"Rethinking Central European Music" – a new special issue of Studia Musicologica is now available

The conference, organized by Anna Belinszky, Gergely Fazekas and Lóránt Péteri, members of the Central European Music Research Group, featured presentations from various fields of musicology that engaged with the concept of Central Europe, either using it as an obvious interpretative framework or taking a critical stance toward it. Speakers from Hungary as well as specialists from the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom gave papers at the conference.

The newly published special issue brings together a selection of twelve articles based on the conference papers, representing a broad range of thematic focuses, approaches and methodologies. They cover a wide scope of musical phenomena of the past 200 years, focusing on the life, work and reception of Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, Dohnányi, Bartók and Szymanowski among others, as well as the varied musical activities of communities and institutions. Some of the essays also discuss the possible musical dimensions of a Central European identity.

The study of the phenomenon of traveling singers and instrumental performers presents how these musicians’ mobility fortifies the relations between the landscapes and cities of Central Europe. Essays dealing with the music culture of Transylvania and the musical dimensions of Polish-Hungarian relations bring to light the importance of the regional (as opposed to the global and the national) aspect of music history. The issue of sound recordings is discussed from a philosophical, and also from a historical point of view. The interwoven history of record companies and record distribution indicates that the dense network of regional relations was not completely torn apart by the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The inclusion of other branches of art in the discussions also facilitates the understanding of Central European music history. Some of the essays point out parallels in literary and musical works, while the cinematic portrait of a musician is also subject of an analysis.

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Essays published in the special issue:

Stephen Downes: A Polish Pianist Travels to Budapest: “Affective Geography” in Bruno Monsaingeon’s Piotr Anderszewski: “Voyageur intranquille” (2009)

Jeremy Barham: Understanding Mahler’s Central European Musical Identity: Literary Analogues in the Works of Joseph Roth and Gregor von Rezzori

Lóránt Péteri: Mahler’s Music in Hungary, 1920–1956: Performance, Reception, Politics

Anna Stoll Knecht: Richard and Cosima Wagner: Singing around 1900

Anna Belinszky: Death, Nostalgia and Tradition: Narratives of Brahms’s Funeral from Vienna to Budapest

Veronika Kusz: Round Dances in Vienna: An Interpretation of Ernst von Dohnányi’s "Winterreigen"

László Vikárius: What Did Béla Bartók’s Five Hungarian Folk Songs Want to Do at the 1938 Baden-Baden Festival

Virág Büky: Response to a Salonstück: The Question of Szymanowski’s Influence on Bartók’s Sonata for Violin and Piano no. 2

Péter György Csobó: Music – Recording – Aura: Marginal Notes on the Debate between Adorno and Benjamin and on Adorno's Fragmentary Theory of the Gramophone Record

Ferenc János Szabó: (Inter)national Recording Histories of Central Europe

Gabriella Murvai-Bőke: Formalism, Tradition, Folk Music: The Vocal and Dance Ensemble of the Hungarian People’s Army in Poland in 1952

Oana Andreica: Polystylistic Traits in Ede Terényi’s Music: The Baroque Concertos

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Editor-in-Chief: Péter Bozó

Special Editors: Anna Belinszky, Lóránt Péteri

Assistant Editors: Julianna Kőnig, Patrick Devine

Editorial Secretary: István Csaba Németh

For further information, see the website of the journal: https://akjournals.com/view/journals/6/65/1-2/6.65.issue-1-2.xml