| This dissertation examines the relationship between musical composition and technology during the Weimar Republic. I analyze theoretical discussions of "mechanical music" along with a series of musical works by young composers that depict, reflect, and otherwise incorporate the media and machines characteristic of urban life and mass culture in the 1920s. This technology includes the gramophone, player piano, radio, and electronic instruments. I also suggest the significance of several musical and artistic organizations that fostered these young composers' interest in technology and experimental music, such as summer festivals and educational institutions.;Chapter one focuses on a series of theoretical essays by the German critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt on "mechanical music." These essays, which Stuckenschmidt began to publish in 1925, initiated a public debate on the subject. In the pages of several Weimar-era contemporary music journals composers and critics debated the use and significance of mechanical instruments, sound recording, and live, unmediated performance. In chapters two, three, and four I continue to trace many of the issues raised by Stuckenschmidt's essays in my analyses of musical works by composers linked to the New Objectivity of the Weimar era. I find musical evidence of "technological" approaches to composition in Stefan Wolpe's Stehende Musik for solo piano [1927], Max Brand's opera Maschinist Hopkins [1928], and Kurt Weill's radio cantata Der Lindberghflug [1929]. I show how these works express changing notions of machine-age temporality, human subjectivity, artistic authenticity, and musical objectivity. In the conclusion I examine the status of early electronic instruments within the context of mechanical music in the Weimar Republic. |
