Performing Austria: Protesting the Musical Nation

Zapruder World, 2023

In activism, music plays a crucial role in disturbing oppressive spaces, actors, and institutions. Activists credit the communicative function of music to create solidarity among different people at demonstrations 1. Music has a specific value in this space. On the one hand, music makes possible pleasurable bodily experiences. On the other hand, the tapestry of music and chants in the activist setting enable the formation of an imagined stage that can be elevated or on street level. From that stage, the desired political encounter can take place, can be seen, and experienced together. The stage is crucial in the activist dramaturgy. As part of that, music helps create a scene in which the political struggle can come into existence visibly and audibly. The musical coulisse sets in motion a dialogue between audience and performers. This dialogue is felt bodily, but the method in which the dialogue is staged also reveals that there is a political function assigned to music. Music is supposed to encourage and enable the audience to recognize ways in which injustices can be called attention to and unmasked creatively and collectively. This way of using music shows the audience how injustices work to sustain themselves. Music serves to unveil the theatricality of the phenomenological world, and with that seeks to encourage action from the audience. Jacques Rancière’s has discussed this method of unveiling as the “method of scene” 2. This paper investigates such methods through the example of musically assisted anti-right-wing activism that has been taking place in the city of Dresden, Germany via the work of the brass collective Banda Comunale. The methods of scene that musicians use in this protest setting are the focus of this paper and specific attention will be paid to the role that transcultural engagement takes. Banda Comunale has been active in musical street activism since 2001 but became the prominent opponent to the right-wing-movement Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident) that took hold of the city of Dresden in 2015. When thousands of Pegida supporters marched the city’s streets, calling for anti-immigration policies and a removal of supportive measures for migrants from Syria, Banda Comunale played international brass classics to recode the city’s sonic tapestry and sonically drown out right-wing chants. The function of the music was to use the cultural heritage with which the band associated the newly settled residents to demonstrate that the people from Syria and other places in the Global South had a right to establish a home in Dresden. Banda Comunale’s music in the streets and on stages throughout the city came to symbolize the possibility of arriving and making a life for oneself in the city despite strong and growing resistance from right-wing groups. My contribution draws on my 2017-20 ethnographic study of the ensemble that revealed Banda Comunale deeply engaged in aesthetic debates on multiculturalism and transnational connections in music to fuel the band’s visibility as a blueprint for social integration through music and music as a pathway to the right to belong. In this paper, I argue that understanding Banda Comunale’s musical aesthetic through looking at the band’s dramaturgy in protest encounters reveals how the band’s music unveils right-wing propaganda, and how it stages transcultural music to give migrants and refugees the opportunity to be seen and heard in political terms. Along with this critical reflection, I provide narrative map via www.soundofheimat.wordpress.com that tracks the transformative process of Banda Comunale’s music in relation to the ever-changing political landscape in Dresden.

Journal of Language and Politics, 2016

Political discourses are found not only in speeches and newspapers, but also in cultural artefacts such as architecture, art and music. Turkey’s June 2013 protests saw an explosion of music videos distributed on the internet. This paper uses these videos as a case study to examine the limits and potential of popular music’s articulation of popular and populist politics. Though both terms encompass what is “widely favoured”, populism includes discourses which construct “the people” pitted against “an elite”. Past research has shown how popular music can articulate subversive politics, though these do not detail what that subversion means and how it is articulated. This paper uses specific examples to demonstrate how musical sounds, lyrics and images articulate populist and popular politics. From a corpus of over 100 videos, a typical example is analysed employing social semiotics. It is found that popular music has the potential to contribute to the public sphere, though its limits a...

Music and Democracy, 2021

This paper explores subaltern cultural counterpublics in Serbia in the last three decades, through different forms of performative and participatory music activism: from radio activism, public noise, and performances in public spaces during the 1990s, to self-organized choirs in the 2000s and 2010s. By referring to the concept of citizenship, it emphasizes the importance of the relationship between politicality and performance in the public sphere. Analyzed case studies have shown how subaltern counterpublics brought together aesthetical, ethical, and intellectual positions, challenging principles imposed by the state and the church. Through music activism, cultural counterpublics addressed different social anomies: nationalism, xenophobia, social exclusion, hatred, civil rights, and social justice, becoming a focal point of civil resistance, a discursive arena that provokes and subverts mainstream politics. An interdisciplinary research framework has been achieved through linking music and cultural studies with political sciences and performance studies, then applied to the data gathered from the empirical ethnographic research covering several case studies.

The idea of ‘political music’ is problematic and calls for clarification from the outset. In the context of popular music and folk music, the term is most usually associated with what became known in the 1950s and 1960s as ‘protest music’, particularly as protest songs in relation to the protest movements of the time. In the case of art music, however, the idea of a specifically ‘political music’ is usually understood as politically committed or politically engaged music, in the way often associated with composers like Hanns Eisler in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, and in the 1950s and 1960s with composers like Luigi Nono. In addition to these, there is the association of music—both art music and popular music—with political propaganda, especially in the Second World War and in the Cold War that followed. However, whilst all of these notions of ‘political music’ need to be addressed early on in this chapter, a further important issue is raised as a result: what about musics that do not easily fit into any of these categories, but which nevertheless came to be regarded as ‘political’ or politically provocative and critical in their implications, even though not obviously or directly political in their content or their function? The purpose of this chapter is therefore not only to explore the problematic notions of ‘protest music,’ ‘politically engaged’ music, and the political use of music as propaganda, but also to discuss the ‘politically mediated’ character of so-called autonomous music in order to clarify concepts that are fundamental to the rest of this dissertation. Beginning with a cursory examination of definitions of protest music and politically engaged music that foregrounds the role of song text in determining the political meaning of music, I then move on to consider ways in which supposedly ‘apolitical’ music can be considered political when it is used in a political context. Finally, I turn attention to the political implications of so-called ‘autonomous music’, arguing that it is through its critical relation to its material, which is itself of a collective and socially mediated character, that such music can be understood as radical and politically critical.

Ethnomusicology, 2020

From 2000 on, the emergence of activist choirs has greatly influenced practices of political activism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. In this article, I analyze how activists, singers, and listeners repurpose antifascist music legacy in order to experiment with new forms of political engagement. I propose the concept of radical amateurism, a political community that fuels the politicization of a field of leisure, which enables people to form new au-diosocial alliances at local, regional, and global scales. Locating my theoretical framework within the field of affective politics of sound, I show that political potentiality, when related to music and sound, is inscribed in the complex relationship between imagined and real, exception and everydayness, emerging and routinized, and impossible and possible. In conclusion, I scrutinize contingencies of affective politics and discuss the ways affective encounters enable a new framework for practicing political engagement in a moment of apathy and neoliberal exhaustion.

This paper is based on a small-scale ethnography carried out among musicians associated with the Climate Camp movement in the UK. I use this site to explore what makes music political as well as to investigate the values and ethos of this social movement. In this paper I argue that politically motivated music involves a mutual mediation of music and politics: the political message is shaped by its expression in music, and in turn the political intention of the music-making shapes the musical object on various levels of multitextuality (drawing on Born:1991). These levels of multitextuality can include the lyrics, visual aspects of performance, or how the audience and venue frame the music. I draw on my data to show how genre contributes to this mediation through generic conventions inflecting the political message, and by contrast how using music in political 'actions' can render any music political regardless of its lyrical or musical content. This demonstrates how music's political qualities do not inhere in the musical 'object' itself but in its conditions of mediation. I examine this process of mediation in the context of live performance, describing how the audience shapes the musical 'object'. Finally, I relate this to Hannah Arendt's work on political praxis, emphasising the unpredictability of both musical performance and political participation in co-presence.

This series publishes major musicological monographs on the relationship between music and politics from XVII century to the present, as well as multi-authors, multilingual volumes on this topic. The series also focuses on the cooperation of music criticism, pamphlets and the press as a mechanism for the expression of cultural power. Vo The subject of this monograph is protest music and 'dissident' composers and musicians during the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the forms with which dissent may be expressed in music and the ways composers and performers have adopted stances on political and social dissent. In the present volume, articles by scholars of different nationalities explore not only the way in which protest music is articulated in artistic-cultural discourse and the political matter, but also the role it played in situations of mutual benefit. Moreover, the phenomenon of dissent has been investigated within the contexts of musical historiography and criticism, approaching the topic from historical, sociological and philosophical points. The Contributors are (in alphabetical order):