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\"In The Necessity of Music, Celia Applegate explores the many ways that Germans thought about and made music from the eighteenth- to twentieth-centuries. Rather than focus on familiar stories of composers and their work Applegate illuminates the myriad ways in which music is integral to German social life. Musical life reflected the polycentric nature of German social and political life, even while it provided many opportunities to experience what was common among Germans. Musical activities also allowed Germans, whether professional musicians, dedicated amateurs, or simply listeners, to participate in European culture. Applegate's original and fascinating analysis of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and military music enables the reader to understand music through the experiences of listeners, performers, and institutions. The necessity of music demonstrates that playing, experiencing, and interpreting music was a powerful factor that shaped German collective life.\"-- Provided by publishers.

In The Necessity of Music , Celia Applegate explores the many ways that Germans thought about and made music from the eighteenth- to twentieth-centuries. Rather than focus on familiar stories of composers and their work Applegate illuminates the myriad ways in which music is integral to German social life. Musical life reflected the polycentric nature of German social and political life, even while it provided many opportunities to experience what was common among Germans. Musical activities also allowed Germans, whether professional musicians, dedicated amateurs, or simply listeners, to participate in European culture. Applegate’s original and fascinating analysis of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and military music enables the reader to understand music through the experiences of listeners, performers, and institutions. The Necessity of Music demonstrates that playing, experiencing, and interpreting music was a powerful factor that shaped German collective life.

Bach'sSt. Matthew Passionis universally acknowledged to be one of the world's supreme musical masterpieces, yet in the years after Bach's death it was forgotten by all but a small number of his pupils and admirers. The public rediscovered it in 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn conducted the work before a glittering audience of Berlin artists and intellectuals, Prussian royals, and civic notables. The concert soon became the stuff of legend, sparking a revival of interest in and performance of Bach that has continued to this day. Mendelssohn's performance gave rise to the notion that recovering and performing Bach's music was somehow \"national work.\" In 1865 Wagner would claim that Bach embodied \"the history of the German spirit's inmost life.\" That the man most responsible for the revival of a masterwork of German Protestant culture was himself a converted Jew struck contemporaries as less remarkable than it does us today-a statement that embraces both the great achievements and the disasters of 150 years of German history. In this book, Celia Applegate asks why this particular performance crystallized the hitherto inchoate notion that music was central to Germans' collective identity. She begins with a wonderfully readable reconstruction of the performance itself and then moves back in time to pull apart the various cultural strands that would come together that afternoon in the Singakademie. The author investigates the role played by intellectuals, journalists, and amateur musicians (she is one herself) in developing the notion that Germans were \"the people of music.\" Applegate assesses the impact on music's cultural place of the renewal of German Protestantism, historicism, the mania for collecting and restoring, and romanticism. In her conclusion, she looks at the subsequent careers of her protagonists and the lasting reverberations of the 1829 performance itself.

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy found the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the word culture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system. The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even the raison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

Meanwhile, disciplines other than history and German, especially political science, fostered numerous initiatives to further the academic study of German-speaking countries. With the growing visibility of the Federal Republic in the 1960s, such initiatives sought to increase public knowledge of contemporary German politics through educational outreach and scholarship. In such contexts, people used the term German studies loosely, referring to a body of knowledge about Germany initially stimulated by the generation of émigrés from Nazi Germany. [George K. Romoser], one of the leading political scientists of Germany in the United States, felt uneasy calling German studies \"a guiding tool to content\" in 1978: \"I believe that what many persons from my fields of interest (political science and contemporary history) are actually doing in their work is not simply 'German Studies,' but the use of a fascinating array of German materials to approach important questions in their disciplines.\"3 Romoser projected the use of such \"German materials\" in the \"comparative study of social science approaches and methodology.\" More than a decade later [Andrei S. Markovits], a younger political scientist, did use the term German studies to characterize the issues raised in such investigations, but likewise emphasized the commitment to comparative politics as \"the epistemological and methodological intersection of an historically informed political sociology, political economy, political anthropology and political psychology.\"4 At that same meeting, Frank Trommler, [Michael Geyer], and Jeffrey M. Peck led a colloquium on the subject of \"Germany as the Other: Towards an American Agenda for German Studies.\" The colloquium acknowledged what [Patricia Herminghouse] called the \"multiplicity of fragmentary and particular knowledge\" and attempted to secure a path forward. The desiderata for such a path were ambitious. Trommler called for a more conscious encounter with the foreign text as the central catalyst of intellectual and pedagogical self-reflection; Peck identified the need to abandon a binary Atlantic approach that distinguished between \"America\" and \"Europe\" and had produced a tendentious \"grand transatlantic narrative of German history\"; Geyer too suggested that we lived in an \"era of diminishing returns from the traditional historical narrative\" and warned that the intellectual communities of Germany and the United States were moving apart, that a \"postmodern turn\" in history had failed to materialize, and that \"many historians have long ceased to experience anything at all, because there is always another student to teach, another paper to write, and another conference to attend.\"26 In one of the most thorough recent efforts to take stock of GDR studies since the [Wende], Andrew Port has identified three \"waves,\" as it were the tsunami effect of the earthquakes of 1989, one after another rising and cresting before the others had lost their strength. The first was marked by a nearly exclusive focus on state power and repression, the second by an opening out to the history of society, and the third was inspired by the new cultural history of the 1980s in its attention to mentalities and values, practices and places, subjectivity, and experience. As Port observes, these changes mirrored \"at breakneck speed the trajectory of postwar historiography more generally\" with its more gradual shiftin emphases from, in GeoffEley's lapidary summation, the \"political\" to the \"social\" to the \"cultural.\"27 If the first wave made an effort to revive and revise totalitarian theory and was, in [Catherine Epstein]'s 2003 analysis, \"skewed by its heavy focus on the first and last years of the SED regime\" and its politicized moralism, the second wave of social history developed a preoccupation with the unruly workings of Eigen-Sinn throughout what had initially been regarded a \"pervasively rule-bound society\" (durchherrschte Gesellschaft). Nuance, complexity, and the sheer range of topics have in turn characterized the third wave of scholarship.28 No one denies that the GDR was, in Port's words a \"disagreeable and unpopular dictatorship,\" but innovative and fresh approaches to understanding politics and power, culture and society, life and death in a society marked by asymmetrical relations between the state and its citizens have created a field that draws scholars to it less for the \"lurid\" appeal of Stasi file-diving than for the quality of the work it has produced.29 Nevertheless, the years of breathtaking transformations in central Europe in 1989/90 remain the crucial period for formulating the strategies that have allowed scholars to pick, choose, and combine among disciplines to build a comprehensive understanding of Germany reunified. One can see the beginnings of all the tendencies that have come to fruition in contemporary German studies in a prescient collection of interdisciplinary conversations, organized and published as a book in 1997 by [Konrad Jarausch]. After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities consists of five chapters, each a collaborative product of one historian, one Germanist/in, and one political scientist, discussing a broad aspect of the project of German studies: \"the presence of the past,\" \"natives, strangers, and foreigners,\" \"East and West identities, united or divided,\" \"women, men, and unification,\" and finally \"Germany and Europe.\" By such means, scholars working in multiple disciplines combined the strengths of political, historical, and sociological approaches with those of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical ones. The troubling legacy of recent German history and the Holocaust made the need to achieve wider and deeper understanding all the more urgent, and after a point, the quest for more knowledge had to consider new methods and interpretations along with new (and old) sources.

As a historian engaged with musicology, it seems to me that the discipline is in its golden age. The royal road from the musical past to the musical present built in the first century or so of its academic existence no longer contains all the traffic. But thanks to the earlier efforts at disciplinary definition, musicologists share an enormous amount of knowledge, understand what colleagues are doing and are able to face the challenge of understanding music-making outside of the Western cultures from which the field of musicology – and ethnomusicology – emerged. Rarely has a discipline been so well equipped for the task of deconstructing itself. But deconstruction (of canons, grand narratives and the like) accompanies construction: musicology has built and expanded, adding on more sources and more methods rather than abandoning the old ones. Given this happy state, it seems worthwhile to reconsider some of the cultural work that writing about music did before the discipline cohered in the nineteenth century, so that we can consider from a longer perspective why people tried to ‘discipline’ musical knowledge in the first place.