Vortrag in Berlin: Musikwissenschaften

Abigail Fine über: Objects of Veneration: Music, Materiality and Marketing in the Composer-Cults of Germany and Austria (ca. 1870-1927)

Thesis e.V. – Vortrag am 27. November 2014
20:00 Uhr
Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht Campus Schöneberg
Raum B 5.12
Badensche Straße 50-51 10825 Berlin

Keine Anmeldung nötig, alle sind willkommen! Das Ziel ist es, den Vortragenden die Möglichkeit zu geben, vor einem kritisch-konstruktivistischen Publikum die Dissertationsthemen vorzutragen. Willkommen sind alle Interessierte, nicht nur Musikwissenschaftler. Nach einer kurzen Präsentation des Themas findet eine Diskussion statt. Abigail Fine, die Musikwissenschaftlerin (University of Chicago) wird auf Englisch vortragen.

Thema:
Objects of Veneration: Music, Materiality and Marketing
in the Composer-Cults of Germany and Austria (ca. 1870-1927)

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Abigail Fine
University of Chicago

Short summary:
My dissertation examines the widespread practices of quasi-religious veneration that surrounded composers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The remnants of composers – their so-called “relics,” along with the spaces in which they were born, died, lived or worked – were treated as sacred objects and pilgrimage-spaces in a manner akin to the veneration of saints. While many scholars have noted that composer-devotion exists, my project is the first to critically examine these practices against the backdrop of 19th-century mu reception, Catholic vs. Lutheran tensions, and material culture -- and in particular, the marketing of these practices as a material component of canon-formation.

Biography:
Abigail Fine is a Ph.D. Candidate in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago, an advisee of Prof. Berthold Hoeckner. She earned her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania with a major in Music and minor in German. Abigail is currently conducting archival research in a variety of locations in Germany and Austria – primarily Berlin, Bonn, and Vienna – with joint funding from the Mellon SSRC IDRF and the DAAD. Her research during this year is supervised by Prof. Christian Thorau at the Universität Potsdam. In addition to her research, Abigail is enthusiastic about pedagogy, both in the music-history classroom as well as the private piano studio.

Abstract:
My project explores how composers were venerated in the decades surrounding 1900, and particularly how these popular practices contributed to the bottom-up formation of the Western canon. While artists of all kinds were revered in this period, the particular case of German and Austrian composers reveals a critical tension between the abstract, intangible, and ephemeral nature of music versus the material, tangible, and incorruptible remains of composers. This obsession with traces of the composer’s body (so-called “relics”) emerged from practices of secular saint-devotion that pervaded popular culture. In this period of nationalist hero-worship, artists were regarded as transcendent prophets, saints of an art that was conflated with the divine (known as Kunstreligion, a pervasive concept rooted in early German Romanticism). The historical case studies that comprise my dissertation revolve around three central aims: 1) to situate quasi-religious cult practices in the cultural landscape of Kunstreligion, Catholic vs. Lutheran tensions, and secular devotion, 2) to link cults of personality and the widespread appeal of composers’ bodies with the reception of these composers’ music, and 3) to better understand the impact of material practices on certain composers’ canonic “timelessness.” I argue that these practices of veneration shaped musicology as a discipline – a discipline perpetually troubled by music’s status as both material and abstract, and grounded in a (predominantly German and Austrian) canon that emerged in part from the “canonization” of composers

Raum: B 5.12