Music and concentration camps: An approximation

John, Eckhard

doi:10.1080/01411890108574791

Cited by 30 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In the Buchenwald camp in Germany, Jews were made to sing Judenlied (Jews’ Song); this ended with the words ‘Now our hooked Jew-noses mourn, we have spread hatred and discord in vain. Now we can no longer steal nor gorge ourselves, it is too late, forever too late’ (John, 2001: 276). More recently, forced singing was one of the methods frequently used to humiliate and debase individuals detained in some of the many camps set up during the Bosnian war (Baker, 2013: 417–418).…”

Section: Music and Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Resilience and ‘Soundscaping’: Some Reflections on the War in Ukraine

Clark

2023

Cultural Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There exists a rich corpus of literature exploring some of the diverse roles – positive and negative – that music can play in war. This interdisciplinary article makes a novel contribution to this literature, and to research on the sociology of music more broadly, through its particular emphasis on resilience. Scholarship on resilience has increasingly moved beyond person-centred, psychology-based approaches towards more complex relational and multi-systemic framings that situate the concept in the interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (environments). However, it has given little attention to the sensory dimensions of these ecologies, including their acoustic dimensions. Focusing on the war in Ukraine and drawing primarily on media sources (including several online videos) to develop its analysis, the article argues that music can be a form and expression of resilience (and resistance) in war situations that directly acts on the acoustic ecology – a concept that to date has mainly been discussed within ecology and conservation research. Specifically, the article frames music as a form of ‘soundscaping’, in the sense of an active aligning of sound and wellbeing.

show abstract

Section: Music and Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music, Resilience and ‘Soundscaping’: Some Reflections on the War in Ukraine

Clark

2023

Cultural Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Secondly, the same insight enables us to better grapple with the complexity and ambivalence of musicking events by refusing to see them exclusively in terms of opportunities to 'affirm and celebrate our relationships' (Small, 1998: 142), but as also potentially bound up with efforts to, for instance, stake out social territory (Witchel, 2010), control public space (Hirsch, 2007), repress or displace identities (Cloonan and Johnson, 2002), cause discomfort (e.g. Eckhard, 2001;Goodman, 2012), or exercise power in more diffuse ways (Attali, 1985). Essentially, then, the anti-substantialist impulses of trans-actionalism translates, in grounded terms, into both an avoidance of totalizing perspectives upon musical events and a concerted effort, via detailed, responsive and sensitive empirical inquiry, to grapple with the divergent ways in which trans-actors (dis-)value musicking events.…”

Section: Implications For a Trans-actional Music Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beginning at the Beginning: Towards a Trans-actional Music Sociology

Rimmer

2022

Cultural Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Music sociology has proven a fertile arena for the study and theorization of object–subject interaction, with the work of scholars such as Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion marking its key contribution to the ‘new sociology of art’. Recent years have, however, witnessed no little debate amongst music sociologists about the broader purchase and value of such scholarship, especially considering its apparent challenge to Bourdieu’s critical cultural sociology. This article seeks to contribute to debates in this area by advocating a novel approach to questions about music’s relation to the social, one that seeks less to map the social distribution of taste profiles or explore how listeners make use of music’s affordances than understand the variable ways in which music emerges as something to be attended to (or not) in the first place. Drawing on recent work in relational sociology, the mature philosophy of pragmatist John Dewey as well as new materialist thought, this article explores the potential of a trans-actional prospectus for music sociology. This is an approach that advocates a ‘flat’ social ontology in order to focus on questions about the constitution and configuration of musical events. In so doing, the article argues that if we are to gain a better understanding of music’s varied relation to the social, it is necessary to transcend the residual substantialism implicit in ‘new sociology’ and mediation-focused accounts and adopt an approach capable of integrating concerns of object-ness, emergence and attention with questions of power and inequality.

show abstract

“…In his substantial review of this body of work, published in 1991, musicologist Eckhard John outlined the work that had already been done and identified areas that deserved more attention. 21 Musicologists and historians working in a number of different languages began to address these lacunae during the 1990s and 2000s, interviewing survivors, combing through archives and publishing their findings. 22 Scores of books and articles have examined music from a variety of different perspectives as it existed in a number of different camps.…”

Section: State Of the Research On Music In Nazi Concentration And mentioning

confidence: 99%

How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps

Bräuer¹

2016

Music and Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Birkenau extermination camp, recounted an incident he witnessed in the infirmary there: The beating of the big drums and the cymbals reach us continuously and monotonously, but in this weft the musical phrases weave a pattern only intermittently, according to the caprices of the wind. The tunes are few, a dozen, and the same ones every day, morning and evening: marches and popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraven on our minds and will be the last thing in the Lager that we shall forget: they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards. 1 Levi forcefully describes how music purposefully attacked prisoners' identities, certainties, selfconceptions, and sense of humanity. The fact that music played an important role in the Holocaust is neither a new discovery nor is it surprising. We know, based on survivors' memoirs, that music was part of daily life in National Socialist concentration and extermination camps. Survivors' accounts clearly convey how concentration camp prisoners could draw on music as a resource to aid in their survival, but music served equally as the most striking symbol of the inherent lunacy of the camp. Levi completes his description of the incident in the infirmary: "We all look at each other from our beds, because we all feel that this music is infernal." 2 Levi uses the term "infernal" deliberately and links the music in the camps to Dante's Inferno. By emphasizing the danger inherent in music that was-in this context-demonic and nightmarish, Levi attributes to music a rather specific impact. "Can music be considered as a form of torture?" was the question recently posed by musicologists in a special edition of the journal Torture. 3 The guest editors were two of the academics responsible for the creation of the Free Floater Research Group, Music, Conflict and the State, situated at the University of Göttingen. Over the course of six years, group members contributed to an investigation of the relationship between music and violence in contexts marked by uneven power dynamics. 4 Drawing on Article 5 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they defined torture as "cruel, inhuman and degrading I would like to thank

show abstract

Music and concentration camps: An approximation

Cited by 30 publications

References 1 publication

Music, Resilience and ‘Soundscaping’: Some Reflections on the War in Ukraine

Music, Resilience and ‘Soundscaping’: Some Reflections on the War in Ukraine

Beginning at the Beginning: Towards a Trans-actional Music Sociology

How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About