Kenneth Burke and the Problem of Sonic Identification

Abstract

As music reviewer for The Nation in 1934, Kenneth Burke attended the New York premiere of Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, a symphony that Burke felt had the dangerous potential to merge Nazi ideology with other dissenting German voices. Through this review and his introduction of the theoretical term “identification” in Attitudes Toward History, Burke joins a growing body of sonic rhetorics scholarship that investigates the semiotics of sound. Burke’s attention to sonic identifications reveals the fragile nature of sound, meaning, and division.

Notes

¹ I offer gratitude for the supportive and detailed feedback from RR reviewers Benjamin Hedin and Gregory Clark. I also thank Eric Detweiler, Jayme Yeo, Sharon A. Harris, and Ann George for their help on multiple versions of this work.

² Many critics who initially reviewed the work also believed Hindemith was attempting to advance a Nazi ideology, and though a brief examination of Hindemith’s life leading up to the composition of the Mathis der Maler symphony contradicts their assertions, composer intent has no bearing on Burke’s ultimate conclusion.

³ The term “sonic” has come to refer to a wide range of sounds beyond simply music. While I will focus primarily on how Burke’s theory of identification emerged through the sonic symbol of music, I would argue that the term sonic identification illuminates the persuasive appeals of all non-verbal sounds.

⁴ Recent work by Cynthia Selfe, Thomas Rickert, Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks, and Bump Halbritter have defined the field using a variety of names such as aural rhetoric, aurality, sound studies, and sonic rhetoric. However, the field seems to be rallying around the term sonic rhetorics as evidenced by the Gunn et al. review and the name of an upcoming Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Institute Workshop.

⁵ Scholars trace Burke’s transition into a social critic to both his 1931 essay titled “Boring from Within” and his 1932 sonically-titled and unpublished book Auscultation, Creation, Revision.

⁶ Copland only visited the group (Dunaway) and contributed a song or two to the Songbook (Lieberman).

⁷ Though M. Elizabeth Weiser provides a useful look into the effects of WWII on Burke’s work in the 1940s, her historiographic study only goes as far back as 1938.

⁸ Burke finished a draft of Permanence and Change for submission to Harcourt Brace and Company. After they rejected the work, Burke continued to tinker with the draft through July 1934.

⁹ The Reichstag building housed the German parliament, and the fire served as a symbolic destruction of plurality within the German government.

¹⁰ Though Burke appears to ignore the spread of fascism in Europe, he mentions “the coming war in Japan” in an early 1933 draft of Permanence and Change for an overview of “metabiology” (“Metabiology, Outline for a Minimized Ethic” 3;(Tm, 3pp, P9c).

¹¹ Burke translated Mann’s Death in Venice, Ludwig’s Genius and Character, and Zweig’s article “Charles Dickens.”

¹² While many sources attribute this uproar to a group of Nazi critics, Vaget claims that of the forty who signed the document only a handful were local Nazi officials. Instead, Vaget claims Mann’s exile was largely a result of personal vendettas with Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner in particular.

¹³ Mann was in the middle of composing this work when he was exiled to Switzerland in 1933. His children and friends had to rescue this manuscript and forward it to his new address (“The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” 91).

¹⁴ In late 1933, nominated by Nazi officials to become a representative of a new generation, Hindemith appeared to be placating the Nazi party by joining the Reichsmusikkammer, a Nazi institution founded by Joseph Goebbels to promote German music. Nazi leaders hoped that Hindemith would be a model of conformity to the Nazi party for other contemporary German composers.

¹⁵ The Mathis der Maler symphony is an early iteration of Hindemith’s opera of the same name, which premiered in 1938. Otto Klemperer was the conductor for the performance that night.

¹⁶ Further evidence of Hindemith’s disapproval of the Nazi party can be found in the plot of the Mathis der Maler opera, which premiered four years later in Zurich, Switzerland. The protagonist of the opera, sixteenth century painter Matthias Grünewald, decides to give up painting and join the peasants in a revolt against those in power. Throughout the staging of the opera, Hindemith overtly indicts Nazi practices such as in scene four, where in a restaging of the Peasant’s War of 1524, the federal army overpowers the peasant army and burns Lutheran literature, evoking the Nazi burning of “politically and morally un-German writings” (Kemp 30).

¹⁷ In this revolutionary situation in 1934, Burke viewed words as the primary way for reestablishing division. However, in our contemporary multimedia moment, non-linguistic symbols such as image and gesture could potentially preserve divisions as well.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel Overall

Joel Overall is assistant professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he teaches courses in writing, digital rhetoric, and rhetorical practices in culture. His work has also appeared in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Readers can contact him at [email protected].