Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front

Yri, Kirsten

doi:10.2307/25046050

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“… 31 See Yri (2006, 2010). For the flavour of this, see also Denis Stevens, in the notes for The Three Ravens, Songs of Folk and Minstrelsy out of Elizabethan England (Vanguard, VSR- 479, 1956.…”

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Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

Yri

2019

Pop. Mus.

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This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed ‘authentic’ medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practices. In short, German ‘folk’ bands invented ‘medieval’ rock to sidestep Nazi connotations with the word ‘folk’. Besides invoking the semantic shift from ‘folk’ to ‘medieval’, I argue that the band adopts the figure of the medieval minstrel and asserts that his multilingual texts, ‘foreign’ instruments and colourful performance practices speak to an inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan community. Paradoxically, they do so by first positioning the medieval minstrel as a punked-up, marginalised ‘outcast’. The cultural capital of this outcast status helps medieval rock bands like Corvus Corax carve out a space for marginalised voices who, in their new privileged positions, offer a form of retribution for politics of exclusion, racism and authoritarianism.

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Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

Yri

2019

Pop. Mus.

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“…Altman, 175–89. Kirsten Yri attributes utopian impulses to the Early Music movement in “Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front,” American Music 24/4 (Winter 2006): 427–28; see also Sarah J. Eyerly, “‘Singing From the Heart:’ Memorization and Improvisation in Eighteenth-Century Utopian Communities of the Moravian Church” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2007).…”

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Competing Utopias? Musical Ideologies in the 1930s and Two Spanish Civil War Films

Hess¹

2008

J Soc American Mus

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Although literature inspired by the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied, music so inspired has received far less scholarly attention, and film music even less so. Musical ideologies of the 1930s, including the utopian thinking of many artists and intellectuals, emerge in some surprising ways when we consider two films of the era. Both The Spanish Earth (1937), an independent documentary, and Blockade (1938), produced in Hollywood, were intended to awaken Loyalist sympathies. The music for the former, consisting of recorded excerpts chosen by Marc Blitzstein and Virgil Thomson and widely understood as folkloric, embodies leftist composers' idealization of folk music. Werner Janssen's score for Blockade relies on many stock Hollywood gestures, granting it the status of a commodity. This article explores both films in light of Michael Denning's reflections of the relationship between the “cultural front” and the “culture industry,” along with Fredric Jameson's advocacy of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic tool. It argues that the music for The Spanish Earth unwittingly subverts the Loyalist cause, whereas the score of Blockade, with its manipulation of Hollywood codes, is far more persuasive than the political whitewashing of its plot would seem to suggest.

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Remembering faith inNoye’s Fludde

Wiebe¹

2012

Britten's Unquiet Pasts

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Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front

Cited by 5 publications

References 3 publications

Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

Corvus Corax: medieval rock, the minstrel, and cosmopolitanism as anti-nationalism

Competing Utopias? Musical Ideologies in the 1930s and Two Spanish Civil War Films

Remembering faith inNoye’s Fludde

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