Instruments for New Music: Sound Technology and Modernism in the Weimar Republic

Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was the epicenter of an explosion of activity around the question of new instruments and their role in modern music. From the mid-1920s until the fall of the Republic--and for a time even under the National Socialist regime--composers, inventors, and musicologists alike were transfixed by the prospect of the technological rejuvenation of music. But this aspect of the Weimar Republic's musical life remains virtually unknown to historians, especially in the English-speaking world. Due to the relative dearth of surviving musical artifacts--scores, recordings, and even instruments themselves--the history of this milieu must be reconstructed on the basis of the period's rich documentary evidence. Through readings of primary sources such as journal articles, books, pamphlets, and patent papers, this dissertation explores the phenomenon of what I call musical "technomodernism" through case studies of three different technological constellations: mechanical instruments, such as the Welte-Mignon player piano; electric instruments, exemplified by the inventions of Jorg Mager; and "media instruments" such as optical sound film, in which recording media were re-functioned as experimental sound sources. Combining descriptions of the relevant instrumental technologies with explications of the aesthetic debates about the "new music," this study aims to establish the historical significance of a distinctive and influential movement in twentieth-century music. The dissertation further investigates the period's influences on later discourses and practices of music, technology, and instrumentality, particularly as they manifest in the tradition that has come to be known as "electronic music."