Our Conservatories? Music Education, Social Identities and Cultural Politics in Germany and Austria, 1840-1933

This dissertation is a history of conservatories of music in Germany and Austria from the founding of the first German conservatory in 1843 to 1933. This period allows an investigation of continuities and changes in the cultural work performed by conservatories as political relationships shifted. As music was central to German cultural identity, conservatories were sites in which competing visions of Germany were contested. Chapter 1 analyses the founding and expansion of German conservatories, focusing on local and regional identities. Music education was a way to deepen music’s local grounding while contributing to the culture of the larger fatherland. Chapter 2 explores national visions for German music education both in the absence of a nation-state and as part of the process of moulding national identity after unification. Chapter 3 concerns North American exchanges with German and Austrian conservatories. This sheds light on the discourse of “Americanisation” in Germany and Austria as well as on the place of central-European music in American cultural history. This chapter explores the Austro-German music-educational establishment’s attempts to grapple with American culture as well as Germans’ understanding of American modernity, which they found enticing, liberating and threatening. Through analysis of the debate about jazz in German music education, this chapter explores how Germans imagined American culture and the influence of African Americans and Jews on it. Chapter 4 analyses the role of German music education in defining terms of Jewish claims to German cultural belonging. This chapter considers the role of Bildung and music education in the construction of a distinctly German-Jewish identity; it also analyses the consequences of exclusionary racial antisemitism for conservatories. Chapter 5 analyses the position of conservatories in battles between progressives and conservatives. Conservatories could be bulwarks against change, but they could also serve to legitimate new developments. Recent years have seen the development of a body of scholarship devoted to the history of individual music-educational institutions. This dissertation enriches, challenges and extends that work. It does so by treating conservatories throughout German-speaking Europe as a cultural concept, and by anchoring music education in larger scholarly conversations in German and central-European history.Ph.D