Research

Workshop (Max Weber Foundation, German Historical Institute in Rome)

In April 2022, a workshop at the German Historical Institute in Rome brought together scholars from doctoral through senior levels based in Italy, Germany, Austria and the UK in order to discuss the multi-faceted image of 'Italy' in international music and media history of the post-war period. The aim of this workshop was to better understand the construction of the powerful myth of Italy in modernity, and more specifically the internationally widespread clichés of Italy that are often charged with national subtexts. During the workshop, perspectives from historical musicology were confronted with positions from ethnomusicology, literature media studies. The case studies discussed did not only explore the postwar image of ‘Italy’ in light of media pluralization, mass tourism and marketing or internationalization; moreover, politically charged categories such as home, folklore or exoticism were examined in the ways they bring about a reactivation, de-/recontextualization and reframing of Italy as a historical place of longing in late 20th century popular culture. On the basis of rich visual, acoustic and textual sources from Italian, US-American, South American, French, Dutch and German-Austrian provenience, it actually became clear how associations of ‘Italy’ got widely provoked within the realm of everyday culture. The workshop resulted in a speciel issue published in late 2023, which unveils the multimedia re-imagination of 'Italy' since the mid-20th century. Well-known catchy tunes, advertising clips and postcards come likewise into play, just like translations of pop songs, the movie character James Bond, GDR films and the German Allianz insurance company. As the foreword to the publication states: “The perspectives opened up here complement each other in regard to the critical examination of an almost unmanageable, continuous production and diffusion of images of Italy, charged with clichés and stereotypes on both auditory and visual levels. Precisely because the latter have long since found their way into 21th-century everyday culture across media, this special issue aims at encouraging a productive skepticism about what actually constitutes Italy - or, contrary to widespread belief, what does not. (Translation from: C. Krahn, "Fakturen eines Faszinosums: ‘Italien’ als multimedialer Assoziationsgegenstand," in: QFIAB 103 (2023), pp. 3-7, here p. 7).

Further information (mainly in German): publication on the publisher’s website

Participants: Luca Aversano, Marina Forell, Marita Liebermann, Julio Mendívil, Nina Noeske, Goffredo Plastino

Project head: Carolin Krahn

Postdoc project (Max Weber Foundation, German Historical Institute in Rome)

To what extent was the concept of 'early Italian music' shaped as some form of national reference point in the period between the political unification of Italy and the end of the fascist regime? How did this affect the repertories and representations of Italian musical traditions? Using these questions as starting point, the research project focuses on the idea of ‘early music’ and its practical usage in the period from 1861 to 1943.
The hypothesis of the research project is that what is hidden within the term ‘early music’ (or musica antica) is a complex of meanings – to which the idea of the Italian nation has been linked – which shifted in different contexts over time. Accordingly, ‘early music’ in Italy during the period in question is noy treated as a given, immutably defined category, but rather as a phenomenon to be viewed from varied perspectives. Not least because it went hand-in-hand with the process of national identity-building in Italy and could therefore be consciously shaped in different contexts and, in addition, be used for cultural-political purposes. Against this background, ‘early music’ is considered as a myth that has been reinterpreted again and again – suffused with musical content from Palestrina and Marenzio to Tartini, Boccherini and beyond, and presented historiographically so as to underline the monumentality and continuity of the Italian musical tradition.
The practical expressions of musica antica within Italy is analyzed on four levels which complement each other in terms of material and method: older monographs on music history; editions of ‘early music;’ composing with ‘early music;’ and journalistic discourses on ‘early music’ during fascism. On the basis of the evaluated source material from various archives, these approaches combine research on cultural memory with theories of tradition and canon formation and at the same time enter into dialogue with scholarly work on individual aspects of the described topic within the field of musicology (cf. Nicolodi 1991, Garratt 2002, Ellis 2005, Celestini 2007, Vitzthum 2007, Bertola 2014).
By adopting a consistently dynamic perspective on ‘early music’, the ultimate goal of this research project is to understand more comprehensively the complexity of its interrelated practices specifically within the political borders of Italy. Accordingly, the project locates music and its forms of representation in the space between historicism, musical modernity and national cultural politics. On this basis, select case-studies from different repertories which have been subsumed under the title of ‘early music’ and are related to the question of nation will be subject to a differentiated analysis and reflection. Thus, the project contributes to recent cultural and music historical research concerning both nationalism in the 19th century and the role of music in the age of fascism.

Further information: essay and interview about ongoing research

Principal investigator: Carolin Krahn

Transdisciplinary seminar series (Max Weber Foundation, German Historical Institute in Rome)

This public seminar series provides an international and transdisciplinary exchange forum bringing together the fields of modern history and music history. Hosted by the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome, which enjoys a privileged position as a bridge between different disciplines and scholarly traditions, Contrappunto strengthens such links by exploring topics from a transdisciplinary and transnational perspective. Historians and musicologists at different career stages were invited to add their voices to this public seminar. They will be presenting either in person (in hybrid form, in order to reach as vast an audience as possible) or remotely. Each 30-minute presentation will be followed by an open discussion moderated by the chair, who will provide additional food for thought to stimulate the Q&A. Historians will chair the music history sessions and vice versa as a way of enhancing the interdisciplinary contrappunto.

Further information: program 2021/2022, program 2022/2023

Participants: Tobias Becker, Charlotte Bentley, Annalisa Capristo, Alessandro Carrieri, Axel Körner, Martin Rempe, Silvia Salvatici, Astrid Swenson, Ruben Vernazza, Rebecca Wolf

Project team: Antonio Carbone, Bianca Gaudenzi, Carolin Krahn, Andrea Carlo Martinez

Research colloquium (German Academic Merit Foundation, Elisabeth and Helmut Uhl Foundation, University of Mainz)

What happens when we experience a sense of wonderment as circumscribed by the German word “staunen?” This question, which is also highly relevant to the study of the fascination with music, was the focus of two transdisciplinary research colloquia at the Buchnerhof in Bolzano/South Tyrol. The colloquia took place in the summers of 2016 and 2017, bringing together early-career and avanced to senior-level scholars from the fields of philosophy, theology, Romance languages and literatures, German studies, linguistics, art history, musicology and media studies, as well as music performance, mathematics and physics. The common goal of this encounter was to try to locate the aforementioned sense of wonder, or “staunen” for that matter, within the tension between the categories of nature and culture. The collected volume resulting from the two research colloquia draws on insights from philosophy, art, literature, technology and the natural sciences and approaches the phenomenon of “staunen” in a systematic way. The insights from various scholarly disciplines complement each other, while they are linked to one another by the desire to investigate how “staunen” is inscribed into the relationship of nature and culture in individual cases. After all, the publication shows that staunen is far more than just a momentary affect beyond the human mind. The volume is part of the publication series  “The Power of Wonder,” supported by the SNF research funding program Sinergia.

Further information: colloquium report and publisher's information on the resulting publication

Project team: Timo Kehren, Carolin Krahn, Georg Oswald, Christoph Poetsch

Doctoral fellowship (German Academic Merit Foundation)

The ambivalent image of music and musicians from Italy was of fundamental importance for the historiography of music in the German-speaking world around 1800. However, although numerous cultural contacts and exchange processes between German-speaking countries and Italy are known all to well and have been discussed time and again, this has hardly been systematically researched until recently. Against this background, the aim of this research project is to show the extent to which German music historiography and public discourse on music were already influenced by notions of Italy in the early phase of nation-building. Starting from this transnational perspective, this research project examines a broad spectrum of writings and documents relating to the well-known Leipzig music writer, narrator, librettist, critic and editor Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, who proved central to German music historiography. Situated in the culturally and historically diverse context of his time, Rochlitz's oeuvre opens up a multifaceted discursive field that extends not only to aesthetic but also confessional, nationally charged and often polemical attitudes towards musical Italy. Central (predominantly) male actors (and a few women, too), infrastructures and institutions, 'old' and 'new' music, fine arts, opera, church and instrumental music are touched upon in the course of this study, as are media dissemination strategies in the pursuit of the primacy of German “Tonkunst”. The research project contributes to the transnational reflection of a dialectically exacerbated relationship between German and Italian music and cultural history that extends to the present day and is informed by numerous generalizations, clichés and stereotypes – the roots of which can be traced back to the time of Goethe and sometimes beyond.

Further information: interview on the research project and publisher's information on the resulting book

Principal investigator: Carolin Krahn