Performances of gender, ethnicity, age and ability in sheet music editions of popular music from 1930 to 1950 in Austria and Germany
Roxane Lindlacher
In the first half of the 20th century, popular music was composed and published in ever greater numbers, produced as records and presented on stage, in films and on the radio, whereby intermedial and international networks were formed that facilitated the widespread dissemination of popular music in people’s cultural lives. The high status of popular music in everyday life in the societies of the Weimar Republic and the First Republic continued after the NSDAP seized power in Germany and during Austrofascism in Austria. The fascist systems quickly recognized the possibilities of all-encompassing propaganda and entertainment of the people, which were opened up to them by influencing the production of popular music.
One aspect that has always been of great importance in popular music is that of the body. It is treated and staged in the various media of popular music production, be it in the songs themselves, in dance, on stage, in the voice or in the sheet music of well-known Schlager. This last area of body staging in particular offers a diverse approach to negotiating the body, for example through illustration, song lyrics or the dance genres associated with popular songs. For the National Socialist government, the body was a central element in its ideological program, which was used to negotiate discourses on racial politics, exclusion vs. community and gender roles. Thus, a large number of sheet music editions in which the body plays a role stand at the interface between ideology and the music industry.
This dissertation project examines sheet music editions of popular music as media combinations that reveal representations, stagings and negotiations of bodies in contemporary discourses between 1930 and 1950. The extent to which cultural figurations and stereotypes become clear will be shown, particularly with regard to gender, ethnicity, age and ability. The question of the extent to which bodies are staged according to ideological influences and the extent to which the music industry was still able to ‘freely’ orient itself to the market will be investigated. Finally, the project focuses on the body, which, embedded in the media, political and ideological circumstances of the time, is read as a text to be deciphered. For this purpose, the extensive holdings of sheet music editions of the AKM Archive at the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz, the Austrian National Library and the Center for Popular Culture and Music in Freiburg are used and critically evaluated.