Institut für Musikwissenschaft

Musik ist ein Kassenschlager – vom frühen Kino bis zu heutigen VR-Plattformen. Die audiovisuelle Dokumentation von Musikern, Genres und Szenen ist dabei eng verbunden mit dem Begriff der «Rockumentary». Doch was ist eine Rockumentary? Dieser Frage geht der Band nach. Ein umfassendes filmtheoretisches und medienhistorisches Vergleichsmodell und eine aktuelle Industriestudie zeichnen dabei erstmals ein eingehendes Bild des dokumentarischen Musikfilms.

Music is a blockbuster - from early cinema to modern VR platforms. The audiovisual documentation of musicians, genres and scenes is closely linked to the term «Rockumentary». But what is a rockumentary exactly? This is the central question this publication investigates. Comprehensive theoretical and historical models and a study of contemporary industrial contexts help draw a detailed picture of the documentary music film.

Focusing on jazz in the GDR, this paper explores different methodological approaches ranging from everyday history and concepts of cultural transfer to musicological analysis, looking for insights to the question: how to write the history of subcultural music?
GDR Jazz underwent many sociopolitical changes, “swinging” from being practically illegal to official cultural acceptance. Jazz musicians and enthusiasts were distrusted as a group, but analysis of their social history, subjective perspectives and self-conceptualizations reveals that jazz was not a unified subculture, but hosted a wide spectrum of nonconformity.
I conceptualize GDR Jazz activities as an aggregation of scenes, each made up of musicians, enthusiasts and organizers collectively gathered in self-organized jazz clubs and embed it into in the historical and political contexts of the Cold War under State Socialism. The paper examines the culturally rich region of Thuringia, encompassing half of all GDR jazz clubs, trying to reconstruct local jazz scenes, practices and networks interconnecting them. My goal is to display dynamics of interplay between the socialist party and jazz fans, following the notion that ideology and power are always negotiable social practices.
On a larger scale, the paper argues that theories of cultural transfer enable a different understanding of jazz as a highly complex and creative process of transformation, reinterpretation and re-signification, framing and explaining the historic musical and social processes that occurred in GDR jazz. The music itself is taken into account by analyzing representative pieces. The process of transformation itself is proposed as the key concept for including musicological perspectives into the discourse on jazz history, combining sociological, historical and musicological theories.
The paper concludes by contemplating implications of these reflections on the study of other music subcultures, such as blues, rock and heavy metal in the GDR.

Abstract  for „Writing the Noise“ The Second International Conference of the Inderdisciplinary Network for the Study of Subcultures, Popular Music and Social Change,  November 2017.

Conference Presentation in: September 2018 at Reading University