Music Pioneer Research Articles

Alice Shields’ Apocalypse and the Beginnings of Electronic Opera

Between 1987 and 1993, computer music pioneer and opera singer Alice Shields wrote three electronic operas, Shaman, Mass for the Dead, and Apocalypse. Each of these operas is written for some combination of tape track and live performers. These works combined Shields’ strong background in both electronics and opera. In trying to place her works in a historical context, it becomes clear that there is a lack of scholarship on the development of electronic opera, its origins, and where Shields’ work fits in chronologically and aesthetically. This article will discuss electronic operas from the 1950s to the early 1990s, looking at their performance forces and the role of electronics. Alice Shields’ works, notably <em>Apocalypse</em>, will be placed into this context, with a brief analysis of the narrative use of technology in the opera, and discussion of her unique combination of virtual instruments and classical electronic studio techniques.

Neo‐Fluxus: Multimedia Performance Art and Architecture

AbstractSpace Interface is a collaboration between artist‐architect Mathew Emmett and the legendary Eberhard Kranemann, a German neo‐Fluxus artist and founding member of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. Here, Emmett describes how, through mixed‐reality performance and audiovisual installation, their work transforms architectural settings by using video and electronic improvisation to evoke extended levels of architectural reality. They consider buildings as psychological prostheses, and their experiments attempt to invert and extend what might constitute architecture.

Diminishing Dreams

Diminishing Dreams

Exploring the life and works of Roberto Gerhard, the electronic music pioneer

Exploring the life and works of Roberto Gerhard, the electronic music pioneer

Way Out Music for Way Out Kids

This article explores the 1960s children’s recordings of Canadian electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack and his collaborator, the American dancer and educator Esther Nelson. Their musical partnership existed at the intersection of music, performance, and technology at a time when all three were changing rapidly. The unpredictable and playful recordings that resulted relied upon DIY electronic equipment to create an unusual range of styles and sounds, from low-fi electronic collage to traditional folk music against a mechanical backbeat; they also, crucially, relied on the input of children. By examining the resulting musical experiments within the cultural and technological context of electronic music from the early 1960s to today, we hope to emphasize that, far from being diminished versions of electronic music, children’s electronic music articulates some of the genre’s most intriguing and lasting concerns. Indeed, the innovations in musical technology and technique deployed in these recordings forecasted changes that would come in electronic music decades later.

An instrument for the birds - [Past Forward_by Allison Marsh

In the 1920s in Weimar Germany, Friedrich Trautwein was a young electrical engineer and musician who wanted to make a splash in the burgeoning field of electronic music. And so he invented the Trautonium. The instrument's playing interface consisted of a single wire stretched over a metal plate. When the musician pressed the wire against the plate, it closed the circuit and produced a tone. Moving your finger along the wire from left to right changed the resistance and therefore the pitch. It sounded like a violin. Sort of. Trautwein's attempt to find a mass market for his instrument went nowhere. But decades later, electronic music pioneer Oskar Sala would use the Trautonium to terrifying effect, producing the screeches and caws for Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror-thriller The Birds.

Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia by Josh Beckworth

Reviewed by: Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia by Josh Beckworth Ron Pen Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia. By Josh Beckworth. Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2018. Pp. x, 226. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-1-4766-6729-4.) My academic tenure has been guided by two beliefs: scholarship grounded in a personal connection to the subject yields the most passion and perspective; and [End Page 943] music that springs directly from the soil closest at hand has the greatest power to affect us. Josh Beckworth’s Always Been a Rambler: G. B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, Country Music Pioneers of Southern Appalachia hews to both of these principles, revealing insight informed by a personal subjective relationship tempered through objective research. With family connections in Crumpler, North Carolina, the author is intimately invested in the people and place of his investigation: William Henry Whitter, half of the celebrated hillbilly recording duo Grayson and Whitter, also resided in Crumpler. Consequently, Beckworth’s narrative sparkles with the immediacy of family interviews and is enlivened by original photographs, many of which were first published in this book. A striking example of Beckworth’s methodology is revealed in the chapter devoted to the sprightly fiddle tune “Nancy Blevins,” which was transmitted by the White Top, Virginia, musician Albert Hash, who played with Whitter. Beckworth doggedly searches for the tune’s origin through convoluted genealogies and eventually traces the music back to the colorful Nancy Baker, née Blevins, who smoked a clay pipe, was associated with witchcraft, and, in a twist of fate, was also the grandmother of Whitter’s fourth wife. The accompanying portrait and gravesite images of “Nannie” Blevins animate this history of the tune with vivid associations despite the intervening century and a half since it was created by the adolescent girl shortly after the Civil War. While the careers of pioneering country musicians Gilliam Banmon Grayson and Whitter were created nationally through commercial recordings made between 1927 and 1929, their lives and music were bound to the soil closest to hand in their southern Appalachia communities. Grayson’s life was rooted firmly in Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, at the nexus of Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, while Whitter’s early life and career were circumscribed by the textile mill town of Fries, Virginia, perched on the New River. The partnership of these two musicians embodied the union of their respective cultural geographies. Grayson’s traditional mountain music felicitously married into Whitter’s entrepreneurial drive and the diversity of cultural influences nurtured by migrant labor lured to the company town. Country music could never have arisen without such urban society. Beckworth’s narrative of country music’s origins proceeds through his biographies of Whitter and Grayson and their associated historical and cultural contexts. Always Been a Rambler is very much a music history that devotes equal measure to the music and the history, fully examining the ways one informs the other. The author navigates this challenging balancing act by conceiving his book as two large divisions of collected essays designed to be read either independently or sequentially as a single narrative. Historians will profit from the personal details that contribute nuance to an overview of Appalachian regional history from the Civil War through industrialization in the early 1920s. Musicians will gain perspective on song repertoire and transmission, as well as the origins of hillbilly music. Beckworth’s installment in the Contributions to Southern Appalachian Studies series successfully illuminates and confirms the seminal role of Grayson and Whitter as original voices in one of the nation’s most enduring musical expressions. [End Page 944] Ron Pen University of Kentucky Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Suspending the Habit Body through Immersive Resonance:Hesitation and Constitutive Duet in Jen Reimer and Max Stein’s Site-Specific Improvisation

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand this role in terms of our habitual relationships to place, asking whether and how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, and with what consequences. This inquiry is anchored in a series of site-specific improvised performances by Jen Reimer and Max Stein, and the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. The argument made interpreting these performances is grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, and Alia Al-Saji’s reception of it. This paper claims that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.

Mayuzumi’s Electronic Studies

The author examines the study and implementation of serial electronic music techniques of the Cologne School—specifically those Karlheinz Stockhausen employed in his ‘Studie I & II’ (1953/54)—by Japanese electronic music pioneer Toshiro Mayuzumi through his works ‘Music for Sine Waves by Sequences of Prime Number Ratios’ (1955) and, in collaboration with Makoto Moroi, ‘7 Variations’ (1956), both realised at the NHK Electronic Music Studio. Mayuzumi’s account of Music for Sine Waves’ in his essay ‘The Principles of Electronic Music’ is cross-examined with Stockhausen’s account of ‘Studie I’ in his essay ‘Komposition 1953 Nr. 2’; while technical details from Mayuzumi’s programme note and Moroi’s essay about ‘7 Variations’ are compared with those in Stockhausen’s score for ‘Studie II’. Attention is also given to Mayuzumi’s own assessment of the works and his ultimate abandonment of electronic music composition.

Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Utrecht

The Gaudeamus Muziekweek is now in its sixty-ninth year and, as ever, it focuses on young music pioneers, in hopes of presenting a snapshot of the newest ideas in contemporary music being developed across the world. The festival's dense and diverse programming is compressed into five full days, in 2016 from 7 to 11 September, squeezed principally within one labyrinthian building, the TivoliVredenburg, whose impressive monolithic glass exterior imposes itself as a pillar of cultural life in central Utrecht. Amid this density, it is impossible to provide anything but a partial account of the festival, and my presentation is far from impartial, as I was one of the five nominated composers for this year's Gaudeamus Award. If only from these fragments and particular foci, then, I will present my own reactions and estimations of how the festival has highlighted some of the innovations and interests of a few of the newest practitioners of new new music.

Tracing voice through the career of a musical pioneer: A conversation with Pauline Oliveros

Abstract In this conversation from 2014, composer Pauline Oliveros, one of the most important figures in American experimental music, provides insight into her relationship with the voice and when in her career it was most pivotal for her compositional development. Oliveros touches on her 1961 choral piece Sound Patterns, her Sonic Meditations, the works she performed for voice and accordion in the 1970s and 1980s, Deep Listening, and the late operas that she made with her partner, vocalist and poet Ione.

Cool Control, Occam, and Océan: The Radigue and Bozzini Game

This article analyzes the dynamics of the new and current collaboration between the Montreal-based Bozzini String Quartet and female electronic music pioneer Éliane Radigue. Starting in the late 1960s, Radigue’s electronic music career has been characterized by seemingly unchanging hour-long pieces in which organic micro oscillations between pitches replace traditional rhythm. Since 2001, Radigue has turned to working with instrumentalists, using an “intuitive-instinctive compositional process” akin to “oral transmission of ancient traditional music” (Sonami 2017). While the few academics that have shown interest in Radigue’s instrumental music have focussed their attention on the oral aspects of her compositions, this paper seeks to move beyond non-written formal parameters of her music, and explore the ways in which the actual sound of a Radigue piece generates radically new understandings of performance and composition. Drawing on field notes and recordings of the Bozzini rehearsals at Radigue’s apartment on July 2017, as well as on the author’s correspondence with Radigue and the quartet, this paper highlights moments of strong emotional response to, or caused by, Radigue’s sound. Affective reactions on both Radigue’s and the quartet’s side reveal points of tension between different assumptions regarding collective creation, and completely reorient what it means to own, to transmit, to perform and to compose music. Spectrograms and recordings of the Bozzini’s attempts to create a Radigue sound will be used to further analyze these points of tension, and will reveal that in order to successfully play a Radigue instrumental piece, the Bozzinis need to reproduce every element of Radigue’s previous electronic music—the string quartet needs to “become” Radigue’s electronic instrument.

The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution by Andrew J. Nelson

Reviewed by: The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution by Andrew J. Nelson Simon Zagorski-Thomas (bio) The Sound of Innovation: Stanford and the Computer Music Revolution. By Andrew J. Nelson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Pp. 248. $34. The Sound of Innovation provides a fascinating journey through the history of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Andrew Nelson has indeed drawn on “extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers” (inside front cover notes) to bring this story together. One of the first keyboards I bought when I started a commercial studio in the mid-1980s was a Yamaha DX7, the hugely influential and profitable result of the partnership between Yamaha and John Chowning’s CCRMA. My first degree was a joint honors that included Artificial Intelligence and, after I’d moved away from programming toward being a “consumer” of commercial music computing, the DX7, with Chowning’s FM synthesis, was one of the few things that drew me into the more theoretical world of shaping sounds using digital processors. So, not only did I want to read this book, I also found myself drawn into the narrative and wanting it to be an epic saga of heroism. The first five chapters certainly drew me in and allowed, even encouraged, me to construct that sort of story. The remainder of the book brought me back to earth and reminded me that life is more complicated. That may not make it a very good epic saga but it does make a better history book. The CCRMA certainly deserves the sobriquet “hotbed,” and Nelson [End Page 1039] has done a great job of gathering together the evidence about what happened. I’m less convinced about the explanatory theory and, therefore, how well it fits with the MIT Inside Technology series aim to “stimulate a variety of perspectives that address the social shaping of technology.” It is not that the explanatory power of multivocality to show “how interdisciplinarity, open innovation and commercialization not only can reinforce one another, but also can form an inseparable web of mutual fate” (p. 9) is problematic. It is just that I felt there was a suggestion of agency around the CCRMA throughout the book that made that explanation more two-dimensional. So what do I mean by “a suggestion of agency”? Nelson describes multivocality as a “tactical capacity” (p. 161), a tool used by a successful agent, rather than as a generalized attribute of a system. There may be many instances of the CCRMA deliberately sustaining “multiple attributions to its activities” (p. 161) in ways that worked to its advantage. However, I wasn’t convinced that, for example, the involvement of the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the California Arts Council should be uncritically attributed to the “CCRMA’s skill at multivocality” (p. 162) rather than to more general attributes of the system (probably including that skill). I also felt the definition of success and progression could have been explored in more nuanced terms. The tangled web of commercial protectionism and open access can be read as an optimal combination of financial security and academic freedom in retrospect, but this doesn’t amount to the “secret formula” that Dane Stangler’s back cover quote suggests. I wonder if it amounts to much more than saying that if you want to be generous it’s a good idea to get rich first. Perhaps it’s my dour British sensibility but the narrative of superlatives grated on me. On the one hand, that may be an unpleasant by-product of me growing up without central heating in a drizzle-based climate, but it also comes from a wariness of history written by the winners. If the United Kingdom can have written its own history to the extent that the rest of the world doesn’t unanimously think of “the Empire” as a period of ruthless thievery and bloody genocide, then what are all the other victorious authors of their own history getting away with? What I should emphasize though, before I’m accused of setting up a straw man, is that I...

‘Don't let me go! Hold me down!’: inspiration, voice and image in Kate Bush's ‘Hounds of Love’

AbstractAlthough Kate Bush's reputation as a significant musical pioneer has been accepted by most critics and academic commentators since her return to music in 2005, most readings of her work have been highly ahistoric. This paper explores how, with the release of her fifth album, Hounds of Love, in 1985, her popular appeal was widened into a genuine acceptance of her idiom by contemporary cultural commentators. In particular, the paper focuses on the rival inspirations and the shape, form and delivery of the title track, ‘Hounds of Love’ and its ‘alternative’ version, released on a 12” disc. The paper concludes by analysing the visual presentation of the song through the promotional video (directed by Bush herself) and her two mimed performances and offering a contextualised explanation for Bush's perceived ‘authenticity’ as an artist and performer.

The sound of innovation: Stanford and the computer music revolution

In the 1960s, a team of Stanford musicians, engineers, computer scientists, and psychologists used computing in an entirely novel way: to produce and manipulate sound and create the sonic basis of new musical compositions. This group of interdisciplinary researchers at the nascent Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, pronounced karma) helped to develop computer music as an academic field, invent the technologies that underlie it, and usher in the age of digital music. In The Sound of Innovation, Andrew Nelson chronicles the history of CCRMA, tracing its origins in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory through its present-day influence on Silicon Valley and digital music groups worldwide. Nelson emphasizes CCRMA's interdisciplinarity, which stimulates creativity at the intersections of fields; its commitment to open sharing and users; and its pioneering commercial engagement. He shows that Stanford's outsized influence on the emergence of digital music came from the intertwining of these three modes, which brought together diverse supporters with different aims around a field of shared interest. Nelson thus challenges long-standing assumptions about the divisions between art and science, between the humanities and technology, and between academic research and commercial applications, showing how the story of a small group of musicians reveals substantial insights about innovation. Nelson draws on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with digital music pioneers; the book's website provides access to original historic documents and other material.

English

Record production is a major aspect of many tertiary-based popular music education programs. It is a practice that involves the capturing of an artist’s vision and is realised when that vision draws an emotional response from the listener. In professional practice there are many techniques the producer learns via experience to accomplish this, but as technology develops, processes of past eras risk being brushed aside by technological advancement. The capturing of a live performance was the practical framework used by popular music pioneers and the creative results of this process have particular characteristics that are difficult to achieve by contrasting methods. This article outlines the importance of an education in live recording frameworks to tertiary popular music students; it presents learning and teaching practices that accomplish this and concludes with a case study of a live recording workshop that nurtures the students’ developing creative practice.

Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer by David C. Paul (review)

Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer. By David C. Paul. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. [xi, 288 p. ISBN 9780252037498 (hardcover), $45; ISBN 9780252080517 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780252094699 (e-book), various.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Pick up a copy of David Paul's Charles Ives in the Minor: American Histories of an Iconic Composer, and you will find yourself staring back at your own image reflected in the dust jacket. For the prospective reader who is dazzled by the shiny, silvery reflectivity, the initial response is perhaps surprise. The only opaque imprints are the text of the title, author, and a photograph of Ives's favorite fedora hat. This seems to imply that Ives inhabits the perspective of every expectant reader who holds the book in hand and sees the floating hat above his or her head. And as with a mirror, the perspective of each viewer and composition of each reflected image is different. For some, the mirror will inspire the notion that the histories of this iconic composer are ongoing, interactive, and even inclusive of the reader. For others, the title will evoke a breathing composer who gazes consciously at his own reflection in the mirror: responding to his own and perhaps mirroring the public persona that his devotees had created for him (p. 36). Indeed, it is fascinating to consider the degree to which Ives's perception of himself relates to the various legends (e.g., musical pioneer, American maverick, neglected genius, etc.) with which he has been so strongly associated. David Paul's interest lies with how Ives's reflection is colored by the viewpoints of other Americans. He has written the first book-length history of the composer since his relatively recent passing in 1954. His methodology is based on the idea that there exists no single reception or legacy of culture, but rather that its influence and interpretation are relative, fluid, and constantly changing. Paul links this approach to coined by intellectual theorist Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980]). In fact, Fish's are basic to the structure of the book. Over the course of six chapters, Paul suggests six unique yet overlapping communities of discourse, from composers and conductors to scholars of various disciplines. The chapters are constructed roughly chronologically, corresponding to ten- to twenty-year segments of the twentieth century and characterized by broadly changing cultural, social, economic, and political tides. But there are other factors to consider in how the six interpretive communities are distinguished from each other, such as disciplinary approach, methodology, audience, and the setting of the discourse (popular newspaper, academic journal, lecture hall, and concert hall). The book addresses all of these ingredients, as well as the volume, variety, and endurance of voices that populate its various portrayed communities. That said, the communities themselves are nebulous and difficult to define even for Paul, in part because they are characterized by many disparate factors. After all, Paul is making a bid for relativism, plurality, and flexibility, and so his very methodology resists categorical assumptions. As is to be expected, there is also considerable overlap and disjunction within and among the interpretive communities, as Paul's subjects jostle for attention. If each chapter implies a particular community of discourse, then each chapter essentially asks the question: in what ways do its members share a common identity? What is the common thread? In the first chapter, Conservative Transcendentalist or Modernist Firebrand? Ives and His First Publics, 1921-1934, Paul provocatively suggests that Before a represents the first example of Ives (Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata [New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1920]). …

Creative Conceptualisation: Nurturing Creative Practice Through the Popular Music Pedagogy of Live Recording Production.

Record production is a major aspect of many tertiary-based popular music education programs. It is a practice that involves the capturing of an artist’s vision and is realised when that vision draws an emotional response from the listener. In professional practice there are many techniques the producer learns via experience to accomplish this, but as technology develops, processes of past eras risk being brushed aside by technological advancement. The capturing of a live performance was the practical framework used by popular music pioneers and the creative results of this process have particular characteristics that are difficult to achieve by contrasting methods. This article outlines the importance of an education in live recording frameworks to tertiary popular music students; it presents learning and teaching practices that accomplish this and concludes with a case study of a live recording workshop that nurtures the students’ developing creative practice.

Christian Themes in the Heavy Metal Music of Black Sabbath?

This article looks at the music and lyrics of heavy-metal, rock music pioneers Black Sabbath. Though often labeled a “satanic” band, for their eerie sounds and dark lyrics, a closer look reveals that the band actually penned many songs with Christian themes, which range from outright endorsement of the faith to questioning explorations of it. This is remarkable for two reasons. One, Sabbath was the first major rock band to explore Christian themes so thoroughly. Two, the band’s members are not practising Christians, although bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler did have a strong Roman Catholic upbringing. It is perhaps this background of But-ler’s that comes to the fore in the band’s music, infusing the songs with Christian topics that are all the more remarkable, given the atheism, or at least agnosticism, apparently manifested in the personal lives of the band’s members

Pionier der alten Musik: Hans Eberhard Hoesch und die Kabeler Kammermusik by Nikolaus de Palézieux (review)

PIONEERS Pionier der alten Musik: Hans Eberhard Hoesch und die Kabeler Kammermusik. By Nikolaus de Palezieux. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2012. [155 p. ISBN 9783761822722. i29.95.] Illustrations, index.Nikolaus de Palezieux's 2012 study of early music pioneer Hans Eberhard Hoesch (1891-1972) is an indispensible work for academics and amateurs alike who are interested in the early music revival in twentieth-century Germany. Although Hoesch played a vital role in collecting rare baroque scores, period musical instru- ments, and even creating the first early mu- sic chamber orchestra in Germany, his name has been ignored in virtually all other historical accounts. De Palezieux's book represents a vital step in rectifying this omission, and this work will be the volume on which all other studies of Germany's early music revival must build.Hoesch lived most of his life in the small city of Hagen, located on the eastern edge of the Ruhr region. As a teenager, he stud- ied violin with Bram Eldering in Cologne, a colleague of Johannes Brahms. After Hoesch's service in World War I, he re- turned to Hagen to serve as the technical director of his family's highly successful pa- per factory. Most of the book details the years 1928 to 1934, the period in which he created Kabeler Kammermusik, an early music concert series in which Hoesch played viola. By April 1931, Hoesch had as- sembled the first complete chamber or- chestra to play on period instruments. He then founded his own workshop for instru- ment preservation on the ground floor of his home. Hoesch ultimately financed the entire venture himself, as he received little to no support from the city government. And in 1933, he opened a small concert hall inside his home for public performances.Through de Palezieux's treatment of Hoesch's musical tastes, it is easy to get a sense of why he was so driven to create such an ensemble. Hoesch considered modern music (especially jazz) to be a highly de- structive influence, a sentiment that he also shared in the program notes for the Kabeler Kammermusik's first public con- cert in January of 1930. Hoesch's own musi- cal ideology can tell us much about the cul- tural milieu in which the early music revival took place, and although the Nazis would share his musical preferences in many re- spects, Hoesch nevertheless found the party's cultural politics abhorrent.The question lingering throughout the book-why did Hoesch not receive any credit for his part in the early music revival?-is artfully threaded in and out of the narrative. Ultimately, there are several reasons why Hoesch languished in obscu- rity: his primary role as a paper manufac- turer rather than cultural impresario, the ensemble's Hagen origins which isolated the group from success outside the region, and Hoesch's own brief involvement with the entire project. As de Palezieux points out, Hoesch's decision to resign from the ensemble in 1936, just as the group was be- coming more established, also meant that he remained uncelebrated. With the unex- pected death of his third wife, Hoesch felt unable to continue his work with the Kabeler Kammermusik. In addition, the Nazis' cultural politics had begun to make Hoesch increasingly uncomfortable, and he wanted to avoid registering his ensemble with the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK). To Hoesch, there appeared no better solution than to resign.After his departure, the group soon changed their name to the Kammer- musikkreis Scheck-Wenzinger after two of the ensemble's long-standing members, flutist Gustav Scheck and cellist and recorder player August Wenzinger. Al- though Hoesch had resisted pressure to join the RMK and accept funding from the National Socialists, the ensemble's new leaders were not so reticent. In 1940, the Kammermusikkreis Scheck-Wenzinger re- ceived funding from the Nazi organization Kraft durch Freude and its Italian counter- part, Dopo Lavoro, to go on a concert tour of Italy. …