Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(s) of Weltmusik

Abstract

Since the mid-1960s, just after the time at which Jameson posits the emergence of postmodernist aesthetics, (1) German musicians and producers, operating in a range of fields of musical production from highbrow Ernste-Musik ('serious music') to jazz and rock, have experimented with notions of Weltmusik (a term I will not translate since, in German discourses, Weltmusik has tended to signify western music in which various musical components are thought to synthesise into a whole, whereas the English term 'world music' has often been used by the music industry as a marketing label to represent 'authentic' musics from the margins). (2) These musicians include the high modernist Karlheinz Stockhausen, the various modern jazz musicians who participated in the producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt's Jazz Meets the World Series (1965-71) and Weltmusik summits (1983-85), the 'Krautrock' group CAN (with its so-called Ethnographic Forgery Series, 1968-78), and others. Weltmusik activities have not been 'merely' musical; they have frequently been subjected to considerable ideological interpretation. Readers familiar with English-language debates about 'world music' and 'world beat'--debates conducted with a vehemence that escalated markedly in the 1990s--will not be surprised to learn this. As David Bennett has shown in a recent article, following Steven Feld's useful typology, the positions taken in these Anglophone debates generally adhere to either 'anxious' or 'celebratory' narratives of world music. Anxious narratives, taking a neo-Marxist tack, tend to focus on the ways in which western musicians and the large recording companies, protected by their position of relative economic power and by copyright law, are able to appropriate (or expropriate) musical material from the margins and turn a profit from it, a profit in which the musical creators from the margins do not equally share. By contrast, the celebratory narratives stress ideas of 'fluidity, hybridity and collaborative exchange ... underpinned by postmodern anti-essentialist theories of the performative, dialogical and porous nature of all cultural identities'. (3) While the German discourses of Weltmusik reflect many similar concerns, this article will show how and why they diverge from their Anglophone counterparts. Significantly, the German debates were initiated well before the rise of 'world music' and 'world beat' as marketing terms in the English-speaking world in the mid-1980s, and they were strongly influenced by the comparatively recent memory of National Socialism. For this reason, they were also highly polemical. My analysis will focus, in particular, on the notions advanced by J-E. Berendt, as one of the foremost and longest-running champions of Weltmusik, as well as on the critiques that he attracted from German critics, musicologists, sociologists and philosophers, including Peter Sloterdijk and others. I shall examine how a peculiarly German antinationalist Weltmusik discourse has been informed by the trauma of National Socialism, just as it has contended with postmodernity and broader anxieties (also reflected in the wider English-language discourses on world music) about the breakdown of grand narratives and with utopian hopes arising from the processes of globalisation. My aim is thus to unpack the paradoxical meanings of Weltmusik as a music that acknowledges the fragmentation of (post)modernity and yet yearns for a new wholeness--and as a music that deliberately questions earlier notions of cultural essentialism and is capable of celebrating cultural inauthenticity, but which still retains concepts of 'otherness'. Finally, the essay performs what the musicologist Veit Erlmann calls an ethnography of Weltmusik, by analysing some of the ways in which the experience of 'authentic' alterity and global communication have been constructed within extra-musical discourses (such as in articles, cover notes, concert and record reviews). (4) It also examines the processes in which--to use an expression of Timothy Taylor's--'different sounds' have been mobilised in Germany 'as a way of constructing and/or solidifying new identities'. …