Mediating New Music: communication, media and performative strategies of composers (1918–1938)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Kordula Knaus
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553061439

With the new aesthetics and compositional techniques of a musical modernism around and after 1900, the expectations of a concert and opera audience and the actual musical production of a musical avant-garde increasingly drifted apart. In many places it is criticized that the "new" music is no longer accessible or understandable. Composers react to this with various strategies to communicate their music to an audience. Presentation platforms (e.g. journals, concert series, associations or societies) for New Music are founded. Introductory lectures, essays, interviews, program notes, and conversations accompany performances and new releases. The medium of radio, which emerged in the 1920s, is also increasingly used. Until now, statements by composers in essays, lectures, or radio broadcasts have been regarded in research primarily as statements about their work or their aesthetic views. In this project, they are for the first time comprehensively understood as communicative acts with a real or imagined audience in a world of music and media in a state of upheaval. The aim is to gain insights into how and through which media and presentation platforms avant-garde composers communicated their music, which target audiences they addressed, and into which broader discourses on New Music their utterances can be embedded. First, the project will look at the relationship between newly founded platforms and established institutions. The focus of the specific investigations is in general on the German-speaking countries. What opportunities did the latter offer composers to communicate their music (e.g., program guides, introductory lectures), and to what extent did composers take the diverse audience segments into account in their communication offerings? Conversely, the question arises whether newly founded associations, societies or concert series developed completely new concepts and how composers themselves were involved in them. Secondly, the project aims to embed texts and events in which composers express themselves about their music in a larger framework and to position them within discourses on New Music. Perspectives here range from the question of audience education to the socio-political significance of New Music. The influence of the emerging fascist and Nazi regimes and dictatorships will also be addressed. Third, through a focus on communication, media, and performative strategies, the project will look not only at the "what" but also the "how" of these activities. The materiality of media as well as the dramaturgy and performance of certain contents will be examined. Theoretical and methodological approaches from communication, media, and theatre studies will thus be applied for the first time to the acts of music mediation by composers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants