Citation (1)
Map of Germany
Citation: Country Map (Germany), in Europa World online. London, Routledge. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Retrieved 11 August 2021 from http://www.europaworld.com/entry/de.MAP
Books
Burning down the Haus by
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Rolling Stone * BookPage * Amazon * Rough Trade Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence "[A] riveting and inspiring history of punk's hard-fought struggle in East Germany." --The New York Times Book Review "A thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world." --Rolling Stone "Original and inspiring . . . Mr. Mohr has written an important work of Cold War cultural history." --The Wall Street Journal "Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk's fury and high stakes."--Vogue It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: in their gray surroundings, where everyone's future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy--quite literally, as it turned out. But as these young kids tried to form bands and became more visible, security forces--including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi--targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and fired from jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of conforming, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. This secret history of East German punk rock is not just about the music; it is a story of extraordinary bravery in the face of one of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rollicking, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and thrillingly topical, Burning Down the Haus brings to life the young men and women who successfully fought authoritarianism three chords at a time--and is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution.
Call Number: ML3917.G3 M63 2018
Cultivating Music by
German and Austrian music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stands at the heart of the Western musical canon. In this innovative study of various cultural practices (such as music journalism and scholarship, singing instruction, and concerts), David Gramit examines how music became an important part of middle-class identity. He investigates historical discourses around such topics as the aesthetic debates over the social significance of folk music, various comparisons of the musical practices of ethnic "others" to the German "norm," and the establishment of the concert as a privileged site of cultural activity. Cultivating Music analyzes the ideologies of German musical discourse during its formative period. Claiming music's importance to both social well-being and individual development, proponents of musical culture sought to secure the status of music as an art integral to bourgeois life. They believed that "music" referred to the autonomous musical work, meaningful in and of itself to those cultivated to experience it properly. The social limits to that cultivation ensured that boundaries of class, gender, and educational attainment preserved the privileged status of music despite (but also by means of) their claims for the "universality" of their canon. Departing from the traditional focus on individual musical works, Gramit considers the social history of the practice of music in Austro-German culture. He examines the origins of the privileged position of the Western canon in musicological discourses and argues that we cannot fully understand the role that canon has played without considering the interests that motivated its creators.
Call Number: ML275 .G66 2002
German Modernism by
In this pioneering, erudite study of a pivotal era in the arts, Walter Frisch examines music and its relationship to early modernism in the Austro-German sphere. Seeking to explore the period on its own terms, Frisch questions the common assumption that works created from the later 1870s through World War I were transitional between late romanticism and high modernism. Drawing on a wide range of examples across different media, he establishes a cultural and intellectual context for late Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as their less familiar contemporaries Eugen d'Albert, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Max von Schillings, and Franz Schreker. Frisch explores "ambivalent" modernism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as reflected in the attitudes of, and relationship between, Nietzsche and Wagner. He goes on to examine how naturalism, the first self-conscious movement of German modernism, intersected with musical values and practices of the day. He proposes convergences between music and the visual arts in the works of Brahms, Max Klinger, Schoenberg, and Kandinsky. Frisch also explains how, near the turn of the century, composers drew inspiration and techniques from music of the past--the Renaissance, Bach, Mozart, and Wagner. Finally, he demonstrates how irony became a key strategy in the novels and novellas of Thomas Mann, the symphonies of Mahler, and the operas of Strauss and Hofmannsthal.
Call Number: ML275 .F75 2005
Music in German Philosophy by
Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher, and Oliver Fürbeth, a musicologist, here fill this important gap for musical scholars and students alike with this compelling guide to the musical discourse of ten of the most important German philosophers, from Kant to Adorno. Music in German Philosophy includes contributions from a renowned group of ten scholars, including some of today's most prominent German thinkers, all of whom are specialists in the writers they treat. Each chapter consists of a short biographical sketch of the philosopher concerned, a summary of his writings on aesthetics, and finally a detailed exploration of his thoughts on music. The book is prefaced by the editors' original introduction, presenting music philosophy in Germany before and after Kant, as well as a new introduction and foreword to this English-language addition, which places contemplations on music by these German philosophers within a broader intellectual climate.
Call Number: ML3800 .M894413 2010
Singing opera in Germany : a practical guide by Call Number: ML3795 .K66 2005
A Social History of Early Rock 'n' Roll in Germany by
A Social History of Early Rock 'n' Roll in Germany explores the people and spaces of St. Pauli's rock'n'roll scene in the 1960s. Starting in 1960, young British rockers were hired to entertain tourists in Hamburg's red-light district around the Reeperbahn in the area of St. Pauli. German youths quickly joined in to experience the forbidden thrill of rock'n'roll, and used African American sounds to distance themselves from the old Nazi generation. In 1962 the Star Club opened and drew international attention for hosting some of the Beatles' most influential performances. In this book, Julia Sneeringer weaves together this story of youth culture with histories of sex and gender, popular culture, media, and subculture. By exploring the history of one locale in depth, Sneeringer offers a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on space, place, sound and the city, and pays overdue attention to the impact that Hamburg had upon music and style. She is also careful to place performers such as The Beatles back into the social, spatial, and musical contexts that shaped them and their generation. This book reveals that transnational encounters between musicians, fans, entrepreneurs and businessmen in St. Pauli produced a musical style that provided emotional and physical liberation and challenged powerful forces of conservatism and conformity with effects that transformed the world for decades to come.
Call Number: ML3534.6.G3 S62 2018
Sovereign Feminine by
In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity--a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal--linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.
Call Number: ML82 .H44 2013
Listen to German Music
Garland Encyclopedia of World Music-Germany
- GermanyRead more about German Music!
Facts in Brief
Capital: Berlin
Official Language: German
Area: 357,124 sq km (137,886 sq miles)
Climate: In the area surrounding Hamburg, in the north, average monthly temperatures range from 1.6°C (35°F) in January, the coldest month, to 18.2°C (65°F) in July, the warmest, whereas around Munich (München), in the more mountainous south, the average temperature in January is about −0.7°C (31°F). Frankfurt, in the warmer centre of the country, reaches an average temperature of 19.4°C (67°F) in July.
Religions: Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Lutheranism (Protestant)
Current Population: 83,155,031
Citation (2)
German Opera
The beginnings
The multiple lines of development that opera followed in German-speaking lands up to the middle of the 19th century reflect not only the absence of a single or dominant tradition of musico-dramatic practice but also a general state of cultural and political decentralization. Only with Wagner’s music dramas (themselves deeply embedded in German instrumental practice, and without successors) did a purely national and indigenous conception of opera obliterate the art form’s undertone of foreignness.
A variety of stage representations involving music antedate the arrival of Italian opera on German soil: sacred dramas, Latin school dramas, court entertainments, ballets and plays with music in the popular theatre. For most of the 17th century, operatic activity of any kind in German lands was sporadic and directly dependent on Italian example. The first German opera, Heinrich Schütz’s Dafne (to a libretto adapted from Rinuccini by Martin Opitz) was an occasional piece given in 1627 at Torgau, near Dresden.
Germany's most important civic stage, established at Hamburg in 1678, quickly became the principal centre for German-language opera. Although local diplomats and nobles were involved, the undertaking was essentially civic in nature, with frequent changes of management.
Singspiel
The ‘Singspiel’, as the new German phenomenon has come to be called, owed its life and lineaments to the German system of private theatrical entrepreneurship, called Prinzipalshaft, whereby an impresario (or Prinzipal) organized and guided a group of actors at his own risk and profit, sometimes securing a privilege from a court or town council allowing a more or less extensive stay in one place, sometimes wandering from one small centre to the next. Leipzig, where the new genre was born, attracted rival troupes during its commercial fairs; it also drew the kind of middle-class audience that, together with its own population of townspeople and university students, were the true free-market arbiters of the new genre’s popularity and economic value to theatrical managers.
Streaming Video: JVC Video Anthology of World Music & Dance
Composer Highlight: Ludwig van Beethoven
German composer. His early achievements, as composer and performer, show him to be extending the Viennese Classical tradition that he had inherited from Mozart and Haydn. As personal affliction – deafness, and the inability to enter into happy personal relationships – loomed larger, he began to compose in an increasingly individual musical style, and at the end of his life he wrote his most sublime and profound works. From his success at combining tradition and exploration and personal expression, he came to be regarded as the dominant musical figure of the 19th century, and scarcely any significant composer since his time has escaped his influence or failed to acknowledge it. For the respect his works have commanded of musicians, and the popularity they have enjoyed among wider audiences, he is probably the most admired composer in the history of Western music.
Kerman, J., Tyson, A., Burnham, S., Johnson, D., & Drabkin, W. Beethoven, Ludwig van. Grove Music Online. Retrieved 27 Aug. 2021, from https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040026.
Van Beethoven, Ludwig. Beethoven: The 9 Symphonies. Cond. Herbert Von Karajan. Rec. 4 Feb. 2008. Warner Music, 2008. Music Online: Classical Music Library Database. Web.
Citations
(1): "Germany 2012" by "This.Usually.Works"
(2): Country Flag (Germany), in Europa World online. London, Routledge. University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Retrieved 11 August 2021 from http://www.europaworld.com/entry/de.FLAG