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Type of Document Treatise Author Jackson, Margaret R. Author's Email Address jackso_m@otto.cmr.fsu.edu URN etd-11172003-180442 Title Workers, Unite! The Political Songs of Hanns Eisler, 1926-1932 Degree Doctor of Musical Arts Department Music, School of Advisory Committee
Advisor Name Title Jerrold Pope Committee Chair Keywords
- Weimar Music
- Agitpropaganda
- Eisler
Date of Defense 2003-11-10 Availability unrestricted Abstract One of the most prolific German composers of the 20th.century, Hanns Eisler was a communist who sought to blend politics, advanced musical
techniques, and folk elements into compositions that would five a powerful
voice to Europe's working classes. To that end he left behind an extensive body of songs,
chamber works, film scores, and theoretical writings that stand as critiques of and alternatives
to popular society.
While Eisler has received much musicological attention in his native Germany,
he has received less notice from scholars in the United States. This treatise provides English-speaking
singers and music historians with an introduction to Eisler's Kampflieder, or fighting songs, from the pre-World War
II period. As these songs are bound to the political culture of Weimar Germany, I have included an analysis of the ways Marxist dialectical
materialism shaped Eisler's compositional aesthetic. Eisler's fighting songs were also bound to agitpropaganda theater
groups that developed in Berlin's working class neighborhoods; this treatise offers a glimpse into the social context that
produced those groups and Eisler's position within them as a musical
revolutionary.
In 1947, while living in the United States, Hanns Eisler was investigated by the FBI and interrogated
by the House Un-American Activities Committee, making him one of the first artists to be publicly attacked
as "Communist" and blacklisted for his political affiliations. I have argued that his pre-War fighting songs bore directly
on his American fate, and that the lingering effects of McCarthyism have led to his neglect in American music
scholarship.
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