Claudia Albert y Tomasz Kurianowicz: «City, Music, Text» (20-24 de febrero 2012)

Curso extraordinario de Posgrado

City, Music, Text (20-24 de febrero 2012)

Impartido por Prof. Dr. Claudia Albert y Tomasz Kurianowicz (Freie Universität Berlin)

The course will be held in English.

Program:

Session 1: Relations between Text, City and Sound. And: Virtuoses in Paris.

Session 2: Musical and Urban Topographies: Rome, Vienna, Paris, Leipzig.

Session 3: Machinism and Technology in Music. / Brecht / Weill

Session 4: Brecht / Eisler: Hollywood and Heidelberg.

Session 5: Jazz in the GDR.

Requirements: All students should read: • Denis Diderot: Rameau’s Nephew • Brecht’s libretto: Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny • Brecht / Eisler: Hollywood Elegies

Other texts by Heine, Bachmann and Fries will be provided in a Spanish or English version during the course.

The analysis regarding the musical will consider some scores, but will focus mainly on the literary text-sources.

Literary references:

Denis Diderot:

Bertolt Brecht:

  • Martin Puchner: Stagefright. Modernism, Anti-Theatricality & Drama, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2002, specifically pp. 139-156, Chapter: «Bertolt Brecht: The Theatre on the Leash».
  • John C. Nichols: «Saving the Fallen City of Mahagonny: The Musical Elaboration of Brecht’s Epic Theatre». In: Helmut Hal Rennart (Hrsg.): Essays on Twentieth Century German Drama and Theatre, New York 2004.
  • Rebecca Hilliker: «Brecht’s Gestic Vision for Opera. Why the Shock of Recognition Is More Powerful in ‚The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny than in The Three Penny Opera«. In: Helmut Hal Rennart (Hrsg.): Essays on Twentieth Century German Drama and Theatre, New York 2004, specifically pp. 219-224.
  • Erhard Bahr: Weimar on the Pacific. German Exile Culture on the Pacific in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, Berkeley / Los Angeles 2007, specifically Chapter 3, pp. 79ff.

Franz Liszt:

  • Dana Gooley: The Virtuoso Liszt, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, pp. 18-78 („Parisian Publics“).

John Cage:

  • Majorie Perloff: «John Cage’s Dublin, Lyn Hejinian’s Leningrad: Poetic Cities as Cyberspaces». In: Maria Eugenia Diaz Sanchez, Craig Douglas Dworkin: Architectures of Poetry, New York 2004, specifically pp. 131-143.

Jazz in the GDR and Poland:

  • Martin Kane: «From Oobliadooh to Prenzlauer Berg: Literature, Alternative Lifestyle and Identity in the GDR». In: Axel Goodbody, Dennis Tate (Hrsg.): German Monitor. Geist und Macht – Writers and the State in the GDR, Amsterdam / Atlanta 1994, specifically pp. 90-103.
  • Penny von Eschen: Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Harvard 2004.

References to the essays regarding this field by Claudia Albert:

Monographies:

  • 1991: Das schwierige Handwerk des Hoffens. Hanns Eislers „Hollywooder Liederbuch“ (1942/3). Stuttgart 1991.
  • 2002: Tönende Bildschrift. ‚Musik’ in der deutschen und französischen Erzählprosa des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg 2002.

Articles

  • 1991: «Adorno und Eisler als Repräsentanten des Musiklebens in den beiden deutschen Staaten der Nachkriegszeit.» – In: Jahrbuch Exilforschung 9 (1991), pp. 68-80.
  • 1992: «Opernkomponisten im Exil». – In: Gesungene Welten. Aspekte der Oper. Hamburg 1992, pp. 247-260.
  • 1994: «Musik und Musiker in der Literatur – am Leitfaden von „Rameaus Neffe(n)». – In: Musica 48 (1994) H.6, pp. 354-356.
  • 1995: «Zwischen Enthusiasmus und Kunstgrammatik: Pergolesi als Modell für Wackenroders „Berglinger“-Erzählung». – In: Ton – Sprache. Bern/Stuttgart/Wien 1995, pp. 5-27.
  • 1999: «‘Nichts gleicht ihm weniger als er selbst‘ – Aufspaltung und Multiplikation der Identitäten in Diderots Dialog ‘Rameaus Neffe'». In: Doppelgänger. Von endlosen Spielarten eines Phänomens. Bern u.a. 1999, pp. 15-29.
  • 2000: «Dirigenten und Oberkellner: Eislers Kritik der musikalischen Verhältnisse». In: Brecht und seine Komponisten. Laaber 2000, pp. 133-154.
  • 2006: «Stadttopographie als Texttopographie». In: Stadt & Text. Ed. Bettina Bock & Björn Dumont. Leipzig, pp. 157-166.
  • 2006: «Fritz Rudolf Fries auf dem ‘Weg nach Oobliadooh‘». In: Literatur und Musik in der klassischen Moderne. Ed. Joachim Grage. Würzburg, pp. 347-360.
  • 2008: «Music and Romantic Narration». In: Romantic Prose Fiction. Ed. by Gerald Gillespie et al. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, S. 69-89.
  • 2010: «Harmonie/harmonisch». In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Studienausgabe, Stuttgart: Metzler 2010, pp. 1-25.

Claudia Albert is Adjunct Professor of German Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. She studied German, French and comparative literature at Cologne, Toulouse and Berlin (Freie Universität) and music education at the Hochschule der Künste (Berlin). Her main fields of interest are the relationships between literature and music, and literature and culture in exile. Her book Das schwierige Handwerk des Hoffens in particular examines the reception of Hölderlin in Brecht/Eislers «Hollywooder Liederbuch» (1942/3). Currently, she is completing a book on Stadt und Text which analyzes the different relationships between the geographical structure of cities (Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York, and others) and those of literary texts describing them.

Tomasz Kurianowicz, born in 1983, is a PhD candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied German Literature and Musicology at the Freie Universität Berlin and Universität Zürich and wrote his master thesis about Robert Musils opus magnum «The man without qualities», analyzing the relation between irony and the language of madness by comparing the social theories of Niklas Luhmann and Michel Foucault. After finishing his studies in 2010 he began to work on a Phd thesis, focusing on Robert Musils concept of contingency. His essays, feuilletons and articles have appeared in German and Swiss newspapers, mainly for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He also works as a literary critic and reporter. Recently he published articles in the «Musil-Forum» and IASL-online. In 2011 he will join the German Department of the University of Michigan, USA, working as a Teaching Assistant for the graduate program. His PhD adviser is Prof. Dr. Claudia Albert.