José Gálvez
This subproject examines recorded popular music in Nazi Germany through the media-specific conditions of its production and circulation and through historically situated practices of listening and consumption. It asks how records were shaped by the political, racial, and cultural order of the Nazi regime and by the legal, administrative, commercial, and wartime conditions that structured their production and movement. At the same time, it investigates how recorded popular music was experienced by its listeners. The subproject comprises three studies, each developed as a separate publication. Together, they connect the institutional and material history of recorded popular music with auditory history, gendered politics of pleasure, and wartime subjectivities.
(1) The chapter “Unruly Media: Producing, Circulating and Listening to Recorded Popular Music in Nazi Germany” (Bloomsbury Academic 2027) analyses the legal, administrative, and economic conditions of record production and circulation, focusing on tensions between political regulation, commercial interests, and the media entanglements of recorded music.
(2) The article “Listening for Evelyn: Mediated Voice and Soldiers’ Desire on the Eastern Front, 1943–44” (in preparation) turns to soldiers’ listening practices. Based on archival sources, including fan mail to Evelyn Künneke, it examines how mediated voice became entangled with auditory experience, desire, and imagined intimacy in wartime.
(3) A comparative study of Künneke and Hilde Föda, planned as a chapter in an edited volume, explores “soldiers’ sensibilities” through their responses to different female voices, performances, and musical personae. It examines how sonic and visual mediation shaped gendered practices of listening, looking, and attachment, using the contrast between the two performers to trace wartime sensibilities.