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“Rise up, Singing Voices!:” Reflections on Setting Japanese Protest Poetry to Music Since 1945. This article gives an overview of the tradition of setting Japanese protest poetry to music since 1945 and examines the relationship between the socio-political movement, poetry and music. In particular, it deals with the origin and development of the Utagoe movement, established shortly after the World War II, as well as the musical adaptation of politically relevant poetry, which has its origin in the tradition of Brecht’s song. These forms of setting Japanese protest poetry to music are associated with the poetic-musical works that were written immediately after the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima in 2011.

A unique figure within Spanish music circles of the 1930s, the Berlin-born Jewish musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra was a central figure in a transnational network of communist musicians actively engaging with musical propaganda in support of the Republic during the Spanish civil war. Hanns Eisler, Ernst H. Meyer, Ernst Busch, Grigori Schneerson, Ferencz Szabó and several members of the Union of Soviet Composers belonged to this network. The article's first section examines Mayer-Serra's attempts to introduce in Spain a number of propagandistic musical practices that had been central in the communist splinter group of the German Workers' Music Movement before 1933. In the second section I discuss Mayer-Serra's intensive promotion in wartime Spain of the genre of overtly propagandistic 'battle songs' composed by members of this network. These practices and repertoires are also studied as part of the powerful movement of Catalan nationalism in 1930s Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Książka Composing for the films jest wyjątkową pozycją wśród literatury muzykologii filmowej. Wydana w 1947 roku była niemal natychmiastową odpowiedzią na szybko rozwijający się w Hollywood przemysł filmowy. Chociaż powstała we współpracy dwóch autorów – Theodora Adorno oraz Hannsa Eislera, przez wiele lat znana była tylko pod nazwiskiem tego drugiego. Pomimo oryginalności koncepcji, nie była ona przedmiotem analizy w Polsce. W pierwszej części artykułu koncentruję się na okolicznościach powstania publikacji oraz historii jej wydań. Proces ten był utrudniony ze względu na skomplikowaną sytuację polityczną obu autorów. Kluczem interpretacyjnym koncepcji zawartej w książce jest teoria krytyczna, zaadaptowana przez Theodora Adorno do badań nad muzyką filmową. W artykule wyodrębniam zawarte w myśli autorów cztery segmenty tematyczne – krytykę kinematografii jako przejawu kultury masowej, krytykę warsztatu kompozytorskiego twórcy muzyki filmowej, krytykę tradycyjnych technik kompozytorskich i możliwości zastosowania w kinie nowej muzyki oraz krytykę i niebezpieczeństwa związane z użyciem w muzyce filmowej nowej technologii. Taki podział umożliwił mi przedstawienie wszystkich czynników analizowanych przez autorów – muzykologicznych, filozoficznych, ekonomicznych, politycznych, socjologicznych. Analizę samej refleksji autorów poszerzam o koncepcje socjologiczne Maxa Webera oraz Theodora W. Adorno - fetyszyzację muzyki, racjonalizację, regresję w słuchaniu. Przedstawiam także część technik kompozytorskich, wciąż stosowanych w muzyce filmowej, które autorzy opisują jako ,,złe nawyki kompozytorskie'' – stosowanych przez kompozytorów do dziś.

Although virtually ignored by music historiography so far, the Berlin-born musicologist Otto Mayer-Serra (1904–68) holds a unique position in the intellectual landscape of twentieth-century Spain. He was the first musicologist to develop a critical theory of music in Spain based on Marxist philosophy and greatly influenced by the positions on music history, music sociology, and aesthetics of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, to whose Berlin circle of Marxist musicians Mayer-Serra belonged in the last years of the Weimar Republic. This article examines the development of Mayer-Serra’s thought from the beginning of his career as a music writer in late 1920s Berlin until the end of his exile in Spain in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War. It provides detailed biographical information about Mayer-Serra’s hitherto largely unknown life and work in this period, a detailed examination of his application of Marx’s theory of history and society to the scholarly study of music, and a thorough assessment of Eisler’s influence on his thought and work in the 1930s. The critical theory of music developed by Mayer-Serra in part of the ca. 200 articles that he wrote in Spain formed the conceptual basis from which he later developed his influential studies of Mexican music history.

The article discusses Adorno's analysis of cinema at different moments of his oeuvre and presents a scarcely discussed text, written with the musician Hanns Eisler while both lived in Los Angeles, which has as its central theme the presence of music in the cinema. In addition, it tries to demonstrate how some essays written in the 1960s try to reconsider the cinema and to discuss its potentialities in dialogue with the so-called New German Cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo desenvolve uma análise contextual dos filmes Die Dreigroschenoper (A ópera dos três vinténs, 1931) e Kuhle wampe (1932). Buscamos mostrar as diferentes caracterizações da crítica política nos filmes, a partir da relação entre som e imagem. Por isso, a participação dos compositores Kurt Weill e Hanns Eisler na fatura final dos filmes é decisiva. Após observar a parceria de Brecht e Weill, focamo-nos na trajetória de Eisler e sua parceria com Brecht, pelo prisma conceitual de Walter Benjamin, avaliando a presença da música nos filmes, a fim de mostrar a correlação estética e política entre imagem e som a partir da relação entre o audiovisual, teatro e a música de vanguarda.

Composer Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), best known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, engaged with the German Männerchor tradition in complex ways in 1925. Having broken with his teacher Schoenberg and in the process of moving from Vienna to Berlin, Eisler fragmented and set three political poems by Heinrich Heine for male voices. These choruses satirize the nationalist bombast of right‐wing choirs in Weimar Germany (in forced male voices Eisler criticized as "collective Caruso"). At the same time, this music voices masculine vulnerability in a period of still only partly processed post‐World‐War‐I trauma. Particularly in the first chorus, "Tendenz," extremes of vocal range combined with musical tropes such as the Baroque "step of sorrow" result in music that push the male voice to its limits and encode more collective mourning than ideological zeal. Where Eisler cuts Heine's more explicitly critical lines of text, the musical score voices what the words do not: rather than what Helmut Lethen has called the Weimar‐era culture of "coolness," a collective voice emerges, both parodic and pained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates that Hanns Eisler's serial music composed in the early 1920s and his cantatas created in the 1930s are interrelated with Arnold Schoenberg's serial music. The specific purpose is to reveal the musical interactions between the two composers, such as how Eisler was influenced by Schoenberg, and how Eisler himself influenced Schoenberg. The former aspect is highlighted by the analysis of Schoenberg's Suite für Klavier (1923) and Eisler's Zweite Sonate für Klavier (1925). The latter is shown while Eisler's Deutsche Symphonie from the 1930s and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) are subjected to a comparative analy sis. Eisler was not simply a pupil who renounced Schoenberg's teachings, but a "true disciple" who succeeded Schoenberg's serial technique in a manner comparable to that of Webern and Berg and who, in addition, was a musical companion of Schoenberg, influencing Schoenberg's later music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Ravels Volksliedadaptionen wird gezeigt, inwieweit Verfremdungsästhetik und Verfahrensweisen von ›Musik über Musik‹ Ravels kompositorisches Denken prägen. Der Beitrag arbeitet unter anderem mit den von Bartók entwickelten ethnomusikologischen und musiktheoretischen Kategorien des Umgangs mit Volksmusik und weist auf den nicht nur ästhetischen, sondern auch kulturpolitisch-politischen Hintergrund der Ravelschen Volksmusikbearbeitungen hin.

Dieser Artikel porträtiert den Komponisten Hanns Eisler, dessen Musik zahlreiche Stücke von Bertolt Brecht begleitet, anhand von Äußerungen von Eisler selbst sowie von Arnold Schoenberg und Bertold Brecht. Eisler, der ein neues politisches Bewusstsein in die Musik einführte - Brecht sprach von Misuk im Gegensatz zu Musik-, wäre 1998 100 Jahre alt geworden.

The Austrian sociologist Kurt Blaukopf (1914-99), writing as Hans Wind in 1 935 in the treatise Die Endkrise der bürgerlichen Musik und die Rolle Arnold Schönbergs, or The Final Crisis of Bourgeois Music and the Role of Arnold Schoenberg, represents modern music in »final crisis,« the result of a history riddled with bourgeois contradiction. Wind studies bourgeois aesthetics from a Marxist perspective through a chart of the rules of art applicable »to bourgeois music as a whole.« The chart constitutes a substantial Leftist rethinking of musical terminology under the influence of a historical materialist framework, wherein style links to methods of production and class relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the music during modernism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The composition of modernistic music in the Eastern Bloc is interpreted by the communist party officials and western observers as an act of dissidence. Arguments in favor of modernism in GDR came from socialists which challenged the socialist realist doctrine yet convinced on the contribution of music in the development of the socialist society. In explicitly carrying social text, two composers from East Germany Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, used the twelve tone method in their music.

The 'Orient' as place, idea, and well-spring had intrigued Romantic writers and artists since the late 1700s. The question is posed at the outset of this study: what was 'Exoticism' at the finde-siècle? A capsular history of the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement--outside and within the 'Viennese orbit' -- is followed by brief explorations of the literary (chiefly through Richard Dehmel and Hans Bethge) and artistic (through Gustav Klimt) pathways of the Exoticist quest. The study's central concern is with the history of musico-poetic Exoticism in the Viennese orbit during the pre-and post-World War I years. It is traced through the direct and indirect influence Gustav Mahler's music (in particular, Das Lied von der Erde) had on some selected composers: Alexander von Zemlinsky, Karol Szymanowski, Walter Braunfels, Anton von Webern, Ernst Toch, Hanns Eisler, and Arnold Schoenberg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]