Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music by Florian Scheding

Abstract

Reviewed by: Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music by Florian Scheding Tristan Paré-Morin Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music. By Florian Scheding. (Music in Society and Culture.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2019. [x, 196 p. ISBN 9781783274611 (hardback), $95; ISBN 9781787446601 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, bibliography, index. No single book could possibly account for the diversity of responses to migration and displacement and to their impact on twentieth-century music. The careers of prominent figures at the center of countless standard music histories (Igor Strav insky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, etc.) were shaped by their experiences as migrants. In Musical Journeys, Florian Scheding has chosen to focus on three comparatively unfamiliar composers—Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960), and István Anhalt (1919–2012)—to address what he considers a lack of attention, in musicology, to migratory communities and to the act of migration itself. In the introduction, Scheding describes his project as “a humble and, in some ways, unambitious book that tells little stories and works outwards from them, linking them with wider themes” (p. 7). The reader should not be fooled by the author’s modesty: the “wider themes” are thoughtful, detailed, and provocative reconsiderations of the migratory experience, mobility, place and space, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, identity, and memory. One of the main purposes of Musical Journeys is to continually problematize the dialectics of individuality versus collectivity. Although the book builds on the experiences of three migrants, Scheding discusses their individual identities as part of larger networks of musicians, while making sure to present these networks as heterogeneous in order to avoid essentializing migrant communities. The theoretical framework of the book is for the most part very much grounded in migration studies, with regular references to recent and classic texts, in particular the writings of Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said. In chapter 1, “Angels in Paris,” Scheding draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to highlight the cultural spaces of displacement and of migratory networks as heterogeneous spaces. He examines the genesis of Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie in the context of mid-1930s Paris (as “migrant capital”) and draws similarities to the works of other migrants: Klaus Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Walter Benjamin, who highlight heterotopia and mobility as central to the migratory experience. Scheding shows how Eisler resisted immobility in his travels and his music. Despite its title, the Deutsche Sinfonie is paradoxically a highly mobile work that transcends the national and that presents German culture as diasporic. For instance, Scheding positions Eisler’s use of dodecaphony as an “effectively displaced and profoundly migratory idiom” (p. 34). Such analyses of particular musical techniques as part of migratory culture are recurrent in Musical Journeys, as Scheding illustrates how composers adapt and reflect on national styles and on styles of fellow migrants (such as Schoenberg). Scheding presents migration as “a process that may transcend national borders, but not engagement with the national itself” (p. 47). Chapter 2, “Facing the Nation,” shows Mátyás Seiber’s evolving engagement with the Hungarian nation and nationalism. Scheding writes a fascinating account of Seiber’s long migratory journey from his native Budapest, where his integration of elements from Hungarian folklore was influenced by the guidance of Zoltán Kodály, to Frankfurt in the Weimar Republic, where Seiber’s promotion of [End Page 225] jazz was met with attacks amidst growing anti-Semitism and calls for ethnic purity, up to his migration to England in 1935, where the dichotomy between traditionalist and progressive currents in Seiber’s music reached its peak. Scheding’s discussion of characteristic works for each stage of Seiber’s migration illustrates the influence on his music of changing national politics. As Scheding shows, even when Seiber eschewed folklorist elements, and decades after his departure from Hungary, responses to his music remained marked by xenophobia and nationalism. The chapter then shifts back to Eisler. Challenging the idea that the composer’s move to East Berlin was a return home after years of migration, Scheding argues that his artistry remained that of a migrant, and that works such as Eisler’s 1949 anthem for the...