Second World Music: Latin America, East Germany, and the Sonic Circuitry of Socialism

• Applicant: Sydney Hutchinson, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Musicology
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443306118

While “world music” became an important musical category and commodity in the Western world in the 1980s, an incipient world music practice had already begun to take shape in the Eastern Bloc, one with very different ideologies and forms of circulation. This project looks at the globally-oriented Festival des politischen Liedes, held in Berlin from 1970 onwards; East German radio programming; artistic and scholarly exchanges; and social dancing to show how cultural and musical interchange connected diverse peoples around the socialist world, transformed musical sounds and practices, and created new forms of solidarity and cosmopolitan cultural formations. After 1989, although “Second World”– musics have entered the Western world music market, to date Second World practices of international musical exchange have been largely left out of world music scholarship. This omission leads to impoverished understandings of the world music phenomenon, of Cold War soundscapes, and of international relationships and imaginaries that endure in part to this day – a soundscape I term socialist sonic circuitry. This project focuses on one particular trajectory of musical and choreographic exchange – the one which linked the GDR and Cuba, East Germany’s most important partner in the Western hemisphere – while also touching on the influences of other Latin American musical socialisms (Chile, Nicaragua, etc.) in both Germanys. It draws upon primary archival and ethnographic sources including audio recordings, film, concert and festival ephemera, transatlantic oral history interviews, and policy documents in order to provide concrete examples of how the "Second World" created and presented itself to the world as an international political/artistic movement, to correct biases in representations of life beyond the perhaps surprisingly permeable “Iron Curtain,” and to illuminate wide-ranging and highly influential cultural flows that have been little studied to date. This history not only reveals East German citizens, a group currently linked to the rise of a xenophobic political right wing, to have once been international, cosmopolitan, and xenophilic; it also helps to shed light on some Germans’ current attitudes towards Cuba, its music and dance. Research results will be published as a monograph and two peer-review articles; part will also be turned into an audiovisual exhibit for the Humboldt Forum, now being built on the site of the former East German Palast der Republik – the home of the Festival des politischen Liedes for two decades.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants