Table Of ContentSOUNDMATTERS
S M
OUND ATTERS
Essays on the Acoustics of
Modern German Culture
Y
Edited by
Nora M. Alter
and
Lutz Koepnick
h h B
Berghahn Books
NEW YORK • OXFORD
Published in 2004 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2004 Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick
First paperback printed in 2005
Reprinted in 2006
All rights reserved.
Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sound matters : essays on the acoustics of modern German culture /
edited by Nora M. Alter & Lutz Koepnick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57181-436-1 (alk. paper)
1. Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. 2. Sound. 3. Music—Social
aspects—Germany. 4. Music—Acoustics and physics. I. Alter, Nora
M., date–. II. Koepnick, Lutz P. (Lutz Peter)
ML3845.S6835 2004
780'.943—dc22
2003063625
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Acatalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library.
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper
1-57181-437-X paperback
CONTENTS
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Acknowledgments vii
Introduction:Sound Matters 1
Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick
Part I: Sound Nation?
1. Hegemony through Harmony: German Identity, Music, and
Enlightenment around 1800 33
Nicholas Vazsonyi
2. Mahler contra Wagner: The Third Symphonyand the Political
Legacy of Romanticism 49
Carl Niekerk
3. Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an
Acoustic Experience 65
Frank Trommler
Part II: Dissonant Visions
4. The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe 79
Nora M. Alter
5. Sound Money: Aural Strategies in Rolf Thiele’s
The Girl Rosemarie 91
Hester Baer
6. The Castrato’s Voices: Word and Flesh in Fassbinder’s
In a Year of Thirteen Moons 104
Brigitte Peucker
v
vi Contents
Part III: Sounds of Silence
7. Benjamin’s Silence 117
Lutz Koepnick
8. Deafening Sound and Troubling Silence in
Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel 130
Elizabeth C. Hamilton
9. Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann 142
Christopher Jones
Part IV: Translating Sound
10. Broadcasting Wagner: Transmission, Dissemination,
Translation 155
Thomas F. Cohen
11. Sounds Familiar? Nina Simone’s Performances of
Brecht/Weill Songs 171
Russell A. Berman
12. Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock,
the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in
West Germany 183
Richard Langston
13. The Music That Lola Ran To 197
Caryl Flinn
Part V: Memory, Music, and the Postmodern
14. “Heiner Müller vertonen”: Heiner Goebbels and the Music
of Postmodern Memory 217
David Barnett
15. The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in
Stockhausen’s Hymnen 228
Larson Powell
Notes on Contributors 242
Index 245
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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The editors would like to acknowledge the University of Florida Scholar-
ship Enhancement Fund, the Graduate School of the University of
Florida, and the Graduate School of Washington University in St. Louis
for their generosity, which facilitated the research, organization, and edit-
ing for this project. In addition, the editors would like to extend their
thanks to all of the contributors in this volume, who provided original
and exciting texts with which to work.
Thanks also go to Alexander Alberro, Keith Bullivant, Gerd Gemün-
den, Sander Gilman, Anton Kaes, and Eric Rentschler for their encour-
agement and support for this project, and to the anonymous readers at
Berghahn Books for their helpful comments on the entire manuscript.
We are indebted to Leah Chizek, Gwyneth Cliver, and Patience Gray-
bill for their help in editing individual contributions and preparing the
manuscript for publication.
We would like to express our gratitude to the entire staff at Berghahn
Books and in particular to Shawn Kendrick for her careful copyediting
and typesetting of the manuscript. Last but not least, thanks go to Marion
Berghahn for her support of this project.
NORAALTER LUTZKOEPNICK
vii
INTRODUCTION
Sound Matters
Y
Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick
I
First published in 1992, Rick Altman’s Sound Theory: Sound Practice and
Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead’s Wireless Imagination: Sound,
Radio, and the Avant-Garde broke new ground in cultural studies.1 Both
volumes, by investigating the role of the acoustic across a broad spectrum
of genres and media, spearheaded a virtual explosion of work on sound
that took place during the second half of the 1990s. Adecade after Alt-
man’s and Kahn and Whitehead’s anthologies, sound has come to figure
today as a viable space of critical exploration, a productive register of
social and cultural analysis in various academic disciplines. One often
hears that we live in an age dominated, and even overwhelmed, by the
visual image. But we merely need to close our eyes for a moment to real-
ize just how much sound matters in late modernity as well—to those
involved in scholarly writing as much as to those participating in the
arena of cultural production itself.
In the area of film and media studies, the examination of sound has
become one of the primary fields of interest and analysis. Numerous
recent monographs have drawn attention to the manifold ways in which
filmic music, noise, and dialogue can shape cinematic meaning and direct
the viewer’s perception.2Additionally, sound itself has been thematized in
recent years by a number of filmmakers who have sought to increase our
awareness of the acoustic dimension of the medium. German director
Wim Wenders, for instance, in his 1994 Lisbon Story,centers the entire nar-
rative on the efforts of a soundman, Philip Winter, to produce a soundtrack
Notes for this section begin on page 27.
