Anyone who watches operas, operettas or musicals often comes across historical musical personalities who are portrayed. In this way, the audience gains knowledge about music and musicians in passing. Musicologist Anna Langenbruch wants to find out how this works. The Emmy Noether Programme for Young Researchers gives her the space to do so.
The renowned programme of the German Research Foundation (DFG) includes five years of funding totalling 1.1 million euros and enables Langenbruch to set up a junior research group on the topic of "Music History on Stage" at the Institute of Music at the University of Oldenburg. "The DFG funding in the millions once again recognises the outstanding qualifications of our young researchers, whose promotion is a particular concern of our university," explains University President Prof. Dr Dr Hans Michael Piper.
Prof Dr Melanie Unseld, in whose working group Langenbruch teaches and researches, adds: "Throughout Germany, there are not even a handful of musicologists who have received Emmy Noether funding. This makes it all the more important that a group of young researchers can now establish themselves in Oldenburg."
Seeing, hearing and feeling music history
Langenbruch and her junior research group will investigate how the musical past is constructed in musical theatre - for example in operas, operettas and musicals. "Musical history is not only written and read, but also brought to the stage," explains the researcher. Mozart, Farinelli, Clara Schumann, Edith Piaf or the Beatles - there are hundreds of plays that deal with historical musicians. They often appear as stage characters themselves. "Music history is presented and experienced in a very special way: it is sung, spoken, played or composed, we see, hear or feel it," explains Langenbruch. Music history itself becomes an aesthetic event. The researcher is interested in how this type of knowledge production works, i.e. how knowledge about music is created in the medium of music.
In order to research this interface between science, art and everyday life, Langenbruch will now be able to take on two doctoral candidates. She hopes that her project will provide new insights for the historiography of music and the history of knowledge of the arts in general. "Knowledge about music and its history is conveyed in very different media, in books, films, computer games or on the internet. And in music theatre," says Langenbruch. In terms of the history of culture and knowledge, this means that we have to look at what characterises each of these media - specific listening knowledge, staging practices, genre rules or similar - and which stories are created in this way.
PhD on musicians in exile in Paris
Langenbruch, a research associate at the Institute of Music since 2012, was the first young Oldenburg researcher to receive a Carl von Ossietzky Researchers' Fellowship in 2013. This award and the associated funding from the university helped her to prepare the proposal that has now been approved. Langenbruch studied music and mathematics in Cologne and completed a bi-national doctorate in 2011 at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales Paris with a thesis on the possibilities for action of musicians in Parisian exile between 1933 and 1939. Langenbruch researches the cultural history of exile, intermedial music historiography, popular music theatre and topics relating to the history of science.
About the Emmy Noether Programme:
The DFG's Emmy Noether Programme aims to provide outstanding young researchers with a path to early academic independence. Doctoral researchers with substantial international experience acquire the qualification to become a university lecturer by leading their own junior research group, usually over a period of five years. The programme is named after the German mathematician Emmy Noether, who was instrumental in advancing abstract algebra at the beginning of the 20th century.
