Kultur und Musik nach 1945: Ästhetik im Zeichen des Kalten Krieges. Kongressbericht Hambacher Schloss11.–12. März 2013 ed. by Ulrich J. Blomann (review)

In March 2013, Ulrich Blomann invited a group of academics, musicians, and critics to Hambach Castle near Neustadt an der Weinstraße in Germany for two days of presentations and discussions on the influence of the Cold War on music and culture. This volume, consisting of an introduction by Blomann and fifteen essays, commemorates that event. Blomann's opening address establishes the premise that German scholars and critics have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which the political realities of the Cold War shaped musical ideas and products after 1945. He characterizes this gap in scholarship as a consequence of the West's "propagandistic" insistence on the link between autonomous art and political freedom and sees the failure to investigate connections between music and politics in this era as a dogmatic avoidance, even a blindness, born out of Germans' unwillingness to confront the realities of denazification and reconstruction (p. 13). The volume's essays focus mainly on divided Germany, with brief forays into North and South Korea and the Soviet Union, and address Blomann's call to arms through heterogeneous methodologies, with some authors giving specific historical case studies and others attempting a more theoretical or reflective project.

The perspective is historical but often feels contemporary, as many critiques remain relevant today. Some topics come up repeatedly—e.g. the contested dominance of the avantgarde, the stealthy politics of "apolitical" music, and the neglect, out of ignorance or prejudice, of especially East German artistic products—but a set of common principles is sometimes hard to discern. Luckily, for topics for which clarification or additional amplification might be helpful, Blomann has included interviews of the participants conducted by Gisela Nauck, and all of the panelists' discussions and audience questions have been transcribed, thus translating to the page what are arguably the most fruitful parts of any conference process. One of the volume's main strengths, then, is in the emerging dialogue among participants, both in the essays themselves and in the reproduced discussions.

The first three papers confirm that political thinking influenced the main aesthetic categories used during the Cold War, even (or especially) when art was positioned as autonomous and apolitical. In "Coordinates and Con figurations" ("Kalter Krieg. Koordinaten und Konfigurationen"), Hanns-Werner Heister considers ideological aspects of anti-Communism and their influence on musical thinking throughout the twentieth century and up to the present. In his analysis, dyads of left and right, political and apolitical, modern and classical are all falsely hegemonic and tended to produce polarized, antagonistic musical discourses. Anne Shreffler, like Heister, suggests that musicological discourses have been influenced by the Cold War. Her essay analyzes criticisms by Carl Dahlhaus and Richard Taruskin concerning whether twelve-tone music could be politically engaged: while Dahlhaus believed that art could not by definition be politically engaged because that would inappropriately instrumentalize something that was meant to be autonomous, Taruskin criticized politically-engaged dodecaphony for being ineffective at communicating with audiences. The third essay, "Inward Totalitarianism" ("Totalitarismus nach innen"), by composer Konrad Boehmer (who died in 2014), approaches the avant-garde from his perspective as a composer. He criticizes the dogma deployed by some proponents of twelve-tone music and diagnoses totalitarian tendencies in serialism as a system that he sees as having been unfairly dominant; later, in his interview with Nauck, he speculates that serial music could not have existed in its dominant form without the Cold War.

In the volume's second main section, Irmgard Jungmann, Achim Heidenreich, and Blomann himself offer further reflections on modernism's significance. In her essay concerning musical modernism's status as a "herald of freedom" (pp. 105–23), Jungmann outlines different ideologies of musical value, including the commodification and institutionalization of the avant-garde. Her historiography of the concept of...