Options for Action and Strategies of Popular Swing and Dance Orchestras in the Third Reich
Thomas Flömer
The project focuses on swing and modern dance music in the Nazi and Austro-fascist environment of the pre-war and war years. At the centre of interest are the possibilities and strategies of commercially successful swing and dance orchestras in the field of tension between far-reaching (cultural) political restrictions and economic interests.
Using the example of popular bandleaders (Heinz Wehner, Erhard Bauschke, Oskar Joost and others), the study examines how creative spaces for manoeuvre opened up, how they were used in different ways, and how this became visible and audible in repertoire, arrangements, recordings and dancehalls at different levels of the production process, as well as in marketing and distribution.
The sources examined – recordings, sheet music/textual sources, publishing catalogues, etc. – are comprehensively contextualized and evaluated according to the dynamically changing (cultural) political, media and economic conditions.
In addition to musicological methods and approaches, this contribution combines complementary and enriching perspectives and concepts from related disciplines (media and cultural studies) in order to more comprehensively analyse swing as an international phenomenon of popular culture in its complex and variable forms of appearance, production, and appropriation under National Socialism and to open up new potentials for explaining and understanding popular music in dictatorial contexts.