Presentation Abstracts

Sounds of Two Worlds:
Music as a Mirror of Migration
to and from Germany

September 13 and 14, 2002
Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Free and open to the public

Abstracts

Jim Leary
“Dutchmen and Dialect Songs”

German-American identity, throughout the United States but particularly in the Upper Midwest, has been constructed and sustained through an array of cultural symbols and performances involving complex negotiations within and between putative “German” ingroups and “American” outgroups. Such negotiations suffuse the largely unexamined genre of broken-English dialect songs by entertainers who typically assume a rotund, horn-blowing, beer-drinking, pretzel- chomping, polka-dancing Dutchman persona. This presentation will illustrate and ponder genre and persona, while explaining the existence of the Happy Schnapps Combo and why, as Syl Groeschl says, “Ve Get So Soon Oldt, Und Ve Get So Late Schmardt.” [On-Line Paper]

Scott Lopas
“Integrating Euro-Ethnic Music into American Mainstream Radio”

One of the few radio stations in the country programming 80+ hours of polka music, predominantly rooted in German, Swiss, Slovenian, Polish, Bohemian, and Austrian folk music, WTKM Radio in Hartford, WI, has incorporated polka music into its daily programming to some extent for over 50 years. The balance of local information, polka, classic country, and local talk has earned the station an extremely loyal listening audience throughout southeast Wisconsin and now globally via the internet. While maintaining such a unique format can be challenging, serving a niche audience also can be very satisfying and rewarding.

B. Venkat Mani
“Other Sounds in Another City: Turkish Music in Germany”

This paper examines the presence of Turkish music in Germany in the post-World War II period, after the arrival of the first Gastarbeiter in West Germany. It also focuses on the second life of hybrid, westernized Turkish music in clubs and bars in German metropolises and documents the liberation of Turkish music from official cultural institutions to its proliferation in today’s German culture. Referencing popular singers such as Aziza and Tarkan, the paper also reflects on the concept of “World Music”: a trade-specific term of the music industry in the context of immigration and globalization.

Pamela Potter
“American Musical Life and Its German Builders: A 200-Year Overview”

This paper traces how German immigrants provided the main impetus for structuring a classical music tradition in the United States. Although World War I created a period of anti-German sentiment that seriously affected American music, World War II revived the German influence and brought it to new heights with the huge influx of German talent who could be welcomed as victims of the Nazi regime. Since then, the influence of American popular music on German culture has significantly tipped the balance of the German-American musical exchange, but the legacy of German immigration remains in full force in American classical music.