Music history on stage: constructions of the musical past in musical theatre

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anna Langenbruch
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282607863

Be it Mozart or the Beatles, Marlene Dietrich, Stradivari's violin, Riemann's dictionary of music - figures, events, compositions, practices and even scholarly texts from the history of music have been represented in musical theatre for hundreds of years. These stage events combine music, theatre and historical narrative by explicitly referring to music historical subjects. The project at hand examines this historiographical musical theatre systematically from its beginnings around 1750 to the present day. By detailing essential dimensions of the production of music historical knowledge it develops a new conception of music historiography integrating art, science and everyday life. It describes knowledge as a sociocultural process of negotiation revealing interactions between sound and sense, action and narrative, theory and practice.The initial idea of the project is that people create and experience music history on stage as a representation of history in the event. This situational, inter-medial display of music history differs widely from current written or cinematic approaches. It is particularly useful when trying to capture the importance of non-verbal knowledge, especially acoustic knowledge, for music historical knowledge. At the same time, this still on-going practice shows the past and present impact of non-academic music history and its close interdependency with scholarly historiography. These leading hypotheses arise from the applicant's preliminary work on the research corpus, on representations of historical or fictional musicians in musical theatre as well as on the representation of history in music in general. They combine approaches of historical musicology, Sound Studies and the history of historiography and will be historically and systematically tested and specified in the current project.On the level of musical theatre the project starts by asking how historiographical musical theatre tells its stories - using composition, interpretation, performance, words or images -, and how people experience this. As its research focus is music history, the project concentrates especially on the role of sound and hearing in this context. On the level of historiography the project uses historiographical musical theatre to compare music history in- and outside of the academic world and to analyse techniques of music historiography in different media. Thus, the project wants to enlarge the concept of knowledge taking sound and everyday levels of the production of music historical knowledge adequately into account. At the same time, it seeks to determine whether and to what extent its findings on the relationship between medium and object of music historiography can be applied to other arts. Music history on stage thus opens new perspectives for the history of knowledge of the arts.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups