Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(S) of Weltmusik

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Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(S) of Weltmusik

Since the mid- 1 960s, just after the time at which Jameson posits the emergence of postmodernist aesthetics,1 German musicians and producers, operating in a range of fields of musical production from highbrow Ernste-Musik ('serious music') to jazz and rock, have experimented with notions of Weltmusik (a term I will not translate since, in German discourses, Weltmusik has tended to signify western music in which various musical components are thought to synthesise into a whole, whereas the English term 'world music' has often been used by the music industry as a marketing label to represent 'authentic' musics from the margins).2 These musicians include the high modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen, the various modern jazz musicians who participated in the producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt's/azz Meets the World Series (1965-71) and Weltmusik summits (1983-85), the 'Krautrock' group CAN (with its so-called Ethnographic Forgery Series, 1968-78), and others. Weltmusik activities have not been 'merely' musical; they have frequently been subjected to considerable ideological interpretation. Readers familiar with English-language debates about 'world music' and 'world beat' - debates conducted with a vehemence that escalated markedly in the 1990s - will not be surprised to learn this. As David Bennett has shown in a recent article, following Steven Feld's useful typology, the positions taken in these Anglophone debates generally adhere to either 'anxious' or 'celebratory' narratives of world music. Anxious narratives, taking a neo-Marxist tack, tend to focus on the ways in which western musicians and the large recording companies, protected by their position of relative economic power and by copyright law, are able to appropriate (or expropriate) musical material from the margins and turn a profit from it, a profit in which the musical creators from the margins do not equally share. By contrast, the celebratory narratives stress ideas of 'fluidity, hybridity and collaborative exchange . . . underpinned by postmodern anti-essentialist theories of the performative, dialogical and porous nature of all cultural identities'/1 While the German discourses of Weltmusik reflect many similar concerns, this article will show how and why they diverge from their Anglophone counterparts. Significantly, the Ger...

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