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

Ann Reagan
“German-American Music Societies and Nationalistic Sentiment during the Late Nineteenth Century”

The decades encompassing the Napoleonic Wars (“War of Liberation” to the Germans) and the Franco-Prussian War witnessed a tremendous surge of nationalism in the German states and principalities, both politically and in the arts. It is therefore not surprising that the final victory over the French in 1871 resulted in elaborate celebrations, including numerous compositions extolling the virtues of the German nation, the Kaiser, and ancient Teutonic culture. What may seem remarkable is that the overt nationalism inherent in these works was not limited to the Fatherland; German-American composers and musicians were if anything, prouder than the Germans.

Joel E. Rubin and Rita Ottens
“Sounds of the Vanishing World: Yiddish Music in Contemporary Germany”
Website: http://www.rubin-ottens.com

This paper will combine the experiences of Joel Rubin as a Jewish-American performer and scholar in Germany since the late 1980s with the research of German music sociologist Rita Ottens on the German klezmer movement since Reunification, a movement in which mostly non-Jews are performing the music, (pro)claiming it and the culture of annihilated East European Jewry as their means of expression, and showing at the same time both continuities and discontinuities with pre-war anti-Semitism. The German klezmer movement is an important territory where a new place for Jews in the reunified German nation-state is being negotiated by Germans for Germans.

Helmut G. Schmahl
“America non cantat? German Views of Nineteenth-Century Music in America”

For many Germans nineteenth-century America seemed both a paradise of political freedom and at the same time a cultureless desert. Their dislike of musical expression in the United States—a genre partly rooted in Puritan and other English traditions—has to be seen in the broader cultural context. This presentation will focus on accounts of immigrants or visitors from Central Europe who commented on the musical life in the “land without nightingales,” as the country was called by the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau in 1832.

Christoph Wagner
“Old World Hillbillies—Alpine Music Entertainers on Tour through the US in the 1920s”

Musical entertainment was provided by ensembles from within the Swiss-American communities until the 1920s, when bands from the old homeland such as the Moser Brothers and The Scheidegger Seven crossed the Atlantic to tour the Swiss communities circuit. These extended tours became a big success and audiences in great numbers were attracted by the emblems of “Swissness.” This evoked feelings of homesickness and the longing for the alpine mountains while providing comfort at the same time.
[On-Line Paper]

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