellingham, Duane and Dowell (1999) and Virole (1995); for an account of raï and censorship, see Mehdid (2006); for the relationship between music and processes of identification, see Gazzah (2008) and Gross, McMurray and Swedenburg (1994).

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monopoly by distributing the music on cassette tapes. The politically tumultuous 1980s/90s saw new performers appear on the scene: the Cheb (“young”) and Cheba (female) performers such as Cheb Hasni, Cheba Fadila, Cheb Khaled, Cheba Zahouania. Raï pressed the buttons of North Africa’s political and social problems. One example was Cheb Hasni’s and Cheba Zahouania’s song (1987) Beraka (The Shack), which triggered fierce protest by Islamic groups11 and whose lyrics were even described by the francophone radio station RFI as “beyond daring”: “making love in a dirty old shack. I had her ... because when you're drunk that's the sort of idea that runs through your head!” The song caused a veritable scandal—and proved an instant hit with Algerian teenagers … catapulting young Hasni to overnight fame (rfi music 2004).

Raï tackled taboo subjects like sex, alcohol, “divorcées, young widows and adultery” and the “frustrations and preoccupations of an entire generation”. In El Visa, for instance, Hasni sang, “I was going to go and see my baby / But you’ve taken my visa / You want to kill me! / I'm gonna drink myself stupid and smash everything” (Cheb Hasni 2004). The cassette copy of El Visa was a huge hit in 1992, selling over 250,000 copies within a few days of its release. Despite being banned from the official broadcasting system, it “found a venue via the Algerian-French community radio stations in southern France in the early 1980s” (Noor AlDeen 2005, 605). The genre’s popularity was overwhelming in the end, and finally, some of the restrictions were lifted. The first open-air raï festival was held in Oran in 1985 and more recently, raï has begun drawing on “jazz, reggae and hip hop influences” from the French banlieu (Hogge 2010). The evolution of raï and its complex musical structure and lyrical semantics is inseparable from the evolution of the politics of identity in the Maghreb. Raï championed identity beyond religion and state, and escaped the control of authoritarian Maghrebian states and religious leaders to some extent. It voiced “popular opposition to the status quo, breaking open instead a space for the articulation of difference lived and experienced at 11 Hasni Chekroun, born in 1968 in Gambetta, a working-class suburb in the northeast of Oran, was murdered in front of his house in 1994. The following year, the producer Rachid Baba-Ahmed, another leading figure in the raï scene, was assassinated in Oran. In June 1998, the famous Lounès Matoub was gunned down. He was the first singer to be murdered after fighting broke out between government forces and armed Islamic groups like the GIA (Groupe islamique armé).

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collective levels” (Nair 2007, 65). At the same time, it contributed to the construction of identity of the “migrating population, and with them it travelled outside Algeria into France, then Europe, and recently, the United States” (Hogge, 2010). Moving to France, raï incorporated the French language. “[F]rom one tongue to another, then to a third and a fourth … In a single sentence, French, English, and two forms of Arabic, standard and spoken, are jumbled together” (Daoudi 2000, 34; Noor AlDeen 2005, 607), the music expressed what has been called postmodern cultural “hybridity” and cultural de-centring. Such linguistic and lexical hybridity, manifested by the development of a common spoken and written colloquial language that challenges grammatical and orthographical rules by introducing abbreviations, acronyms, leetspeak, code-switching, in short: the development of a “postmodern vernacular” (Potter 1995), can also serve as a medium for negotiating a collective identity. On the one hand, raï voices emerge from contest against marginalization and exclusion. On the other, however, the assertive battle-cry “Maghreb United / Algerie, Maroc, Tunisie! Reunifié” (see Appendix A) promotes a common—although contentious—Maghreb identity. While such linguistic hybridity promotes a common identity, the lines of identification are complex. YouTube provides a multilingual (French, Arab, German, English) and fluid transnational space that allows for processes of identification, the voicing of national pride and the negotiation of difference and collective identities.12 Comments on clips— which are mostly autoreferential—provide a forum for discussing concepts like “Maghrebian blood”, “brotherhood” (sometimes in explicit opposition to “Arab” identity) and a de-territorialized “national” identity. One such exchange reads: ASHYLIA88: (user profile: age 29) your tunisia is a small square in algeria....go check your map....we are wider and better...123 viva l algerie13 moMoeXe: (user profile: age 26) maybe tunisia is smaller than algeria...but where are all you algerian brothers in their Summer holidays???? in Tunisia ;) shut up ugly boy. Vive Tunisie! Magreb United !!!14 12

Affirmations of a fluid identity expressed in raï music (cf. Nair, 2007) do not take into account the contested elaborations of identities by the audience. 13 ASHYLIA88 (user profile: age 29), stated: “The thing that doesn't kill me, that's what makes me stronger”; about the user: “Beleive in God and love my country, Algeria, Profession: Computer engineer; Interests: Music, theater, and studies; Films and music: Brave heart, Seven, Saw; Rock, POP, Chaabi, R&B, Reggae, Gnawi, Andalousi, Houzi, Jazz.......etc; Books: Coran, Introduction of Ibn khaldoun” (Account closed on February 12, 2012).

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tunsiano16: All mahribinians are brothers… but Tunisians are the best;)15

Comments on Partir loin also explicitly invoke a common Muslim identity: One is who one is—full stop, the most important thing in life is not to consider oneself as arab or kabylian16 but to feel MUSLIM and take part in the community of Mohammed, the prophet, why live in the communitarianism and feel different??? Mohammed from Tizi or Mohammed from Oran is the same...17

According to Nair, “in its crossing of national and other boundaries, raï displays late modernity’s hybrid reinventions of cultural memory through what are largely collective experiences of de-territorialisation and relocation” (Nair 2007, 66). By doing so it expresses the vertigo of creating a shared cultural memory of the Maghreb that addresses current postcolonial experience in Europe.

Partir loin As I have already mentioned, harga is basically a project of young men and thus part of highly mobile cultural articulations, signs and symbolizations. One anthem of harragas is—next to El Harraga by Reda Taliani—certainly Rim-K 113/Reda Taliani’s Partir loin which voices alienation, poverty and attitudes of a “lost” generation, that has “nothing to lose” and strives for new perspectives and “happiness”. By February 2012, the video of the song on YouTube had been viewed by 1,242,333 users.18 14

http://www.youtube.com/user/moMoeXe. “T’ous les maghrebiens vous êtes de frères…mais les tunisiens sont les meilleurs, ,,, ;)]” http://www.youtube.com/user/tunsiano16. 16 Kabylia/Kabylie is a region in Northern Algeria. 17 The original entry: “Mais il n'y a ni a se prendre pour un arabe ou un kabyle on est ce qu'on est point barre,le plus important dans la vie est de se sentir MUSLIM et de faire parti de la communauté du prophéte Muhammed:pourquoi vivre dans le communitarisme et se sentir différent??? Mohammed de Tizi ou Mohammed d'Oran c'est la meme” by abdallllllllah@lahagra93. Userprofile: age 31, based in Paris, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLMkUr_GIIc and http://www.youtube.com/user/abdallllllllah. 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLMkUr_GIIc. Rim-K (Abdelkarim Brahmi), born in Algeria in 1978, set up the “crew” 113 (Yohann Duport, born in Guadeloupe and Mokobé Traoré, born 1979 in Mali). They became a commercially highly successful group (since 2004 with Sony Music). Rim-K 15

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Partir loin (see appendix for the translation of the song) certainly resonates with Cheb Khaled’s famous and prophetical song El Harba Wayn, where he rhetorically asks: “You can always cry or complain/ Or flee, but where?” Both songs voice the desire to escape from personal, social and political circumstances—having been raised with “thieves”—a “hard life” that seems without alternative. Breaking away, being “on the route for Eldorado, even in economy class” is the dream of evading daily misery. Partir loin speaks of a search for dignity, self-respect, liberty and a good life. The first sequences of the video clip to Partir loin offer an ironic representation of a generation of hard working grey-haired migrants (chibenis), who return home for Ramadan in old-fashioned cars loaded with fridges and washing-machines. These images illustrate parallel universes existing in the contemporary world, juxtaposing the camel, symbol of the past, with the migrant’s car, a symbol of modernity, which carries goods that testify to the success of the migration project and symbolize both the improvement of the family’s economic situation and the enhancement of social capital.19 Cars are particular objects of desire, because they embody masculinity. There are two types of cars in this respect: the “family” car and the “assertive” car. One of my Tunisian friends—who spent most of his youth in Sicily before returning to his hometown where he married, built a house and bought a fishing-boat—was considered to be a rich man by everyone in his village. He not only owned all modern kitchen appliances, but his sons had a Vespa of their own. The symbol of his success were also two cars, one used on a daily basis by his wife and an Alfa Romeo, which with its industrial sound-designed, smacking doors was a regular topic of his best friends’ jokes about a “poor migrant” car. Not surprisingly, the video of Partir loin features a ferry unloading a cargo of consumer goods stacked on top of an old Mercedes.20 founded his label Fresnik (see http://www.banlieue-connexion.com/rim.html). Reda Taliani, the “Italian” (Tamni Reda), was born in 1980 in El-Biar, Algeria and lives in France. For accounts of origins and development of hip-hop/rap, see Chang 2005; Potter 1995. For an account of rap and cultural studies, see Rosello 2000. Due to copyright issues, stills and/or screenshoots of the mentioned videos could not be reproduced here. 19 These are proceeded by quite “orientalizing” images of (imagined) homelands, which are criss-crossed by images of the roofed skyline in downtown Paris. 20 The video has already been viewed by 2,847,871 users and is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlNsHGxYRxQ. The topos of consumer goods stacked on top of old cars is quite recurrent, see the video of Tonton du bled by Rim-K/113.

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The image of the ship is symbolically charged and reappears in many of these music videos. The video clip of L’espoir des favelas also opens with the image of a cargo ship. In this case, the performer, filmed from a low-angle shot, appears against the background of a massive wall of cargo containers. The desire to escape to a mythical European Eldorado expressed in Partir loin cannot be separated from the living conditions in the “lands of plenty”, which do not match with the aspirations of those who depart. “To flee, but where?” The experience of daily exclusion, repression and marginalization is at the centre of L’espoir des favelas. However, the protest against the circumstances in the banlieu and hegemonic ways of life is already part of the current cultural industry. The exaltation of consumer goods—such as the highly sexually loaded BMW here— indicates the dream of participation in a system, from which one is still excluded. Baudrillard noted that “[t]he display of abundance, of appropriation of the miraculous object, the good of consumption” from which one is excluded is “conjuring away the real with the signs of the real” (Baudrillard 1998, 33). “Affluence is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness” writes Baudrillard (1998, 31). The car becomes a privileged object. It is a trophy, a magical sign, the vehicle of male appropriation of a world that is (no longer) governed and under control. The act of touching your testicles, a gesture used in the Mediterranean to neutralize the “evil eye” and employed also in the raï video clips, is not only a performance of masculinity but a rite to neutralize envy. It is male strength that enables to defend and protect your property and goods. The videos picturing the object of admiration and symbol of masculinity, the BMW car, or street car racing (so-called “street rodeos”) are particularly characteristic of harga. 21 The act of driving relates here to the prestige of the pilote, who steers the boat with migrants across the Mediterranean. It also involves a kind of “undocumented mobility” within the spatial and social order of Europe. The marginalized banlieu moves into the centre of the nation, driving by l’Arc de Triomphe, Champs d’Élysées, and the famous 36, Quai d’Orfèvres - seat of the Direction de la police judicaire. The success of the performer, sealed by a commercial recording contract with SONY, embodies the ultimate participation in the so far contested hegemonic order. The celebrated BMW is a preponderant

21

The video is linked to clips of street rodeos, see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbDzwLOK96o&feature=fvw.

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signifier of appropriation.22 It embodies the miraculous cargo, charged with magical power and masculinity, which however does not belong to the order of productivity but to spectacular consumption. What is developed and displayed is a post-modern cargo-cult.23 For Baudrillard “in everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle” (Baudrillard 1998, 31). If the above mentioned grey-haired migrants react with a certain perplexity to—if not rejection of—harga, this can be understood as a reaction to the (post-) modern cargo-cult that dissociates the magical object from production. The hands that assemble the desired consumer goods are no longer those of the chibeni, the fathers who once emigrated to improve the life of their family, but those of nameless, invisible outsourced workers in far-away countries. Baudrillard describes this process in the following way: The consumer does not merely inherit goods, but the natural right to abundance … It does not appear to be something produced and extracted, something won after a historical and social effort, but something dispensed by a beneficent mythological agency … Consumer goods ... present themselves as a harnessing of power, not as products embodying work (Baudrillard 1998, 32).

Contest contains the desire, l’espoir, to participate in capitalist consumer culture and have a share in its magical abundance. Cargo—the object—and the ship turn out to be components of this dense symbolic fabric. Imagination is part of the processes of transforming reality and thus, a central element of the political. Ya l'babour, ya mon amour—the ship becomes the symbol of rupture and, at the same time, of the processes of inclusive exclusion. The ship is, according to Michel Foucault “the greatest reserve of the imagination” and a “heterotopia par excellence” (Foucault 1994, 762). As a marginal “counter-space”, it is both the means and the symbol of venturing out, departure and yet it is related to social spaces. The (slave)ship is a central topos and a “central organising symbol … and starting point” in Paul Gilroy’s account of the Black Atlantic, in which it is pictured as a “living micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” 22

As an abbreviation, the BMW was a symbol for Rastafaris as well: Bob Marley and the Wailors (personal communication, C.-L. Reichert). 23 See the classical account by Worsley (1968); for a recent and more critical discussion, see Jebens (2004). For an account of Sub-Saharan cults of powerful Western politicians and objects, see Bonhomme (2010). I am indebted to C. Fetscher for bringing my attention to this essay.

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(Gilroy 1993, 4 and 12-13). Not surprisingly the ship is one of the most recurrent topoi in bricolage harga clips.

Harga on YouTube Video clips of harga and harragas that are distributed to a wider audience via YouTube can be divided into two categories. The first type is a form of creative bricolage using published clips, photos, TV news, maps, and Google images. It pictures harga as a process. It shows a dense fabric of highly mobile images and offers strong political statements on exclusion and repression, the establishment of the “Fortress Europe” and the complicity of European politicians with the dictators. The second type shows the harragas as actors. It is more documentary in scope and madeup of clips taken with cell-phones during the voyage. These clips serve as a private-public testimony of the enterprise of reaching Eldorado—“even in economy class”—the joys of cunning courage, leaving the bad past behind and “chanceux d'être en vie”. Engaging with undocumented mobility and memories of precarious border crossings, both varieties of videos are characterized by a distinct structure in the way they create, repeat and appropriate images. Looking at these clips, we can distinguish the following typical sequences.24

The Desire to Escape The figure of the man in contemplation, fixing the boat, the sea and the distant horizon in his gaze, is a recurrent image. The figure evokes both a classic romantic representation of longing and wanderlust (Sehnsucht, Fernweh) and the sense of being lost, represented most famously by Caspar David Friedrich with his contemplative figures as viewed from behind (Rückenfiguren).25

Signposts The crossroad embodies the challenge and vertigo of the traveller and symbolizes an irrevocable and dramatic point of decision. This critical decision is unavoidable: one never turns back to the crossroad to choose a 24 For a general account of visuality, see Ball and Gilligan (2010); Friend (2010); Rose (2007); for the narrativity of images in the context of migration, see esp. Gilligan and Marley (2010). 25 Images and symbols move: the play Akin l Lebhat – Au-delà de la mer by Buzou (Théâtre Régionale de Béjaïa, Algeria) also uses these Google images.

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different path. The choice is final. Thus, signposts are highly charged symbols of coming to a crossroads and symbolize the need to choose a route and give one’s life a precise direction. They point to the Promised Land, the space of desire that lures beyond familiar, well-trodden paths.

The Boat “The overcrowded boat”, note Gilligan and Marley, “is a common visual representation of threatening immigration to the West. In the European context this is usually a flimsy looking craft filled with black Africans” (2010). This image appears both in the current mass media representations and music videos. It reiterates the prevailing political metaphor of the “assault”, the racialised migrant as “threat and victim”, the biblical “flood” that has to be stopped by European policies of socalled border management. By using available images, however, the video clips destabilize the hegemonic message created by the negative media coverage of immigration. Instead, they invite identification with the migrants. The overcrowded boat becomes a symbol of protest, a forceful denunciation of the processes of global exclusion, injustice, elimination and rejection.

Interception and Rescue The images of rescue operations also convey a clear political message. Even though they are joyous events - most boatpeople are happy being rescued from wreckage and even call the Coast Guard for salvage themselves—the media images used in ready-made clips show giant, massive, and highly technological war-machines employed to impede the arrival of migrants and the “global poor”, considered the “human waste” of globalization (Bauman 2004, 7). The sea becomes an insurmountable border, almost a site of warfare, evident in the striking disproportion between the fragile boats and the gunboats and helicopters employed against them.

Bodies Washed Ashore The image of dead bodies floating in the water or lying on the shore, likewise, brings to mind the imagery of war. The body becomes a (political) site of globalization and inclusive exclusion. The wrecked are its jetsam. Most images feature black bodies, thus, establishing a—

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negative—hierarchy of death and nameless victims. As Gilligan and Marley observe, In Europe in recent years the image of irregular African migrants washed up on the beaches of southern Europe has become a recurring visual representation of immigrants as victims … The representations of immigrants as victims may counter the idea of immigrants as threat. They do so, however, by robbing immigrants of their agency by presenting them as defined by what is done to them, rather than by their own actions. (Gilligan and Marley 2010)

In the context of bricolage clips however, humanitarian discourse depicting and denigrating the (racialised) Other as eternal victim deprived of agency is re-arranged. The shocking vision of the defeated corpse is sometimes spectacularised, surrounded by curious spectators or indifferent tourists enjoying romantic sunset at the beach. But although these images still carry a “trauma tag” (Gilligan and Marley 2010), in the harga videos they are inserted into a frame of courage, action, empowerment and defeat in an (un)declared war for (global) justice, participation and the claim to a good life in Europe.

Fortress Europe and the Camp Providing a structure for the articulation of the experiences of displacement, emphasizing in particular the legal and political aspects of relocation, these clips are quite elaborate and offer a carefully designed plot. The sequences of images and music develop a classical narrative commencing with the desire to escape and ending with imprisonment. By describing an endless circuit of repression and exclusion, however, the narration is somewhat circular. The flight from marginalisation and exclusion ends in nameless death, detention and exclusion again. Cheb Khaled’s question “To flee but where?” becomes particularly urgent. Escape ends in death or yet another imprisonment. These clips contrast the dynamic of travel with motionless confinement. Confinement signifies being subject to coercion. Moreover, it means being stuck and, again, symbolises a future blocked in a sort of eternal frozen present. These clips envision exclusion and a common destination, the destiny of the global poor, be they black or white. Marking borders, the (undocumented) migrant is a “borderline” figure par excellence and, as such, he is relegated to a non-space in no-man’s land. Bricolage music clips poignantly represent global injustice and European policies of restricting mobility. While similar in some respects,

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the “first-hand” clips filmed by harragas on board with their cell phones—and accompanied by the noise of the motor and chatter—are structured in a different way and develop another default ordering of sequences.

Companions At the centre of clips realised by the actors of the self-organised escape enterprises are shots of friends and companions, optimistic faces, laughter and jokes, signs of victory, exaltation and excitement. These selfrepresentations display firm companionship and unity, gestures of solidarity, intimacy and optimism. They certainly do not portray anonymous victims, traumatic experiences or human trafficking; rather, they display transgressive yearning, empowerment and a joyous experience that encapsulates a moment of realised utopia.

The Pilot The symbol of harga is not the suitcase, the object of museums and current symbol of classical modern migration. Those who confidently undertake this venture do not carry personal objects but depart with nothing more than the shirt on their back and a few blue canisters of fuel for the motor (Friese 2007, 2013). Their cell phones are the only objects that ensure a certain continuity and relationship with those left behind. The display of agency and empowerment is reinforced by images featuring the pilot in charge. These sequences focus on the man who steers the boat, the row of blue fuel canisters and the outboard motor (embraced and kissed like a beloved one), on which the whole enterprise has to inevitably rely.

The Sea: Horizons Although clips predominantly feature companions of the voyage, some also capture the sea and its fauna, for example, dolphins. The sea is a challenging space to traverse (especially for the inexperienced), however, harga clips display a complete mastery of the situation—and testify against handed down images of the monstrous devils of the sea (which attempt to pull you into their realm) or shark attacks.26 Harga clips 26

Comments often express good wishes or political opinions. Sometimes they respond to practical questions: “Some questions about this video:/ the temperature

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envision not just one horizon, namely the horizon of desire lying ahead. Action and movement double the classical horizon to allow a second horizon to emerge: the horizon of what is being left behind. The “first-hand” clips do not develop a conventional narrative, rather, they serve to commemorate and safeguard shared moments documenting the enterprise. They fix an exceptional moment, the “now” of shared history and obviously also comfort those left behind. As a rule, no dead bodies are shown, as the clips are supposed to communicate a sense of victory. The heterotopic space of the ship, against the background of the endless sea, becomes a stage for performing values of companionship and the ability to take command of one’s own future. The clips are, however, also marked by absences. I did not, for example, come across clips authored by blacks. And, although different in structure and scope, both visualisations of harga and harragas share the already mentioned common feature, namely the absence of women. Both establish a space for the reelaboration of mobile masculinities and what Donaldson and Howson have termed “well-established practices about manhood and gender relations” (Donaldson and Howson 2009, 210). Raï signifies an opinion or a point of view. Within the specific historical and social context of modernity, harga and harragas and their complex (gendered) cultural articulations, musical and visual representations are opening up a space of rupture, agency, empowerment and political mobilisation. Harga was (and is) a daily plebiscite against the deplorable political, economical and social state of affairs in the Maghreb. Its representations voice claims of dignity, liberty and participation and, thus, the demands of the Tunisian revolution (Thawrat al hurriyyah wa alkaramah), as well as processes of inclusive exclusion in globalised times. These claims point to the political urgency of reviewing European policies of the water?/ Did you encounter sharks? Seagulls during the trajectory? Do portable phones work beyond the borders? Which kind of inflatable did you use?” (“Plusieurs questions sur cette vidéo:/La température de l’eau?/ Avez vous rencontrer des requins? Des mouettes?/ Durée du trajet?/ Les téléphones portables fonctionnent-ils mème sans les bornes?... /Quel type de Zodiac votre embarcadère?”)—and offer advice. User MrMalaineh responds: “temperature was 20°c/yes, we encountered huge fishes but no sharks/the trajectory was 36 hrs./no but they function on the other side of the Mediterranean/ the boat was 4.80m long/ we were 10 people on board (04 of them held a diploma)”. (“la température été 20°c /oui nous avons rencontré des grand poissons mais ne sont pas des requins /la durée de trajet est 36 heurs/ non mais ils fonctionnent quand nous étions de l’autre coté de la méditerranée/ une embarcation de 4.80 m, nous étions 10 personnes a bord (04 sont diplômés)”) (MrMalaineh January 9, 2011, from Algeria; Harraga Ténès le 10-08-2010.mp4).

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restricting mobility, and the obsolete legal distinction between so-called “economic” migrants and refugees, a highly problematic distinction that deprives mobile people of fundamental rights and defines the limits of hospitality.

Reference list Al-Taee, Nasser. 2003. Running with rebels. Politics, identity and sexual narrative in Algerian rai. Echo: a music-centered journal 5 (1) (Spring). www.echo.ucla.edu. Ball, Susan and Gilligan, Chris. 2010. Visualizing migration and social division. Insights from social sciences and the visual arts. Forum qualitative social research 11 (2) (unpaginated). Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The consumer society: Myths and structure. London: Sage. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bonhomme, Julien. 2010. Masque Chirac et danse de Gaulle. Gradhiva 11 (2). http://gradhiva.revues.org/1663. Chang, Jeff. 2005. Can’t stop—won’t stop: A history of the hip-hop generation. New York: St. Martins Press. Cheb, Hasni. 2004. El visa. http://www.cheb-hasni.com. Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population. 2011. Report on the visit to Lampedusa (Italy, 23-24 May 2011). http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2011/amahlarg03_REV2 _2011.pdf. Daoudi, Bouziane. 2000. Algerian rappers sing the blues. In UNESCO courier 53 (7-8):34-35. http://www.unesco.org/courier/2000_07/uk/doss23.htm. Daoudi, Bouziane and Hadj Miliani. 1996. L'aventure du raï—Musique et société. Paris: Seuil. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual review of anthropology 31:419-447. de Haas, Hein. 2007. The myth of invasion: Irregular migration from West Africa to the Maghreb and the European Union. IMI Research Report, University of Oxford. Donaldson, Mike and Mike Howson. 2009. Men, migration and hegemonic masculinity. In Migrant men. Critical studies of masculinities and the migration experience, ed. Mike Donaldson, Raymond Hibbins, Richard Howson and Bob Pease, 210-217. London: Routledge.

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Ellingham, Mark, Orla Duane and Vanessa Dowell, eds. 1999. World music. Africa, Europe and the Middle East. London: Rough Guide. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1984]: Des espaces autres. In Dits et écrits, Vol. IV, 752-762. Paris: Gallimard. Friend, Melanie. 2010. Representing immigration detainees: The juxtaposition of image and sound in “Border Country”. Forum qualitative social research 11 (22) (unpaginated). Friese, Heidrun. 2007. Partire. Photoessay. http://www.hfriese.de. —. 2009a. The limits of hospitality. In Extending hospitality: Giving space, taking time, ed. M. Dikec, N. H. Clark und C. Barnett. Paragraph 32 (1):51-68. —. 2009b. En route. Photoessay. http://www.hfriese.de. —. 2010. The limits of hospitality. Political philosophy, undocumented migration and the local arena. In Borderlands. migration and social theory, ed. Heidrun Friese and Sandro Mezzadra. European journal of social theory 10 (3):299-333. —. 2011. The limits of hospitality. Undocumented migration and the local arena. The case of Lampedusa. In Crossing and controlling borders: Immigration policies and their impact on migrants’ journeys, ed. Mechthild Baumann et al., 249-272. Opladen: Budrich UniPress. —. 2013. Objects left behind. Ebook download available at the iTunes Store. Gazzah, Miriam. 2008. Rhythms and rhymes of life. Music and identification processes in Dutch-Moroccan youth. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gilligan, Chris and Carol Marley. 2010. Migration and divisions: Thoughts on (anti-)narrativity in visual representation of mobile people. Forum qualitative social research 11 (2) (unpaginated). Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. London and New York: Verso. Gross, Joan, David McMurray and Ted Swedenburg. 1994. Arab noise and Ramadan nights: raï, rap, and Franco-Maghrebi identities”. In Diaspora 3 (1):3-39. Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. Hogge, Allison. 2010. Unveiling Arab popular culture. University of Arkansas. http://researchfrontiers.uark.edu/6361.php. Jebens, Holger, ed. 2004. Cargo, cult, and culture critique. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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Labdelaoui, Hocine. 2009. ‘HARGA’ ou la forme actuelle de l’émigration irrégulière des Algériens. CARIM Notes d’analyse et de synthèse 18. Florence: Institut Universitaire Européen Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. Mehdid, Malika. 2006. For a Song: Censure in Algerian Rai Music. In Popular music and censorship in Africa, ed. Michael Drewett and Martin Cloonan, 199-214. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mig@Net. 2011. Transnational digital networks, migration and gender. Deliverable D5. http://www.mignetproject.eu. Nair, Parvati. 2007. Voicing risk: Migration, transgression and relocation in Spanish/Maroccan rai. In Music, national identity and the politics of location: Between the global and the local, ed. Ian Biddle and Vanessa Knights, 65-79. Aldershot: Ashgate. Noor Al-Deen, Hana. 2005. The evolution of rai music. Journal of black studies 35 (5): 597-611. Potter, Russell A. 1995. Spectacular vernacular: Hip-hop and the politics of post-modernism. Albany: SUNY Press. Rfi music. 2004. Biography of Cheb Hasni. http://www.rfimusique.com/siteen/biographie/biographie_7360.asp. Rogers, Richard. 2009. The end of the virtual: Digital methods. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Rose, Gillian. 2007. Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Rosello, Mireille. 2000. Rap music and French cultural studies. For an ethic of the ephemeral. In French cultural studies: Criticism at the crossroads, ed. Marie-Pierre Le Hir and Danav Strand, 81-102. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schade-Poulsen, Marc. 1999. Men and popular music in Algeria: The social significance of rai. Austin: University of Texas Press. Slater, Ron. 1997. Consumer culture and modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing capitalism. London: Sage. Virole, Marie. 1995. Le chanson rai. De l’algérie profonde à la scène internationale. Paris: Èditions Karthala. Worsley, Peter. 1968. The trumpet shall sound: A study of “cargo” cults in Melanesia. 2nd augmented ed. New York: Schocken Books.

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Appendix A Interactive Translations/Annotation Table 10-1. The first column displays a transcription of the song “Partir loin” by Rim-K 113 and Reda Taliani as appearing on the Lyricsmania forum.27 The second column shows a translation into English by the forum’s user “ELEEF”.28 The third column lists corrections of that translation by the user “rafik_40150”.29 Typos and/or further inaccuracies have deliberately not been altered. Annotation by Heidrun Friese. Transcription of “Partir loin” (Bledard ) Oué gros (113) Elle est où Josephine? (Bledard) Allez laissez moi de toi (113) Ah bon c’est comme ça (Bledard) Met ayinich (113) 113 taliani (Bledard) C’est bon Refrain (Reda) Y’al babour y’a mon amour khelejni mel la misere (113) Partir loin Fi bledi rani mahgoure Aïte aïte ou j’en ai marre (113) C’est bon! Manratish l’occasion

27

English translation of the lyrics by “ELEEF”

Corrections by “rafik_40150” (Where is Josephine? ‚Josephine’ = well-known song of Reda Taliani)

O boat, o my love Take me away from misery In my country , I’m tyrannized I am so tired and pissed off

I won’t miss the opportunity

“Partir loin”, available at: http://www.lyricsmania.com/. Available at: http://www.allthelyrics.com/forum/arabic-lyrics-translation/44112partir-loin-113-a.html. ELEEF / Senior Member / Join Date Dec 2008 / Thanks 72 / Thanked 335 Times in 164 Posts. 29 User “rafik_40150”, basic information: date of birth August 28, 1985; location, Algeria. 28

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(113) lela! fi bali sa fait longtemps hedi nenssetni qui je suis

(113) 113 nekhdem alia jour et nuit Y’al babor, y’a mon amour Khelejni mel la misère Evasion spécial mel l’Algerie l’occidentale

(113) Moi chui d’Kabilyfornie, on fumait 350 benji sur les bords dla corniche

It has been longtime in my country She made me forgot who I am

I work for her day and night

“bali” is my mind and thinking (not country) hedi (here he says "heda" not hedi) and heda means herrga to us, that is, illegal emigration so its “heda nenssetni qui je suis”: "the illegal emigration made me forget who I am" I’m working for it day and night

O boat, o my love Take me away from misery special evasion from Algeria to the Western

Hebchini merlich, rien à perdre, Rim’k l’malade mental Plus connu qu’le Haj mamba

Me, I am from Kabyl-fornia (it’s a place in algeria, was an ancian tribe called kabylie, u know, from where zinedine zidane is, so their people call it kabyl-fornia, cuz the cuz it’s name is close to California lol) we used to smoke 350 cigarettes stop me it’s ok, There’s nothing to lose , Rim-K the mental ill (the crazy) More known than the old Mamba

J’voudrais passer l’henné à ma bien-aimé avant qu’j’taille

I want to put the « henna » for my beloved (means to mary her) Before I get older

“occidentale” here doesn’t mean west of Algeria, but the West, that is the non-Arab world "special escape from Algeria to the occidental" meaning: special (illegal) emigration from Algeria to the occidental = the West = non Arab world)

(Haj Mamba, Hadj Mamba, or Marabout, islam. saint)

“Ya l’babour, ya mon amour”: Raï, Rap and the Desire to Escape Comme Cheb Hasni chui sentimentale, Partir loin Rien à perdre, vie à boston ou la cheba, laissez moi de toi Comme Robinson su une île, mon mouton j’l’appelerais mecredi Dès qu’l’avion atteri j’applaudi Comme les chibenis, j’vous rends la carte d’residence Un moment d’evasion, y’a ahmare lève toi et danse! (113) J’reste bledard, débrouillard J’t’annonce emmène moi loin d’la misère mon plus fidèle compagnon En route pour l’Eldorado, même en classe eco dirou sac à dos Partir loin, sans les cousins, les blacks arrachent c’est dur J’me considère chanceux d’être en vie pourvu qu’ça dure J’ai grandi qu’avec des voleurs J’aurais toujours les youyous qui résonnent dans ma tête

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Like Cheb Hasni (an algerian sentimental singer), I’m sentimental, Going far, we’ve nothing to lose Boston’s Life , or the beautiful woman? Like Robison (Chrusoe) on an island My sheep , I’ll call it Wednesday as soon as the airplane land I will applaud Like the old men , I will give you back the residence card A moment of an evasion , you stupid , stand up and dance I will remain always from north Africa , a smart I announce you , take me far from the misery The most faithful companion of mine is in his way to El Dorado Even in the school classes put the backpacks Going far without the cousins It’s hard I consider myself as lucky to be alive May it last (continue) I grew up only with thiefs I will always have the ‘youyou sounds’ that raciotinate (the youyous are kind of sounds made by women in arabic world expressing joy, like in marriage) inside my head, questing for happiness

(on the way to Eldorado even if in economy class)

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(Reda) Y’a bledi nti fik el khir

O my country, you have the well

Yi di ghi li endou el zahar

The one who is lucky can get it

Ye hecheri endou l’ktef

Only the strong one can live,

Ou te zidi loul belel bahar

and you add for him the money of the sea

Refrain (Reda)

el khir = blessing, benefaction ,wealth, riches (not goodness) Ύ˰˰˰ϳ ϱΩϼ˰˰˰Α Ζϧ΍ Ϛ˰˰˰˰ϴϓ ήϴ˰˰˰Ψϟ΍ "oh my country there is wealth on you" Yi di ghi li endou el zahar//for the one that has luck Ϫ˰˰˰˰ϳΪϳ ϲ˰˰˰Ϡϟ΍ ϭΪϨϋ ήϫΰϟ΍ "take it who has luck" Ye hecheri endou l’ktef//[B]and for the one that has shoulders ζ˰˰˰˰˰ϴόϳ ήϴ˰˰Ϗ ϲ˰˰˰Ϡϟ΍ ϭΪϨϋ ϑΎ˰˰˰˰ΘϜϟ ye3ish ghir eli 3endou lektafe "life only who have shoulders" shoulders: here means people with high positions in the society and help the others (cousins and friends) in getting a job for exemple Ou te zidi lou elma le elbehar//and you boost for him the wetness in the sea (you serve them by making them more confortable) ϱΰ˰˰ΗϭϮ˰˰˰˰ϠϳΩ ˯Ύ˰˰Ϥϟ΍ ή˰˰˰˰ΤΒϠϟ mean: that its dropp more water in sea = give more wealth for people thats rich allready

“Ya l’babour, ya mon amour”: Raï, Rap and the Desire to Escape (Reda) N’sacrifie woun dire

I sacrifice and I revenge

Enta lohek tena wouli shar Eheyeyaaaaaa (113) Algerie, Maroc, Tunisie (Reda) Ehyoudiehyouyoudi (113) Viens jt’emmène, viens viens, laissez moi de toi (Reda) Romen jamais i ghmel

Me too , I’m gonna be nob

(113) Oué viva JSK

Viva J.S.K (the name of the kabylie team, where he comes from)

Maghreb United Algerie, Maroc, Tunisie ! Reunifié Partir loin pour fuir les problèmes qu’on à dans la tete, Mec! Maghreb United Farid williams au clavier, Rachid le toulousain aux percus (Maghreb United )

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here he say: nesacrifi ou nedir edar ou het ana manwelish ϲϔϳήϛΎ˰˰˰˰˰˰˰μϧ ϭ ήϳΪ˰˰˰˰ϧ έ΍Ϊ˰˰ϟ΍ ϰΘ˰˰Σϭ Ύ˰˰ϧ΍ Ύϣ ζϴϟϮ˰˰˰˰˰ϧ i Sacrifice and i’ll make my own home and also me will not return back

Come on ,I will take you , come come e remel jamais yeghmel Ϟ˰˰ϣήϟ΍ ϲϣΎΟ Ϟ˰˰˰Ϥϐϳ the sand will never become ancient mean: that his idea of emigration will never become ancient or leave his mind (La Jeunesse Sportive de Kabylie, JSK – JS Kabylie)

CHAPTER ELEVEN “AS IT ECHOES SOUTH AND NORTH”: GIRLS AND BOYS SINGING IDENTITY INTO THE NATIONAL LANDSCAPE JOSEPHINE HOEGAERTS

I do not think I exaggerate when I say that school excursions are the most powerful means to develop children’s minds. What the best and most complete statements, comparisons or descriptions cannot make clear in three months, a moment’s observation or one excursion of a few hours can show indelibly and clearly.1

When in 1878, the children of the public primary schools of Brussels undertook their first substantial school trip, it was heralded as major progress in education. In Antwerp, where the young travellers had spent their trip, the event was reported in some local papers, which not only recognized these excursions as an adoption of the principle of object education (Anschauungsunterricht), but also their capacity to ignite youngsters’ passion for their country.2 In the 1870s and 1880s, Flemish schoolchildren not only visited the capital, but also undertook trips to the country’s southern, francophone region and travelled through Belgium for up to three days. 1 MAX, “Schoolreisjes”, De kleine gazet, June 27, 1877, held at the Antwerp City Archives (Stads Archief Antwerpen, henceforth SAA). In the original: “Ik geloof niet te overdrijven met de schoolreisjes te houden voor veruit het machtigste middel tot ontwikkeling van der kinderen geest? Wat de beste en volledigste bepalingen, vergelijkingen of beschrijvingen in geen drie maand kunnen duidelijk maken, dat doen een oogenblikje zien, dat verhelpt één schoolreisje van weinige uurtjes met onuitwischbare kracht en helderheid”. All translations by the author unless otherwise noted. 2 G. Haegens, “Schoolreisjes”, De koophandel van Antwerpen, [n.d.] 14, 196 and 197; MAX, “Schoolreisjes”, SAA.

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Despite some criticisms, most commentators and educators agreed that direct experience of the national landscape would instil bonding with and knowledge of the country. In order to process their first-hand experiences of the landscape and successfully transform them into proper patriotic feelings, however, pupils needed to be discursively guided by their teachers. During trips, teachers pointed out important or interesting sights, related contextual information (often in the form of national legends) and helped their charges interpret their experiences. In numerous articles in educational journals or even monographs on the subject, educators narrated real or imagined trips with children, in which teachers’ pedagogical discourses and children’s acts at their guidance were described (cf. Anon. 1896; Steylaert 1858). An important practice that helped link (direct) experiences of the national landscape with discourses of the nation was singing en route. At particularly picturesque spots or as a thank-you to their hosts, children would sing a canon of songs related to either the nation or the act of travelling. As I will aim to show below, the interplay between the physical experience of walking and singing, on the one hand, and the cognitive practice of seeing and hearing the subjects of the songs’ lyrics, on the other hand, was consciously employed as an educational method to breed patriotism and—ultimately—conscious citizenship. The practices of travelling and singing, then, were seen as a way to build a community of compatriots. Despite the collectivism implied in these practices, however, the particular activities and discourses during school trips also betray a number of attempts toward differentiation and exclusion inherent in the desired national community. Most notably, those excursions devoted to instilling patriotism in Belgian children were understood as heavily gendered attributes, cementing more explicitly political interpretations of citizenship (Dudink and Hagemann 2004; Dudink et al. 2007). What was “echoed south and north”, then, should not only be understood as a recurring discourse of nation: the musical practices during school excursions also provide us with echoes of gendered identities. More specifically, they give us a clue on how gender could be vocalized, and how gendered vocal practices were gradually learned throughout childhood and tied to specific, and often strictly controlled, geographical and cultural contexts. In this text, I will focus on the particular songs composed by “national” composers, compiled by educators and sung by children in Belgian public schools. Using sheet music as well as different descriptions of school trips at the end of the nineteenth century, I aim to piece together the musical practices of young travellers in order to analyse the process of transforming children into the gendered and nationalized

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adults educators envisioned.3 The story that follows is therefore mainly one of ideals and norms, underscoring the late nineteenth-century conviction that the manipulation of bodies could lead to moral education. Nevertheless, using these reports written by children and recounting their experiences and practices, I also aim to go beyond an understanding of children as “passive receptors of culture” or as “stages in the process of making an adult identity”. Following the suggestion of the historian of childhood Sanchez-Eppler, I aim to retrace the ways in which children learn “the language of moral life in the forms and phrases that have been taught to them” while also recognizing the active and conscious character of their reflexive writings after school trips (Sanchez-Eppler 2005, xvxvi). A reading of these reports should indeed take into account that, like children keeping a diary, these young travellers “recognize[d] writing as an important part of [their] learning” (ibid., 35). Moreover, because the reports were written by children but within an explicitly educational framework (and indeed constantly reproducing stock phrases), they also give an insight into what Sanchez-Eppler calls “the dualistic construction of childplay and adult responsibility”. The reports were not only designed to show gratitude but also to provide a showcase for teachers’ modern pedagogic endeavours and to elicit an affective reaction from the city council through the endearing tone of the reports. Rather than “missing how children may take for themselves and enjoy the very things adults intended as lessons”, these reports allow us to see how children could represent themselves as playful while also reproducing the desired results of a school excursion. (ibid., 40)

Vox manet Despite the many and detailed descriptions of school excursions, no accounts of failure or of children trying to counteract these disciplining practices have been recorded. Children’s singing practices in the city streets were occasionally reported—when complaints rose over the bawdy songs some boys had apparently intoned in the centre of Antwerp after school, for example—but similar instances on school trips seem not to 3 More specifically, I am basing my research on, firstly, the reports sent to the Antwerp municipal government by all public schools after their excursions at the end of the nineteenth century, held at the city archives, secondly, on the songs present in school manuals used by the Antwerp teachers and the ones presented in liberal educational journals and, thirdly, on the compositions of the Antwerp school of composers (headed by founder of the Antwerp Conservatory, Peter Benoit), which often collaborated with the local public schools.

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have taken place.4 This lack of different voices—and, more pointedly, of dissenting voices—in the source material is of course a familiar problem for historians. Verba volent, scripta manent, the saying goes, and historians of music in particular are aware of the voice’s volubility, often stressing the ephemeral character of the human voice and the active role of the audience in defining its meaning and identity (cf. Connor 2000; André 2006). French historian Arlette Farge, attempting a history of the spoken word in the eighteenth century, describes the voice as un fil sonore, sitôt évanoui; il [the voice] relie l’un à l’autre à travers le vent et le souffle, le mystère des aléas tremblés de cordes vocales portées par le larynx. (Farge 2009, 21)

In some cases, though, as Ovid knew, vox manet. In his Metamorphoses, the chattering nymph Echo is punished by Juno for her verbal distraction maneuvers: she is reduced to the repetition of others’ speech and can no longer produce her own narratives. However, on meeting the handsome Narcissus, the nymph proves to be everything but mute: by repeating parts of Narcissus’s discourse, she manages to get her own sensual message across to the unsuspecting boy. Once Narcissus finds out that the familiar voice seducing him belongs to Echo, he brutally rejects her advances. In this story of Narcissus and Echo, the body of the nymph withers and disappears, but her voice remains alive in the landscape. Like the nymph herself, however, her remaining voice only becomes audible when an intersubjective space is created by another speaker. Throughout history, this peculiar capacity of Echo (and, indeed, of the acoustic phenomenon of echo) has fascinated artists and scientists, and has led them to various (re)interpretations of the gendered qualities of speech and voice through analyses of the nattering nymph who was ultimately impossible to silence. Re-readings of the story of Echo by moralists, novelists, poets and psycho-analysts have resulted in a conundrum of different texts echoing Ovid as well as each other. Many of these accounts focus on issues of power and the way in which gender, authority and the capacity of speech intersect. Much of their interpretation depends on what part of Echo’s story they attach most importance to: Echo’s punishment and the loss of her ability to initiate speech, or Echo’s unrequited love and the loss of her body. In all representations and interpretations, however, 4

The city archives contain reports of “political songs” being handed out to children, the noise of roving gangs of little boys around the school and the need to counteract the influence of “disgusting songs of the street” (walgelijke straatliederen), SAA.

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Echo is a (young) woman, and most authors therefore see her story as an (admonitory) tale about femininity and its relationship with vocal performance. Early modern translations and stage adaptations of the story usually retain the cheeky, dissident character of Echo: using Narcissus’s words, she fashions her own sensual and witty discourse (Bloom 2007). Ovid had Echo famously answer Narcissus’s huc coeamus with coeamus, transforming his rather innocent question to meet into a seduction. Historians of literature and/or voice dealing with early modern texts on Echo tend to read works like Ovide moralisé as witnesses of the conflicts that arose between the classic, impertinent, Echo with her vocal authority and early-modern morality, in which women were seen as unrestrained chatterboxes but not necessarily as rational and free vocal agents. The story of Echo’s punishment easily fit into these morals, but her intelligent use of her “new” voice did not. Echo’s capacity for wit and sexual innuendo was preserved for the stage, but commentaries on Ovid’s story explained the natural phenomenon of echo in technical terms in order to disembody and disenfranchise the echoic voice. A commentary by George Sandys, for example, cited Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, which insisted on the predictability of the echoic voice (Sandys 1632). Echo did not interpret and consciously use others’ sounds to speak, these commentaries suggested, the echo just naturally bounced back deformed words. Psychoanalytical interpretations of the nymph seem to disenfranchise her even more. Freud famously ignored Echo and focused on Narcissus exclusively (feminizing him in the process). More recent psychoanalytical readings of the story do include Echo, but usually see her as essentially bereft of speech (Greenberg 1998). Echo is an in-fans (or hers is an infantile voice) in that she cannot speak (Cavarero 2005, 169). This view of the powerless woman, silenced by a narcissistic man who can love only himself, returns in the works of some late twentieth-century philosophers of gender and voice. Likening the mother tongue to mother’s milk, assigning female qualities to the voice and questioning Freud’s omission of Echo from the mythical story, feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Adriana Cavarero have interpreted Echo’s punishment as a mirror image of a more general endeavour to silence women and reduce them to responsive sound (thereby denying them self-initiated speech; Cavarero 2005). Gayatri Spivak, in a close reading of several psychoanalytical interpretations of Echo’s and Narcissus’s story, voices the necessity to “give woman to Echo”, suggesting that not only women’s voices are silenced through the appropriation of the nymph in discussions

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of narcissism, but that these readings also leave women bereft of a place from which to speak (Spivak 1993). Echo, like the acoustic phenomenon echo, is indeed also intimately connected to a sense of place. As Echo withered and died, her body was dispersed throughout the forests and woods and echoes “as disembodied voices” remain to “inhabit” these regions (Hollander 1981, 1). Even though Echo’s is an ephemeral voice, lacking a body to be emitted from, her sounds can be traced and located. The echo’s bounce back from a reflective surface allows the listener to gauge the dimension and quality of space. So much so, that the sound of echo can be used as a technique to call up an imaginary space within a recording or within a piece of music (Doyle 2005, 17). The echo thus not only allows us to hear the same music twice and therefore perceive how sound travels through space, it also gives us an opportunity to hear our own voice. As Peter Doyle has pointed out, we can imagine that, in the echo, something “which is not the self seems to talk to us with our own voice, using our own sounds” (2005, 39). Much like in literature, where “echoing” the themes and styles of others is a poetic reflexive practice and creates a shared, intersubjective space of artistic discourse, acoustic interaction with Echo creates an intersubjective space between the self and its sound (Hollander 1981 and Claes 1988). In order to retrace the history of gendered voices, then, echoes might be the right place to start. Where else would speakers and singers reflect on the sound of their voices than in the inter-subjective space between themselves and the resounding landscape? In listening in on the dialogues between singing children on school trips and the reverberating environment surrounding them, we might learn something about the value girls and boys attached to their own voices. Moreover, the skewed voices produced by echo would have allowed singers to slowly manipulate the constructions of identity inherent in the constant repetition of their vocal performances, thus gaining agency within the process of the construction of their own gendered bodies. As Tom Delph-Janiurek has suggested, the voice could and should be included when we historicize processes of gendered embodiment, and the disembodied voice of echo can possibly serve as a useful mirror to reflect images of gender in the nineteenth century (Delph-Janiurek 1999 and Butler 2004). The imagery of the echo as an invisible partaker in dialogue was explicitly used as an educational device in the nineteenth century. A story relating a conversation by a little boy called “Willem” with the echo was included in a reading manual from 1847. Like a modern day Narcissus, Willem does not recognize his own voice when the echo mirrors his speech. Complaining to his father that an unseen boy who “repeated

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everything” had been swearing and railing at him, he discovers that he has been offered a harsh look in an acoustic mirror—what Willem has experienced reproduces, according to his father, “the way of society”, in which those who abuse others will be abused.5 Chastened, he recognizes the infantile character of the echo’s (and therefore of his own) voice and he leaves his narcissistic childish identity behind (Pietersz 1847, 18). The story of Willem held a double lesson. On the one hand, it informed children of the mechanics of echo, while, on the other hand, it warned them against improper speech. The echoic lessons learned on school trips were also multifaceted. Children had the opportunity to experience how their voice reverberated through different parts of the country, while they also were instructed by their teachers in which songs were appropriate in different circumstances. And so songs in 2/4 time about travelling were sung while walking, and songs on the beauty of nature were performed while gazing at a specific panorama. The national anthem could be sung anytime and anywhere, but was often used as a way to thank friendly hosts for a meal, thus underlining the shared patriotism of singers and audience. Unlike Willem’s voice, however, these songs and the echoic sound they engendered were not clearly delineated. On the one hand, singing was seen as an active engagement with a passive landscape. The sound produced travelled, like the singers, through the country and explored its surface. However, on the other hand, the songs themselves were sometimes understood as echoes rather than as original sounds. Particularly in patriotic songs, the landscape reverberated as children sung of murmuring brooks or the whistling wind. In accounts of school excursions, the (rural) landscape of Belgium was allotted a role similar to that of Ovid’s withered Echo: its sounds could be individual and specific, despite its responsive nature. Additionally, much like Echo, the landscape was often imagined to be feminine.

Echoes from the Road As school excursions were treated as ideal opportunities for teachers to engage in object education, it is not surprising that the reports of these trips are riddled with accounts of sensory experiences. Children did not explicitly describe what they learned, but rather what they saw, felt, tasted, smelt and heard. They reminisced about the fine glass of beer they had enjoyed, exclaimed wonder over a panorama in the Ardennes or recalled their surprise at the particular sound of the Brussels clocks. The sounds 5

Pietersz (1847, 18): “Zoo gaat het ook doorgaens in de zamenleving”.

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most often described in the reports were those of the railway. From the moment of departure onward, the young travellers seem to have been transfixed by the whistles and hisses of their mode of transport. Moreover, the rhythm of the train was also that of their view of the landscape. The reports all stress—often unwittingly—the stark contrast between the loud rhythmic industrial train and the quiet, melodious and bucolic landscape seen from its windows (Schivelbusch 2007). Observing the country’s fields and far-off villages also inspired pupils to imagine the sounds pertaining to these natural landscapes. One boy, for example, described a milkmaid sweetly singing in the fields. He could not possibly have heard her, of course, but he obviously associated sweet-voiced milkmaids with the picturesque view his modern vantage point gave him. Once they left the train, other sounds took over. Visiting cities, there often seems to have been too much to see and hear, and children struggled to keep their stories in check. When travelling the countryside, however, travellers apparently experienced the landscape as a calm, orderly and welcoming place. Apart from some modest ambient sounds, most acoustics were provided by the children themselves. It is hard to glean from the reports just how much and how often one sang on a school excursion, but the casual way in which children mentioned their singing suggests that it not only happened regularly on school trips, but was also a normal part of their day at school. The children as well as their occasional audience seem to have fully expected singing sessions. For teachers, these singing sessions may have been more momentous and consciously staged occasions. One pupil penned how he “almost forgot” that he “also sung the national anthem”, possibly nudged by a corrector anxious to show the mayor that he had used his time on the road well and had educated his charges in matters national.6 The national anthem or the Brabançonne was a set part of pupils’ travelling repertoire. It featured all of the characteristics that travelling songs seem to have needed. Although children did not always specify song titles, and some of the titles are not identifiable, one can roughly distinguish three characteristics in the songs returning on school excursions. Firstly, many songs contained descriptions of the national landscape. They neither necessarily described the region visited, nor were they always very place-specific (one could argue that gargling brooks or green treetops are not exclusively found in Belgium), but the natural and geological phenomena of which children sang were, in the songs’ 6

R. Hellebuick, “Beschrijving van het schoolreisje naar Brussel”, SAA: “Maar ik zou u nog vergeten te zeggen dat wij na het eten het Vaderlandslied zongen en ons nog fel vermaakten”.

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narrative, nevertheless, encased within a national framework. Secondly, many of the songs mentioned in reports stressed the singers’ emotional ties to the nation. They spoke of love—mainly of the filial kind—and of loyalty. Thirdly, the grand majority of the songs branded as “travelling songs” were vigorous, rhythmic songs resembling military marches: in 2/4 time, with well-defined melodic leaps and little dynamic. The Brabançonne had started out as a revolutionary song, written during the revolution of the 1830s in partial imitation of the French Marseillaise and focussing on the Belgian fight for independence from the Dutch. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the lyrics of the Brabançonne had been changed. Rather than describing Belgium’s servile history (“des siècles d’esclavage”, as the original lyrics stated), the new anthem described—and thereby helped to create—a Belgian national landscape. The lyrics described the country as stretching “from Hesbaye to the Flemish beach, from north to south, along the shores of Scheldt and Meuse”, and thus the Brabançonne left its revolutionary identity behind to become a national anthem rather like the German one, focusing on what would later seem to be the country’s “historical geography”, and thereby acquiring a sheen of permanence and continuity (Bohlman 2004, 35). Moreover, the practice of singing played an important role in the anthem’s lyrics as well. The Belgians were not only to “jubilate in broad, full chords”, they were also to show that they were a manly people by singing in a manly way and while their hearts “tremble[d] with noble pride”, thus tying the national landscape, through vigorous singing, to an honourable and manly emotion. Considering children’s inability to recall the titles of songs sung (or indeed even the act of singing more generally), we probably should not overestimate the educational or emotional impact that particular songs had. The goal of repertoire chosen by the teachers is clear, however. Children were to bring the national knowledge and emotion they had learned about in school into practice by developing a consciously patriotic identity, tied to the nation as a tangible object. Patriotism, in travelling and singing, became an embodied and situated practice that could be encouraged and guided by teachers, but was in the final instance acted out by children themselves. Thus, by engaging all their senses, the excursion proved to be the ultimate object lesson, and the ultimate moment of identity formation. In keeping with educational theories of the Enlightenment, such as those of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, the school excursion would turn every child into a modern-day Emile, ready to discover the world in what was considered to be a more natural, and therefore, more effective manner. Ideally, it would provide children with a carefully controlled sense of self.

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The reports children wrote after coming home can be read as manifestations of this “self” as it was envisioned by educators. In these pieces of writing, the intended audience—the city aldermen and mayor— could detect the perfect citizen-to-be schools attempted to create in the flesh as well: disciplined, patriotic, well-behaved, healthy, and, surprisingly perhaps, very young. When consulting the few lists of the excursions’ participants that have been preserved in the archives, one cannot help but be surprised at the advanced age of these children. Most children on the trips were well over twelve, and yet their reports dutifully paint the image of cute, innocent little children frolicking in the fields and marvelling at every single piece of technology.7 It makes little sense to try to find out if their abiding marvel was “real”, but I would suggest that the childhood that appears in these reports was one constructed (and perhaps wished for) in a disciplinary and educational context, rather than the reflection of the experiences of teenagers who would typically be wageearners at the time of travelling. Rather than “conjuring up more adult selves” (Sanchez-Eppler 2005, 20), these children wilfully recreated an image of dependency and innocence that would be associated with childhood. Unlike youth, gender was not stressed in these reports. Girls and boys participated in identical travel programs, described identical activities and were supposed to gain identical knowledge during these trips. One almost has the impression that the childish community en route consisted of gender-neutral beings, their youthful innocence precluding identity formations bound up with adult roles and the sexual identities related to these. However, late nineteenth-century schools were anything but genderneutral: school manuals teemed with allusions to male professions and female housework, illustrations in books and on the walls clearly depicted bourgeois sensibilities of gender-appropriate clothing for children and adults, while spatial arrangements increasingly stressed the physical separation of boys and girls at school (Eggermont 2001). When going on trips, girls’ and boys’ schools typically went separately, on different dates. Moreover, singing practices comprised a range of gendered performances. Even though both boys and girls generally resorted to the same repertoire of songs describing the landscape and love for the fatherland, and encouraging physical movement, the gendered discourse in the song lyrics and the way in which these songs were usually performed turned the act of singing into a moment of active gender construction. The 7

The Antwerp City Archives contain a number of lists of pupils taking part in short excursions (e.g. to the local zoo), and in longer trips, most dating between 1886 and 1891.

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songs differentiated between boys and girls—be it potential singers themselves or the boys and girls “of the nation” more generally. Girls and boys had separate roles in the country and fit into its landscape in different ways. Most typically, of course, boys would be described as potential soldiers (but they could also be seamen or farmers in the making). Girls were usually seen as potential mothers (but that did not preclude them from an identity as artists’ daughters or peasant women). For example, in a cantata by Jan Blockx, girls sang of “mother’s home, so quiet and peaceful”, while boys intoned how they “heard father’s word”, thereby already ascribing acoustic characteristics to differently gendered performances of domesticity.8 Rather unsurprisingly, boys were also called upon to sing with force and gusto more often than girls were. Gender differentiation became even more obvious when children sang about adult identities constructed in this national framework. The nation itself was often described as a motherly woman towards whom especially boys were to feel filial duties and exhibit their willingness to shed their blood, with songs stating, for example, that once grown up, they would “get saber, gun and lead” and would “owe it to the fatherland” to shed their blood.9 Other songs framed children’s singing practices in a context of generational continuity, perhaps referring to a more anthropocentric definition of nation. A text entitled “The song” by Emmanuel Hiel, for example, recounted how a song performed by boys and girls was heard and appreciated by a father, a mother and elders. They each express a different interpretation of the acoustic experience. The father hears in the children’s song their prospective identity as labourers, and therefore identifies the song as “glorious” and “forceful” and as originating from “fit chests”. The mother characterizes the song not only as “forceful” but also as “tender” and localizes it in the singers’ hearts rather than their chests. The song is, according to this maternal second verse, predicting how the singers “will love”. The final and third verse represents yet another reading of the song “from a child’s mouth”, in which elders emit a sigh of pleasure over a sound they define as intrinsically youthful and as a precondition for “good breeding”.10 8

Jan Blockx and H. Melis, Vlaanderens grootheid, Ons vaderland, Gloria patriare: Cantate voor meisjes en knapenstemmen, SAA: “Moeders huis, hoe stil, hoe vredig”,”Daar klonk vaders woord”, “En we hooren moeders liedeken”. 9 “Voor vorst en vaderland”, Verzameling vaderlandsche schoolzangen, 21-23, “Ik word eens sterk, ik word eens groot / Dan krijg ik sabel, roer en lood / en roep: ziet makkers, thans mijn bloed / voor vorst en vaderland te goed”. 10 “De vader luistert ’t lieken na / en zegt: wat is het schoon, o ja! / zoo gaan zij ´ééns aan ’t werken / een heerlijk lied / een krachtig lied / dat uit hun frissche

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The more specific knowledge we have from children’s formally staged singing practices points to yet another way to acoustically imprint gender on school children. Composers of grand cantatas—and these were mainly identical to the composers of travel songs—often assigned different lines to boys and girls. This resulted not only in the association of different textual motives with a gendered identity, but also in different musical practices for groups differentiated by both gender and age. In a cantata entitled “The Muse of History”, Peter Benoit composed a dialogue between the male and female voices which were also spatially separated on stage, each gender on one side of the orchestra. Women: Freedom is a man’s honor, We love him, Whose eyes say: Let the sons be free as well! When he draws the sword in need or in mourning Our hearts and souls will stay true to this hero! Men: Let women’s sweet mouths Now sing of men’s honor … O lovely hour, What flows from their lips Enthralls us! And the love of country and freedom Glows in their bosoms!11

During school trips, such complex polyphonous practices were impossible, but as both teachers and pupils would be familiar with gendered borsten schiet, zal hun gemoed versterken ... De moeder luister ’t lieken na / en zegt: wat is het schoon,o ja! / zoo zullen zij beminnen / een teeder lied, een krachtig lied / dat rein uit hunne herten schiet / zal hun de zielen winnen ... En de oude lieden zien het na / ze zuchten: o ’t is schoon, o ja! / zoo kweekt men brave menschen / een lustig lied, een heerlijk lied / dat frisch uit kinderherten schiet / wat kan men beters wenschen?”. (Hiel n.d., 9) 11 “Vrouwen / Vrij-zijn eert den man: h`em beminnen wij / Uit wiens oogen spreekt: ‘Ook de zonen vrij!’ / Trekt hij het zwaard in nood of rouw, / Met hart en ziel zijn wij den held getrouw! / Mannen / Laat zoete vrouwenmonden / Nu mannenlof verkonden ... / O Schoone, schoone stonden! / Wat van haar lippen vloeit, / Hoe houdt het ons geboeid! / ’t Is land- en vrijheidsliefde / Die in haar boezems gloeit!”. (Benoit and De Geyter 1880)

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and embodied interpretations of multi-voiced music, the specific choice of repertoire while on the road might have been influenced by these concert experiences.

The Composer as Narcissus? Although the direct control of children’s singing was in the hands of teachers, the role of composers in this “civilizing” and gendering process should not be underestimated. Especially in the case of the urban schools of Antwerp and Ghent, the musicians of the conservatory maintained excellent relations with local schools and teaching personnel, which often resulted in their collaboration in large symphonic projects, in which teachers and children constituted most of the choir. They also provided the schools with a repertoire teachers seem to have felt they lacked: especially in Flanders, a number of educators bemoaned the loss of local tradition, and the new patriotic canon created by contemporary composers was warmly welcomed, as its ubiquitous presence in school manuals shows.12 Like a modern Narcissus, composers provided children with sounds they could echo. Or was it rather the composer who did the echoing? The modern image of the composer as an individual and original genius, combined with children’s presumed lack of agency, would make the Narcissus-composer parallel a perfect fit. The reappearance of a relatively small number of composers in school manuals effectively created the image of a small family or a national pantheon of composers. As historians Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel have pointed out, the pantheon could serve as a reminder of the nation’s debt to its heroes. Depicting a “family album” of forefathers, “the pantheons reminded people … that the legacy of the nation’s benefactors also imposed a heavy duty: their example had to be followed”, and thus composers’ grand names were to be as inspirational as the songs they had offered to the nation (Tollebeek and Verschaffel 2004, 12 School inspector Huberti, in his report on the quality of music education in the city schools, stressed the importance of folk songs in the curriculum as well. In 1880, his report resulted in a long and polemic correspondence with the city council on the specific function of music theory and “authentic” folk songs respectively. The city council seems to have preferred a more theoretical curriculum than musicians did (although they changed their minds some years later). What the correspondence shows in the first place, though, is how much importance non-musicians accorded to music courses in primary schools at the end of the nineteenth century. “Enseignement du chant. Rapport de Mr Huberti: January 24, 1880”, SAA.

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95). Their example was, moreover, an explicitly masculine one, as pantheons “explicitly demonstrate that nations collect their male heroes under the rubric of originality, creativity and virility” (Biddle and Gibson 2009, 2). But the songs these musicians wrote were in no way individual or original work. The canon of patriotic songs crafted throughout the second half of the nineteenth century was the result of bricolage rather than originality. Composers combined and rearranged familiar motives into new compositions. This made it easier to teach them to “the people” (including children) and also strengthened the widespread notion that their songs belonged to an older national tradition. The familiarity of the songs’ musical language possibly also facilitated the process of relating to the songs’ content emotionally. The poets responsible for the songs’ lyrics, meanwhile, exhibited a similar echoic nature. All songs shared the same language, constantly echoing each other, but rather than acknowledging this intertextuality, the lyrics claimed to be echoes of the national landscape and history. Even though poets’, like composers’, status as individual heroic geniuses went unquestioned, their identification as national poets or even fathers of the nation nevertheless included them in a larger collective of shared traditions and a shared experience of space and belonging. Poets like Jan Van Beers or Jules Degeyter regularly reappeared in anthologies of song and poetry, were eulogized in educational, artistic and political journals, their funerals were often attended by large crowds of officials, teachers and children; streets were named after them and statues were erected in their honour. Constituting the nation’s cultural landscape, they therefore also became part of the space of the nation after their death. Rather than constituting a separate artistic world, then, these songs reflected the nation as a particular masculine, middle-aged elite saw it. Songs did indeed “echo” the Flemish rural landscape, the Walloon industry, the country’s pre-national history and a plethora of similar songs, but these echoes were filtered by creative artists who had a cultural background and a political agenda of their own. This is perhaps most clearly exemplified by the collaborative works of Peter Benoit and Julius De Geyter. Both carried a torch for a particular brand of nationalism that positioned Flanders at the centre of its frame of reference. Both were educators, artists and active members of the Flemish movement. And both contributed to a canon of songs for Antwerp’s school children (Dewilde 2001). This flamingant duo was responsible for the single most popular travelling song of the nineteenth century. “Wij reizen om te leeren” (We travel in order to learn) appeared in almost every school songbook and was

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taught to generations of Flemish children well into the 1950s. At first sight, the song seems merely to echo the landscape (or maybe a geography class): the children sing their view of “mountains and valleys” and describe the “mines of copper, bluestone and metal”. However, the song also very openly invites the formation of a particular identity. By singing that they were “on their way to the Walloons”, the singers would of course self-identify as Flemish. And the final words of each verse, promising an “iron” soul as the result of all this travelling, paints a colourful image of the kind of citizenry De Geyter envisioned. The vigorous “iron” characteristics of the young travellers was further underlined by Benoit’s musical translation of the text, which gave the souls’ “steel” the necessary weight by marking it with a major chord in what is otherwise mainly a song in unison. Artists like De Geyter and Benoit were key players in the Flemish canon song production and were therefore also instrumental in the production of acoustic national and gendered identities. They were largely responsible for the recurring repetition and re-interpretation of familiar gender tropes such as the sweet and melodious quality of female voices, the low pitch of the masculine voice, the roughness of male discourse, and the dependent character of the adult woman. In many ways, composers and poets were the ones producing the intersubjective spaces between original sound and echo, their work serving as the interface between singers and landscape. In doing so, their own identity seems to disappear: composers placed themselves (temporarily) outside the imagined community and outside the tangible landscape in order both to observe and turn them into sounding boards of each other. When considering the sanitized and repetitive canon of patriotic songs, one could almost forget the presence of composers as returning motives and phrases seem to mechanically echo each other. At the time of their artistic activity, however, these artists were highly visible. Benoit often took to the stage as conductor for the performance of his own cantatas. Georges Eeckhoud, who had witnessed his performances on the Antwerp Groenplaats, described a fictionalized version of the composer-conductor in his novel La nouvelle Carthage: [il] rappelait, avec sa haute taille, sa coupe robuste, son masque léonin, sa crinière abondante, sa complexion sanguine, la figure du maître des dieux dans Jupiter et Mercure chez Philémon et Baucis, de Jordaens. C'était, sinon un païen, du moins un "Renaissant" que ce Brabançon. Rien, ni au physique, ni au moral, des types émaciés, blafards et béats, des primitifs à la Memlinck et à la Van Eyck. Il avait converti au panthéisme l'oratorio chrétien du vieux Bach. (Eeckhoud 1888, 134)

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Benoit was also included in a compilation of patriotic songs by Jozef Moulckers. Presented as the archetypical masculine, rational man—suited and bearded—he appeared as part of a specific collective: that of the musicians’ pantheon. Even the composers of travelling songs, then, though only symbolically present during these school excursions, carried their own gendered characteristics and contributed to the power balance in the songs’ acoustic intersubjective space.

Hoera! (A Conclusion) Whereas Benoit mainly specialized in large symphonic works, heavily orchestrated and requiring massive choirs (of up to 1500 singers), his contemporary and fellow figurehead of music education in Antwerp, Edouard Gregoir, focused rather on accessible, portable songs. Gregoir was perhaps less visible as a musician, but he was very active as an educator and managed to be present in debates on the need for music in the primary school curriculum, the interdependence of music and physical education, and the role of choral music in the fabric of the modern urban community. Rather than aiming to dazzle and move large audiences with an original work of genius, Gregoir wrote functional pieces of moralizing and patriotic music, borrowing well-known and often folkloric themes, motives and rhythms to contribute to a homogenized and sanitized canon of the kind of music he considered appropriate for schoolchildren. One of his compositions, entitled “Hoera”, a two-part harmony set to a text by Dela Montagne is a typical example of how lyrics, composition, singing practices and the landscape could converge in one moment of conscious construction of a nation of gendered citizens through music. Dela Montagne’s text expresses all the appropriate patriotic sentiments and gendered norms one would expect to find in a travelling song at the end of the nineteenth century. The singers start by giving voice to a general sense of joy, which they then connect to the “Flemish region”, the “fathers’ mores”, and the “mighty past”. In the second verse, it becomes clear that the patriotism put forward in the song is inherently gendered as the singers look forward to becoming “men, and brave ones, the defenders of welfare and hearth”. The connection to the past and the forefathers that was already part of the first verse is, at that point, imbued with notions of filial love and boys’ ambitions to live up to their fathers’ example. In the last phrases of the song, the lyrics locate their beloved region in Europe and the world, voicing the singers’ supposed hope that Flanders will acquire a place of honour in this international context.

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Different echoes play a role in this patriotic song. The themes of the lyrics are in constant dialogue with the emerging national canon. The image of sons “swearing” on their fathers’ graves to do their duty for the country, for example, echoes the more famous and highbrow song “They have long been buried” (Ze liggen lang begraven) by Emmanuel Hiel and Lode Mortelmans. Gregoir included even more echoic qualities into the musical setting of the song. When singing that their love of the region was to reverberate “south and north”, the two vocal parts partially overlap in repetition, thus creating an imaginary space in which the singers’ voices actually seem to echo, seem to reach the region they are singing about and bounce back from its forests and rocks. Finally, in describing the beloved country as the “Flemish region”, the song circumscribed its own reverberating space. Rather than dealing with the whole Belgian nation, like Benoit’s “Wij reizen om te leren”, this song lent itself to marching in a smaller but equally emotionally charged landscape. When young singers of “Hoera” heard their own voices speak back to them through the landscape, they would heard not only Flemish voices—as the echo threw back their language and accent—but also voices issued from an inherently Flemish place. The intersubjective place created by the intonation of “Hoera” was one populated with Flemish men: sons and fathers, or young singers and their heroic predecessors. It is, in fact, by creating this intersubjective place that a national history and a national landscape could come into being. By appropriating the role of the patriot in touch with a long “national” history, young boys not only fashioned their own identities as citizens, but also the community in which their citizenship would be valued. It could be argued that, in combining the reports of school trips with specific sheet music that would have been taught for these trips, the national singing and citizenship have been harnessed, so that we as historians can now read series of literal and symbolic echoes in the pages. In reducing our story to these disciplinary written documents, however, we are writing Echo out of the story, and denying her and the young children entering into a dialogue with her, any agency. Reading the school trip merely as a part of the road towards citizenship and sheet music as recordings of emotional singing practices, one has to accept the premise that these young singers were passive receivers of educational wisdom and that they internalized the message of their songs unquestioningly. It is here, I think, that Echo’s mythological gift for wit and distortion could offer a valuable contribution to research, and that she should be granted a place to speak from. This means, of course, lending Echo our own voices, stepping into an intersubjective space of our own creation and

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allowing it to bounce back our interpretations of these travelling songs. Undertaking the experiment with “Hoera” in March 2010, the singers gathered (in a chapel with great amplification of echo, in this instance) not only proved to be sensitive to the echoic qualities of the song, but their shared estrangement from and hilarity over the now largely meaningless lyrics also resulted in distorted textual motives bouncing back from the chapel’s walls. Some singers spontaneously corrected what is now seen as faulty grammar, or substituted the more old fashioned terms with their own rhymes. Rather than a unified patriotic sound, what was produced was firstly a cacophonous collection of misunderstandings and rebellious rewriting. Not surprisingly, several attempts were needed to get a recording without suppressed laughter cutting through the song’s dramatic echo. Recreating these songs, stepping into the intersubjective space with echo, will only bounce back our own voices, and thus the historical actors, to which we would perhaps like to give a voice, will remain as silent as before. Nevertheless, it might allow Echo to reclaim her place on the historical stage as “the instrument of the possibility of a truth not dependent upon intention, a reward uncoupled from, indeed set free from, the recipient” (Spivak 1993, 183). At the very least, the practice of singing and its results should alert us to the active role young singers played in creating their own citizenship, the resistance they might have brought against (parts of) the lyrics they were given to sing, their inability to assume a proper attitude and perhaps their active embrace of patriotic values. If the enthusiasm with which these children wrote about their school trips in their reports to the city council was perhaps guided or even forced upon them, we should nevertheless allow for the possibility that they consciously enjoyed the partial freedom a school trip allowed them, and that they knew how to employ this limited freedom in order to carve out their own, less straightforward, road toward citizenship.

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uitvoering op de Groenplaats den 21n Autusti 1880. Antwerp: L. Dela Montagne. Biddle, Ian and Kirsten Gibson, eds. 2009. Masculinity and Western musical practice. Burlington: Ashgate. Bloom, Gina. 2007. Voice in motion: Staging gender, shaping sound in early modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bohlman, Philip V. 2004. Music, nationalism, and the making of the new Europe. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. London: Routledge. Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For more than one voice. Toward a philosophy of vocal expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Claes, Paul. 1988. Echo’s echo’s: De kunst van de allusie. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Van Tilt. Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A cultural history of ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delph-Janiurek, Tom. 1999. Sounding gender(ed): Vocal performances in English university teaching spaces. Gender, place & culture, 6 (2):137153. Dewilde, Jan. 2001. Me voici à Paris. Parijse brieven (1859-1863) van Peter Benoit. Antwerpen: Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven. Doyle, Peter. 2005. Echo and reverb: Fabricating space in popular music recording, 1900-1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Dudink, Stefan and Karen Hagemann. 2004. Masculinity in politics and war in the age of democratic revolutions, 1750-1850. In Masculinities in politics and war. Gendering modern history, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh, 3-21. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark, eds. 2007. Representing masculinity: Male citizenship in modern western culture. London: Palgrave. Eekhoud, Georges. 1888. La nouvelle Carthage. Brussels: Kistemaeckers. Eggermont, Betty. 2001. The choreography of schooling as a site of struggle: Belgian primary schools 1880-1940. History of education, 30 (2):129-140. Farge, Arlette. 2009. Essai pour une histoire des voix au dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Bayard. Greenberg, Judith. 1998. The echo of trauma and the trauma of echo. American Imago 55:319-347. Hollander, John. 1981. The figure of echo: a mode of allusion in Milton and after. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Hiel, Emmanuel. n.d. Liederen en gezangen voor groote en kleine kinderen, Brussels: J. Lebègue. Pietersz, J. 1847. Eerste leesboek voor de hoogste klas eener lagere school in dicht en ondicht. Mechelen: Kops-Suetens. Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. 2005. Dependent states. The child’s part in nineteenth-century American culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sandys, George. 1632. Ovid’s metamorphoses. Oxford: John Lichfield. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 2007. Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert. 4th ed. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Echo. New literary history 24 (1):1743. Steylaert, J.J. 1858. Een speelreisje in België. Behelzende schilderachtige en geschiedkundige beschryvingen der landstreken en nationale gedenkstukken, zeden, gebruiken en instellingen, levensschetsen van beroemde Belgen. Ghent: Van Doosselaer. Tollebeek, Jo and Tom Verschaffel. 2004. Group portraits with national heroes: The pantheon as an historical genre in nineteenth-century Belgium. National identities 6 (2):91-106.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Magdalena Waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. She is currently an assistant professor of East European history and culture at the University of Bremen, Germany. She is the author of Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany (Oxford University Press, 2013). Oksana Sarkisova is a film historian, researcher at the Open Society Archives (CEU) and director of the International Documentary Film Festival Verzio (Budapest). She has co-edited Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008) and published on Russian and Eastern European cinema and amateur photography. Ana Sobral is a research assistant and lecturer in the Department of British and American Studies at Konstanz University, Germany. She is the author of Opting Out: Deviance and Generational Identities in American Post-War Cult Fiction (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2012) and has published, among others, in the European Journal of English Studies (2012). Katharine Leiska teaches musicology at the Hochschule für Musik in Nuremberg and works as a curatorial assistant in the collection of musical instruments at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. She graduated from Uppsala University and received her PhD from the University of Kiel. She is the author of Skandinavische Musik in Deutschland um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main, 2012). Mario Dunkel is a PhD candidate and lecturer in American Studies at the Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany. His MA thesis dealt with the music of Charles Mingus and was published as Aesthetics of Resistance: Charles Mingus and the Civil Rights Movement (Münster: Lit, 2012). He has published in American Music and the Word and Music Studies series (Rodopi).

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Tal Soker studied musicology in Berlin and Tel-Aviv, and is now completing his doctoral dissertation on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's Berlin concertos. His research interests span from eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics to the relations between music and society in contemporary Israeli music. Ailbhe Kenny is a lecturer and Coordinator of Music Education at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has published internationally in such journals as the British Journal of Music Education and International Journal of Music Education. E-mail: [email protected]. Davide Ceriani is an assistant professor of musicology at Rowan University. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at Columbia University (2011-2013) and holds a PhD in musicology from Harvard University (2011), an MA in musicology from the University of Florence (2003) and a diploma in Saxophone from the Conservatory of Bologna (1999). Christina Taylor Gibson is an assistant professor of musicology in the Rome School of Music at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C. She received her PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park with a dissertation about Mexican music in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. She has published, among others, in American Music (2012). Ulrike Präger is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Boston University, where she is also a teaching fellow. She has published in Ethnomusicology Review (2011) and will contribute to the handbook Medien und Praktiken der Erinnerung an Flucht und Vertreibung (forthcoming from Campus, 2014). Heidrun Friese teaches social anthropology at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/M. She is the author of, among others, Geglücktes Leben (Berlin: Europäischer Universitätsverlag, 2011) and has also published in Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures (2012), The Journal of Theory and Practice and European Journal for Social Theory (2010). Personal website: http://www.hfriese.de, e-mail: [email protected].

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About the Authors

Josephine Hoegaerts is a post-doctoral researcher of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) at Leuven University. She has published, among others, in BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review (2012) and Gender, Place and Culture (2010).