Dissertation Committee for Michael James Schmidt Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Copyright by Michael James Schmidt 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Michael James Schmidt certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Multi-Sensory Object: Jazz, the Modern Media, and the History of the Senses in Germany Committee: David F. Crew, Supervisor Judith Coffin Sabine Hake Tracie Matysik Karl H. Miller The Multi-Sensory Object: Jazz, the Modern Media, and the History of the Senses in Germany by Michael James Schmidt, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 To my family: Mom, Dad, Paul, and Lindsey Acknowledgements I would like to thank, above all, my advisor David Crew for his intellectual guidance, his encouragement, and his personal support throughout the long, rewarding process that culminated in this dissertation. It has been an immense privilege to study under David and his thoughtful, open, and rigorous approach has fundamentally shaped the way I think about history. I would also like to Judith Coffin, who has been patiently mentored me since I was a hapless undergraduate. Judy’s ideas and suggestions have constantly opened up new ways of thinking for me and her elegance as a writer will be something to which I will always aspire. I would like to express my appreciation to Karl Hagstrom Miller, who has poignantly altered the way I listen to and encounter music since the first time he shared the recordings of Ellington’s Blanton-Webster band with me when I was 20 years old. Many thanks also to Sabine Hake and Tracie Matysik for their thoughts and feedback on different drafts of this project. My other great debts are to my closest friends. Each deserves their own book of praise: Matt Casey, Dorian Singh, Brian Fonken, Jamin Greenbaum, Chay Baker, Caitlin Hammer, Mary Katherine Matalon, Caitlin Earley, Andrew Schmidt, Scott Dubois, Blair Hicks, and Daniel Coonan. I would like to especially thank Madeline Detelich for her affection, care, and enthusiasm during the last phase of this project. v Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to DAAD and the Central European History Society for their generous support of my research and to those who helped me rat the Jazzinsitut in Darmstadt (Doris Schröder and Arndt Weidler), the Akademie der Künste (Wolfgang Lux), the Lippmann+Rau Musikarchiv, and the Bundesarchiv. This project would not have been possible with them. A version of chapter one has been published as: Schmidt, Michael J. “Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic.” German History 32, no. 2 (2014). vi The Multi-Sensory Object: Jazz, the Modern Media, and the History of the Senses in Germany Michael James Schmidt, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: David F. Crew This dissertation traces the perceptual history of jazz in Germany between 1918 and 1960. It argues that jazz was a multi-sensory cultural object: jazz was never just sound but was fundamentally composed of many different media and their respective combinations of sensory address. This work follows the major transformations of the perception of jazz. During the 1920s, it argues, jazz was primarily a visual and textual phenomenon; by 1960, its audience considered sound to be its most important attribute and its consumption involved a well-developed hermeneutics of listening. As an intersection point for multiple media—it was a subject in newspaper articles, books, street advertisements, film, radio, and sound recordings—jazz opens a vii window onto the larger history of media and perception in Germany.. During the twentieth century, Germany witnessed a shift in its dominant media regime. Before the rise of sound film, Germans public communication was dominated by images and text; between 1929 and 1940, German society became inundated with sound. These media regimes shaped both the contours of perception and the form and presence of cultural objects. viii Table of Contents Prologue ................................................................................................................1 Introduction ..............................................................................................................2 Chapter One: Visual Music, Weimar Jazz, 1918-1929..........................................22 Chapter Two: The Sound Age and the Dismemberment of Jazz, 1929-1945 .......63 Chapter Three: Hot Clubs and the Ascension of Listnening, 1945-1955 ..........113 Chapter Four: Textualization, Simultaneity, and Everyday Life, 1945-1955 .....192 Chapter Five: The Fragmentation of Pop Music, 1948-1960 .............................236 Chapter Six: East Germany, Marxist Jazz, and Socialist Listening, 1949-1960 300 Conclusion .........................................................................................................347 Bibliography ........................................................................................................359 ix Prologue http://youtu.be/Qg0OBWJkx40 1 Introduction And yet, who knows very much of what jazz is really about? Or how shall we ever know until we are willing to confront anything and everything which it sweeps across our path? -Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching, and Jazz” What follows is an attempt to tell in words what the prologue says and shows in sound and image. Both outline a history of the many ways that people have encountered and perceived music in the twentieth century. Taking jazz as its object, this study argues that the music of the last century was deeply multi-sensory. Music was never simply sound, but was always comprised of a constellation of different perceptual phenomena and media. Jazz, it shows, was made manifest in text, image, film, records, radio waves, and live performance and, as such, it was something audiences read, saw, listened to, and felt. Such manifestations occurred independently and as a host of combinations. Between 1918 and 1960, the shape and form of jazz changed dramatically in Germany. During roughly its first decade, it was mostly a visual and textual phenomenon. With the introduction of sound film in 1929, it gained a voice and, for most Germans, it had a definite sound for the first time. After Hitler and the National Socialists rose to power in the 1930s, jazz became mute once again, albeit during a decade replete with radio and Musikfilme. The collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 brought sound back once again, but, after the creation of the two Cold War Germanys in 1949, the meaning of its 2 sound had two very different interpreters. Over the course of the 1950s, the perceptual qualities of jazz fragmented and solidified into new genres. It was only during this decade that the sonic details of jazz—the brash tone and high drama of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet playing or the startling, vibrato-less melodic invention of Charlie Parker— became paramount. The genealogy of jazz traced here contradicts a long-standing, fundamental assumption about music: that music is essentially a cultural phenomenon that privileges sound. This assumption is tied to the legacy of Absolute Music, the nineteenth century philosophical and cultural claim that music is an autonomous, self-referential art form. The term “absolute music,” although itself coined only in the middle of the nineteenth century, encapsulates a developing conception of music that began more than fifty years before its appearance. Music has been identified as something sonic from the beginning, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that European critics, philosophers, and literary writers began to claim that music was, in essence, pure, abstract sound.1 This was something new. Before 1790, the meaning and reception of music was deeply tied to external practices and specific contexts—it received its significance from the functions it played in the rituals of the church and court.2 To Kant, instrumental music’s lack of content and its inability to represent things—whether it be concepts, people, or events— 1 For important studies of the history of the concept of Absolute Music, see Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006) and Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 122-123. 3 made it a flawed artistic form. In the years around and after 1790, however, the perception of music began to alter radically in Central Europe. For German idealists like Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, wordless music’s lack of representation was not a handicap but its supreme virtue. Instrumental music, according to their ears, was a “vehicle of ideas” and, in their writings, “the act of listening became equated with the act of thinking.”3 Outside of human language and beyond the forms of the sensible world, the abstract sounds of music, they believed, could reveal deeper, more ideal forms of reality. In these circles of intellectuals and their readers, the symphony became a “mode of philosophy, a way of knowing” and listening became “associated with the quest for truth.”4 In the words of Hoffmann, music—and especially the music of Beethoven—is perhaps “is the most romantic of all the arts, one might almost say the only really romantic art, for its sole object is the expression of the infinite.”5 During this seismic shift in the hierarchy of aesthetics, instrumental music became the paragon of music in general. Although music was prized as autonomous, the musical idealists did not necessarily set the sound of music in opposition to the other senses, however.6 3 Bonds, Music as Thought, xiv. 4 Bonds, Music as Thought, xv. 5 Arthur Ware Locke and E.T.A. Hoffmann, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music: Translated from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana with an Introductory Note,” The Musical Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1917): 127. 6 Simon Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 31-39.