Project focuses 2007-2009

In this phase, the research project orients its work on the leading categories "writing of music history and cultures of remembrance“ and hereby questions concepts, transformations and perspectives of German music culture in Eastern Europe.

The focus is therefore initially on the own subject area. It is therefore necessary to make the history of this subject and the various discourses which have become connected (temporarily or permanently) to it from the 19th century to the present differentially accessible in a series of the discourse about 'German' Music Culture in Eastern Europe.

These researches were also closely connected to the consideration of a particular region; this method should make it possible to regularly validate the approaches and results of the discourse analytical studies on the basis of historically precise materials and processes. This intention serves West Prussia as a case study, the examination of the history of music culture in Danzig and the 'Country on the banks of the lower River Weichsel', in which the focus is on the exemplary concerning oneself with one of the provinces of the empire – as a (relatively) enclosed former German settlement area.

In an additional project section which is on the other hand very theory-driven, the study perspectives are to be fundamentally extended by the aspect of music as an intangible cultural asset. This has to do with understanding music has being a lived cultural practise beyond the high culture schemata, the exploiting of appropriate historical sources as a medial repository and the testing of museological concepts of a contemporary presentation of such documents.

The actual, fourth part project applies such more general subject matters to a specific case study, which is concerned about aspects of the music cultures of South East Europe, particularily of those of the Danubian Swabs and the Transsylvanian Saxones. In a systematic difference to the case study of the former province West Prussia, an explicitally multi- and inter-ethnically marked settlement area is on focus here.