Heather Wiebe – författare

InMobilizing Music in Wartime British Film,author Heather Wiebe traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animated British films of the 1940s. In acclaimed films such asThe Red ShoesandBrief Encounteras well as experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. As this book demonstrates, these films were driven by questions around the efficacy of art music, not just in the conventional sense of uplift or morale-building, but as a sonic force acting on bodies, minds, and materials, and as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Wiebe explores what these films tell us about the experience of World War Two, but also about more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battle front, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war: not just as violence and trauma, but as everyday boredom and melancholy, as loneliness, helplessness, and disappointment. Most of all, they show how music was used to test the limits of "total war," and to conceptualize its new reach into all corners of life

InMobilizing Music in Wartime British Film,author Heather Wiebe traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animated British films of the 1940s. In acclaimed films such asThe Red ShoesandBrief Encounteras well as experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. As this book demonstrates, these films were driven by questions around the efficacy of art music, not just in the conventional sense of uplift or morale-building, but as a sonic force acting on bodies, minds, and materials, and as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Wiebe explores what these films tell us about the experience of World War Two, but also about more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battle front, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war: not just as violence and trauma, but as everyday boredom and melancholy, as loneliness, helplessness, and disappointment. Most of all, they show how music was used to test the limits of "total war," and to conceptualize its new reach into all corners of life

Examining the intersections between musical culture and a British project of reconstruction from the 1940s to the early 1960s, this study asks how gestures toward the past negotiated issues of recovery and renewal. In the wake of the Second World War, music became a privileged site for re-enchanting notions of history and community, but musical recourse to the past also raised issues of mourning and loss. How was sound figured as a historical object and as a locus of memory and magic? Wiebe addresses this question using a wide range of sources, from planning documents to journalism, public ceremonial and literature. Its central focus, however, is a set of works by Benjamin Britten that engaged both with the distant musical past and with key episodes of postwar reconstruction, including the Festival of Britain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral.