2026, 2016, 2009
Andrea F. Bohlman
- Associate Professor
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract
“Rewind” is a music history through tape rather than a history of tape. Each of the book’s six chapters emerges out of careful engagement with a specific sound–archive constellation to illuminate moments when the troubles and challenges of tape-making generated reflection on—even rejoinder of—sound recording’s ideological harness of objectivity and authenticity. Taking a microhistorical approach that connects postwar auditory cultures in eastern Europe with those in divided Berlin and the US South, the project follows tapes as tangles of affective relations, power, and creativity that together reveal the intense everyday pleasures, vulnerabilities, and desires—as well as mundane distractions, malfunctions, and disinterest—that point to sound as a messy site of the historical imaginary.
Abstract
This project illuminates the intersection of creativity and materiality across three vibrant amateur sound recording networks in twentieth-century East Central Europe: reel-to-reel recordings in the 1950s, homemade records in the 1960s and 1970s, and cassette tapes in the 1980s. Responding to the material losses of World War II and the constraints of state socialism in Poland, untrained recordists took recourse to sound media to command agency. Amateurs embraced the impermanence of these flimsy and malleable materials in order to create places for music in everyday life. Their work issues a challenge to the assumption that recording is a tangible means to counter sound’s ephemerality and exposes the importance of aural culture under communism.
Abstract
The John Paul II Catholic university of Lublin School of Polish Language and Culture