Florian Scheding (Associate Professor in Music, University of Bristol), ‘Hans Eisler, Viktor Ulmann, and the Quest for a Migratory Aesthetic’

Abstract: In what Edward Said termed the “age of the refugee, the displaced person, [and] mass immigration,” art song became a medium deeply entangled with questions of mobility and exile, a form as embedded in tradition as it was unsettled by movement. I bring into dialogue two emblematic contemporary works: Hanns Eisler’s An den kleinen Radioapparat (1942), composed in Californian exile and later incorporated into the Hollywooder Liederbuch, and Viktor Ullmann’s Berjoskele (1944), part of his Brezulinka cycle written in the Terezín concentration camp shortly before his death in Auschwitz. Though composed in isolation from one another, both songs give voice to displacement and catastrophe, while also staging dialectics between mobility and stasis, technology and nature, utopia and dystopia, nationalism and internationalism. I argue that these works demonstrate how migratory voices, while often marginalized, are central witnesses to the catastrophes that shaped modernity and stand at the very centre of modern music history and historiography. Further, Eisler and Ullmann, without ever hearing the other’s song, contribute towards a nexus of migratory culture. Taken together, they invite us to consider the contours of a broader migratory aesthetic of music history.

Biography: Florian Scheding is Associate Professor in Music and Migration at the University of Bristol. He has published widely on migratory musics across the last century, ranging from functional to popular and art musics. His first book, Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, was named Outstanding Publication of the Year by Choice Magazine. His second book, Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in 20th-century Music, received the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Monograph Prize 2020. He is former editor of the RMA Research Chronicle and has just finished a British Academy Fellowship for a project on cabaret refugee in WWII Britain.