Reflecting upon the previous weeks of this course, I found interesting in this week’s readings the importance of tonality and the “idea of major” (Potter, 216), as well as the constant dismissal of experimentation and atonality. The latter point was referred to by Furtwangler (“musical life today… cannot take any more experiments” (165)), Goebbels (“the essence of music does not lie in experimentation” (183)) and Hitler (music “is least qualified to satisfy our intellects” (185)) alike. The reason for this dismissal, I assume, is in the alienation of musical experimentation – music, as Goebbels declares, should “appeal to a wide audience” (183). As we have seen repeatedly, experimentation does not necessarily accommodate this interpretation of audience/ the desire for mass appeal (see: Schoenberg, Berg). Moser blames “bourgeois individualism… for creating an ever-increasing gulf between musicians and the public” (Potter, 208). This dismissal is particularly interesting to me in the context of Hitler’s claim that the Nazi Party had no “musical philosophy” (186).
I’m also curious about Goebbels’ definition of ‘audience’. I suppose this was a primary issue facing Nazis and one that, particularly in hindsight, emphasises the fallacies of Nazi interpretations of Germanness. A patchwork of 300+ states had preceded the formation of Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, which was followed by the territorially disparate German Confederation, German Empire and German Reich. Germanness, as Potter’s text evidences, is essentially inconclusive.
Who, then, was music under the Nazi Party actually for? And what threat did experimental music, atonalism, or “bourgeois individualism” variably pose to Nazi control?
