Academic Research

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, as well as 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 socialist solidarity and cosmopolitan cultural formations. Drawing upon primary sources including audio recordings, film, concert and festival ephemera, transatlantic oral history interviews, and policy documents, the 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 in both Germanys. After 1989, sounds of what was then termed the “Second World”– musics transformed by socialist governments and their international exchanges - entered the Western world music market, some with great success. Yet to date, Second World practices of international musical exchange have been left out of world music scholarship, leading to impoverished understandings of the world music phenomenon and of the Cold War soundscapes, relationships, and imaginaries that form the socialist sonic circuitry. This project aims to correct the blind spot by providing a concrete example of how the Second World created and presented itself to the world as an international political/artistic movement and of its wide-ranging and highly influential cultural flows.

The project's methodology combines oral history with archival research. Aside from the cataloged collections at archives around the city, the project makes use of uncatalogued and, in part, previously unknown archival materials. In this final phase of the project, we are working particularly with the Cold War-era LP collection of Humboldt University's Musicology Institute.

Interns' primary task will be to inventory the LP collection mentioned in the project description. It consists of approximately 10,000 items, mainly produced by Eastern Bloc labels, and covering all genres from classical to pop, rock, jazz, and folk.

Interns will also assist in creating social media content about the project - podcast episodes, short-form videos, blog posts, and more. 

Depending on interns' skills and interests, they might also help to create new recordings or videos of East German music and dance reconstructions.

Familiarity with Excel and Word is essential, as is prior experience with social media. 
Also desired: prior experience with cataloging, web design, MAXQDA, bibliographic citation programs, data visualization, field research methods, and musical and/or dance performance.