Rubble Music by Anderton Abby;

Author:Anderton, Abby;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

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EMBODIED AND DISEMBODIED VOICES

Listening to Sonic Ruins

AS HENRY GLUSKI FLEW OVER BERLIN BEFORE LANDING at Tempelhof Airport in August 1945, he could scarcely believe the cityscape he witnessed. The ruins stretched as far as he could see—monuments to carpet-bombing and the violent street fighting of the war’s final weeks. Nineteen-year-old Gluski had just accepted a broadcasting position with Berlin’s American Forces Network (AFN), the radio station of the American military government designed for American GIs stationed in Berlin. Because he was the youngest and most inexperienced, Gluski was given the radio programs no one else wanted to moderate. His assignments included the early, early morning show and the weekly Quadripartite Symphony Hour. He chose mostly nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertoire—namely, the works of Jewish composers, including Mahler and Mendelssohn, believing their music held reeducational value for any German listener who might be tuning in.1

In a city that more closely resembled a moonscape than a metropolis, radio provided a link to the outside world. As historian Monica Black writes of the rubbled landscape of 1945, “Ruins and the graves of the dead had come to comprise the city’s topography and become part of a new, postwar way of seeing.”2 Yet the war had also created a new postwar way of hearing, as the destruction left its imprint on the aurality of the city. Without walls, doors, windows, or roofs, the ruins allowed sound to travel from dwelling to dwelling without any impediment. Radio blurred the boundaries of musical/sonic publicness and privacy, to evoke Georgina Born’s terms, as sound could now freely travel. Radio waves lacing through one ruin to another created what R. Murray Schafer has called schizophonia, or the confusion between sound happening in real time and its electroacoustic counterpart. As British officer George Clare recalled, “My most striking first impression was not visual but aural: the muted echoes of a battered city.”3 Other visitors found the ruins even took on a melody of their own: “Amid the sour wreckage of a spotted city this music of a sweet and nostalgic nature was often to be heard,”4 Allied soldier Richard Brett-Smith noted in his memoir.

While much scholarship has focused on the visually arresting aspects of ruins, less attention has been paid to their sound. One did not just see the ruins; one also heard them. These “musically imagined communities,”5 created and informed by postwar German radio, offer a window into the shared traumatic experiences of the air war. This chapter explores the tensions between ruin listening in the private and public spheres. The disembodied voice of the radio created a community of listeners while still dividing the listening public who had to choose between the American- and Soviet-supported stations. Yet radio heard in the privacy of one’s home stood in sharp contrast to the proliferation of public concerts in the ruins throughout postwar Germany. As Berlin musicians returned to the bombed craters of their former venues to stage performances, these ruin concerts permitted ensembles to engage with notions of German suffering by reclaiming churches, palaces, and concert halls destroyed by Allied bombing.

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