Main Areas of Research 2007-2010

In this second phase, the research project oriented its work on the leading categories "Writing of Music History and Cultures of Remembrance" and hereby questioned concepts, transformations and perspectives of German Music Culture in Eastern Europe.

The focus was therefore initially on the own subject area. It was 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 has made it possible to validate the approaches and results of the discourse analytical studies on the basis of historically precise materials and processes. This intention served West Prussia as a Case Study, the examination of the history of music and music culture in the 'Country on the banks of the lower River Weichsel'. In theses exemplary studies a province of the German Empire was focused. As a relatively enclosed former German settlement area for centuries, nevertheless, it was at the same time marked by diverse, highly insightful interferences among different ethnic groups and cultural traditions.

In an additional project section which was on the other hand very theory-driven, the study perspective has been thereafter extended by the aspect of Music as an Intangible Cultural Asset. This had 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 already the testing of museological concepts of a contemporary presentation of such documents.

Finally, the fourth part project applied 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. Thus, the interest was now in difference to the case study of the former province West Prussia, an explicitly multi- and inter-ethnically marked German settlement area.