Beate Kutschke – författare

Music was integral to the profound cultural, social and political changes that swept the globe in 1968. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the role that music played in the events of that year, which included protests against the ongoing Vietnam War, the May riots in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From underground folk music in Japan to antiauthoritarian music in Scandinavia and Germany, Music and Protest in 1968 explores music's key role as a means of socio-political dissent not just in the US and the UK but in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa. Contributors extend the understanding of musical protest far beyond a narrow view of the 'protest song' to explore how politics and social protest played out in many genres, including experimental and avant-garde music, free jazz, rock, popular song, and film and theatre music.

Music was integral to the profound cultural, social and political changes that swept the globe in 1968. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the role that music played in the events of that year, which included protests against the ongoing Vietnam War, the May riots in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From underground folk music in Japan to antiauthoritarian music in Scandinavia and Germany, Music and Protest in 1968 explores music's key role as a means of socio-political dissent not just in the US and the UK but in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa. Contributors extend the understanding of musical protest far beyond a narrow view of the 'protest song' to explore how politics and social protest played out in many genres, including experimental and avant-garde music, free jazz, rock, popular song, and film and theatre music.

Reconstructs the socio-political history of the heroic in music through case studies spanning the middle ages to the twenty-first centuryThe first part of this volume reconstructs the various musical strategies that composers of medieval chant, Renaissance madrigals, and Baroque operas, cantatas or oratorios employed when referring to heroic ideas exemplifying their personal moral and political values. A second part investigating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expands the previous narrow focus on Beethoven's heroic middle period and the cult of the virtuoso. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of heroic positions - national, ethnic, revolutionary, bourgeois and spiritual - that filtered not only into 'classical' large-scale heroic symphonies and virtuoso solo concerts, but also into chamber music and vernacular dance music. The third part documents the forced heroization of music in twentieth-century totalitarian regimes such as Nazi-Germany and the Soviet Union and its consequences for heroic thinking and musical styles in the time thereafter. Final chapters show how recent rock-folk and avant-garde musicians in North America and Europe feature new heroic models such as the everyday hero and the scientific heroine revealing new confidence in the idea of the heroic.

Der kulturelle Wandel im Zuge der Ereignisse von 1968 verdankt sich weniger konkreten politischen Eingriffen in Staat und Gesellschaft, als vor allem massenmedial verbreiteten intellektuellen Diskursen, die Wissen, insbesondere wissenschaftliches Wissen, popularisierten und politisierten. An diesem in Soziologie und Geschichtsschreibung in jüngster Zeit viel beachteten Paradigmenwechsel setzt die vorliegende Studie an. Dass das linksintellektuelle Wissen eine neue Lebenskultur – geschlechter- und basisdemokratische sowie ökologisch nachhaltige Lebensformen – prägte, gehört zum vertrauten Bild der Epoche. Dass es aber auch in so entlegenen Gebieten wie der zeitgenössischen Musik kulturalisiert wurde und hier zahlreiche Kompositionen und Stilrichtungen motivierte, wird nun erstmals anhand von acht Fallbeispielen systematisch untersucht. Für die 68er Forschung erweist sich Avantgardemusik dabei als wichtiges kulturelles Feld für heute fast vergessene linksintellektuelle Diskurse und Theorien.