Pergamentet nr 6, 2013 by Pergamentet

Pergamentet Tema: ”Musikhistorie”

nr. 6, 2013

Pergamentet Redigeres af studerende på historiestudiet på AAU

Leder

Ansvarshavende Redaktør: Martin Ottovay Jørgensen (moj@cgs.aau.dk)

Tema: Arma virumque cano: On gender and music in history

Redaktion: Casper B. Krogh (5.sem) Jonas Bertelsen (5.sem.) Katrine Funding Højgaard (5.sem.) Martin Ottovay Jørgensen (PhD.stip.) Niels Jacob Olesen Søren Christian Winther (5.sem.)

Historical Performance Practice: Musicians bridging the past 13

Korrektur: Katrine Funding Højgaard (5.sem.) Martin Ottovay Jørgensen (PhD.stip.) Layout: Søren Chr. Winther Forside: Jonas Bertelsen (4.sem.)

Musikkens vilkår i Østtyskland

Interview m. Stine Lindahl Jacobsen

Anmeldelse: Shine a Light

Udenfor tema

Skribenter i dette nummer: Andreas Lie Stokbro Casper B. Krogh Christopher Balslev Strøyer Esben Ruben Bendixen Jonas Bertelsen Josephine Hoegaerts Jozefien Cottyn Katrine Funding Højgaard

Deadline for indlæg næste nummer: 20/02-2014 njfo11@student.aau.dk Oplag: 100. Kan fås som PDF ved henvendelse.

Indlæg repræsenterer alene forfatterens holdning. Redaktionen holder sig derfor ikke ansvarlig.

Utopia: Da nationalsocialismen blev legitim

Fæstning og by ca. 1650 Fæstnings- og byhistorisk konference den 8.-9. oktober 2013

Historiske seværdigheder: Æbelholt Kloster

INTH konferencen.

Leder Musik er på mange måder den mest komplicerede kulturelle kunstform som eksisterer. En kunstform som formår at appellere til masserne, men som samtidig kan være meget personlig. Vi har hver og især vores holdninger til diverse kunstnere eller genrer inden for musik. Dette gør emnet bredt og uhåndterbart, men også et emne som kan være sigende for, hvorledes kulturen i den givne periode har været. Musik kan også være ”tidløst”, altså noget, som altid vil passe ind, da det for eksempel kan beskrive menneskelig natur – som sjældent ændrer sig. Musik kan mange ting som kunstform, og Platon skrev i sit værk ”staten” blandt andet om hvordan forskellige tonearter kan have forskellige psykologisk virkning på folk. Nogle kan gøre mennesket blødagtig, hvorimod andre kan vække en mere heroisk følelse. Diversiteten for hvad musik kan bruges til både inden for historie, men også noget så nytænkende som musikterapi, vil blive belyst i denne udgave af Pergamentet. Musik har i så lang tid der har eksisteret historiske kilder, været drivkraften for menneskets kulturforståelse. Kulturformen opstod især af religiøse hensyn hvor Egypterne for eksempel havde musikkonservatorier som skulle uddanne musikere til at hjælpe præster til tempeltjeneste. Det er, som Platon sagde, noget der kan spille på nogle forskellige psykologiske aspekter såsom heroisme og ens generelle stemning som vi alle kender fra når vi kommer i godt eller dårligt humør når vi hører et stykke musik. Det var så lidt om hvad musik kan, og hvorfor det er et relevant emne at bringe op i dette tidsskrift for jer historiestuderende. Vi har på grund af emnets dybde valgt at bringe en række artikler i dette nummer, som spænder vidt, og der burde derfor være noget for enhver smag. Derudover satser vi på, at det kan inspirere folk til at tænke ud af boksen næste gang de tænker på musikhistorie; det behøver ikke være intetsigende bare fordi at høre musik og samle på lp’er er ens store passion. Redaktionen håber derfor i vil nyde dette nummer af Pergamentet og de indlæg vi har valgt at bringe denne gang. Derudover vil vi gerne undskylde for den lange tid der er gået imellem numrene. Der har været problemer internt med at finde tid grundet studier, rejser og frafald i antallet af redaktionsmedlemmer. Bladet kører på frivillig basis, og nogle gange tager det lidt tid at få gjort tingene færdig eller bare få nok artikler så bladet kan fremstå præsentabelt. Vi er altid på udkig efter nye kræfter til at gøre bladet bedre, så hvis du skulle få lyst til at pynte cv’et med en titel som redaktionsmedlem eller blot kunne henvise til en artikel du har skrevet, er du mere end velkommen. Det er jer derude der skaber bladet. De bedste hilsener, Redaktionen

Marx in the nineteenth century, lead to cemented views on gender and left musicians to project those back unto earlier periods and composers. McClary had gone a long way in debunking this type of received knowledge on the gendered meaning of (classical) music, and others have followed, analyzing e.g. the grounds for the gendered perception of different composers (Beethoven’s music is generally seen as masculine, Schumann’s as feminine). I knew all this as I was singing my way through the Te Deum. What fascinated me, however, was quite how pervasive and farreaching these notions of gender still were, and the enormous impact they could have on real musical practice – and on real singers’ identities. Obviously, we all had an implicit understanding of gendered sound, and unless we were told otherwise, we produced a sound that was conventional for our gendered bodies and identities. Altos who identified as women would intuitively sing ‘like women’, even if they were capable of sounding ‘masculine’ if need be. The singing voice, it turned out, was an amazing instrument for conscious and unconscious performances of gender.

Arma virumque cano. On gender and music in history. Af Josephine Hoegarts, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Leuven, Belgium “Altos, for God’s sake, it’s the second part of the sonata, try to sound masculine!” In the end, it wasn’t Roland Barthes’ Grain de la voix or Butler’s and Spivak’s Who sings the nation state? that convinced me to focus on music as part of my ‘history of masculinity’, it was my – by that point very incensed and exasperated – choir conductor. It was a sunny afternoon in June: I was one year into my PhD, we were practicing Scarlatti’s Te Deum and the altos (including me) had done it wrong. Again. Throwing up his hands in despair, our conductor – slightly choleric at the best of times, positively impossible at the end of a long rehearsal – told us to sing more ‘like men’. As a historian of masculinity, I was utterly puzzled by this demand. Surely sounding ‘like a man’ could mean many things? It would depend on one’s social status, historical and cultural context, the unconscious ideology of masculinity one subscribed to etc. As a singer, however, I instinctively knew what to do. We sang the line again in our most ‘masculine’ tones. It was fine. All was well in the world of the gendered sonata.

Cycling home after the rehearsal, I decided I needed to change tack in my research and give more room for music and singing in my concept of ‘masculinity’. I had been toying with this possibility before. At the outset of my research, sound and music had not even crossed my mind: my aim was to write an account of the development of discourses of masculinity and citizenship as they intersected in homo-social (i.e. all-male) national institutions. I would zoom in on the boy school, the barracks, and parliament to see how different boys and men appropriated discourses of citizenship and acted out masculinity. My framework was heavily influenced by gendertheorists like Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and based on a growing body of research on the history of masculinity. The idea was for me to apply Butler’s idea of gender as readable and continually repeated performances to

With his request for a ‘masculine’ sound, our conductor was referring to a long-standing theory in musicology and music history: that composers constructed their highly structured pieces out of ‘questioning’ phrases, with a feminine endings, and more decisive phrases with a ‘masculine’ ending. In fact, Susan McClary’s book Feminine Endings deals almost exclusively with this type of gendered ascriptions to musical structures. It showed, amongst other things, that the idea of masculine and feminine endings that had been introduced by music theorist Adolph Bernhard 4

sources reflecting the hierarchical structure of all-male institutions. If all went well, I would be able to reflect on the power-riddled relations between different masculinities and question the impact of discipline and hierarchy an actual practices for masculinity by focusing on one small place as a whole and allowing for its internal chaos to play out by simply including all the sources generated by a specific institution (You won’t be surprised to learn that this last goal proved to be – to put it mildly – delusional). I headed to the archives to look for the chaos inherent in heavily organized worlds, and promptly found it. It soon transpired that boys had their own ideas about manly valor that contradicted those of their teachers’.

tice, children sang silly and soldiers saucy version of well-known songs. If it weren’t for the essentially ‘dumb’ nature of nineteenthcentury sources, my database would have been positively deafening. I had dutifully noted this, thinking that I should perhaps include a paragraph or two about the importance of sound for performances of masculinity. After my confrontation with musicians’ apparent ongoing conviction that there was such a thing as a ‘masculine’ sound, however, I decided I would devote a whole chapter to what I would come to call the ‘sound of masculinity’ – including noise and functional sounds as well as music. I ended up devoting three chapters, about half of the dissertation, to the subject. Oh, so you’re a musicologist? – interdisciplinarity and secondary literature I should have known it would get out of hand once I started looking for secondary sources and theoretical underpinning for my ideas of a ‘sound of masculinity’. As I had expected, there wasn’t a lot of work on masculinity and music as such. (Stan Hawkin’s book on the British pop dandy as well as Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson’s edited volume Masculinity and Western Musical Practice would be published while I was writing my dissertation). Once I started to dig a little deeper, however, looking for analyses of social differences and music, gender and music or social histories of music, the field turned out to be absolutely vast. Moreover, there was not only this enormous amount of work published on a wide array of themes that seemed to be connected to mine (there was quite some stuff on popular music in the army, e.g., and its performances by soldiers, and of course a vast literature on the meaning of the heroic in nineteenth-century compositions), these works were written by researchers from all sorts of disciplines – and they all seemed to have very different aims and questions when dealing with the past. I quickly discarded most analytical musicology and music psychology (which, apart from being highly technical, leans to-

One of the patriotic songs taught in Antwerp primary schools, entitled “Homage to Belgium”. Boys and girls are allotted different parts of the score. Soldiers’ notions of citizenship and obedience did not necessarily comply with those of their officers either. Politicians could also disagree profoundly on the necessity of dueling for the preservation of a man’s honor – to give but a few examples. Apart from these instances of naughtiness and conceptual chaos, however, I had also found that the sources reflected an enormous amount of noise. Teachers shouted as they clipped boys around the ears, socialists sang to disrupt parliament, soldiers complained about the ringing in their ears after gun prac5

wards a staggeringly a-historic approach to human behavior) and focused mainly on anthropological research – or ‘ethno-musicology’ as some would have it -, new musicology – musicology of the kind that got swept up in the cultural turn that pervades most of the humanities – and good old music history – which tends to focus quite a lot on personalities and institutions but has developed, as will become clear, a quite sizable branch of what you could call social music history.

citizenship, I decided that I needed to get a grip on the intersections between music and social distinction. More specifically, the works that turned out to be most helpful to me were those dealing – broadly – with music and class, nation and-obviously-gender. Relating them back to the disciplines referred to earlier, and allowing for some broad generalization, one could say that the issue of music and class was mainly the domain of music historians, the intersection of nation or region and music had been most extensively researched by ethnomusicologists, and that gendered notions of music were analyzed mainly within the field of new (or radical, or feminist) musicology. Again, the borders between disciplines are not quite as sharply drawn, but one could trace a fairly logical chronological evolution of these fields. Social histories of music seem to draw mainly on the Marxist wave of social histories in the sixties and seventies and therefore tend to focus on class distinction, most often concerning themselves with ‘popular’ or ‘working class’ music. The influence of E.P.Thompsonlike works on these studies is hard to dismiss (indeed, they do seem to provide an answer to Thompson’s call for a cultural approach to the ‘making of the working class’, and look at music as both a means of popular education by the middle classes, and as a way to build a collective – often rebellious- working class identity). For the nineteenth century, Dave Russell’s Popular music in England is the most important example of this type of work. It studies both vocal and instrumental music and their role in the shaping of morality and ideologies in the working classes of industrial England. It’s a wonderful resource if you want to write a history of local choirs or brass bands, or if you’re looking at the influence of music on several kinds of popular education (be it in a primary school or within the temperance movement). The class-central approach to music history has moved on since – most notably towards histories of the working-class roots of rock bands, which tends to focus on

The distinction between these disciplines is partially an artificial one: authors trained in musicology have written impressive historical work, anthropologists have made huge contributions to musicology (especially when it comes to non-Western music) and when I present my research at historical conferences, I am often greeted with the phrase “oh, so you’re a musicologist?” (which might by now be true, but I still deny it in the company of ‘real’ musicologists). Whilst I firmly believe that an interdisciplinary approach to music in the past is the only sensible way to do research, I will hold on to these disciplinary distinctions for the next few paragraphs. They will allow me to bring some structure to what has been a rather chaotic reading list but also, and more importantly, I think that the particular value of this interdisciplinary field comes from the distinctions between the disciplines involved, i.e. the different questions they bring to the table, the different techniques to answer them, and the ultimate goal of their research. Historians have a beautiful tradition of adopting and adapting whatever methodology comes in handy for research (and in this field, the world really is our oyster), but when it comes to formulating a research question and methodically plundering the archives to answer it, we still have our own perspective and I hope it will become clear that a historical approach to music can bring important contributions to the field of music and gender. So what is this ‘field’? Considering I was trying to write on constructions of masculinity and 6

rebellion rather than education1 - but Russell’s main contention, that music could work as a power to forge collectives and thus contribute to class-based identities, remains influential, and the subject shows no signs of being worn out yet.2

sic and citizenship, especially because I was dealing with explicitly ‘national’ institutions and the sounds they produced. However, they were less applicable to my analysis of masculinity. There are, obviously, various intersections between gender and class, or gender and nation that needed to be addressed,4 but in a general sense my working definition of masculinity (and the interpretation of ‘gender’ of most cultural theorists) was that it was not a collective identity, but rather a range of corporeal and discursive practices that needed constant reiteration, both on an individual and a societal level. Music, I sensed, would be an excellent example of, firstly, how discursive and corporeal practices could coincide, and, secondly, how constant repetition and slight adaptations to established practices could lead to societal change.5 Analytical musicology had addressed a number of questions concerning the gendered ideology that was inherent in music itself, and some early feminist work had been published on a number of female conductors and composers in which gender was quite obviously an issue, but the publications that turned out to be most useful for my project were those dealing with gender and performance. Some, but by no means all, authors on this subject were looking at gender as a performance as well. In fact, those dealing with the theme most closely aligned to my questions of masculinity – those writing on the castrato – had managed to almost steer clear of questions of gender altogether, and focused on castrato roles, their cultural impact and their connection to the Catholic Church instead. Nevertheless, it was works on the castrato that showed most clearly that the ‘sound of masculinity’ and its meaning had – at least on stage – changed considerably (its pitch had dropped by about an octave, to put

The issue of music as a force in the construction of collective identities is equally present in ethno-musicologists’ or musical anthropologists’ work. Ethno-musicology seemed of particular interest to me, as its origins are so firmly rooted in the nineteenth century: the urge to collect and classify the music of different ‘peoples’ – a thoroughly modern endeavor, often aided by new machinery such as the phonograph – has propelled the work of its early proponents and seems never to have truly left the discipline. Rather than merely applying a rigid (and often hierarchical) classification to the folksongs they record on fieldtrips, however, contemporary ethnomusicologists have done a great deal of work in showing how music has played a role in the continuous performance of regional identities, and the creation of national identities. Most of the authors involved are either influenced by the theories of nation and nationalism of the eighties (quite a lot of them refer more or less obliquely to music as an element in the making of ‘imagined communities’3), or – when dealing with music outside the ‘West’ – by postcolonial or subaltern studies. Both these strands of research on ‘collective identities’ were helpful to shape ideas on mu1

The history of pop music seems, intriguingly, to be the domain of media studies, and is often tied up in studies on marketing. 2

As it is, the field remains rather Anglo-Centric, and there is room for interaction with ‘super-ordinate studies’, to include different social strata, and different styles of music.

Which is why most histories of masculinity tend to conceptualize different masculinities in order to accommodate the internal versatility of gender. 5 Again, an approach that was very much influenced by Judith Butler’s Undoing gender, and its adaptation to vocal practices by Tom Delph-Janiurek.

Cf. for example a recent conference on Music and Imagined Communities. Articulations of the Self and the other in the Musical Realm, 2011, Florence (proceedings published as Waligorska, 2013).

it simply). Works that did deal with a musical performance of gender mainly dealt with female voices (such as Naomi André’s Voicing Gender on operatic second sopranos, for example), referred to notions like authority or power that could be read as part of a gendered discourse, but were not necessarily represented as such (e.g. John Potter’s Vocal authority, for example, or works on the role of the creative genius and the authorative conductor such as Norman Lerbrecht’s The maestro myth), or focused on the gendered representation of musicians and their performance style.

tions. What we need to understand the intersection of music and gender, in other words, is a firm historical context in which the issue of change (be it political, economic, cultural, social, or religious) is accurately addressed. On a more pragmatic note, that means quite simply that a historian should not only read scores, or listen to recordings, or look at musical instruments and attempt to classify them within a musical framework, but should read the different texts reflecting or commenting on music, or those simply produced by the institutions in which this music plays a role. Rather than reading children’s patriotic songs within their musical context (defined by their composers, style or publisher), for example, I read them in conjunction with reports of school trips in which the actual singing of these songs was mentioned by children, and contextualized within a corporeal practice and a tangible landscape. This is not to say that ‘actual’ music can be left out of music history. Too often, it seems, researchers forget that music is not a dead artifact on paper- what sources reflect on when describing music is sound, and often language just happens to be their means to do so. Relating these silent texts back to an actually sounding past is probably the greatest challenge any historian of music faces. After all, the sound is – in every sense of the word – ‘gone’ and on top of that we lack the period ear of its original audience.6 As fun as it is to try and imagine the sounds of a singing battalion of soldiers, trying to extrapolate from sheet music is a tricky business (and, it turns out, humming bawdy army songs in the library is severely frowned upon).

No humming in the library! – methodology and sources Going through the obviously well-developed field (or fields) of social distinction and music in history, it’s hard to imagine what the specific contribution of a historian might be (after all, most of us are not very well-versed in the ‘language’ of music – we are mainly trained to analyze discourse, i.e. text, and perhaps an image or two). However, it was also clear that the question I was asking – what role did sound play in the performances of masculinity and citizenship in the nineteenth century? – had not been answered before, and seemed to fall outside the remit of musicology or anthropology. The tight relation between the political (citizenship) and the socio-cultural (music) of nineteenth-century male identity seemed absent in most research, as anthropologists tended to focus almost exclusively on the political meaning and use of music (as social glue, as protest, as a way to preserve tradition etc.) and musicologists are mainly interested in the esthetics of music (how different styles ‘work’, what roles are created for the stage, etc.) It might be exactly at these crossroads that historians have an important role to play: showing that music indeed has political and social impact, and that to generate this impact it has to be performed and answer to specific esthetic sensibilities, which are of course tied to socio-cultural conven-

The ‘period ear’ is a concept introduced by Bruce Smith, and later adopted by Gina Bloom. It focusses on the role on the audience in shaping the sound it perceives through its own expectations, cultural sensibilities, historical context; and calls attention to the fact that not only have sounds themselves changed, but the way we engage with them is historically volatile too.

However, in the last two decades a new field has arisen that explicitly attempts to address sound ‘as sound’ rather than as an abstract social force or a thing of beauty and it was in these early works of ‘sound studies’ that I finally found a way to work with my silent material which would allow me to expose performances of gender without reducing sounds and music to mere discourse, and which allowed me to combine text, images and sheet music. Sound studies has risen partially from early work on the history of the senses (Alain Corbin’s influence in particular is obvious), and it has retained some of the materialistic quality of these early forays. Quite a number of authors in the field have focused on emerging acoustic technologies (Jonathan Sterne’s history of the MP3, e.g., or Karin Bijsterveld’s research on mechanical sounds) and their impact on the perception of sound, or on the classification of sounds, e.g. as ‘noise’ or as in indication of ill-health: the intersection between the intangible issue of sound and the very material nature of producers of sound is often at the heart of their research – which provides an interesting avenue of thought when dealing with the production of fleeting sound by very real and material gendered bodies.

text, the text itself is preserved and can be read – as was the text’s original intention (this is not to say that the interpretation of texts is simple or straightforward, but at least the act of reading is anticipated by the author). When looking for sound, however, the sound itself cannot be preserved, but only recorded – and the recording will always differ in some way from the original. As Jonathan Rée has suggested, “recording is not the same as preservation: it is a technique for generating copies of an original, rather than maintaining it in existence”. Looking back at my body of sources, I was broadly dealing with three types of material: prescriptive texts, outlining which sounds should be produced in order to produce a masculine identity, descriptive texts, putting into words which sounds the author had heard and what these meant to him, and ‘recordings’ attempting to convey the sound itself. In the first category, arguably the easiest one to work with, there were a number of manuals, e.g. overviews of the way to shout orders in the army (first a long drawn-out sound, and then a short, staccato one, should you feel the need to try this at home), teachers’ manuals advising on the right way to sing in the classroom, regulations defining posture for speaking in parliament, etc. Educational and military journals often carried similar texts with advice on ‘proper’ behavior – and as it turned out, notes on ‘how to be’ a soldier, pupil, politician or teacher usually also contained at least some reflection on acoustic behavior (singing played a particularly important role in the schools and barracks, courses in music were compulsory for both teachers and officers). The ‘descriptive’ texts were a more fragmented lot: I included press-cuttings and official reports on military exercises, correspondence between parents and teachers (which often contained complaints of ‘loud’ children), booklets describing musical performances at national celebrations over which politicians presided, reports of excursions written by school children, correspondence on the music-curriculum, personal

Soldier’s pocket book with sentimental and military songs, ca. 1908. What sound studies made abundantly clear to me, was that ‘acoustic’ sources could not be treated as traces from the past as I would usually do for a discourse- or performative analysis. To put it simply, if an author writes a 9

notes of royalty observing military parades, and a handful of fictional accounts of grand concerts on a ‘national’ stage. Because these texts not only contained celebratory descriptions of sound, but criticisms of ‘noise’ as well, they gave a more balanced view of the impact sounds, and the masculine voice in particular, was thought to have in the public sphere. One of the most important findings, perhaps, was that ‘having voice’ or ‘being heard’ did not necessarily coincide with having more power. Those lowest in rank (soldiers and young boys) could be forced to produce sound or to produce music, whereas the most powerful – the politicians – could easily afford to remain silent. (And politicians were certainly never depicted in the frivolous activity of singing – that was left to the lower classes, women and children). Moreover, descriptive texts also gave an insight in the effect of music: authors noted how music could move, rouse or irritate them, or described when ‘music’ turned into noise and lead to sanctions (singing in the wrong place could be punished, as was the singing of improper words or by improper singers).

provided copies of very specific performances at very specific moments in time. The report on parliamentary proceedings was merely a copy of what the ‘real’ performance had been, and scores only have a public existence at the moment when they are performed.7 Because I had gathered a rather large amount of material (which at first sight might have seemed inconsequential) I could actually pinpoint the moments in which the scores had been performed. I knew, for example, when and where children had sung the national hymn, or particular travelling songs, and I could link the recording of parliamentary sessions to the regulations that guided them and the correspondence that erupted in their wake. By providing this context of non-acoustic activity that framed the sounds and music that had been recorded, it became clear that producing sound was an activity that could contribute a great deal to the construction and reception of men’s identity in all-male contexts, and that the repetitive nature of some acoustic practices (such as the repetition of some poems and songs) betrayed the existence of a conventional ‘masculine’ sound. At the end of the ride, I could draw the conclusion that there was such a thing as the ‘sound of masculinity’, which could be expressed musically or otherwise. This ‘sound of masculinity’ depended on continual practice: not only did it have to be acquired (in school, or in the barracks), it also had to be performed repeatedly in order to remain conventional and recognizable. Yet, because of this necessity of continuous performance, it was also continually subject to change. Finally, the ‘sound of masculinity’ was not only changing over time, but also varied according to the specific construction of masculinity that was to be performed: in the case of upper-class masculinity, silence was the most recognizably masculine sound available –

And then there were the recordings of sound. Broadly speaking these included parliamentary proceedings (more or less word-by-word transcriptions of debates), poems, transcribed lyrics and dialogues from the military training camp (which were probably at least partly imaginary, but were represented as soundbites), sheet music preserved in school manuals or soldiers’ pocket books and more artistic scores for large national cantatas performed by teachers and pupils. Interpreting these as ‘recordings’ rather than discourse radically changed their status within the research and allowed for a more dynamic definition of the ‘sound of masculinity’. Ordinarily, I would have seen most of these types of sources as prescriptive (after all, a score tells you ‘what to do’) or descriptive (parliamentary proceedings describe a scene in parliament), yet as sound studies had shown these sources rather

Or, to borrow a phrase from Daniel Barenboim, in conversation with Edward Said: “The score is not the truth. The score is not the piece. The piece is when you actually bring it into sound”.

it distinguished men from nattering women, from singing boys or common soldiers, or from noisy laborers. The performance of music proved to be a vital part of the acquisition of citizenship and masculinity, then (the singing of patriotic songs in particular was deemed important), but the performance of a carefully controlled silence came to supplant it once a boy reached a certain age and status (or, as some authors would have it, once his lungs had been sufficiently developed, and his broad chest could speak for itself without the help of heroic songs).

about repertoire and performance practice. Yes, historical research can have meaning outside the narrow confines of the profession). It therefore pays off to keep in touch with some interested professionals in your specific field of study and talk through your research question and findings. Or, better still, let them engage with your (musical) sources. As I was wrapping up my PhD, I decided to experiment a bit, and have a –rather hastily assembled- choir perform some of the songs I had analyzed. While I remain ambiguous toward the value of ‘re-enactment’ as a research method, these singing-sessions provided some important clues for a re-interpretation of the relation between score and practice, or between recording and history. 8 Nineteenthcentury scores tend to be very precise: composers noted exactly what sentiments to express, what dynamics to use and – obviouslywhat words and notes to sing. Yet as my pseudo-schoolboys and soldiers quickly showed, they were also quite easy to subvert and manipulate towards one’s own interpretation. The singers also complained incessantly that the music was ‘too high’, its poetic content offensive and the composers’ indications on emotion overly sentimental – showing to which extent esthetic conventions, performance practice, and the legitimacy of (political) messages in music are intertwined. Considering the wealth of reports on boys’ and soldiers’ mischief, it is probably safe to assume that although some men could be forced to sing, it would not have been possible to control exactly how they sung – leading us once more away from an interpretation of scores as mere prescription, and toward a stress on performance and practice (see e.g. Musica Practica, for guidelines). Moreover, acoustically engaging with musical sources is an excellent way of being reminded that music

“That’s way too high for a soldier” – why musicians matter As should have become clear in the preceding paragraphs, the interdisciplinarity of the field of music history – as challenging as it may be – can be a gift to the historian searching for a way to push the boat out and use unconventional methodologies or sources. I have thus far only mentioned neighboring ‘academic’ disciplines that could be useful when dealing with music of the past. In these final paragraphs, I’d like to call attention to another group of professionals that is of enormous importance to music history – and that sadly seems often to be forgotten in academic writing-: musicians. Musicians matter, I believe, for two reasons: they can provide invaluable insights in how the performance of music works and how it has changed, and they are one of the music historian’s most important audiences. Musicians, and not only those involved in ‘historically informed performance’ are curious about the history of their instrument, their genre, their profession, the meaning of what they do, and the questions they have regarding the past are relevant to the historian, because the answers provided will make their way into contemporary creative practice. (Nothing is quite as satisfying as finding out that your work on the connection between treble singing and the performance of citizenship has been picked up by the conductor of a boy choir and has set him thinking

Sound files can be found at www.spacesandsoundsofmasculinity.be.

is, indeed, sound, even if you’re actually analyzing it for a gendered history.

Delph-Janiurek, Tom, “Sounding Gender(ed): Vocal Performances in English University Teaching Spaces”, Gender, Place and Culture: a Journal of Feminist Geography, 6:2 (1999), 137-153.

Bibliography André, Naomi, Voicing Gender. Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in EarlyNineteenth-Century Italian Opera, Indiana University Press, 2006.

Hawkins, Stan, The British Pop Dandy. Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture, Ashgate, 2009. Lebrecht, Norman, The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power, Citadel, 2001.

Barenboim, Daniel and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes. Explorations in Music and Society, Bloomsbury, 2003.

McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Barbier, Patrick, The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon , Souvenir Press, 1998. Barthes, Roland, Grain de la voix : Entretiens 1962-1980, Points, 1999.

Potter, John, Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Biddle, Ian and Kirsten Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, Ashgate, 2009.

Rée, Jonathan, I see a voice. Deafness, Language and the Senses – A Philosophical History, Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Bijsterveld, Karin, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century, MIT Press, 2008.

Russell, Dave, Popular Music in England. A social history, Manchester University Press, 1987.

Bohlman, Philip V., Music, Nationalism and the Making of the New Europe, Routledge, 2011.

Smith, Bruce R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Attending to the O-Factor, The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Bloom, Gina, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Sterne, Jonathan, MP3: the Meaning of a Format, Duke University Press, 2012. Waligorska, Magdalena (ed.), Music and (be)longing. Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm, Cambridge Scholar Press, 2013

Borchard, Beatrix, “Beethoven: Männlichkeitskonstruktionen im Bereich der Musik” in: Martina Kessel, ed. Kunst, Geschlecht, Politik. Männlichkeitskonstruktionen und Kunst im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, Campus, 2005, 65-84. Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging, Seagull Books, 2007. Corbin, Alain, Les cloches de la terre. Paysage sonore et culture sensible dans les campagnes au XIXè siècle, Albin Michel, 1994. Chanan, Michael, Musica Practica. The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism, Verso, 1994. 12

scores, music-theoretical, historical and philosophical literature, paintings…

Historical Performance Practice: Musicians bridging the past

In order to enlarge the public for historical music, several initiatives to spread this music are being developed. As an effect, the music has found a growing public. However, particularly recorder music remains a largely unknown or unpopular terrain so far due to stereotypes associated with the instrument stemming from its wide-spread use in schools. Frans Brüggen, a well-known recorder player, has acted as a key figure in relieving the instrument from its image as “children’s instrument”. Nowadays, recorder players are still looking for several ways to make this instrument and its music more appreciated.

Af Jozefien Cottyn In this article, I explore the use of history in music performance from my own perspective as a professional recorder player. As most of the music for recorder was written before 1760-1770, when the instrument started to disappear, I am most familiar with what is called “historical music”. Historical music refers to music written from Middle Ages until around 1800. As this music can give us an image of life in a specific period, historical music can be approached as a door to the world in which previous generations lived, thought, felt and behaved. In order to reproduce this music in a correct way, I exercise a historical performance practice. This means that I intend to play the music as it would have been played at the time it was written. In order to stay as close to the original as possible, my way of performing relies essentially on the available historical sources. At the age of seven, recorder became “my” chosen instrument and I was introduced to ancient and contemporary recorder music. I was immediately captivated by the tales and old histories emerging from ancient music. Later, my interest in historical music and the versatile properties of the instrument convinced me to become a professional recorder player. I finished my studies at the historical department of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels where I broadened my knowledge on historical performance practice. Today, a lot of musicians of historical music attempt to play and bring the music like it should have sound at the time of writing. Sources that help musicians to reproduce the original performance as faithful as possible are

This is an example of a copy of an alto recorder by Thomas Stanesby At an international level, a good amount of renowned ensembles are successfully increasing the reach of historical music. In addition, new ensembles are coming up with innovative performances, for instance by combining this music with other arts such as spoken word, photography or film, or by fusing historical music with contemporary elements. 1. History, music and historical performance practice Historical performance practice started in the second half of the 20th century. A number of important musicians like Frans Brüggen, Ton Koopman, Gustav Leonhardt en Nikolaus Harnoncourt pleaded for an on history based performance practice. 2. Some thoughts about historical documented performance practice9 The creative process of music consist of two phases: composition and performance, which 9

Some basic thoughts on performance practice, P. Van Heyghen, Den Haag 2002

mostly occur separated from each other by variable amounts of time and/or space. As every composition is the result of an effort made by a specific person at a specific moment and place , every performance is unique and there is no “true” way to perform a composition.

Primary sources include written documents such as treatises, letters, diaries or travelling accounts. Secondary sources comprise notated music published on facsimile, urtext10, music recordings, critical editions and written texts such as reference works, articles, websites or CD booklet texts. Together, these sources form the basis for a personal and informed performance practice.

Time and place provide the esthetical and stylistic background with its generally accepted rules and conventions; the “language” in which the composer speaks. The composer himself/herself provides the “message”.

Methodologically, the analysis of these sources and their “translation” into a performance relies mainly on organology - the science and classification of musical instrumentsand iconography.

A historical performance practice aims to read the message and understand the language; in other words, to reduce the gap between composition and performance. Composers are aware of the fact that a performer is not always familiar with their intentions or the current stylistic conventions at the moment of origin of the composition. Therefore, it is common practice to provide instructions on how the composer wants his/her compositions to be performed.

To the measure that these methods point to a particular combination of sources, the whole picture becomes clearer, allowing music performance to transcend the notion of decoding notes written down on paper. 3. The influence of history in performing a recorder sonata. A case study on sonata HWV 360 in G minor by G.F. Handel The process of historical music performance starts with the choice of an original score. The internet provides in several free public domain music libraries, such as the Petrucci Music Library (www.imslp.org). This is where I found a facsimile in a collection of 6 sonatas for recorder by G.F. Handel, with the title “Sonata a flauto e cembalo”. It was composed in England between 1724-1726, during the HighBaroque.

A performer appeals to her/his whole personality, combining intellectual and scientific activity with esthetical and creative activity. The approach I want to present in this paper is called “historical documented/informed performance practice”. This approach is directed towards restoring the relation between form and content, towards understanding and transmitting the expressive power of the original message embedded in its original language. As such, it has been proposed as the best possible perspective for the quality of the performance of historical music.

In general, Baroque music is characterized by very dynamic movement and by a broad range of emotional expressions. The music gives the sound of a theatrical universe, grotesque, sometimes even slightly decadent, and often

Resulting from this time-space distance, being a Musicologist or a musician requires a considerable amount of historical research and intensive cooperation to exchange insights on how to understand the music.

An urtext is a printed version intended to reproduce the original intention of the composer as exactly as possible, without any added or changed material.

unearthly beautiful. It is the music of heroic yet fragile humans. There were two important employers for music during the Baroque: the Church and the court. The most important countries with their own national musical style in Europe were Italy, France, Germany and England.

An extract from the first page from the facsimile of this sonata The fact that he appealed to a civil public is a first symptom of social change that continued until the end of the 18th century and that had far-reaching consequences for music.

To have a complete image of this music, I need to know about the life of the composer, the music styles, way of performing and the used instruments at the time and place the composer lived. Handel was born in 1685 and died in 1759. He came from a German nonmusical family, but because of his talent he could take music lessons. He started his career in Germany, went to Italy and at the age of 25 he arrived in England where he stayed in London till his dead. All these places have contributed in laying the foundation of his musical style. He has written a lot of musical-dramatic works such as opera or oratorios, vocal and instrumental music for the Church and for courts.

Charles Burney12 gives an insight into his personality: “full of fire and dignity, on one hand heavy and sour and on the other hand intelligent, good-humoured and radiant. He never wanted to spoil his time on frivolous pursuits. He was so fond of art and dedicated in the cultivation and practice of it, as a profession, he led a studious and sedentary life.” In the 17th century, the recorder was adapted more and more in the popular opera tunes. The instrument was by the end of that century risen to new heights and it developed from a 2-joint to a new 3-joint instrument. At that time there was the Stanesby family in England who made recorders that were eagerly sought after.

In this period, the Baroque, most composers maintained a national tradition of music writing.11 Contrary to the national tradition of writing music, Handel was an international composer who knew to combine German seriousness and Italian mildness in his music. All this matured in England, where there was more place for a cosmopolitan style. He became very successful and enjoyed international fame.

To play this music, I choose to use an alto recorder made by a copy of an instrument from Thomas Stanesby. As accompany instrument I choose a harpsichord after a 17th century model. Both pitched on a’=415 Hz13, a pitch that is nowadays mostly used for historical music.

Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen, J.Quantz, 1752

About these national styles and performing this 11 music, books were written by J.Quantz , 11 J.Mattheson and others.

An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon… 1784 in Commemoration of Handel (Londen, 1785), pag.31-37 A pitch is an absolute frequency assigned to a specific note, fixing the relative frequencies of all other notes.

Der vollkommene Capellmeister , J.Mattheson, 1739

Some musicians discovered that this sonata, HWV 360, is connected with Handel’s work as a music teacher to two of George II’s daughters, the princesses Anne and Caroline. The music also contains several parts used in other works, both vocal and instrumental music.

http://imslp.org: “Petrucci Music Library”, International Music Score Library Project, free public domain music library http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com: Grove Music Online and access point for Oxford music reference subscriptions and products online

Once selected a score and familiar with the background of its production, the score must be read to look for musical indications by the composer and maybe faults that could have happened by the copyist. It is mainly by accumulated experience in playing a lot of this music that one can recognize the symbols that have a certain purpose and faults made by absentmindedness while copying. It is the task of the musician to make them sound more logical in its musical style.

http://www.music.indiana.edu/chmtl: transcriptions of treatises on music theory from 3rd to the 17th century http://www.sscm-jscm.org: free digital journal of 17th century music http://www.youtube.com: - “Les Muffati, a musical portrait, Brussels Baroque orchestra with artistic director Peter Van Heyghen

As given in several sources, it was usual in Baroque music to add ornamentations to the melody. There are rules written down for some small fixed ones and there is a variety of ornamentations used to enhance the affect and to foreground the notes. According to my personal taste and capacity, I add ornamentations. Moreover, as Handel’s sonatas are full of the dramatic gestures inextricably bound up with his music for opera, his indications and intentions are open to more than one interpretation. So, while I am forced to rely on and make up my own ideas, this should always happen within the historically context.

- “Baroque Gesture with Sigrid T'Hooft” - “TedxFlander – BOX – A Baroque Remix Manifest” Baroque Orchestration X is a Belgian artist collective which is exploring the full potential of early music instruments today, putting them in unorthodox settings and bringing them to a different audience.

For the performance of historical music, history is what makes the music complete, although there will never be an answer to every question that emerges from historical music. History must be kept in mind while playing. In the end, however, body, personality and feelings are what brings the music towards a listener and bring them in an emotional state. Because that is still the most important aspect of music. 4. Some links about historical music http://musicprintinghistory.org: online museum about the history of music printing 16

ikke på, at der nu var en åbning for vestligt musik i Østtyskland.

Musikkens vilkår i Østtyskland

AMIGA’s censurnet gjaldt naturligvis også musikere internt i DDR, og der var således en række kriterier, der skulle være opfyldt, før en plade kunne udgives: Først og fremmest blev musikerne kraftigt opfordret til at synge på tysk, og dernæst kunne det blive krævet, at teksterne skulle gennemgås for DDR-kritisk indhold. Visse bands klarede disse forhindringer, og især Die Puhdys og Die Klaus Renft Combo opnåede stor succes i den første halvdel af 70’erne. Desværre lykkedes det kun sidstnævnte at udgive to plader, Klaus Renft Combo (1973) og RENFT (1974), samt et par singler, før DDR-toppen besluttede, at bandet var for radikalt, og at det derfor måtte lukkes.

Af Andreas Lie Stokbro, 3. sem. Den østtyske musikscene var ligesom store dele af samfundet generelt underlagt streng censur, men det forhindrede ikke, at der i dag bliver argumenteret for, at musikken kom til at spille en central rolle i skabelsen af den folkestemning, der i sidste ende fik Muren til at falde. Denne artikel vil forsøge at forklare, hvordan dette hænger sammen. I perioden fra DDR’s fødsel og frem til cirka 1970 var den officielle, statslige holdning til vestlig populærmusik, at en del af de idealer og temaer, der ofte blev luftet gennem musikken, var stærkt uforenelige med en socialistisk samfundsmodel. Den kolde krig rasede, og det passede derfor ikke DDR-toppen, når vestlige kunstnere sang om at tage sig diverse økonomiske eller politiske friheder. Resultatet blev derfor, at staten i 1950’erne og 60’erne førte en forholdsvis hård linje over for udbredelsen af udenlandsk musik.

For den østtyske befolkning var adgangen til musik dog ikke udelukkende bestemt af, hvad staten fandt egnet til udgivelse hos AMIGAselskabet. Den østtyske radiotjeneste spillede vestligt musik, men dels skulle det godkendes i lighed med pladeudgivelserne fra AMIGA, og dels var radioen forpligtiget til kun at lade den vestlige musik fylde 40 procent af den samlede mængde afspillede musik. Resten skulle stamme fra DDR eller andre socialistiske stater. I modsætning hertil arbejdede det vesttyske radio- og tv-selskab ARD med at få deres signaler til at nå så langt ind i Østtyskland som muligt, og det lykkedes i en sådan grad, at det kun var et område med ufordelagtig geografi omkring Dresden, der til sidst måtte nøjes med østmedierne. Dette område blev derfor kendt som ”De uvidendes dal”, for det var selvsagt ikke kun vestlig musik, der ikke umiddelbart nåede frem hertil, men også nyheder og vestligt perspektiv på verdenssituationen måtte Dresden-indbyggerne undvære. ARD’s arbejde betød dog, at størstedelen af den østtyske befolkning fik muligheden for at stifte bekendtskab med en del af den musik og de synspunkter, DDR-lederne ikke havde godkendt til udgivelse eller radiotransmission, og det betød også, at de østtyske musikere fik en

Dette ændrede sig i starten i 1970’erne. Med en vis afspænding i Den kolde krig turde statslederne godt indlede et samarbejde, der betød, at en række udenlandske og vestlige kunstnere kunne blive udgivet på statens eget pladeselskab, som bar navnet AMIGA. Siden slutningen af 40’erne havde selskabet udgivet plader med østtyske musikere, men nu blev også en række udenlandske kunstnere som The Beatles og Bob Dylan tilgængelige for det østtyske publikum, og med tanke på især Dylans ofte samfundskritiske tekster er det ikke svært at forstå, hvorfor han fandt vej gennem det censurnet, statslederne og AMIGAselskabet fik opstillet. At komme gennem dette net kunne godt være en langvarig proces, hvilket blandt andet illustreres af, at både Pink Floyds The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) og Fleetwood Macs Rumours (1977) først blev udgivet på AMIGA i 1979, men det ændrede 17

mere varieret inspiration til deres musikalske arbejde.

tekstsammenhæng systemkritisk, men med tanke på situationen i DDR forekommer det ikke urealistisk, at der antydedes en kritik, når temaer som grænser og frihed blev bragt på banen.

Slutningen på 70’erne markerede begyndelsen på en ny periode med en voksende spænding mellem øst og vest. Sovjets invasion af Afghanistan, USA’s boykot af OL i Moskva og Reagans oprustning før en eventuel atomkrig var alle eksempler på et forværret forhold mellem de to parter, men i modsætning til perioden før 70’erne fik dette ikke umiddelbart den store indflydelse på musikkens vilkår i Østtyskland. Reglerne for udgivelser var ikke svækkede, men blandt nye tiltag var, at der var en vis udveksling mellem øst- og vesttyske orkestre, der fik lov at turnere i begge lande. Blandt de bands, der nød godt af dette, var Die Puhdys og det nye band Karat, som med pladen Der blaue Planet (1982) skulle blive det østtyske band, der opnåede de bedste salgstal både internt i DDR og i udlandet. Bandet havde dog allerede udgivet tre albums på dette tidspunkt, og et klart karakteristikum var den progressive rocklyd, der ikke lå langt fra det, man kunne finde hos eksempelvis Jethro Tull, The Who og Pink Floyd. Samtidig formåede både The Puhdys og Karat at finde en lyrisk balance, der gjorde, at de kunne klare AMIGAcensuren, men samtidig komme med tekster der i hvert fald kunne tolkes systemkritisk.

Et sted, hvor kritikken mod systemet ikke var til at tage fejl af, var det punkmiljø, der opstod i Østtyskland i starten af 80’erne. DDR-lederne så ikke med milde øjne på stilen, som blev anset som samfundsnedbrydende, og det betød blandt andet, at hverken The Clash, Ramones, Sex Pistols eller Dead Kennedys tilsyneladende fik udgivet plader i landet. Derfor må det anses for at være et resultat af den vesttyske indsats for at bringe vestlig radio og tv til Østtyskland, når der alligevel opstod en punkscene i DDR, men hvor de britiske og amerikanske bands sang i protest mod høj arbejdsløshed, var den østtyske punk snarere et opgør mod den socialistiske stat. Scenen blev derfor hurtigt et interesseområde for Stasi, der havde held til at infiltrere miljøet ved hjælp af rekrutterede stikkere, som skulle bringe oplysninger fra miljøet. Stasi havde stor succes med denne taktik, hvilket især kunne ses ved, at bandet Jena udelukkende bestod af Stasi-hyrede punkere. Punkscenen havde aldrig held til at vokse sig synderligt stor, og i slutningen af 80’erne blev den åbenbart vurderet at være så tilpas ufarlig, at punkmusikere i lighed med andre kunne få deres sange udgivet på AMIGA-selskabet. På dette tidspunkt var der dog ved at ske større ting med musikscenens muligheder i DDR: I 1987 afholdtes i Vestberlin en række store udendørskoncerter, og i den forbindelse forsøgte store mængder af østtyske tilhængere at komme så tæt som muligt på Muren for på afstand at opleve koncerterne. De blev dog mødt med modstand fra de østtyske mur- og grænsevagter, og det kom til sammenstød mellem parterne. Som en konsekvens heraf kom DDR-toppen frem til, at det ikke længere var holdbart at fraholde det østtyske publikum muligheden for at se deres vestlige helte, og det blev derfor besluttet, at østtyskerne nu

Et eksempel på en sådan tekst kan findes på sangen ”Albatros” fra Karats andet album, Über sieben Brücken, som udkom i 1979. Med en spilletid på over otte minutter og en klassisk, storladen, guitar- og keyboarddrevet opbygning var nummeret stilistisk et godt eksempel på den vestligt klingende progressive stil, bandet indspillede store dele af deres musik i. Tekstmæssigt kom forsanger Claudius Dreilich blandt andet ind på albatrossens færd ”vom Südpol nach Norden. Kein Ziel ist zu weit: Der Albatros kennt keine Grenzen” (”fra Sydpol til Norden. Ingen destination er for fjern: Albatrossen kender ingen grænser”), ligesom den fløj mod ”freiheit der Meere” (”havenes frihed”). Man skal selvfølgelig være varsom med ikke at overfortolke enhver symbolik og 18

også selv skulle arrangere koncerter med de største vestlige navne.

Året efter koncerten blev der slået hul i Berlinmuren, og det er nok naivt at forestille sig, at det var Springsteens koncert og ARD’s arbejde med at bringe vestlig kultur ind i DDR, der i sidste ende fik landet til at bryde sammen. Alligevel er det interessant, at musikken kan have haft en vis betydning for den måde, østtyskerne så på sig selv og omverdenen. Musikken var et vindue ind til den vestlige verden, og således kunne den almindelige østtysker afspejle sin egen situation i det, vedkommende blev præsenteret for gennem tekster. Det er ikke utænkeligt, at musikken for nogen var medvirkende til at skabe den længsel mod vest, der kunne ses, når personer satte livet på spil for at krydse grænsen illegalt, og som var endnu mere tydelig i forbindelse med Murens fald.

I en periode var det nærmest som om, Øst- og Vesttyskland konkurrerede om, hvem der kunne arrangere de største koncerter. Michael Jackson og Pink Floyd spillede i vest, mens eksempelvis Bryan Adams og Big Country spillede i øst, men den mest ikoniske østkoncert fandt dog sted den 19. juli 1988, hvor Bruce Springsteen gav koncert foran 300.000 tilskuere. I sin nyligt udgivne bog Rocking the Wall beskriver tysklandskorrespondent Erik Kirschbaum koncerten, og han nævner, at netop denne begivenhed var med til at skabe en frihedsfølelse blandt østtyskerne, at den til en vis grad ændrede befolkningens sindsstemning i mere vestlig retning, og at den viste, at det østtyske regimes kontrol med befolkningen kunne udfordres. Gennem interviews med deltagere fra koncerten argumenteres for disse påstande, og især to hændelser fremhæves som symbolske: Antallet af tilskuere og nogle få ord Springsteen formulerede under koncerten.

Anvendt til teksten og inspiration til videre læsning: - Funder, Anna (2003); Stasiland; London: Granta Books - Maas, Georg & Reszel, Hartmut (1998); Whatever Happened to…: The Decline and Renaissance of Rock in the Former GDR; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press - Shingler, James (Hignett, Dr. Kelly, red.) (2011); Rocking the Wall: East German Rock and Pop in the 1970s and 1980s; The View East; http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/tag/musicin-east-germany/ - Kirschbaum, Erik (2013); Rocking the Wall: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World; New York: Berlinica

At 300.000 tilskuere indfandt sig til koncerten var ikke med i arrangørernes planer. Kun 160.000 billetter var sat til salg, men da over 100.000 mennesker stormede portene, følte vagterne sig så magtesløse, at de lod folk komme til. Således røg kontrollen over arrangementets størrelse, og man kan derfor sige, at koncerten nu blev på befolkningens – og ikke styrets – præmisser. Den næste symbolske hændelse var som nævnt en kort tale, Springsteen holdt mellem sine sange. ”Jeg er ikke for eller imod nogen regering. Jeg er kommet for at spille rock n' roll for jer i håbet om, at alle mure en dag vil blive revet ned”, udtalte han, hvilket skabte store jubelscener blandt publikum. Vagterne reagerede ikke på publikummets reaktion, og mikrofonlyden blev ikke afbrudt, så for at skære ud i pap, hvad han i virkeligheden mente, spillede Springsteen herefter et cover af Bob Dylans ”Chimes of Freedom”. Så kunne ingen længere være i tvivl om budskabet. 19

kalske adfærd og herigennem en forståelse af klienten selv. Klientens og terapeutens unikke samspil og den nonverbale og musikalsk kommunikative interaktion, de har udviklet sammen, er omdrejningspunktet i behandlingsarbejdet.

Interview m. Stine Lindahl Jacobsen Af Casper B. Krogh, 5. sem. Jeg bringer her et interview med Ph.d. i musikterapi og adjunkt på AAU, Stine Lindahl Jacobsen. Vi har valgt at interviewe hende på baggrund af den fremgang musikterapi og musiske studerende generelt har haft i de senere år.

Hvordan har det udviklet sig som behandlingsform? Mens europæisk musikterapi har orienteret sig i psykodynamisk retning, har musikterapien i USA i højere grad været kognitivt adfærdsorienteret. Her har man udviklet den teoretiske forståelse og kliniske anvendelse af musik som stimulus. Desuden er musikkens forskellige elementer og egenskaber blevet anvendt styret og målrettet til at opnå personlig vækst og funktionsforbedringer hos klienterne.

Hvad er musikterapi? Musikterapi er en evidensbaseret behandlingsform, der benytter sig af musikken i arbejdet med mennesker med få ressourcer, eller mennesker som kan være svære at komme i kontakt med på konventionel vis. Musikterapi bliver tilbudt mennesker som har behov for alternative udtryksmuligheder, enten fordi de ikke har et sprog, eller fordi deres problematikker ikke lader sig tilgå gennem almindelig samtale.

Hvad gør man på det konkrete plan og hvordan synes effekterne at blive vurderet? I de seneste 10 år er forskning omkring evidensen af musikterapien vokset betydeligt. Der er findes efterhånden mange af de anerkendte Cochrane reviews indenfor flere forskellige klientområder, og der er mere fokus på kvantitativ forskning end før i tiden. Der tegner sig et billede af, at musikterapien har en positiv effekt bl.a. på mennesker med skizofreni, demensramte og børn/unge med autisme. Musikterapien udvikler også assessment redskaber, der kan leve op til moderne forskningskrav, og det internationale forskningsmiljø er meget aktivt - f.eks. har vi i Danmark verdens største forskerskole i musikterapi med ca. 20 ph.d. studerende fra bl.a. USA, Kina, England og Columbia.

Et det et nyt fænomen at bruge musik terapeutisk? Det er ikke et nyt fænomen at bruge musikken terapeutisk. Musik har været brugt som terapeutisk redskab siden oldtiden, og der findes utallige beretninger om musikkens helbredende kræfter i historiske overleveringer fra mange forskellige kulturer. Musikterapien, som vi kender den i dag, udviklede sig fra bunden omkring 1950 flere steder i verden uafhængigt af hinanden. I Europa har det været en stærk tradition at bruge improviseret musik i musikterapien, hvor musikterapeuten lader klienterne deltage i aktiv musikudøvelse, som traditionelt har været metoden til at engagere og behandle dem. I de seneste år er også receptiv musikterapi kommet med for alvor, idet musiklytning kan være en lige så engagerende og effektiv arbejds- og behandlingsmåde. Kernen i musikterapeutens metode er i begge tilfælde den dybe forståelse af klientens særlige musi-

Hvordan ser du fremtiden for musikterapi? Fremtiden for musikterapien tegner godt, idet faget udvikler sig støt og bevæger sig i retningen mod at blive mere anerkendt også på et samfundsmæssigt plan. I flere europæiske lande er musikterapien en integreret del af sundhedsvæsnet, og med tiden vil musiktera20

pien forhåbentlig også være et tilbud, som alle relevante klienter kan få gavn af her i Danmark.

det talent de berømmede filmfotografer har. Det er fantastisk at betragte hvordan der synes at være et kamera på det rigtige sted på det rigtige tidspunkt for hvert enkelt element i showet - selv de uanmeldte. Selvom filmen er blevet til for at hylde rullestenenes lange levetid og betydning gives der også et overraskende ligefremt og nøgternt billede af hvor meget sangene har betydet for Scorsese og hans tidligere film.

Anmeldelse: Shine a Light Af Casper B. Krogh, 5. sem. Martin Scorseses "Shine a Light" er muligvis den mest intime dokumentar om musik der nogensinde er lavet om til en live koncert. Filmen er uden tvivl den, der har dækket det der foregår på scenen allerbedst hvilket til dels kan tilskrives at, Scorsese har valgt at arbejde med den prisbelønnede filmfotograf Robert Richardson. Scorsese havde desuden et hold af ni andre filmfotografer, som alle hver især er enten tidligere Oscarvindere- eller nominerede til at optage koncerten live i september 2006 på det mindre spillested, The Beacon Theatre i New York. Resultatet af alt dette forarbejde er en opsigtsvækkende umiddelbarhed, en sammensmeltning af billede og musik, redigeret virtuost i takt med hvad der udfolder sig på scenen af en altid energisk Mick Jagger, Keith Richards og co.

“Between 1963 and '70, those seven years, the music that they made I found myself gravitating towards. I would listen to it a great deal. And ultimately, that fueled movies like 'Mean Streets' and later pictures of mine, 'Raging Bull' to a certain extent and certainly 'GoodFellas' and 'Casino' and other pictures over the years". Resultatet af alt dette kulminerer i en af de mest engagerende dokumentarfilm, du kunne forestille dig. Kameraerne ikke bare betragter fremførelserne af sangene, kameraerne er kunstnere i sig selv på den måde skuddene bliver klippet sammen af Scorsese og hans klipper, David Tedeschi. Man bliver heller aldrig træt af at betragte Mick Jagger, der aldrig har brugt de mekaniske bevægelser som mange forsangere bruger i dag, han er en danser, akrobat, dirigent, som bruger sin krop til at dirigere publikum. Modsat er Keith Richards og Ron Wood meget lidt bevægelige, kantet dog med den undtagelse da Richards synes at trodse tyngdekraften idet han læner sig ned til jorden for at vise, at du kan se vibrationerne af Charlie Watts' stortromme, når den rammer det forreste trommeskind. Det er også et umiskendeligt faktum, når man ser filmen, at de gamle fyre har stor tiltro og kærlighed til hinanden. Man ser Ron Wood lægge en arm på Keith Richards skulder under et riff. Man ser små antydninger af ironi og glæde der subtilt bevæger sig på tværs af deres tilsyneladende passive ansigter under koncerten.

Filmen starter med en kort sort/hvid montage hvor man som seer betragter hvordan Scorsese udarbejder kameravinkler, rækkefølgen af sange, rækkefølgen af soloer og sidst men ikke mindst hvor Mick Jagger skal befinde sig på scenen for, at få de bedste billeder ud af ham. Udfordringen for folkene bag filmen bestod dog i, at Mick Jagger legede med sætlisten i en endeløs ubeslutsomhed hvor han henkastet nævner ”at hele sættet kan ændres på stedet”. Det er tydeligt at efter at have spillet sammen i 45 år, har bandet hinanden imellem en nærmest telepatisk kontakt med hinanden og i sand rock’n roll-stil trodser Keith Richards, filmfolkenes ønsker op til flere gange. "Shine a Light" kombinerer samtidig Martin Scorseses nærmest encyklopædiske viden om Rolling Stones’ sangbog med den alsidighed og

Til sidst er der musikken. Hvad skal jeg sige om musikken? Udover at det selvfølgelig er fuld21

stændig fantastisk og for mange af os, har det været lydtæppet til mange monumentale begivenheder i ens liv. Jeg tror ikke det er nødvendigt eller nyttigt, for den sags skyld, for mig at sige mere om musikken, bortset fra at hvis du har været interesseret nok til at læse denne anmeldelse indtil nu, så ved du allerede meget om Rolling Stones og kan med fordel opleve dem i dette brag af en film.

Det interessante var så for mig at se, om nogle lignende mekanismer havde gjort sig gældende, da nationalsocialisterne fik overbevist i hvert fald størsteparten af den tyske befolkning om det rigtige i det nationalsocialistiske (politiske) program. Utopia: Da nationalsocialismen blev legitim Under denne let ironiske titel søgte jeg at forstå, hvilke mekanismer, som blev anvendt i den nationalsocialistiske propaganda. Helt grundlæggende skulle jeg derfor først forstå, hvordan propaganda bedst anvendtes i et moderne samfund som 30’ernes Tyskland.

Utopia: Da nationalsocialismen blev legitim

Her fandt jeg værket ”Propaganda: The Formation of Men´s Attitudes” skrevet af den franske sociolog og filosof Jacques Ellul, hvori han behandler denne problemstilling teoretisk. Her beskriver han the technological society, hvor adgangen til viden er nem igennem medier som avisen og radioen og argumenterer dernæst for, at adgang til viden ikke automatisk udelukker brugen af propaganda. Faktisk opstår der et gensidigt behov, idet medierne har brug for materiale, mens propagandaen har et behov for formidling. Han skelner mellem to typer propaganda med hvert sit formål; Propaganda of Agitation sigter mod at mobilisere individer til at tage handling og gøre noget aktivt for at fremme et mål eller en idé, mens Propaganda of Integration sigter mod at integrere folk i et fællesskab. Som en lille krølle gør Ellul også op med den påstand, at højtuddannede mennesker er mindre modtagelige for propaganda end lavt uddannede, idet førstnævnte søger en forklaring på alting. Hvor de kommer fra, hvad der sker i samfundet og så videre. Det gør dem til lette ofre for propagandaen, hvis opgave netop er at levere skræddersyede svar. Som jeg også senere skulle se, var disse svar sat effektivt i system i Det Tredje Rige.

Af Christopher Balslev Strøyer, 6. sem. Det var med kurset Brug af historien, jeg for alvor fandt ud af, hvad det var, der interesserede og fascinerede mig ved Historie. Hidtil havde min undervisning mest gået på at finde mønstre i fortiden, fortolke dem og så formidle resultatet. Det er selvfølgelig noget af det mest grundlæggende i faget, men selve forståelsen for dette grundlæggende element fik jeg først med dette fag. Der ligger en enorm kraft gemt i historien. Mennesker identificerer sig selv i den og med den, så det kan få store konsekvenser, når der manipuleres med den. Både gode og mindre gode konsekvenser bevares, alt efter, hvad den oprindelige intention var, men mest centralt er det, hvordan historien fortolkes og italesættes. Det var dette område, jeg blev inspireret til at undersøge nærmere, da jeg ret tidligt på kurset blev introduceret til Maren Lytjes artikel ”Myth, Utopia and History; Anders Fogh Rasmussen´s Return to the Desert of the Real or How to Justify a War”. Her beskriver hun det spind af myter, som med udgangspunkt i historien skulle retfærdiggøre dansk deltagelse i krigene i Afghanistan og Irak, men ikke mindst vigtigheden af at give folk en utopisk vision. Når de har det, er de villige til at gå meget langt.

Utopiens rolle i nationalsocialistisk propaganda

bogen beskrev han med talrige eksempler det sprog, han døbte nazistisk. Hvordan bogafbrændinger og kraftig censur var med til at ensrette sproget, hvordan gængse ord pludselig fik nye, ubehagelige betydninger, og hvordan hele samfundet blev gennemsyret af en militær jargon, som beherskede såvel jøder som ikke-jøder, studenter som professorer, rige som fattige.

I forlængelse af Elluls tanker fandt jeg en artikel af Michael Jenson, som går i dybden med hele universet omkring den nationalsocialistiske propaganda. Han introducerer således de to begreber propaganda of power og propaganda of utopia, der ligger sig tæt op af Elluls introducerede begreber ovenfor, blot i en opdateret udgave. Det centrale er ifølge Jenson, at nationalsocialisterne formåede at give det tyske folk den forestilling, at de var det førende folk i Europa. Det lykkedes dem at skabe et utopia for befolkningen, et løfte om, at nationalsocialisterne ville føre dem til et sted, hvor der herskede harmoni. Dét sted skulle bestå i mindst tusind år, ligesom de to foregående riger, Det Tysk-Romerske Rige og Det Wilhelminske Kejserrige. Derved knyttede nationalsocialisterne deres styres legitimitet op på en historisk arv, hvorfor det blev tvingende nødvendigt for dem at tydeliggøre og fastholde denne forbindelse til Tysklands og dets folks glorværdige historie. Fænomenet Volksgemeinschaft bliver relevant i denne forbindelse, idet man ønskede at give folket en illusion om, at de var førende i et vidt europæisk fællesskab. Det springende punkt her er, at nationalsocialisterne skulle bruge et sprog til at formulere deres utopia. Samtidig skulle de finde en effektiv måde at slå det tyske folks overlegenhed fast og formidle det.

Nationalsocialisterne havde med andre ord held til at forme et sprog, som støttede deres vision om et tusind-års-rige. Med det kunne de mobilisere store befolkningsgrupper i samme retning. Jeg kan desuden kun anbefale jer at læse Victor Klemperers bog. Völkischer Beobachter Som en del af bestræbelserne på at vise den ariske races, og især det tyske folks, overlegenhed, begyndte nationalsocialisterne at forske i store europæiske personligheder som Da Vinci, Beethoven og Wagner. Målet var ved hjælp af mere eller mindre kreative stamtræer at bevise, at al kreativitet nedstammede fra germansk blod. Derved blev Volksgemeinschaft langsomt, men sikkert udvidet til at omfatte stort set hele Europa. I forlængelse heraf følger meget naturligt den konklusion, at det tyske folk er forpligtet til at vogte og bevare den europæiske kulturarv, da den i sidste ende tilhørte dem. Alle disse konklusioner blev bragt i det nationalsocialistiske dagblad Völkischer Beobachter. Indholdet i det var ifølge David B. Dennis en sammensætning af nyheder og billeder/tegninger, der gav den et lødigt udtryk. Blot var der anlagt en nationalsocialistisk vinkel på indholdet. Bladet var altså en effektiv kilde til legitimering af det nationalsocialistiske styre, idet det udviklede sig fra at være relativt lokalt til et oplag på 1,7 millioner hen mod krigens slutning.

Lingua Tertii Imperii Tidligt i forløbet gjorde en god studiekammerat mig opmærksom på et foredrag om bogen ’LTI’ på Studenterhuset. Jeg havde aldrig hørt om bogen før, men foredraget lød meget passende for mig, da det ville analysere Det tredje Riges sprog. Da jeg så kom til foredraget, viste ’LTI’ sig at være en sammenskrivning af nogle udførlige dagbogsnotater. De var nedfældet af en jødisk professor, der ligesom mange andre var blevet frataget mange af sine rettigheder under det nationalsocialistiske styre, men ikke helt kunne slippe sin interesse for lingvistik. I

Legitimitet Forestillingen om utopia var med andre ord tæt forbundet med det nationalsocialistiske styres legitimitet. Det hele var igen baseret på 23

en særlig fortolkning af historien, hvorfor det for nationalsocialisterne var af stor vigtighed, at denne balance blev bevaret, men samtidig udbygget hele tiden for at fastholde folks begejstring. Dette sidste kunne ikke blive ved at lade sig gøre. Intentionen om at udvide Volksgemeinschaft til at omfatte stort set alle store tænkere og kunstnere i Europa havde naturligvis sine grænser. Bestræbelserne blev i sidste ende vanskeliggjorte, da kriterierne for at være af arisk race hele tiden skulle udvides for at kunne optage nye medlemmer. Det gav selvsagt problemer med en slap og meget fleksibel liste over optagelseskriterier, hvilket ikke harmonerede med de oprindelige nationalsocialistiske intentioner.

januar måned; i forhold til tidligere ugeopgaver kunne jeg mærke en ny form for motivation holde mig oppe, når jeg under andre omstændigheder ville være gået i seng.

Fæstning og by ca. 1650 Fæstnings- og byhistorisk konference den 8.-9. oktober 2013 Af. Henrik Gjoede Nielsen, PhD stip. Konferencen belyste militæret og dets rolle i de danske byer i tiden efter ca. 1650. Alle danske byer var i større eller mindre grad militariserede, hvad enten der var tale om en egentlig fæstnings- eller garnisonsby, en by med tilknytning til flåden eller om købstædernes forpligtelse til at huse soldater, købstædernes borgervæbning mv.

Det blev altså vanskeligt for nationalsocialisterne at opretholde det univers af myter, som de systematisk havde opbygget. Det blev for abstrakt og nuanceret, så det til sidst nærmest kom til at modarbejde sig selv. Dermed smuldrede grundlaget langsomt for den utopiske forestilling, som skulle legitimere den nationalsocialistiske magt hos befolkningen.

Der er næppe noget enkeltfænomen, der har haft en mere umiddelbar bydannende effekt end militære forhold. Militære forhold har kunnet virkeliggøre en by over natten. Det civile liv har ofte kunnet høste fordele af den militære tilstedeværelse i garnisonen, som selv på forskellig måde har indgået i civile sammenhænge.

Selve processen Der er skrevet ufatteligt meget litteratur om Anden Verdenskrig og gjort utallige forsøg på at forklare og beskrive nationalsocialisternes tankegang, så på forhånd var jeg klar over, at dette projekt skulle skrives for at tilfredsstille min egen nysgerrighed. Denne indgangsvinkel giver én et meget stort råderum, samtidig med, at vi på kurset var frit stillet til at definere vores egen opgave ud fra det overordnede tema ”Brug af historien”. Jeg havde naturligvis erfaring med selv at definere mit problem, fremgangsmåden adskilte sig fra den typiske projektskrivning på en måde, som jeg stadig har svært ved at sætte ord på. Måske var det tidsfaktoren, som gjorde udslaget, da jeg altid bedst har kunnet lide tidsmæssigt korte opgaver. Denne frihed var dog noget svær at håndtere i begyndelsen. Ikke desto mindre blev jeg rigtig glad for fremgangsmåden, da jeg senere skulle skrive opgaven i kolde og regnfulde

Men militære og civile interesser har imidlertid også kunnet virke hæmmende og blokerende for hinanden, eksempelvis i fæstningens begrænsende virkning på den fysiske byudvikling, eller civile, handelsmæssige interessers gradvise overtagelse af militære domæner i fredsperioder. Forholdet civil/militær er derfor et forhold, der både rummer områder af fælles interesser, og potentielle konfliktområder. Periodisk og tematisk lagde konferencen sig i forlængelse af konferencen ”Renæssancens befæstede byer,” arrangeret af Dansk Center for Byhistorie og Afdeling for Middelalder- og Renæssancearkæologi v. Aarhus Universitet, 24

2006, samt af konferencen ”Soldat og civil – Bønders og byboers møde med det militære og konstruktionen af den civile borger 14001815,” arrangeret af CEPS, Cultural Encounters in Pre-Modern Societies, Aalborg Universitet, 2010. Resultaterne fra disse konferencer 2006 er udgivet i Renæssancens befæstede byer, Danske Bystudier bd. 5, 2011, og i Temps – Tidsskrift for historie, nr. 4, Temanummer: Soldat og civil – Bønder og byboers møde med det militære 1500-1800, 2012. Også resultaterne fra konferencen Fæstning og by efter ca. 1650 vil blive søgt publiceret.

helm døde i 1203 og blev helgenkåret i 1224, hvilket gav klostret en ny rolle som valfartssted for pilgrimme. Hvad kan man se i dag Efter reformationen i Danmark i 1536 stoppede klostret sit virke, og i 1561 påbegyndtes nedbrydningen af klostret, hvis sten bl.a. er blevet brugt til at bygge Frederiksborg Slot. Derfor er der ikke meget tilbage af klostret i dag; det er kun fundamentet der endnu kan anes. Derfor er det ikke så meget for at se selve klostret at man skal slå et smut forbi Æbelholt, men derimod det tilknyttede museum. Klosteret udøvede i middelalderen hospitalsvirksomhed, og i forbindelse med udgravningen af klosterområdet er der afdækket godt 780 begravelser, heriblandt både mande, kvinde- og børneskeletter. På klostermuseet er et udvalg af disse skeletter udstillet; her kan man se både mandeskeletter med krigslæsioner, gravide kvindeskeletter, skelettet af en henrettet mand (man kan se på halsknoglen at han er blevet hængt) samt et større udvalg af tandsæt og andre skeletdele. Derudover er der udstillet lægeinstrumenter, syredskaber og andre artefakter fra klostrets storhedstid. Ved siden af museet er der en rekonstruktion af klostret urtehave med knap 100 forskellige lægeplanter, der blev brugt i forbindelse med medicinsk behandling. Således er der et udvalg af planter med forskellige effekter som afførende, vanddrivende, beroligende, smertestillende mm. Selve klosterområdet er dog også interessant nok selvom der ikke er meget af det oprindelige kloster tilbage. Man kan trods alt ane rumopdelingerne, og der er stadig lidt af de gamle materialer tilbage. Det er dog stadig museet med det store udvalg af skeletter der er det mest interessante.

Historiske seværdigheder: Æbelholt Kloster Af Katrine Funding Højgaard, 5.sem Rundt om i landet er der rig mulighed for at opleve de fysiske rester af Danmarks tidlige historie, og her tager vi et kig på et stort middelalderkloster, hvis ruin stadig kan besøges i nærheden af Hillerød på Sjælland. Klostrets historie Klostrets historie starter omkring 1130, hvor et lille augustinerkloster blev grundlagt på Eskilsø i Roskilde Fjord. Det viste sig dog hurtigt at kannikkerne på klostret ikke helt overholdt klosterreglerne, og holdt nogle ordentlige gilder. Dette kom biskop Absalon for øre, og han hidkaldte sin studiekammerat fra Paris, Guillaume, på dansk Vilhelm, til at sætte skik på klostret. Vilhelm ankom i 1165 og blev valgt til abbed for klostret. Omkring 1175 blev klostret flyttet til Tjæreby sogn, hvor det voksede sig til at blive Nordens største augustinerkloster. Abbed Vilhelm er en central skikkelse i Æbelholt Klosters historie, og var allerede i sin levetid en respekteret mand. Sideløbende med sin rolle i Æbelholt Klosters fremgang, var abbed Vilhelm aktiv i Danmarks udenrigspolitik, bl.a. ved at han flere gange fungerede som danske kongers udsending til pavehoffet. Vil-

Mere info om klostret www.folkemuseet.dk Jesper Gehlert Nielsen (red.): Æbelholt Klosters Brevbog, Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 2013. 25

deligt overrasket, udfordret, og til sidst en lille smule deprimeret på historiefagets vegne.

INTH konferencen. Af Esben Ruben Bendixen, studievejleder

For det første blev jeg glædeligt overasket da jeg fandt ud af, at der ikke var nogen der tog notits af, at jeg bare var studerende, om ikke andet fik jeg en fornemmelse af at folk synes det var skønt at "ungdommen" tog noget fagligt initiativ. Nu skal det ikke lyde som om det kun var gamle mænd i grå jakkesæt der var med, det var folk i alle aldre og fra mange forskellige nationaliteter, og hvor jeg ligeledes kom i snak med to hollandske studerende der havde samme interesse. Jeg var dog klart i den yngste del af skalaen. Det var dog befriende at komme i tale med en masse forskellige folk, men også folk som havde samme interesse som jeg selv. Der var ingen pinlighed omkring at diskutere teoretisk og filosofisk historie i pauserne, JA PAUSERNE, mellem de forskellige oplæg som omhandlede samme område. Jeg kunne dog med det samme mærke ud fra samtalerne, oplæggende og foredragene at min begrebsverden ikke var den største blandt dem alle, men det var her hvor jeg blev udfordret, og dette mener jeg i den allermest positive form. Det var hårdt at følge med i de tankerækker der blev udfoldet og slået knuder på, men samtidigt også utroligt givende.

Jeg valgte denne sommer at gøre noget andet end jeg normalt ville have beskæftiget mig med. Jeg valgte at tage Ghent, en belgisk by ca. på størrelse med Aalborg, en by som ikke lige stod øverst på den mentale liste over rejsedestinationer jeg skal nå inden det sidste søm er slået i kisten. Det skal siges at jeg blev positivt overrasket over Ghent, som viste sig at være et utroligt charmerende sted, men hvorfor lige der? Formålet var ikke hverken selve rejsen eller destinationen, som det ellers normalt ville have været i begyndelsen af min sommerferie. Formålet var nærmere den konference, som blev afholdt i Ghent. Konferencen var den første af sin slags og var arrangeret af INTH (International Network for Theory of History), og den omhandlede kerneområde omkring filosofisk og teoretisk historie. Og hvad betyder så det? Det må jeg indrømme jeg også selv var spændt på og nysgerrig omkring at opdage, men nysgerrigheden bundede i en egeninteresse indenfor historisk videnskabsteori, som jeg har gået med ved siden af studiet, så jeg følte derfor at jeg alligevel havde en nogenlunde indsigt i feltet. Man har vel lov til at tage fejl.

Grunden til at jeg så alligevel blev lidt deprimeret på historiefagets vegne var pga. konferencens afsluttende diskussion - og her bliver det nørdet. Diskussionen tog fat i konferencens overordnede tema som var "fremtiden for filosofisk og teoretisk historie", og her gav fire oplægsholdere deres bud på fremtiden, og disse bud var efterfølgende til diskussion. En ting som diskussionen specielt omhandlede, var om historie som videnskabelig disciplin overhovedet ville eksistere 50 år ude i fremtiden. Der var flere grunde til dette spørgsmål. Det ene var, at der var en antagelse om at de fleste historikere reelt arbejder som ontologiske realister, dvs. at der bliver gået ud fra at kilderne er et spejl der viser os fortiden, selvom der ikke findes et teoretisk, filosofisk eller videnskabeligt argument for, at det forholder

Det var dog stadigvæk denne nysgerrighed og interesse der fik mig til at bruge fem dage af min ferie på at tage til konferencen, og hvor er jeg glad for at jeg gjorde det. Forinden havde jeg ellers været meget i tvivl om det var noget jeg skulle gøre. Jeg havde tilfældigt stødt på konferencen på facebook da jeg "liker" den journal, der hedder "History and Theory", og jeg kunne også se, at der var mange af de forfattere jeg har brugt noget af min fritid på at læse, som skulle være foredragsholdere, og at det ydermere fremstod som om at publikum mest ville være PhD'ere og lignende; lidt skræmmende for en sølle studerende som mig. Jeg kastede mig dog ud i det og blev glæ-

sig således. Historikeren har bare sin metode, men intet argument for at den metode holder; man gør bare som man gør. Den anden grund til spørgsmålet blev meget klogt formuleret af en af foredragsholderne. Hun spurgte retorisk "Hvilken social effekt har historie?" og svarede selv "At bevare status quo". Grundstammen i dette var derfor hvad vi overhovedet kan bruge historie som videnskab til, når der reelt set ingen social effekt er? Hvad er det historie kan, som ingen andre videnskaber kan, når der ikke noget argument for den måde der arbejdes på indenfor disciplinen? Min indre historiker havde lyst til at skrige, men det var svært bare at lukke ørene og sætte sig hen og vugge i et hjørne, da spørgsmålene jo var velbegrundede. Det er også derfor at jeg blev en smule deprimeret på historiefagets vegne, men samtidig er det også nogle spørgsmål jeg har tænkt meget over siden.

i sine interesser indenfor historie, og hvor man opfordrer hinanden til det samme. Det er ikke fordi at jeg har været et hak bedre på den front, da jeg har gået med min interesse selv uden at forsøge at finde nogle andre der måske synes at det samme var spændende. Selvom min tid som studerende efterhånden er ved at være slut, tænker jeg dog alligevel, at det ikke aldrig er for sent at starte. Så derfor vil jeg opfordre alle mine medstuderende og historiestudiet til at gøre en aktiv indsats for at skabe et fagligt og seriøst studiemiljø, og hvis der er nogen, der interesserer eller tror at de kunne have en interesse i teoretisk og filosofisk historie, er de meget velkomne til at kontakte mig. Jeg synes det kunne være fantastisk at have en frivillig læsegruppe eller diskussionsgruppe inden for det felt, hvilket sikkert også kunne være et godt supplement til historisk videnskabsteori.

Generelt var det dog en fantastisk oplevelse, og hvis jeg magisk fik muligheden for at tage en ting med hjem til Aalborg Universitet fra INTH konferencen, så skulle det være den faglige stemning som jeg oplevede. Det var helt fantastisk at opleve sådan en seriøsitet og oprigtig interesse omkring noget fagligt, for det var smittende. Skal jeg se tilbage på min egen studietid, som efterhånden er ved at trække mod sin afslutning, så er det lige netop det jeg synes har været en mangel. Et fagligt og seriøst studiemiljø hvor man blev opfordret

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