SPIN Lecture 2012
On Tuesday 26 June Anne-Marie Thiesse will present the SPIN Lecture 2012. The annual SPIN lectures deal with comparative topics in the history of cultural nationalism in Europe.
Previous SPIN lectures have been delivered by John Breuilly, Miroslav Hroch and Peter Burke. This years lecture serves as the closing paper of the international conference/summer school 'Cultural transfer as national identity', organized by SPIN and the Huizinga Instituut, the Dutch research institute and research school of cultural history.
Details:
Date: Tuesday 26 June 2012
Time: 16.00 hrs.
Venue: University of Amsterdam, Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgswal 231
Registration: info@spinnet.eu
Call for Papers
In september 2012 the Study Platform on Interlocking Nationalisms organizes a workshop on cultural heritage in the Rhine region as a political programme. The event will take place in Bingen (Germany). Prospective participants are herewith invited to send in a proposal.
This is the third and final workshop on the SPIN theme The Rhine as a cultural space in romantic nationalism.
Building cultural nations. The matica and equivalent intermediary structures in Europe
A workshop will be organized jointly by CEU, SPIN and NISE at the Central European University in Budapest on 15 and 16 February 2012. The subject is the matica, a particular kind of society established by Slavic national movements in nineteenth century Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, focused on (re)constructing and improving their cultures. Read more.
NEW: The Literary Imagination
Nineteenth century literature articulated a specific romantic of the nation. Almost all European literatures contain foundational texts in the literary foundation of the country’s identity. Many of these texts are online. Click here.
Announcing a new project: National Music
“Classical” music before 1800 was by and large a pan-European cultural field. The diatonic musical system, the use of counterpoint and harmony and even the instruments and orchestral organization followed patterns which were universally distributed, with only minor national or local variations. Composers could effortlessly adopt techniques and stylistic influences across country boundaries, and frequently pursue an international career; forms like the fugue, sonata, concerto, cantata and opera, as well as instrumental combinations such as the string quartet, were Europe-wide in their distribution.
In the course of the nineteenth century and in the wake of Romanticism, we see a growing tendency among composers to turn to “national” topics and styles for inspiration. Demotic dance meters and modalities such as verbunkos (Hungarian) or mazurka (Polish) are taken up, composers like Beethoven of Mendelssohn make grateful use of (recently printed/published) folk tunes (e.g. from Scotland) as themes for their compositions, and operas begin increasingly to thematize “national” themes (alongside the long-established classical/ancient ones) for their libretti.
The tendency to compose in a “national” manner sweeps all of Europe in the Romantic Century, which stretches well into the twentieth century in composers such as Bartók, Vaughan Williams and De Falla. Its rise was made possible to some exent by the fact that the ticket-paying middle classes became the prime financiers of composers and of orchestral music, and that public opera houses, music theatres and conservatoires were established for these audiences in alle the major cities of Europe. But there were cultural (intellectual/artistic) factors at work as well as social ones: “National music” reflects the Romantic idea that national enthusiasm is a particularly strong source for artistic inspiration, and that the artist’s inspiration is purest and most “authentic” when it is driven by national ties.
“National” in this context can mean various things: either the use of non-elite, demotic, “folk” modes and rhythms (Spanish for Albéniz, Hungarian for Liszt); programmatic usage of nationally specific themes, be it in the stylistic evocations of landscapes (Smetana’s Má Vlast, Sibelius’s Karelia Suite); or referencing national-historical or national-mythical subjects (many opera libretti, Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture).
Although each composer affected by this trend turned inward to channel his/her “own” nationality, the trend itself is an outward, expansive, Europe-wide phenomenon (also affecting non-European countries from Armenia to the Americas), and a prime example of “cultural transfer”. Isolated instances in this trend towards national music have been studied, but the transfer pattern still poses a challenge. To study nineteenth-century music from the perspective of intellectual history; to do so in a Europe-wide comparative scope; to align the discursive and historical environment in which the musical pieces were conceived, composed and performed; and to trace the influences and the spread of this vogue from composer to composer and from country to country: all that remains an exciting task which can only be tackled by a project group of dedicated researchers with expertise in various parts of Europe.
The project will be launched in early 2011 and is expected to run to five years. Funding has been made available by the Royal Netherlands’ Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), through their grant of an Academy Professorship to Joep Leerssen. The Department of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam will coordinate the project.
Interested scholars are warmly invited to make themselves known to SPIN.
Banknote database complete
The interactive database of national icon-figures on European banknotes is now complete. It can be accessed through the interactive resources portal or by clicking "Resources" > Banknotes in the main navigation bar.
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe
The Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe, or ERNiE for short, SPIN's core project, has now been definitively conceptualized. A PDF brochure detailing scope and structure has been placed online. It can be found on this website both both under "Documents" and under "Aims/Remit" > Core Project.
A Contents Management System has been set up, various publishers have shown interest and are now consultation partners, and authors and coordinating section editors are being approached.
Printed versions of the brochure are available upon request. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Grimm's Germanisten Congresses (1846-47) to be placed online
SPIN will place a digitized version online of the proceedings of Jacob Grimm's congresses of Germanisten in Frankfurt (1846) and Lübeck (1847).
This initiative has been undertaken in association with the University Library of the University of Amsterdam, and with support from the Duitsland-Instituut Amsterdam and from Amsterdam University Press.
These congresses brought together the cream of Germany's philologists, historians and legal scholars, three specialisms united in what Grimm called Germanistik. The congresses consolidated the study of German culture and mentality into a new, authoritative discipline and also signalled the readiness of Germanisten to place this new discipline at the service of a new, increasingly assertive German nationalism. The delegates at these conferences not only represent some of the leading intellects of their generation (Arndt, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Dahlmann, Droysen, Gervinus, Ranke, Uhland, etc.), many of them also were elected representative in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. In the discussions at these congresses, not only important philological agendas were outlined (such as the project of a comprehensive dictionary of the German lnguage, ultimately to become the benchmark Grimm Wörterbuch), but also matters of political import, such as the German claims on the contested territory of Schleswig-Holstein.
The proceedings of the Germanisten-congresses as a conduit from cultural to political nationalism are well-known, but the texts themselves have not been readily available. SPIN hopes to meet this desideratum. The texts will be placed online in two parallel forms: as PDFs of the original printed pages and in searchable transcript, with a search interface and accompanying background information.