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This study investigates the two surviving performances of Brahms's Third Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler and contextualizes them as part of the reception of cultural tradition and national music in Germany during the early and mid-twentieth century. Many of the conductor's performance choices appear motivated by a desire to project the narratives of heroism, nostalgia and nationalism invented for Brahms's Third by critics in the decades after its premiere. Through his copious writings on aesthetics, as well as critical commentaries on his performance style, particularly those of Theodor Adorno, Furtwängler emerges as a living manifestation of the historical sublime. Sublime aesthetics formed the basis of many contemporary assessments of Furtwängler. He was personified as an inspired orator in the classical tradition, one with special insight into the symphonic repertory, but particularly as an interpreter with a significant connection to the musical past of Central Europe. Perceptions of Furtwängler's »lateness« stemmed from those who identified him as one of the last proponents of the Espressivo style of music making. From this vantage point he was seen as a key protector of tradition and by extension, as the defender of a rapidly disappearing national hegemony of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performative social science seeks to bring the arts and sciences into a productive exchange. Since the 1990s the Centre for Performance Studies at Bremen University (ZPS) has regularly realized projects that implement an artistic approach in scholarly research. The centre's very own theatre ensemble, the Theater der Versammlung (TdV, »Theatre of Assemblage«), one of Germany's first research theatres, intervenes in university seminars, conferences and research projects throughout all the academic departments. By bringing »experimental settings«, open rehearsals and performances into these procedures, the actions of the theatre can have a profound effect on the way the topics are addressed. In this dialogue, social psychologist and performer Clara Schliessler and Jörg Holkenbrink, director of the ZPS and the TdV, discuss how knowledge and learning processes can be induced through performative strategies and interventions in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces El Vez, an important performance artist and musician, whose translation of Elvis extends far beyond local audiences. In our historical moment of shrinking public outlets for the circulation and discussion of alternative and oppositional perpectives, his creator, Robert Lopez, has opened up a discursive space - on the terrain of popular music, in the unlikely genre of Elvis impersonation - that enables both critique of the status quo and dialogue concerning progressive social transformation. This article investigates Lopez's artful superimpositions of Chicana and Chicano realities and cultural icons on to the iconography, soundings and lyrics that cluster around Elvis, and claims that Lopez subverts both the myth of 'Elvis as the embodiment of the American Dream' and the reactionary assumption that American national identity and cultural belonging are (or should be) equated with exclusionary representations of whiteness. This article also argues that the content of his live and recorded stage shows (which are part strip-tease, part Chicana/o studies, part labour history, and part history of popular music course) respond to hegemonic discourses that fault racialized immigrants and working-class people for the consequences of global economic restructuring, and that his aesthetics of resistance subvert both dominant and subaltern dictates for strict, unyielding definitions of identity, sexuality and citizenship. Finally, it suggests that the positive reception of Lopez's performances by racialized, marginalized, displaced and economically outcast youth in Germany speaks to an identification with Chicana/o struggles that is not based on a specific ethnicity, but instead on an articulation of oppositional politics. In this context, Lopez's music enables the possibility of building coalitions beyond the constraints of the nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]