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Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception ed. by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell (review)

Over the past decade or so, there has been a sustained effort to rethink the musical culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Key to this project has been the rejection in Cold War scholarship of totalitarian models; if government control in East Germany was farreaching, it was by no means all-encompassing. The heterogeneity of the state can be observed from a musical perspective on various levels. It was manifest, for example, in the competing aesthetic ideologies that vied for position among cultural elites; in the chasms that existed between the narratives of the socialist canon that were spun by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the realities of programming in East German concert halls; and in the vagueness of socialist realism, which allowed for considerable liberties to be taken in its name. The question of how to capture these pluralities has been paramount for scholars working in the area. There has been a concerted drive in recent years to abandon top-down approaches and develop more sophisticated modes of interpretation that grant agency both to the artists who worked in the GDR and to the music that was produced there. This collection of essays is positioned as the latest contribution in this vein. Conceived by Germanists Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell in response to a perceived neglect of classical music in GDR studies, the volume contains twelve essays on disparate aspects of both the reception and production of art music in the GDR. There are advantages in casting the net this widely. Composers, performers, and musicologists faced many of the same issues, and parallels can be drawn between the aesthetic trajectories of canon reception and composition. In the case of this volume, however, breadth arguably comes at the expense of focus.The essays are not grouped thematically, and in the absence of any meaningful discussion from the editors as to how the different topics and approaches fit together, readers are obliged to work hard to draw coherent threads across the collection. The editors’ own interests appear to lie primarily with East German composition, and much of their Introduction is devoted to questions of its value and legacy. This, it must be said, is a particularly thorny issue. The dominance in musicology of aesthetic benchmarks associated with Western modernism has rendered the evaluation of socialist composition difficult, a problem that has been compounded by the tenacity of Cold War mindsets. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the tendency to place Soviet Bloc composers in neat categories of conformism and dissidence, and to assume a clear mapping between political dissidence and expressions of musical modernism, has been hard to shake. Frackman and Powell rightly argue that a ‘new evaluation’ of GDR composers is needed, ‘one no longer encumbered by the ideological assumptions of the Cold War’ (p. 6). They are less clear, however, about what this new evaluation might involve. They advocate more interdisciplinarity without going into details of the methodological advantages that this could bring. They also assert the need to examine GDR music in wider geographical contexts. While the latter goes without saying, and is an approach that has featured prominently in recent scholarship (see e.g. David G. Tompkins, Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2013)), it is also the case that geographical comparisons do not automatically lead to new insights. Indeed, without nuanced interpretation, they can reinforce rather than confront existing perceptions. Such is the case here when Frackman and Powell invoke the Soviet Union to contextualize East German dissidence, and observe that ‘there is no GDR composer whose work could be seen as unequivocally dissident, as was that of Shostakovich’ (p. 7). Putting aside the questionable designation of Shostakovich’s works as being ‘unequivocally dissident’, this analogy obscures key differences between Soviet and East German artists. That the latter retained their commitment to the principles of state socialism, even as their relationship with the SED soured, reflected their experiences of the Third Reich and the resulting conviction that socialism was the only option for a post-fascist Germany.