Fraught Adjacencies: The Politics of German Electronic Music

Abstract

Electronic music has traditionally been understood inside a purely musical rationale, as continuing the aesthetic progress of Western art music. And yet, electronic studios are not just musical; they are heterogeneous, blending technologies and personnel from science, military engineering, radio broadcasting, and music. Two vignettes—on the Trautonium and on Werner Meyer-Eppler’s activities in National Socialist contexts—reveal specific entanglements of German electronic music from the 1920s through the 1960s. I explore the consequences of such fraught adjacencies in German electronic music. I show that electronic music is not exactly tainted by a Kittlerian determinism, but rather embedded within a broad network of coalitional negotiations between disparate spheres. The investments made in electronic music contributed aesthetic coherence at key moments to Germany’s emerging sense of cultural identity, political priorities, and nationhood. It is in this way that electronic music is consequential.