Mapping Musical Mobilities: Challenging Musical Nationalism through Mobility and Migration

Abstract

Often, music—particularly classical music—has been viewed in some quarters as a product of particular national cultures, with little regard paid to the ways in which mobile phenomena can contribute to its production, whether in the form of mobile people, objects, or concepts. This paper turns to notions of mobility as a means of exploring how musical cultures can be animated. It explores, too, the possibilities of particular forms of “mapping” as a way to retain, but also rethink, the spatial specificity so emphatically signalled in some musical tradition-claiming, while simultaneously avoiding the excessive valorisation of mobility that can characterise many musical careers as endlessly nomadic or socially detached. We begin by discussing the question of music and nationalism in more detail, particularly as it has been conceived of within musicology, ethnomusicology, and nationalism studies. In so doing, we aim to establish a sense of the national framing and fixing through which (classical) music has hitherto been understood in some contexts. This leads naturally onto an attendant discussion of the mobility of music, in which we will outline some of the nascent material on this topic.

 

音乐——尤其是古典音乐——通常被视为特定民族文化的产物。但是, 我们很少考虑流动现象如何以流动的人、物体或概念形式促进音乐的产生。本文将流动性作为探索如何激活音乐文化的方法。还探讨了特定形式“制图”的可能性, 以此来保留并重新思考音乐的某些传统主张所强调的空间特异性, 同时避免使音乐职业成为无休止游荡或社会超然的过度流动性。我们首先详细讨论了音乐学、民族音乐学和民族主义研究已经意识到的音乐和民族主义问题。由此, 我们旨在建立一种民族框架和修复, 并据此在某些情况下去理解(古典)音乐。这自然而然地引出了对音乐“流动性”的讨论, 并概述了该讨论的新素材。

 

Con frecuencia, la música –particularmente la música clásica– ha sido considerada en algunos círculos intelectuales como el producto de unas culturas nacionales particulares, con concesión de mínima consideración a los modos como los fenómenos móviles pueden contribuir a su producción, bien en la forma de personas, objetos o conceptos móviles. Este escrito vuelve sobre las nociones de movilidad como uno de los medios con los cuales explorar cómo poder animar las culturas musicales. El artículo también explora las posibilidades de formas particulares de “mapeo”, como el medio para retener, pero también para repensar, la especificidad espacial tan enfáticamente señalada en algunas reivindicaciones de la tradición musical, al tiempo que se evita la excesiva valorización de la movilidad con la que se pueden caracterizar muchas carreras musicales, como interminablemente nómadas o socialmente desprendidas. Comenzamos discutiendo con cierto detalle el tema de la música y el nacionalismo, en particular como esto ha sido concebido dentro de la musicología, la etnomusicología y los estudios sobre nacionalismo. Haciendo esto, apuntamos a establecer un sentido de la enmarcación nacional y de su afincamiento a través del cual hasta ahora se ha entendido la música (clásica) en algunos contextos. Naturalmente, esto nos involucra en un debate sobre la movilidad de la música, en el cual esbozaremos ciertos materiales novedosos relacionados con este tópico.

Keywords:

• mapping
• migration
• mobility
• music
• musical nationalism.

 :

• 制图
• 迁移
• 流动性
• 音乐
• 音乐民族主义

 :

• mapeo
• migración
• movilidad
• música
• nacionalismo musical

“Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples”—so observed Walter Cook of the New York Institute of Art when reflecting upon the steady flow of talented, cultured (often Jewish) refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe that arrived in America in the years following Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in 1933 (qtd. in Snowman 2003, xiv). Cook was speaking, of course, before the true scale of the horror occasioned by the Nazi regime became apparent, but the metaphorical violence of “[shaking] the tree” speaks powerfully to the forces that drove the vast movement of people away from Europe in the years surrounding the Second World War. As for “the apples,” Cook’s sentiment was one “that many in Britain came to share,” notes Daniel Snowman (xiv). Snowman systematically builds a case for the immense contribution to British cultural life made by refugees escaping the depredations of the Third Reich, both during the war and onward into the post-war years. A particularly crucial pillar of the cultural milieu sketched out in Snowman’s work was music and it is this—along with the mobilities of its production, distribution and reception—that will underpin our concerns in the present paper.

Occupied Europe, the Glyndebourne Festival of Opera, the Edinburgh Festival, internment camps for so-called “enemy aliens” on the Isle of Man, Hampstead in North West London; such places make up a mere fraction of the particular spatial matrix within which musicians and composers fleeing the advance of Nazism on the continent tended to circulate (Dickson and MacDougall 2020), and stories of their movements can serve to challenge some existing categories. In a broad sense, disciplines of musical study and performance, as well as popular conceptions and music marketing, have often resorted to fixing music within particular national containers or compositional lineages, oftentimes adopting national—and sometimes racialised—categories, of style, tradition, technique, and culture.¹ This is perhaps particularly true of musicians (particularly composers) themselves, whose biographies—in publications such as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for instance—tend to rely on particular national categories as a primary mode of categorisation (“German composer,” “French librettist,” “English conductor,” and so on). Recognising the mobility of musicians may begin to partly reconcile the apparent fluidity of music itself in its apprehension of moving, shifting sounds, rather than locking music-makers into national—and at times, stereotyped—containers.

Mobility poses a key challenge to the insistent focus upon the nationality of composers and musicians that remains prevalent within discourse on classical music and within popular understandings of it. This may serve to bring such discourse into closer alignment with other musical traditions; jazz, for instance, is recognised as far more fluid, hybrid and mobile, and highly dependent on movements of transmission, communication, and mobile practices of listening and moving (Berish 2012). As Brigid Cohen notes of musicology, and particularly scholarship on (classical) musical modernisms: “[L]ittle has been done to question how widespread conditions of displacement in the twentieth century might alter the basic terms through which we conceive and evaluate artistic processes” (Cohen 2014, 182). These displacements form the backdrop to our concern here, as does the question of how to undo “smooth national genealogies” (Cohen 2014, 188).

From the perspective of mobility, and geographical approaches towards it, such national framings have been deeply problematic for some time. Transnational networks and international movements of migratory peoples, of course, mark their cultural contributions as decidedly global and transcultural in nature. Cohen usefully summarises the thought of Edward Saïd, in his essay “Reflections on Exile,” when she notes that, “from his perspective, border crossings—cultural, political, and geographical—should not be treated as peripheral to the study of recent history, but rather must be seen as a primary focus” (Cohen 2014, 181). Destabilising the geographical fixity of such notions by drawing attention to examples of border-crossing can highlight the fact that “music rarely observes national boundaries” (Brincker 2014, 604).

In this paper we turn to concepts of mobility as a means of exploring how musical cultures per se can be animated. It brings together the possibilities of particular forms of “mapping” as a way to retain, but also rethink, the spatial specificity so emphatically signalled in musical tradition-claiming, while avoiding the excessive valorisation of mobility that can characterise many musical careers as endlessly nomadic or socially detached. How might one begin to integrate a reading of spatiality into a wider understanding of the biographies of musicians, the social and political contexts within which they moved, their institutional affiliations and, particularly, their artistic works and the various mobilities that characterised their lives? We require other conceptual and methodological approaches to understand, represent, and perform music in tandem with mobility. Such approaches are the concern of this paper.

This article represents our attempt to position a particular approach with which to think through the question of music and mobility and, crucially, to present a theoretical framework by which to achieve this that draws together existing scholarly research in different fields—one that avoids both the replication of static national categories and an excessive valorisation of movement. We begin by discussing the question of music and nationalism in more detail, particularly as it has been conceived of within musicology, ethnomusicology, and nationalism studies. In so doing, we aim to establish a sense of the immobility and fixity with which (classical) music has hitherto been understood, at least in some quarters. This leads naturally onto an attendant discussion of the mobility of music, in which we will outline some of the nascent material on this topic drawing particularly on geographical perspectives. In what follows, we aim to unsettle the notion of music’s spatial fixity without wholly discarding it, and to begin to unpack the multiple mobilities and geographies of music; in order to do this, we will engage with existing scholarly criticism in order to advance our argument and dwell on the experience of some migrant musicians, such as Mátyás Seiber. Later, we will explore different forms of cartography; with reference to work on “ontogenetic” and critical mapping, we suggest that different cartographic forms can begin to offer multiple ways to express and examine both the places and mobilities of music in tandem. It is our aim here to present a particular framework for understanding music in more mobile terms, and to offer an approach through which to engage with such concepts; mapping offers a useful platform to achieve the latter. Throughout the paper, we will introduce a number of examples in order to illustrate our assertions; these will be derived from the lives and works of migrant and refugee musicians who fled the Nazis for Britain in the 1930s and 40s, as per the focus of our wider research.

MUSICAL NATIONALISM, AND THE APPARENT IMMOBILITY OF MUSIC

As we began to suggest above, classical music has hitherto often been understood through the lens of fixed, nationally-oriented frames of reference. Despite this, “[t]he study of musical nationalism”—notes comparative historian Joep Leerssen—“shuttles back and forth like a spinning jenny, between the style of compositions and the context of social facts” (Leerssen 2014, 607); in this, Leerssen intimates quite clearly the difficulty to be found in ascribing nationalist meanings or tendencies to a piece of (non-texted) music. Notwithstanding the fact that all music must originate from somewhere (and will thereby be in some ways shaped by the circumstances of its production), to attempt to interrogate musical nationalism solely in the terms expressed above would seem to be a vain endeavour, perhaps owing to “[music’s][…]proverbial status as the most abstract, least significance-anchored form of art” (Leerssen 2014, 607). Indeed, it is partly for such reasons, Leerssen suggests, that music has often been viewed as “an almost ungraspable corpus to analyse in the frame of developing cultural nationalism,” and perceived instead as “hot air held together by gossamer, shapelessly afloat in an ahistorical, ideal sphere of abstracted art” (Leerssen 2014, 607). Leerssen claims, however—contra-musical autonomy—that, “[m]usic is not an ahistorical canon of continuously performed instances of timeless beauty; it is the outcome of historical practices and events” (Leerssen 2014, 607, emphasis added). Elsewhere, Benedikte Brincker observes within pre-Second World War musicology “a tendency towards considering national schools as a divergence from a universal norm,” suggesting the degree to which the view of music as an abstract, autonomous art was internalised within and beyond the discipline from the latter nineteenth century into the twentieth (Brincker 2014, 603).

On the one hand, then, there has been a tendency in some quarters to view (classical) music as somewhat aloof from the concerns of politics and society, lacking a grounding within particular geographies produced by the formation of music and musical cultures. Yet the strategy of treating national schools as a departure from the abstracted norms of “universal music,” was revealed, according to Brincker, by American musicologists who “advanced the view that universal music should in fact be considered a national, and more precisely, a German phenomenon”—as such, “national schools that had often been addressed in the context of peripheral nationalisms were seen as national musical expressions seeking to distance themselves from dominant German musical tradition” (Brincker 2014, 603; such attempts at distancing demonstrate the extent to which these Germanic traditions played a role in establishing the European canon. Naturally, it was precisely this Germanic tradition in which the bulk of those musicians fleeing Nazi Germany and its subsequent territorial acquisitions had been steeped throughout their musical educations.

Beyond musicology, other disciplines—such as Geography—have not been without their own concern for music and its relationship to the local, national, regional, or global. Within such contexts, music has often been read through its entanglement in webs of normative cultural judgements around what is proper and what is not, and what is—or is not—in its proper place. Some have considered the notion of sounds, including music, intruding into rural spaces, whereby “the honk of a car in a country lane, or the sound of a gramophone in the open air, were considered aesthetically dissonant and unwelcome” (Connell and Gibson 2003, 12). Music has elsewhere been described as “one of the major noise pollutants of modern life” (Fryer and Bunge 1974, 482). Others have discussed music in the terms of an invasion, whereby popular musics disseminate (and in some cases, we might add, export) the values of consumerism, and even (for some) unwanted cultural influences (Fryer and Bunge 1974; see also Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1995). It was only in the early 1990s that a sustained and more spatially-sophisticated approach to music within Geography and the wider spatial turn genuinely began to emerge, within which attempts to place music within particular categories were understood to impose particular kinds of spatial and scalar referents that could be unpicked.

In this regard, Philip V. Bohlman remarks that music “does not simply represent the nation” but rather “is mustered for the making of the nation,” by composers consciously and deliberately working within “national” traditions, for instance, even if many intellectuals concerned with music may have been reluctant to deviate from a more universalist understanding (Bohlman 2009, 83). In this way, we can regard music—in its fragmented, localised iteration—as a kind of cultural buttress for the creation and maintenance of the “imagined communities” of nations (Anderson, et al. 1991). Consider David Fanning and Erik Levi’s (2020) analysis of the “Western Tour” series undertaken by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the years comprising the Second World War, and its perceived propaganda function in the eyes of the Nazi regime. The tours’ propagandistic value lay partly in their attempts to impose the presence of a specifically-German cultural tradition—perceived as superior—upon occupied (Western European) nations in an effort to engender local support for the aims of the Nazi regime. However, the supposition that “emotionally powerful German music had the capacity to sway host audiences into believing that the occupiers shared the same cultural values as those of the occupied” rests entirely, in this case, upon the Nazi deployment of a strategic universalism, one that sought to exploit the elision between “German music” and “music” in order to manipulate local populations into alignment with the cultural values of the Nazi elite. The example of the Berlin Philharmonic, then, demonstrates clearly the tension between the apparent universality of classical music, and the nationally-specific iterations into which this “universal music” was mobilised and channelled. Moreover, its touring activity brought together local elites in occupied countries into the same space, for the same sensory experience, and thereby contributed to the Nazi project of nation-building through the concert hall.

From the particular to the universal, then, debates around (classical) music and nationality have tended to blur such categorisations, even as these distinctions have been eagerly sought, particularly under the purview of nationalistic myth-making, as a strategy by which to claim particular musicians and their art as part of a national story. We might take as an example the migrants that arrived in Britain from Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1930s. Some have supposed that such émigrés and refugees acted merely as disruptors, moving between German and British cultural spheres that constituted unambiguously unified, wholly discrete entities. The notion of unsettling and refreshing the latter with the influence of the former serves simply to confirm the fixity of the nation in the nationalist imagination. The picture was actually more ambivalent, and the distinctive coherence of “British culture” or “Germanic culture” in this period is far more difficult to determine than it might—superficially—seem. As this article progresses, we will refer to some of these individuals and their musical careers as a means of illustrating the utility of the theoretical position we propose.

MOBILITIES AND MUSIC

The above discussion of musical nationalisms has—perhaps unsurprisingly—begun to critique the notion of their apparent fixity, and started to hint at the idea that “music rarely observes national boundaries” (Brincker 2014: 604). Within music scholarship, the fixities and bounded narratives of nationalism have begun to be challenged by efforts to think with concepts of mobility and migration. As Grosch notes, “music is mobile like hardly any other art form […]” (Grosch 2021; see also Kasinitz and Martiniello 2019, 998). Philip Kasinitz and Marco Martiniello note that “[t]he sociology of music has long demonstrated how music becomes an arena for creating and expressing group identity, bonding social groups and establishing emotional connections between people” (Kasinitz and Martiniello 2019, 858). At times, such impulses naturally tend toward the formation of rigid in-groups, and veer toward the “nationalist and exclusionary.” The authors cite Wagner in the nineteenth century and the efforts of various twentieth century governments to ban ““decadent” popular music” as examples—but they note that, “[m]ore often, music, particularly popular music, is a space in which the boundaries between insiders and outsiders blur […] It is a “promiscuous” enterprise which encourages cross-fertilization and discourages the idea of cultural purity” (Kasinitz and Martiniello 2019, 858).

Rigidity and fixed boundaries were evident in the experience of composers such as Mátyás Seiber, a multilingual Jewish composer of Hungarian origin. Political and social upheavals in Hungary throughout the early twentieth century had left Seiber “othered by the nation into which he had been born” as a consequence of nascent Hungarian nationalism, prompting him to seek employment opportunities elsewhere, particularly in Germany (Scheding 2019, 56). Later, he was forced out of his position as a teacher at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt-am-Main as a result of the rise of the Nazi Party; this was due to both his Jewishness, and the fact that he had founded the first Jazz course at a European conservatoire. Eventually, Seiber would arrive in Britain, but here he found difficulty—at least initially—in establishing a new career within the bounds of British musical life, thereby forcing him to adapt his compositional practice to a variety of styles, including music for film and even popular music. He also advised Theodor Adorno in detailed correspondence on his project on jazz. Ultimately, it was (partly) the frustration of such exclusions that led Seiber to become one of the founding members of the highly-internationalised Society for the Promotion of New Music (for more on Seiber’s work and biography, see Snyder 2020; Scheding 2019).

In concert with the spirit of Seiber’s society, Kasinitz and Martiniello (2019) go on to note that music has the capacity to “[cross] borders even when human bodies cannot” (859). Of course, nationalism is not the only way that music has been brought into closer conversation with an apparently-antagonistic quality of movement or mobility. Grosch summarises that the movement of music in space has been dominated by two often separate approaches, “the “movements of people” on the one hand, and the mobility of musical reproduction and storage media on the other” (Grosch 2021). On this note, we consider the many ways in which music (of all kinds) is enmeshed in space, place, and mobility, and we begin here with reference to work within geography.

In the previous section we referred to the enduring understanding of classical music as autonomous, a view that prevailed in many corners of musicology until the aforementioned “new musicology” turn²; naturally, this notion offers a suitable opportunity to pick up the thread of music’s relationship to specific spaces. Geographers Andrew Leyshon, George Revill and David Matless note—much like the musicologists and scholars of nationalism referred to above—that since the early nineteenth-century “classical genres have been defined by practitioners and musicologists as a transcendent language of individual self-expression, above concerns of economy, polity and society” (Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1995, 425), and thus in many ways, above space and place. Yet, as Leyshon and Matless continue, such notions nonetheless have their own “historical [geographies],” and here such thinking is rooted in the era of calcifying national borders and identities that constitute “the rise of the nation state and bourgeois society” (Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1995, 425). By contrast, they emphasise the reality of music’s perennial entanglement—whether acknowledged or not—with the spaces that make up the social and political world. By way of example, they astutely note the explicit production of certain pieces of classical music which were “[d]esigned to fit certain ceremonial spaces” and which thereby functioned to “[define] and [reinforce] the disposition of power within those spaces and the authority represented by that space” (Leyshon, Matless, and Revill 1995, 426). Likewise, the same movement toward nationalism in the nineteenth century that helped solidify perceptions of music as transcendental in fact made the connection between music and place more explicit.

As we have seen, placing music within a national frame perhaps serves several unintended consequences of locking music down into place, and can make mobility seem transgressive or threatening. Furthermore, it both specifies and restricts the spatial referents through which music might be understood, limiting it to national spaces, national borders, and even to local specificities which are seen to stand for the nation. Moreover, it tends to imagine the spaces, places and landscapes of the nation as inherently inert. Classical music may too easily be caught within these assumptions also. As Florian Scheding and Erik Levi write, “musicology needs migrant histories,” and they describe the discipline’s lack of engagement with displacement and its impacts as “all but negligent” (Scheding and Levi 2010, 14).

Scheding and Levi’s critique is all-too-evident in the case of migrant musicians who escaped the Nazis for British shores. There is a notable scarcity of scholarly engagement with many such individuals, including some well-known figures. This is particularly true of the field of performance; individuals such as the pianist Paul Hamburger and the violinist Maria Lidka, for instance—despite being well-known and well-regarded in musical circles—have seen virtually no scholarly attention devoted to them. Even the famous Amadeus Quartet—one of the most influential chamber music groups of the twentieth century—has received little scholarly attention, despite three of the members being displaced Austrian Jews who were forced to flee their native country during the 1938 Anschluß. Composers, meanwhile, remain understudied too, if a little better known than their performing counterparts. The composer Hans Gál, for example, is occasionally referred to in scholarly work, but this is often in relation to his time in internment (see: Snizek 2012; Snizek 2014). Scheding’s own work on Mátyás Seiber (Scheding 2019) and others provides a good example of how such scholarship might be approached.

Connections to space, place, and mobility appear much more prevalent within other musical genres and spheres of musical research. Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes have observed, for instance, that “[h]istorical and ethnographic approaches alike have traditionally claimed that music embodies, represents and articulates place” and they suggest that the manner in which “Ancient Greek modes [of music] and modern Arabic modes cloak themselves with place names” offers an example of this (Bohlman and Stokes 2010, vii). Elsewhere, however, Bohlman emphasises the role of music in place-making, and ascribes it a particularly mobile character in such processes: “Music makes place by moving through it, sounding it in ways that realize place with temporality” (Bohlman 2011, 151). Indeed, this effect is explored by the geographer Philip Kirby in the sphere of videogame scores, in which “music is a key element of videogames” representational worlds and geographical imaginations’ and in which, suggests Kirby, “historical musical conventions[…]suggest, if not prescribe, how the music is to be understood by audiences” (Kirby 2022, 857). Elsewhere, too, Kirby has explored the geopolitics of film scores, including the enduring contribution of mobile (often Jewish) émigré musicians from Europe to the post-Romantic music that often soundtracked early Hollywood films, and which continues to form part of the aural “vocabulary” of (Western) filmgoers (Kirby 2019, 1; see also Kirby 2023 for further discussion on film scoring and questions of nationhood).

Similarly, Connell and Gibson (2003) appropriately-titled Soundtracks marks an earlier approach towards popular music traditions that centralises mobilities in the production, imagination and reception of music. Focusing on practice, Brett Lashua and Sara Cohen suggest that “[p]opular musicianship […] is commonly spoken and written about using metaphors of mobility: musicians go out on the road, on tour, or gig in the club circuit […] The language of popular music is suffused with movement” (Lashua and Cohen 2010, 71). Sonnischen (2019) has explored the transnational exchanges and development-through-circulation of the hardcore punk scenes in Washington D.C. and Paris, and Johansson (2020) has written on the cultural production and circulation of pop music within a globalised world. Elsewhere, Jazeel’s exploration of the transnational soundscapes of British-Asian dance music suggests that musical styles can defy pinning down, and rather express “connections between here and there, this and that […] travel, stretched affiliation and the diasporic experience of shuttling to and fro” (2005, 236–237). Elsewhere, John B. Strait has explored the impact of migration—particularly the “Great Migration” or “Southern Diaspora,” the movement of significant numbers of African-Americans from the South of the United States to the North and West—and the ways in which the “network of movements that gave birth to blues culture reveals the transcultural dynamics of this diaspora” (Strait 2021, 49). Strait has called for the use of blues music as a means of facilitating geographical thinking and teaching, particularly through migro-mobile concepts such as urbanization (see Strait 2010), whilst Woods (1998) offers an assessment of the connections between blues music and social development in the Mississippi Delta region over a span of some three hundred years in his book Development Arrested, illustrating some of the ways in which we can think through rootedness and mobility in tandem.

Such scholarship recognises the constitution of music’s production, performance, and reception through the particular spaces and places in which it, musicians and musical instruments travel, and which often revolve around particular tensions in mobility and immobility. Connell and Gibson, and elsewhere Scheding, return frequently to the relationship between music and (im)mobility, fluidity, and fixity as often in tension– between “music as itinerant and fleeting, and music as something static, fixed and immobile […] Both ‘fixity” and “fluidity” operate as umbrella terms that reflect a range of spatial practices, tendencies, decisions and physical objects’ (Connell and Gibson 2003, 9–10). For Scheding, migration mobilities create particular, creative “spaces that destabilise essentialised national historiographies […] but […] far from being perpetually confined to spaces of transnational uprootedness, migrants are also in places. They interact with them, negotiate them, contribute to them, and shape them” (Scheding 2019, 85).

Bohlman suggests that “[m]usic sounds movement and affords agency, for music sustains mobility by itself never ceasing” (Bohlman 2011, 150). He makes this point in relation to migration, which he suggests “is always political, and the forms of aesthetic expression that arise from it are necessarily politicized” (151). The association with music and migratory experience can be accounted for in a number of ways. Music can be readily “carried” with a mobile, migrating individual; even without the use of instruments, music can be produced by the voice, whistling, and even rhythms tapped out on surfaces. Music’s portability affords the opportunity for migrants and other mobile peoples to form a kind of mnemonic bridge between two distinctive chronotopes—the here-and-now of the new country in the present moment, and the back-home of the past, and the country of origin. In his work on migration from Eastern Europe to Lincolnshire, Dominic Symonds’ interviews with migrants lead him to posit that music can function as one potential “emotional anchor to elicit comfort or nostalgia or connection” to a distant homeland, yet he astutely points out that it can also exacerbate feelings of alienation, dislocation, and estrangement within a new locale (Symonds 2019, 18). Mojca Kovačič and Ana Hofman similarly position migrants as hybrid identities who exist (musically) within a “third space”: “[t]his third space may be a musically reconstructed past, but full of meanings and current identifications that chime with their present habits” (Kovačič and Hofman 2019, 8). In addition to forming a bridge with a distant place and allowing mobile individuals to carry with them aspects of their past, music’s portability can also be viewed as a crucial building block of migrant identities. Bohlman’s observes that “[m]usic was such a valued marker of identity that migrant groups and exiles took special pains to bring it with them. It was in their music that one immigrant world distinguished themselves from others.” (Bohlman 2011, 156). Here, he captures the vital role played by (portable, memorable) music in forming identities in new contexts, and—like the other authors mentioned here—suggests something of its mobile appeal.

In relation to migrants escaping from Nazi Europe, the musical work of the refugee composer, writer, educator, and former soldier Eric Sanders speaks strongly to the notion of a mnemonic bridge. Sanders was forced to flee Vienna as a teenager, at which point he managed to escape to London with his family. He was a composer of popular songs which he would play at dances whilst in the British Special Operations Executive and later, despite his hopes of a career in musical theatre having been dashed by the takeover of the Nazis in his native Austria. His yearning for his lost hometown appears to be indicated in the lyrics of songs with titles such as “I shall never forget Vienna,” “Vienna song,” and “Memories last.” Conversely, other compositions by Sanders also demonstrate his willingness, too, to embed himself in a new locale, such as “Come Back to Soho” and “Rhythm of London” (see Sanders 2010).³

Musical scholarship’s concern for mobility and migration has tended to prioritise the memory-infused qualities of migratory music, which could interpret Sanders’ songs as merely an aesthetic essence, or a yearning for home. Others have turned to debates within “mobility studies” to begin to take more seriously the mobility in migration. Scheding and Levi have perhaps been exemplary of this approach in the study of classical music, with Scheding in particular drawing directly from mobilities concepts in order to consider the role of social networks and the importance of particular places or nodes. Scheding investigates Paris, through which migrant mobilities were choreographed and negotiated across countless escapes from persecution during the Second World War. For him, migrant places, “acted as heterogenous spaces of mobility that allowed for sometimes unpredictable, and often dialectic, engagements with nationalist discourses” (Scheding 2019, 47). The composer Peter Gellhorn, for instance—to take an example not discussed by Scheding—found himself briefly in Paris whilst escaping his native Berlin for Britain; he experienced similar such waypoints throughout his journey elsewhere, too, such as at Saarbrucken, where he was aided in crossing the German border into France by the opera singer Inge Camphausen. Gellhorn was prompted to flee Germany as a result of increasing persecution, particularly after finding himself listed in a deeply anti-Semitic Nazi publication that contained the names and addresses of a wide array of Jewish musicians (Figure 1. For more on Gellhorn’s biography, see: Curran 2017).

FIGURE 1 Judentum und Musik’ [Jews and Music], the anti-Semitic Nazi publication in which Gellhorn found his name and address, along with those of most of his contemporaries. Authors’ own image.

In a similar vein, Dickson and MacDougall (2020) focus upon London, and particularly the “MittelEuropa” of the Finchley Road milieu of pre-Second World War émigrés—the informal networks of migrants and refugees that organised around houses, cafés, small businesses, and places of religious worship, to form informal and intersecting émigré networks of solidarity and informal support. These approaches resemble those of Lashua and Cohen (2010) who recognise that “music performance involves regular voyages that play a central role in the process of becoming a musician and in the creation of musical spaces, places and landscapes” (72). The Association of Jewish Refugees’ Finchleystrasse map (Figure 2), which was produced for the Continental Britons exhibition of 2002, represents one object of Dickson and Macdougal’s study; it appears at first glance not so much a map of musical mobility or migration, but one of locations, some of which no longer exist. Indeed, if we look more closely at the map’s collage-like use of photos, numbered venues, and notice-board and press advertisements, we see how the map indicates much more than abstract locations, but significant places which European émigrés—including musicians—frequented in order to socialise and seek solace. We will return to a discussion of this artefact in due course, but for now it is worth noting how spatially compact this (urban) network of migrant support was; music—as we will see shortly—played a significant role within this space.

FIGURE 2 Finchleystrasse map (reproduced with thanks to Dr. Anthony Grenville and Dr. Bea Lewkowicz, who produced the map, and the Association of Jewish Refugees, who funded the Continental Britons exhibition).

Approaches towards mobility have also highlighted the role of vehicles in mediating forms of travel, mobility embedded and embodied within social structures and cultural experiences (Sheller and Urry 2000). Pestel (2019) examines musical touring and the ambivalence of nationalisms in 1950s Latin America, in which East German and Viennese musical tours were seen as a form of diplomacy, designed to promulgate particular national sympathies and to foster transnational exchange. The tours “followed continuities of performances, travels, and musical entrepreneurship,” with touring ensembles “perceiving music as part of economic reconstruction and in relation to political migration” (44). These methods of travel were themselves signs of modern reconstruction. “Aircraft became the pivotal condition of post-war intercontinental touring,” suggests Pestel (2019, 48). As Pestel intimates, then, the concern of mobility studies for the mediation of mobile experience has also turned authors towards the mobile mediation of music itself, and music’s role within the architecture and rhythm of mobile experience. This is tied especially to mobile technologies and objects, from the iPod to the car stereo (Livermon 2020). As Bull’s research has shown, “[t]he use of sound in the car furthered the increasing mobility of sound use in Western culture in general” (Bull 2004, 245), the car space “energised” a wider transformation of social life by mobile technologies and digital objects. The car plays a role as a mobile and mediating device which transports musicians and musical objects, and equally as a mobile-yet-nodal point at which people gather.

With regard to vehicles as a mediating device, the influence of the cruise ship on the development of the composer Mátyás Seiber is striking. Seiber—after leaving Hungary (perhaps owing to rising anti-Semitism and nationalistic sentiment, although this is unclear)—was employed early on in his career as a member of orchestras aboard transatlantic cruise liners on the Hamburg-America line (see Schweitzer 2012, similarly, on the mobility of musical theatre on trans-Atlantic networks). It is widely thought that it was in this role that he first came into contact with jazz music, particularly through his travels to New York, where jazz was experiencing something of a golden age at the time, particularly in the bars and clubs of Harlem. The cruise ship, then, not only transported Seiber to jazz but, through Seiber, it also transported the idea of jazz back to Europe; Seiber would go on to set up Europe’s first jazz course in a conservatoire at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, with the support of its director Bernhard Sekles. This was shortly before the rise to power of the Nazi Party but, nonetheless, the ugly spectre of racist, anti-Semitic German nationalism would not be long in rearing its head in relation to this development, with Seiber singled out for opprobrium as a Jewish pedagogue, whilst Jazz music itself became an object of hate for public figures and the right-wing press on the basis of its status as a Black art form (see Snyder 2020; Scheding 2019).

To return to the question of the vehicle, its various modalities in relation to musical mobility offer particular mobile infrastructures for (particularly, urban) life and musical reception by audiences. For some, they therefore represent a fruitful metaphor for the centrality of movement and circulation to contemporary music cultures. For Coplan, this role is fulfilled by the goods and mining trains which transport migrant labourers in Lesotho—“trains and trails, not home and family” (Coplan 2006, 228) are familiar features in the sung poetry of the Basotho. As John Slobin notes of Detroit, the car and the road become the infrastructures and metaphors for multi-generational migrant communities and their musical cultures, music flowing “like the stream of cars.” Jazz and the car’s mobilities particularly express multiple metaphors of cultural and national identity in the United States. Berish affords both Jazz and the car a different kind of vehicular status as a transportive geography of music and imagination in the instability and fluidity of America’s changing landscapes, especially its cities. Jazz seemed to be adopted as a “national musical style” (4) somehow levelling the country’s pronounced differences, “even as it transported sound and experiences of distant places” (Berish 2012, 4).

MAPPING MUSICAL “MIGRO-MOBILITIES”

The previous sections of this article have outlined some of the ways in which music can be understood as a mobile phenomenon that resists fixity in restrictive (particularly, national) containers, even if our understanding of mobility cannot be separated from the concerns of spatial experience. Mapping, too, can be understood as a flexible form of representation and practice which has the capacity to not only capture or represent, but also evoke or express something of mobility. Here, we draw on the work of Presti (2020) in order to outline our thoughts on the potential for mapping to act as an analytical and illustrative tool for narratives that trace music in tandem with “migro-mobility.” We will also propose some possible routes forward for mapping narratives of musical migro-mobility.

Broadly, geographic disciplines have perhaps been most active in scholarly attempts to map music. Connell and Gibson have surveyed a wide body of work from the 1970s, and have found that popular music has historically been a common focus for such studies, which include maps that track the diffusion of musical practices or chart out the routes of various musical tours, and others which trace what they describe as the “locations of supposed “hearths” of musical cultures” (Connell and Gibson 2003, 12). Yet they also suggest a number of pitfalls for mapping as a research tool, noting that, whilst it provides valuable detail for

particular styles of music, the ways in which these were disseminated and the lines of migration undertaken by performers[…] ultimately, such studies were limited[…] Cartographies—just like printed maps—need to be situated in networks of economic, social and political relationships. (Connell and Gibson 2003, 12–13)

As Connell and Gibson begin to suggest, there is a danger of reading neutrality into the abstraction that tends to characterise the surface of the map. Maps themselves are not “lifeless” or “re-presentations”; they have often been cast as structures of knowledge, power, and domination, but also as abstractions of movement (Cresswell 2006). Such perspectives have been commonplace within mobilities research. This is particularly true of the mobile body, and indeed cartographies sometimes serve to enable the management and control of corporeal movement, as van Houtum and Bueno Lacy (2020) have shown in their examination of the Frontex representations of migro-mobility at the frontiers of Europe (see also Cresswell 2006 for more on attempts to control and restrict mobility). Chambers (1993) has likewise been critical of the map’s ability to imagine the “palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement,” while remaining alert to its potential use as a metaphor. Chambers (1993) suggested that the figure of the map “permits us to grasp an outline, a shape, some sort of location, but not of the contexts, cultures, histories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes that course through the urban body” (1993, 189).

Cartographies, like the aforementioned Finchleystrasse map, must be properly contextualised. Sébastian Caquard and William Cartwright explain the crucial importance of context: “In a post-representational perspective, the map is as good as the different narratives it is associated with that describe its context of appearance, and its production process, as well as all the discourses associated with the map and the political and personal agendas it helped to push forward” (Caquard and Cartwright 2014, 105). In this sense, the Finchleystrasse map helps animate memories of émigré music, food and social cultures, which it curates spatially in a form used within an exhibition on émigré culture at London’s Jewish Museum, and later on the AJR’s website (https://www.ajrrefugeevoices.org.uk/finchleystrasse). It was also re-animated in theatre and arts productions around the very circuits of migrant culture which the map tracks, such as in the Ballad of the Cosmo Cafe. Indeed, Laura Lo Presti has argued that maps—broadly understood—“appear in and move through different media and fulfil different functions, they stir emotions, and they are physically carried by people to aid movement and connection. Maps elicit, track, connect, withdraw, dehumanise, rehumanise and promote movement” (Presti 2020, 916). In delineating the interlinkage of maps with migration practices, Lo Presti shifts the critical focus away from forms and techniques of migration governance, and instead re-focuses her analysis on its lived experience, in order to provide a more mobile and agentive approach to maps.

Other starting points to be found in ontogenetic (or post-representational) cartography, like Presti (2020), see maps as an active, mobile, and lived form—maps as “practices—they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems,” carrying inherent potential for storytelling, suggest Kitchin and Dodge (2007, 335, original emphases). Ontogenetic cartography emphasises the always-in-process nature of maps, and the crucial role played by engagement and practical use in their generation of meaning. In this vein, Tania Rossetto summarises a key facet of ontogenetic understandings of cartography when she describes maps as “images as environments in which we exist, as well as objects we encounter” (Rossetto 2019, 88, original emphasis). Certain cartographic forms—particularly digital, narrative-led cartographies, such as “storymaps”—offer the potential to generate a deeper level of engagement on the part of a user than that which is usually afforded by conventional cartographies. This is perhaps particularly true of digital forms within which the user is allowed a degree of latitude to explore the map at will, rather than being restricted by a fixed, inflexible cartographic frame. Giada Peterle has referred to the possibilities inherent to a visual and multi-sensory, mobile, navigatory gaze for the process of maps and other graphic representations, which she terms “Graphic Mobilities” (Peterle 2021). Reading and looking at maps, and even graphic forms such as comics, involves tracing, following, scanning work, as well as the animation of imagination, whether of the map or the comic book gutter.

Relations between maps, material spaces, and creative works of the imagination are explored in Sara Cohen’s work on rock and hip-hop scenes in Liverpool (2012). Cohen employs a methodology centred on “conceptual mapping” (or “mind maps”) in order to reveal the spatial imaginations and mobilities of musicians operating across diverse genres within the city. In so doing, Cohen’s work reveals the symbiotic relationship between musical creation and performance and the (here, urban) environments—material and imagined - in which it is produced, the imbrication of music with issues such as race and deprivation—as signalled by particular spaces and places—and the importance of artists’ memory in formulating a spatial understanding of the musicality of urban spaces.

With respect to narrative forms of mapping, we recognise the crucial “…importance of connecting maps with other media and modes of expression to better capture the profound emotional link that some stories have developed with places” (Caquard and Cartwright 2014, 103–104). Some digital cartographies allow for the incorporation of multiple media forms into a narrative webpage. They can thereby serve to facilitate the integration of, say, archival research, biographical and historical narratives, images, videos, and audio clips. The opportunity to bring such diverse media forms into contact with one another offers a useful tool for the representation of spatial stories that touch upon complex, interdisciplinary topics, such as migration and mobility. Further, this kind of intertextuality also allows for the mitigation of any pretensions to absolute objectivity on the part of the cartography integrated into such (digital-cartographic) assemblages, and thereby dampens the potentially-dehumanising effects of transcribing human experiences, such as those of mobile individuals, and especially those whose mobilities were explicitly performed in order to escape the dehumanisation and persecution of state regimes. Indeed, the use of cartographic approaches to map the Holocaust’s displacement of the deported, exiled, persecuted and those marched from the liquidated concentration and death camp systems (some of whom were—or would become—notable musicians, has been the subject of discussion for difficult ethics of representation (Gigliotti, Masurovsky, and Steiner 2014), and the dangers of performing other forms of violence in the cartographic abstraction of those journeys.

The preceding examples may gesture toward some of the ways in which we might employ digital mapping as a means of understanding the (migro-)mobility of musicians, as well as that of musical forms and practices. Of course—as we have explored above—there are other kinds of mapping too. Music itself utilises different notation systems to provide a kind of near-cartographic guidance and expression to musical practice, and additionally mood, place and setting. Here we might look to the composer Mátyás Seiber in order to examine the way in which he mobilised certain carto-graphic forms (see also Unseld’s (2018) analysis of the “selfpositioning” in Icelandic composer Hafliði Hallgrímsson’s diagrammatic monograph). After arriving in Britain prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, Seiber eventually came to work extensively on film music, and in a talk given on the topic in Switzerland in 1954, he presents the process of marrying music to cinematic works in a diagrammatic, map-like form (see Figures 3 and 4). In some instances, he describes an almost “autonomous musical composition,” written within a framework of the film’s narrative. In others, he describes the imperative of being logistically precise in order to synchronise to the precise frame-sequences of the animated film—the “tyrant of a time keeper,” where expressive modulations of the music are rigidly “incarcerated by the details of the timing” (Seiber 1957).

FIGURE 3 A diagram from a talk given by Mátyás Seiber on the topic of film music (Courtesy Julia Seiber Boyd).

FIGURE 4 A diagram from a talk given by Mátyás Seiber on the topic of film music (Courtesy Julia Seiber Boyd).

Within Seiber’s own notation system he traces the musical soundscapes of films, whereby “seeing the movements, the background, feeling the mood of the picture” are crucial to his inspiration (1957). Seiber uses the space of the page to map out sequences of film music in tandem with their temporal placement in relation to on-screen action which he plots in a kind of analysis of the film. In this way, he translates music into a particular (idiosyncratic) spatial language, whereby music is treated almost in the manner of topography, here with a range of undulating “contours” or elevations that shift across time, rather than space. In addition, in Figure 3 we also see the composer tracing the movements of particular characters (“walks in,” “stops,” “pulls diviners stick from the ground”), to whose actions he pins particular sounds and musical moments. Indeed, when applying his craft to film without animated motion, Seiber describes how it is the music itself which “has to supply the sense of movement” (Seiber 1957). Might it be possible to apply aspects of Seiber’s filmic methodology to narratives of musical mobility and migration? Might we amalgamate, for example, aspects of a musician’s migratory biography and their creative practice into a similar diagrammatic form—one which captures time, space, music, and movement? But equally, in attending to Seiber’s own carto-chrono-graphic notation system, we understand his own “graphic mobilities,” creative practices involving film analysis, musical inspiration, expressiveness and composition, and equally the more stringent choreographies of timing music precise to filmic visual representations. Through his own practical graphical mappings (Peterle 2021), do we gain some insight into his musical, mobile imagination?

CONCLUSION

This paper has proffered the notion of music’s mobility. Contrary to some understandings of (particularly) classical music, we have sought to challenge the fixity that is sometimes perceived as inherent to certain national(ist) musics. Work on migratory music and musical scholarship from within geographic disciplines helps us to advance such an understanding, and certain forms of, and wider understandings of, mapping—particularly narrative mapping—may offer a useful vessel for the exploration of music in tandem with its varied mobilities.

Recognising music’s mobility emphatically does not entail discarding the importance of its relationship to particular spaces and places; rather, we have argued that a fuller apprehension of music and its mobile trajectories can allow us to more properly appreciate exactly how a piece of music came to attach itself (or be attached) to a particular place. Nor should such a recognition be understood to imply an excessive valorisation of mobility through, say, a problematic, uncomplicated romanticisation of migration. Music moves. Music moves people, in practice, a feeling, cognitively, or with people as a physical and digital artefact—or in the most fundamental sense, through the reverberation of soundwaves from its transmission or performance. Music’s movements are choreographed and sequenced, styled and expressed, tracked and narrated in various mappings.

An understanding of music’s sociocultural mobility can contribute more widely to an understanding of cultural production as a phenomenon that is characterised by mobility. It should, for example, help to foreground the cultural contribution made by migrants to the countries in which they come to settle, and can cast a light on how migratory flows can affect cultural production in the countries at either end of the trajectory, as well as those in between. That our own work focuses upon refugees from Nazism who were musically-active in Britain during the twentieth century is testament to the fact that such mobility or mobilities are not new, but they may be rethought, reappreciated and remapped.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank the Association of Jewish Refugees and Julia Seiber Boyd for their permission to reproduce imagery within the article. We also acknowledge the guidance of editors Tim Cresswell and Joshua Inwood and the anonymous referees.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant AH/S013032/1.

Notes on contributors

Michael Holden

MICHAEL HOLDEN is former Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Music, Migration, and Mobility project, in the department of Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research focuses on narrative mapping, and his PhD focused upon the use of maps in contemporary, creative works of Holocaust memory.

Peter Adey

PETER ADEY is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. He is the author of Mobility (2009; 2017 2nd edition), Aerial Life: spaces, mobilities, affects (2010) and co-editor of the Handbook of Mobilities (2014).

Beth Snyder

BETH SNYDER is Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research is motivated by an interest in the political utility of music and, in particular, the roles played by music in producing and complicating constructions of identity.

Norbert Meyn

NORBERT MEYN is a professional singer, coach, and researcher at the Royal College of Music, London, SW7 2BS, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. He was principal investigator of the Music, Migration and Mobility project, and has been designing and leading a range of practice-based research projects since 2004. He is director of the research-lead professional Ensemble Émigré.

Nils Grosch

NILS GROSCH is University Professor of Musicology and Head of the Department of Art, Music, and Dance Studies at the University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria. E-mail: [email protected]. He is the editor of the recently-published anthology Novembergruppe 1918: Studien zu einer interdisziplinären Kunst für die Weimarer Republik.

Notes

1 The reasons for this uncritical adoption of nationalist frameworks in the study of classical music are too diverse and complicated to discuss in depth here, although the discipline of musicology emerged alongside and in relation to 19^th-century European projects of national self-assertion (Kelly, Mantere, and Scott 2018). Moreover we do not seek to suggest, of course, that all scholarship or writing on music and musical topics presents the phenomenon in this way; much work in ethnomusicology, for instance, embraces notions of fluidity and border crossing, and works on music by scholars working within other disciplines, such as geography, have also begun to unsettle such notions of fixity. We will draw on such work as this article progresses.

2 Joseph Kerman’s essay “How we got into analysis, and how to get out,” heralded this turn (Kerman 1980). A few other significant works helping to shape the trajectory of “new musicology” include Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Subotnik 1991), Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Kramer 1990), Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (Agawu 2003), and Feminine Endings (McClary 2002).

3 Sanders’s songs are not currently published, but a Royal College of Music Editions collection of them is forthcoming.