Dr. Jennifer Iverson (University of Chicago) presents Fraught Adjacencies: The Politics of German Electronic Music
Room 130, 80 Queen's Park
Free and open to the public. Presentation will be followed by a casual reception.
Abstract:
Electronic music has traditionally been understood inside of a purely musical rationale, as continuing the aesthetic progress of Western art music. And yet, electronic studios are not just musical; they are heterogeneous, blending technologies and personnel from science, military engineering, radio broadcasting, and “low art” spheres such as radio play and film soundtracks. What are the consequences of such adjacencies and imbrications? Are the spheres of science, military technology, and aesthetic work merely adjacent, that is, parallel and non-intersecting? Alternately, must we default to a Kittlerian technological determinism to conceptualize the military-industrial-political imbrications of electronic music? In this talk, three vignettes—on the Trautonium, on Meyer-Eppler’s Nazi affiliations, and on the GDR experiments with the Subharcord—illuminate the broad network that embeds German electronic music from the 1920s through the 1960s. Developments in electronic music refract, contextualize, and recast scientific, military, engineering, and political developments. Electronic music is deeply imbricated with Germany’s emerging sense of cultural identity, political priorities, and nationhood. In the conclusion, I return to questions of adjacency more broadly, suggesting a range of possible consequences, and beginning to theorize the impact of electronic music on the cultural level.