Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften

The research project German Sounds is a global music history of Germanness. It aims to challenge the authority of German music in history by provincializing it. It does so by tracing the musical and sonic manifestations of Germanness primarily in contexts of migration and displacement, between 1890 and 1960. My ambition is to write a history of German music outside the region we know as Germany, because I see in this gesture of decentering the potential for a more nuanced perception of how power operates through music, culture, and knowledge. The idea is not to celebrate the aesthetic authority of German music by pointing to its global dissemination, but to challenge narrative constructions such as the "deutsche Klang" of the orchestra or, more broadly, the German musical canon as defining vectors of modernity, and to examine the material and ideological manifestations of such narratives on a global scale. Geographically the project will focus on tracing the musical and cultural activities in the German colonies in Brazil. I am interested in tracing not only the circulation of people (composers, musicians, musicologists), artifacts (books, musical instruments, musical recordings), and practices (choral singing or musicological editorial projects), but also the transmission, adaptation, and translation of ways of knowing, collecting, and preserving music. The project will be divided into three main pillars: 1) Topography of the musical activities if German communities in Brazil; 2) Praxeology of musicological Practice (Curt Lange and the project of the Denkmäler Brasiliaener Tonkunst) 3) Historicizing processes of othering (German ethnographers in Brazil)