Podcast from HELL Episode 4 – TONLAGEN

The other in music?

Gespräch online

A roundtable discussion on different perspectives on coming to terms with the music of the GDR on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Dresden Center for Contemporary Music.

Moderation: Jakob Auenmüller (PhD in music, history and cultural studies)

Guests: Hilke Wagner (Director of the Albertinum of the Dresden State Art Collections), Claudia Schmidt-Krahmer (Prorector for Artistic Practice at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music Dresden), Clara Bergert (student teacher of music and mathematics at the HfM Dresden)

This year, the Dresden Center for Contemporary Music celebrates its 35th anniversary. In the 4th episode of the Podcast from HELL, moderated by Jakob Auenmüller, PhD, musicologist, different perspectives on the reappraisal of East German art in the post-reunification period are discussed.

How is the current treatment of music and art from the GDR perceived? Where and in which formats does the representation of East German art take place? What role can and should the art of the former GDR play in the future negotiation processes in the all-German debate and integration?

All Podcast from HELL episodes can be found here.

The other in music?

Yes, it’s there, this feeling of otherness, of not quite belonging together yet. This sense that East and West Germany have not yet become one Germany. Particularly in times when cherished convictions are called into question and hardly any concrete answers are available, we are confronted more openly with what separates us than with what unites us. Of course they exist, the individual success stories in the most colorful colors. And yet there are more and more voices speaking out loudly about how complicated it still is to live together in Germany as a whole.

In dealing with art and especially with music from the GDR and the new federal states, both can be found: forgotten composers and successful rock bands, political art and non-political aesthetics, timeless works and those that, at first glance and sometimes at second glance, only had their justification in the separated Germany.

In the podcast we want to approach this often elusive sense of the other and otherness from different perspectives openly and with a look into the past and future. What place does music from the GDR and the new German states have in today’s cultural life in East, West and all of Germany? How can structural underrepresentation, marginalization and ignorance on the one hand, (n)ostalgic niche formation, emotional overload but also commercial success on the other hand be explained? How can or must we concretely deal with these findings for the future? What does this mean for institutions and actors in musical life? And can or should music take on a stronger role as a platform for discourse and paradigm shifts in the future negotiation processes of all-German integration?

by Dr. Jakob Auenmüller

Support ticket: TONLAGEN#seidabei
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