Exile and Technology · Austro-German exile in America 1930-45: interrogating the relationship between science, technology and modern selfhood in cultural and musical discourses.

Austro-German exile in America 1930-45: interrogating the relationship between science, technology and modern selfhood in cultural and musical discourses.

Project title: ‘Austro-German exile in America 1930-45: interrogating the relationship between science, technology and modern selfhood in cultural and musical discourses’. This project examines the relationship between technology, selfhood, and modernity in the context of the music and thought of Austrian and German émigré musicians and cultural theorists in the US from 1930 to 1945. The project looks beyond the boundaries of the nation state and the nexus of the composer and the musical work that tend to structure musicological enquiry. Instead, transnational historical methodologies are used alongside primary archival research to join a timely conversation in musicology about the intersections between histories of music and science. In the period 1930-45, (Austro-)Germany and America were scientific powerhouses. Against the backdrop of mounting political turmoil, both generated ethically controversial scientific and technological research simultaneously liberating and malevolent: atomic technology, cosmology, radar, eugenics, transportation innovations. Technology necessarily shapes ideas of selfhood, and the mass displacement of Austrian and German intellectuals to the US after the rise of the National Socialists created a ‘culture of exile’ in which, as émigrés integrated within the new context, diverse attitudes to the relationship between science, technology, and formulations of the self began to interweave. Using musical collaborations, spectacles, and events to illuminate and explore the range and ambivalence of those attitudes, the project aims to furnish a more finely grained historical understanding of the disconnections between Germanic and American relationships to technology and selfhood in the period. Supplying a contoured historical account of the relationship between technology and selfhood is critical for a current era in which we are grappling with technological debates ranging from smartphone addiction to the geopolitical ethics of technology's manufacture. The research outcomes are a monograph developing the transnational methodology, based on the researcher's doctoral thesis (title: 'The Symphony in 1933'), and two articles as part of substantial work towards a second book. A further key objective is to establish an international interdisciplinary academic network for collaborative projects and conferences exploring technological and cultural/musical discourse in the global contexts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union