Music in the Third Reich

Music played a prominent role in the rise of Nazi culture in Germany and was used extensively in propaganda and indoctrination of the entire country; the Nazi party brought music and politics together and sought to shape their ideal culture by elevating their ideas of pure music to the highest status and outlawing what they defined as inferior. This study addresses Hitler’s specific views on music and explores several of the factors and individuals that contributed to his views. His views were directly inferred into the core of the Nazi party. Hitler himself was an artist and felt that art and music were a vital part of life and culture. He was deeply influenced by Wagner’s views as well as his music, and Hitler saw many parallels between Wagner’s conception of Germany and the stories which the composer used in his operas. This study also explores how the Nazis used music to spread their propaganda, what was considered to be “pure” music, and the impact which the idea of “pure” art had on Jewish musicians and composers. The party made significant use of music to strengthen their political events and indoctrinate the individual citizen. Not only was the actual music used to portray Nazi ideology, but Nazi doctrine played a significant role in the fate of Jewish composers and performers. Many Jewish musicians lost their jobs and found themselves banned from mainstream cultural and musical organizations. Arnold Schoenberg is the prime example of the effect of the Nazi ideology on the music and perception of a Jewish composer, while Wagner is the perfect example of the response to a composer who met the Nazi criteria of pure Aryanism. This study attempts to examine these historical facts in an effort to promote a better understanding of the cultural aspects of the Third Reich in the hopes that the informed individual will ensure that such views will never again permeate government and society

Russian-Jewish Art Music: The Voice of a People

Every culture has a distinct way of communicating their core values, beliefs and history, and for many cultures, music plays a vital role in this communication. The Jewish people have a rich heritage marked by very distinct traditions, values and beliefs which are communicated in what has come to be known as “Jewish Art Music.” This is music composed in the Western-Russian classical idiom which utilizes distinctly Jewish elements. A deeper understanding of this music will give outsiders a better understanding into the culture and heritage of the Jewish people. This paper explores the characteristics of Jewish music, particularly that music composed in the Eastern European tradition. Much of the traditional music of the Jewish people has had a religious context and is a reflection of their collective culture and its interaction with the cultures of the nations into which they have emigrated. This paper looks directly at the founding and development of the Society for Jewish Folk Music, which was an organization founded in Russia in 1908. It examines the interplay between the creation of a distinctly “Jewish” style and how that has interacted with the Russian classical tradition. The Society for Jewish Folk Music has an interesting place in Jewish music history. While the society itself had a short life, it had wide-spread effects, moving to Moscow, Poland, Austria, Palestine, and the United States. The style of music presented by this society is largely representative of a rise in Jewish nationalism which began to grow in Russia near the end of the 1800s. Musical nationalism played a large role in this Jewish cultural renewal. In this paper I examine the interplay between the creation of a distinctly “Jewish” style of music and the idea of Jewish musical nationalism

vbyCaHbeta CCD Photometry of Clusters. VI. The Metal-Deficient Open Cluster NGC 2420

CCD photometry on the intermediate-band vbyCaHbeta system is presented for the metal-deficient open cluster, NGC 2420. Restricting the data to probable single members of the cluster using the CMD and the photometric indices alone generates a sample of 106 stars at the cluster turnoff. The average E(b-y) = 0.03 +/- 0.003 (s.e.m.) or E(B-V) = 0.050 +/- 0.004 (s.e.m.), where the errors refer to internal errors alone. With this reddening, [Fe/H] is derived from both m1 and hk, using b-y and Hbeta as the temperature index. The agreement among the four approaches is reasonable, leading to a final weighted average of [Fe/H] = -0.37 +/- 0.05 (s.e.m.) for the cluster, on a scale where the Hyades has [Fe/H] = +0.12. When combined with the abundances from DDO photometry and from recalibrated low-resolution spectroscopy, the mean metallicity becomes [Fe/H] = -0.32 +/- 0.03. It is also demonstrated that the average cluster abundances based upon either DDO data or low-resolution spectroscopy are consistently reliable to 0.05 dex or better, contrary to published attempts to establish an open cluster metallicity scale using simplistic offset corrections among different surveys.Comment: scheduled for Jan. 2006 AJ; 33 pages, latex, includes 7 figures and 2 table