Political and institutional context

Popular music research in the countries of state socialism cannot be separated from the cultural–political treatment of this music. Although this was subject to ongoing changes, and differed considerably between the countries in East-Central Europe, it was shaped by dogmas and doctrines that nevertheless had comparable effects owing to the dominance of the communist parties under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Thus, until well into the 1950s, popular music was considered a transitional phenomenon to be overcome on the road from capitalism to socialism. And even when realities gradually began to prevail on such ideologically based wishful thinking, the motto ‘the working class to the heights of culture’ still included the task of raising music in everyday life to an artistic level that would make the distinctions between art and entertainment disappear. As the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler, who lived in East Berlin and was one of the practical as well as theoretical protagonists of a ‘socialist musical culture’, put it in 1949, the aim was to create a ‘musical culture in which the old oppositions between entertainment and art, education and pleasure are abolished’ (Eisler Reference Eisler, Eisler and Mayer1982, p. 71). And when this, too, proved to be an illusionary as well as abstract demand, there remained the ongoing attempt to instrumentalise popular music as a means of political–ideological education, or at least as a medium for generating a socialist civic or national identity of one's own, which was strictly demarcated from the musical and cultural influences of the West. Although the latter has remained more a wish than a reality given the transnational impact of mass media (Havlík Reference Havlík, Mazierska and Győri2019), it has directed the development of national forms of popular music, which has not been without consequences for popular music research.

In addition, in the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union, music research was also integrated into a centralised system of politically and ideologically based regulation and control mechanisms. Not only did the communist parties exercise de facto total control over all aspects of social life, even in multi-party systems such as the GDR, they were also present everywhere else, if only because their members made up most employees in companies, institutions, cultural and musical facilities, schools, universities and colleges. This, of course, also applied to musicology, so that research projects without the approval of the responsible party organisation, which extended structurally down to the institute level, or without the party's doctrines and standards, were not completely impossible, but were nevertheless subject to considerable difficulties and restrictions.

The foundations of the Marxist–Leninist conception of art and culture were formulated in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s and then received their particularly rigid and dogmatic expression from Stalin and his satrap Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, who was considered the ‘propagandist-in-chief’ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Petrov Reference Petrov2011). His contribution to the discussion of representatives of Soviet music in the Central Committee of the Communist Party in January 1948 (Zhdanov Reference Zhdanov1948) was published in translation in all countries of the Eastern bloc and was considered as an obligatory guideline both for composers and for the work of musicologists. At the centre of the Stalinist doctrine of art was the educational function of art, which was to be in the service of a ‘new man’ to be created for the new society of socialism, with music in everyday life, and with popular music being of particular importance. This does not mean, however, that this ideology-soaked rhetoric necessarily had practical consequences. In a study of the local dance music scene in the East German city of Dresden from 1945 to 1961, for example, carried out by Simon Bretschneider at the Centre for Popular Music Research at East Berlin's Humboldt University, it could be shown that, although discourses on popular music changed drastically from 1945 onward under Soviet occupation, the music business and the music itself remained largely unaffected. Even repertoire from the West continued to be played on the dance floor without much fuss, notwithstanding the militant rhetoric against the influences of Western culture and music (Bretschneider Reference Bretschneider2015).

The guiding dogma for all forms of artistic creation was the ‘Socialist Realism’ declared in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, which was based on three pillars: partisanship, popular solidarity and class consciousness (for more detail, see Heller Reference Heller, Lahusen and Dobrenko1997; Robin Reference Robin1992; Vaughan Reference Vaughan1973). They were to serve as a guideline for artistic creation and as a standard for scientific research. This special form of realism had to reflect reality in a way that was consistent with socialist ideology. Apart from the fact that this doctrine was decidedly literature-centric because it was developed with reference to narrative literature, no art could really be incorporated into this ideologically based production of wishful images, certainly not the popular arts, which depended on mass appeal and thus approval on the part of its audience. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, there were massive efforts to implement the doctrine of ‘Socialist Realism’ in popular music as well (John Reference John2009). The result, however, was a kind of ‘elevated light music’ (Grabowsky Reference Grabowsky2012), which outside the Soviet Union after 1945 was shunned as counterproductive even by the otherwise uncompromisingly party-loyal state media. It played almost no role in popular music development in the Soviet sphere of domination. The culture and art of capitalism, on the other hand, were equated with misanthropic, because escapist, mass entertainment or elitist decadence, and were radically rejected as evils to be eradicated. Even jazz, with its roots in African-American music in the USA, which originated in a racially oppressed and exploited minority, was condemned until the end of the 1950s (Ritter Reference Ritter, Pickhan and Ritter2016; Schmidt-Rost Reference Schmidt-Rost, Pickhahn and Ritter2016). Even if this is not the place to trace the cultural–political treatment of popular music in the countries of state socialism, the scientific exploration of popular music that developed here cannot be separated from the cultural–political maxims set in these countries in relation to popular music. As Barna and Ignácz (Reference Ignácz, Alisch, Binas-Preisendörfer and Jauk2018, p. 10) note: ‘Science and politics under state socialism were inseparable in popular music research as well which may be illustrated by the fact that the main scholars frequently made their voices heard at political and public fora, and they also argued for the political significance of scholarly work in their writings.’ Popular music research, like art research and cultural studies, thus found itself caught between science, ideology and politics. In contrast, there was a multi-layered and conflictual everyday cultural reality, which generated, both on the part of the artists and on the part of the functionaries of state cultural policy, expectation that science would take a stand in the inevitable conflicts that dominated these tensions.

Despite the doctrinal restrictions, everyday music moved onto the agenda of music research soon after the founding of the socialist republics in East-Central Europe, since it was about the musical needs of the working masses, which, according to Marxist–Leninist ideology, had to be the focus of all efforts to create a socialist society and culture. In many East European countries however, the term ‘popular music’ was for a long time consistently avoided since music that was popular (and could therefore be described as such) was considered a remnant of bourgeois-capitalist culture, and its existence in socialism, in turn, was an unmistakable and therefore politically sanctioned indication of the limitations of the Communist parties’ efforts to implement a socialist-realist mass music. As the ‘music of the people’, the focus was initially on folk music, which in many countries of Eastern Europe could also be linked to research traditions that dated back to the pre-war period. In the ‘people's democracies’, as the state entities that after World War I and World War II were called, this was connected with the process of forming a national identity, in which folk music traditions played an important role (Kratochvíl Reference Kratochvíl2015). Folk song and folk music were considered as the authentic musical expression of the people, representing the inherent power of collective creativity. Consequently, folk music was also at the centre of the first institutions established to study musical genres that were on the margins or outside the musical canon worked on by musicology.

In Czechoslovakia, the Institute for Ethnography and Folkloristics was founded in 1954, dedicated to the study and cultivation of the folk culture present of the Czech Republic. It was a successor institution to the Institute for Folk Song, which had already been established in 1919 (Blüml Reference Blüml2020). At the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, the Folk Music Research Group was formed in 1953 under the direction of Zoltán Kodály, and in 1974 it was integrated into the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which was created in 1969. In the GDR, the accent was initially on the workers’ song. The instrumentalisation of folk music in fascist Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s for the National Socialist ‘Volksgemeinschaft’(Frommann Reference Frommann1999) and the racial ideological character of folk music research during this period (Probst-Effah Reference Probst-Effah and Schulten1993) rendered it impossible to treat folk music as a legitimate object of research under communist auspices. Thus, in 1954, the Arbeiterliedarchiv (Workers’ Song Archive) was established at the Academy of Arts of the GDR in East Berlin as a research and documentation centre that concentrated on scholarly edited and annotated collections of workers’ songs (see, for example, Lammel Reference Lammel1959, Reference Lammel1960), occasionally organising international scholarly conferences on the subject (Albrecht Reference Albrecht1975, Reference Albrecht1977). Although a folk song archive had also been founded at the German Institute for Folklore of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, this concentrated on text-oriented material and on folk songs, which were distinguished according to content criteria as ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ from those of a ‘reactionary’ character (Steinitz Reference Steinitz1954/1962).

Neither folk music nor workers’ song really had much to do with the everyday musical life of the masses in a socialist state, which was and remained dominated by pop songs, dance music and the various, commercial forms of entertainment music. However, folk songs and workers’ songs seemed to offer the closest points of contact for the socialist renewal of everyday music demanded by the party, which could be set against the genres of popular music handed down from the past. Even if folk music research was a first step towards the scientific study of the musical forms that determined people's everyday lives, and which began to include urban song with the work of János Maróthy in Hungary (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1968, Reference Maróthy1981) or Lukas Richter in the GDR (Richter Reference Richter1970, Reference Richter1977), it remained far removed from the contemporary forms of popular music, from what was understood by the working class as popular music. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1960s, within the framework of Marxist musicology, a less ideological view of popular music forms, based on scientific criteria, gradually began to prevail. Especially in Czechoslovakia and Hungary a clear change was noticeable. Jan Blüml and Ádám Ignácz (Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022, p. 166) wrote that:

In this process, there are clear differences between the countries considered here, both institutionally and conceptually. In Czechoslovakia, the decisive impetus for scientifically based popular music research, which gradually was emancipated from ideology, came from the Composers’ Union. As early as 1954, under the leadership of the renowned Marxist musicologist Antonín Sychra, a musicology and music criticism section was established. Jan Blüml (Reference Blüml and Merill2017) has pointed out the crucial role that a conference On Small Musical Forms (O malých hudebních formách), organised by the Czechoslovak Union of Composers in 1961, played in the formation of Popular Music Studies in Czechoslovakia. As a result of this conference, where participants argued for systematic research on popular music, a research group for the study of mass musical genres was established at the Institute of Musicology of the Academy of Sciences in Prague, which was founded in 1962 (Blüml Reference Blüml and Merill2017, p. 36). In Hungary, musicological research at the Academy of Sciences in Budapest, following the discussion of everyday music initiated by Bence Szabolcsi as part of his ethnomusicological research in the 1930s (Szabolcsi Reference Szabolcsi1959, Reference Szabolcsi1966), led to a systematic examination of popular music in a sociological and historical context (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022; Ignácz Reference Ignácz, Alisch, Binas-Preisendörfer and Jauk2018).

In the GDR, on the other hand, popular music research was tied to the university and did not receive an institutional basis that enabled systematic research until the early 1980s. When in 1980, decades later than in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, an Institute for Aesthetics and Art Studies was founded at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, it took another five years for the creation of a six-member working group on musicology. It also included one (!) staff member who had acquired his scientific qualifications as co-author of an ethnographically based study of dance events in the GDR at the Centre for Popular Music Research at Humboldt University (Strulick and Meyer Reference Strulick and Meyer1983). The research project was, however, unable to continue. Prior to the dissolution of the academy in the context of the reunification of Germany in 1990, the musicology working group was compelled by a decision of the party authorities to engage in an interdisciplinary central research project on the ‘appropriation function of art’. This project addressed art-theoretical and aesthetic issues pertaining to the Marxist theory of reflection eschewing any references to popular art or popular music. Popular Music Studies only became possible in the GDR after the emergence of rock music. Given the youth-cultural relevance of rock music, the question of the GDR's own specific rock music development was on the agenda, and thus questions on popular music in general, which had long been neglected here, suddenly became the centre of cultural–political, youth–political, and thus also art– and cultural–scientific debates. This is reflected then in the foundation of the Centre for Popular Music Research at Humboldt University.

The International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) was of great significance for the development of popular music studies behind the Iron Curtain, although as a Western organisation it seemed to have no direct relevance for the scholars and academic institutions working in the Eastern Bloc. However, during the 1970s, especially in Hungary, and to a certain extent also in Czechoslovakia and the GDR, the relationship to the West underwent a significant relaxation, although the political, ideological and cultural efforts at demarcation remained. Nonetheless, the West was secretly regarded as a role model, especially in the scientific and scientific–technical spheres. In the face of never-ceasing economic difficulties, the Communist Parties had long since had to abandon their claim to represent socialist economic, technical and scientific progress, even if this was never publicly acknowledged. In this respect, the founding of an international organisation for Popular Music Studies made visible a field of science that had eked out a shadowy existence in the East, or, as in the GDR, was not even considered necessary as such. It pointed to a need to ‘catch up’. Philip Tagg, as the initiator of the IASPM, was concerned from the beginning that, just as popular music knows no borders, so its research should also transcend the existing borders of the political camps. He made efforts to open the IASPM to scholars from the East. This meant solving the bureaucratic problems of obtaining visas and the financial problems for the participants from the East (the non-convertible currencies in the East required full payment of costs).

Until 1989, the IASPM conferences (Amsterdam 1981, Reggio Emilia 1983, Montréal 1985, Ghana 1987 and Paris 1989) enabled representatives from the GDR, the Soviet Union, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Bulgaria to participate. This resulted in a feedback effect that significantly changed the status of research on popular music, until then tolerated rather than encouraged. Efforts to establish local branches of the IASPM, even if they were interrupted or stalled for the time being by the events of 1989, also made the authorities realise that the circle of people was vanishingly small compared with other areas of music research. Finally, the conference activities of the IASPM led to popular music research in the East becoming networked. As early as 1982, a meeting with participants from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Cuba took place, organised by the newly established Centre for Popular Music Research at the Humboldt University in Geltow near Berlin. It was to meet every two years. The aim of these conference-like meetings was first to inform each other about what research activities existed in the socialist countries, because there had been almost no exchange prior to this for reasons of language differences. It was also an opportunity to use the IASPM to advance popular music research within the framework of Marxist musicology and to internationalise it. This did not really succeed in the short time before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but important initiatives nevertheless came from it, especially because later meetings also allowed for the participation of researchers from the West, who were at the same time visiting the Research Centre of the Humboldt University.

Popular music in Marxist musicology

Popular music research emerged and was conducted in East-Central Europe in a Marxist-oriented scientific environment. In all countries of the Soviet dominion, Marxism was declared the binding theoretical and methodological framework. The beginnings of Marxist thought in musicology date back to the Soviet Union of the 1920s (Panteleeva Reference Panteleeva2019). In particular, Anatoly Lunačarsky, one of the founders of Soviet musicology, who was also active as a cultural politician and thus exemplified the unity of theory and political practice called for in Marxism, attempted to place the scientific study of music on a Marxist basis (Lunačarsky Reference Lunačarski1971). This meant linking it to the conception of history known as ‘historical materialism’ that Marx and Engels had developed in Die Deutsche Ideologie (The German Ideology [1845/46], Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels2010). Music history and social history were to be understood as a unity, and the mutual conditionality of musical and social processes was to be placed at the centre of music research. This inevitably brought popular musical forms into focus as the musical practice of the masses. Yet despite the dogmatic hypertrophying of folk music and the music of the proletariat, the workers’ songs, this initially changed little or nothing in musicology, which remained theoretically and methodologically oriented to the traditional canon of ‘great works’. Even after Stalin's death in 1953, when dogmatically understood Marxism was gradually overcome, Marxist musicology did not become a homogeneous or shared scientific concept. This was despite the fact that from 1963 until the end of the 1970s the International Seminars of Marxist Musicologists in Prague, Berlin, Moscow and Budapest attempted to unify musicology that saw itself as Marxist. Instead, under the heading of ‘Marxist musicology’ one finds a heterogeneous conglomerate of traditional music history concepts, ‘vulgar Marxist’ derivations of musical facts from economics according to the basic-superstructure scheme, constructs based on classical theory in which music appears as an ideology carrier, as well as determined attempts to develop viable Marxist theoretical approaches (Mayer and Stroh Reference Mayer and Stroh2000), which, admittedly, were considerably hindered by the requirement to be differentiated from Western theories, especially from Western Marxism. Overall, however, mainstream musicology in the countries of state socialism simply continued the theoretical traditions of the discipline: ‘Marxist as well as bourgeois, everything went its usual course of German masterpiece aesthetics’ (Schmenner Reference Schmenner, Mayer and Stroh2000, p. 376). Regardless of the political orientation towards the working class and its culture, popular music played only a marginal role, if any, even in Marxist musicology. Popular music was understood by the leading representatives of Marxist musicology as a purely social phenomenon that was considered primarily of sociological relevance. The Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa, one of the most prominent and influential international protagonists of Marxist musicology, saw popular music as a social and ideological phenomenon that could only be addressed scholarly in these two contexts. It is therefore not surprising that popular music played no role in musicological discourses in Poland until the 1990s (Piotrowska Reference Piotrowska2020).

Despite the theoretical postulate of the fundamental unity of music history and social history, which is fundamental for Marxist musicology, and which should have resulted in an unprejudiced view of all forms of musical practice in their respective social-cultural genesis, musicology was also founded under Marxist auspices on a normative concept of music rooted in the classical–romantic musical tradition. According to this, the function of sound in a musical work of art is to represent structures on which the content of the musical work of art is based. With such an understanding of music, European musicology, especially very influential German musicology, exclusively adopts a normative concept of music, which effectively excludes large parts of non-European music as well as popular music. Thus, in all genres of popular music, the structures formed by sound – song architectures, harmonic schemes, rhythmic patterns, melodic construction principles – cannot be reduced to the function of representing meaning. Instead, they are bound to socially determined cultural practices – dance, bodily self-awareness, social group formation and identification processes, social and cultural identity constructs, rituals of various kinds, etc. – in which they have asserted themselves through acceptance and are then perpetuated in commercial processes. If this is assumed to be an aesthetically underdeveloped special case of music, which is also terminologically delimited as ‘light music’, ‘entertainment music’ or ‘trivial music’ and regarded either as a folkloristic preform of (actual) music or as a commercial deformation of it, then popular music is seen, at best, as a marginal problem of musicology that can be exported to the sociology of music. If ‘music’ is always used only in the singular and tied to a concept of music that determines its aesthetic level by the complexity of the sonic structures, then popular music inevitably appears as primitive, redundant, trivial and superficial or, in Marxist terminology, as a commercially depraved decadent expression of the bourgeoisie and its ideology.

The relativisation of this normative concept of music marked the beginning of popular music research. Yet the assumption that popular music is a form of music that is in principle comparable with the conditions of musical aesthetics, only inevitably diluted by the mass of artefacts generated here, and therefore could be analysed with the same musicological instruments quickly proved to be a dead end (Wicke Reference Wicke, Goer, Greif and Jacke2013). The Marxist insight that society consists of different classes, groups and strata, from whose living conditions different forms of cultural practice with different musics (plural!) emerge, was opposed in musicology by the dominance of this normatively set concept of music (singular!). This resulted in an ambivalence about popular music, which was reflected in a terminological artistry that made possible the selective reference to only certain forms of music from the field of popular music such as jazz or big band dance music that seem to allow a traditional musicological approach. Because an unconditional engagement with what its listeners understood by popular music was neither possible politically nor congruent with the understanding of music that prevailed in Marxist musicology, terminological constructions emerged that allowed the object of research to be divided into legitimate and illegitimate forms of popular music.

In Czechoslovakia, this was the concept of ‘non-artificial music’ (Fukač and Poledňák Reference Fukač and Poledňák1977), which allowed selective reference to politically and methodologically appropriate musical forms beyond the traditional canon of musicology. This changed according to personal preferences, political expediency or even appropriateness of the analytical tools of musicology. Thus, jazz and jazz-related forms of dance music dominated Czech research on popular music for a long time, even if there were notable exceptions. In the GDR, the selective construction of the object of study in popular music research was concealed behind the umbrella term ‘dance and light music’ (Schneider Reference Schneider1980). This conceptual composite, which was deliberately kept vague, was defined from case to case according to previously established aesthetic and political criteria. In Hungary, the term ‘dance music’, which was conceptually linked to folk dance, was used as a euphemism for entertainment music. Here, however, the early onset of music sociological analyses with their empirical findings and, above all, the changing cultural–political assessment of ‘modern’, Western-influenced forms of popular music from the early 1960s gradually rendered such selective constructions obsolete (Ignácz Reference Ignácz and Mazierska2016).

Popular musicology in Czechoslovakia

The first move within Marxist musicology towards popular music was made in Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s, conspicuously avoiding the ‘large-scale theories’ characteristic of Marxism with their fruitless debates about the historical legitimacy of popular music. At the Institute of Musicology, founded in 1962 at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague and headed until 1971 by Jaroslav Jiránek, a renowned protagonist of Marxist musicology, a workspace for the study of ‘mass music genres’, such as popular music, had been established. It was staffed by Josef Kotek, who was to become one of the most distinguished popular music researchers in Czechoslovakia in the following decades. He published extensively on Czechoslovak popular music in the past and present. His main work, a two-volume history of Czech popular music, appeared in the 1990s (Kotek and Fendrych Reference Kotek and Fendrych1994, Reference Kotek and Fendrych1998). In 1966, the ‘workspace’ was expanded to include the musicologist and music sociologist Vladimir Karbusický, who had shortly before earned his doctorate with a study of the history of workers’ song in the Czech Republic. Karbusický was interested in sociological, historical and aesthetic questions of commercial music production (Karbusický Reference Karbusický1968). He became one of the most prominent representatives of the newly emerging Czechoslovak sociology of music, until he had to leave the academy after the Prague Spring in 1969. He emigrated to West Germany and was replaced by musicologist Ivan Poledňák, who joined Josef Kotek at the Institute of Musicology of the Academy. Poledňák's scientific background stretched from methodological questions of musicology to music aesthetics, music pedagogy and semiotics. However, from the beginning of his academic career his work focused on jazz and modern popular music. He was one of the editors of the four-volume standard work Encyklopedie jazzu a moderní populární hudby (Encyclopaedia of Jazz and modern popular music) (Matzner et al. Reference Matzner, Poledňák and Wasserberger1983ff), which made him, along with Kotek, one of the leading representatives of the first generation of Czech popular music researchers. His first book, Kapitolky o jazzu (Chapters on Jazz) (Poledňák Reference Poledňák1961), was devoted to musical practice beyond the canon of traditional musicology. He also published extensively on the theoretical and methodological problems of popular music (Poledňák Reference Poledňák1974, Reference Poledňák, Elsner and Ordzonikidze1983, Reference Poledňák1984, Reference Poledňák1985; Poledňák and Kotek Reference Poledňák and Kotek1974; Poledňák and Matzner Reference Poledňák and Matzner1982; Poledňák and Fukač Reference Poledňák and Fukač1982).

From the very beginning, theoretical and methodological issues of popular music research played a major role in the Mass Music Genres Section at the Institute of Musicology of the Prague Academy of Sciences. Thus, the Institute's journal Hudební věda, published in 1964, its first year, a programmatic essay by Lubomír Fendrych, one of the editors of the journal, and Josef Kotek on the methodology of research into mass music genres, K metodologii a metodice výzkumu masových hudeních žánrů (On Research Methodology and Methodology of Mass Music Genres) (Kotek and Fendrych Reference Kotek and Fendrych1964). Using a two-dimensional model that pointed the way for popular music research in Czechoslovakia, they outlined the methodological basis for dealing with mass musical forms. On the one hand, it was to be based on the inherent rules of this area of musical culture, which, owing to its social, cultural, musical–technical and economic–commercial peculiarities, cannot be understood as a derivative of folk music, nor as a depraved form of classical music. Rather, the ‘difference in functions and the related aesthetic demands and standards’ must be considered. The central question is therefore what ‘distinguishes the creation and production of music in this field’ (Kotek and Fendrych Reference Kotek and Fendrych1964, p. 609). This already contradicts the reduction of the social function of music to a predominantly extra-aesthetic dimension of only sociological relevance, a point of view that Kotek also clarified in later publications (Kotek and Fendrych Reference Kotek and Fendrych1978). Therefore, this terrain of music culture in its specificity had to be grasped and delimited with an appropriate terminology. Kotek introduced the term ‘mass music genres, or, more precisely, music genres directly connected with the life of the masses’ (Kotek Reference Kotek and Fendrych1978) for this sphere of music, which later became the term ‘non-artificial music’ coined by Jiři Fukač and Ivan Poledňák (Fukač and Poledňák Reference Fukač and Poledňák1977).

The second dimension of their methodological approach to popular music research is its grounding in the category of genre as developed by the Czech music aesthetician Antonín Sychra in his work on the aesthetics of Dvořák's music (Sychra Reference Sychra1959). Genre is understood here as a category in which interrelated musical artefacts, ‘related in content and by a number of identical attributes’ (Sychra Reference Sychra1959, p. 35), can be grasped in the social contexts that constitute and generate them. This approach, expanded, differentiated and modified, in principle provided the methodological basis for Czechoslovak popular music research, and proved to be extremely fruitful. It became the foundation of what in retrospect was then called the ‘musicology of popular music’ or also ‘popular musicology’ (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022, p. 149). Blüml and Ignácz wrote: ‘The musicology of popular music differed from the later Western conception of “popular music studies” not only in its origins but also in its methodology, thematic emphases, and overall perspective; in the former, musicology and aesthetics played a central role, and in the latter, cultural studies’ (Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022, p. 150). This does not exclude, as Kotek proved with his book-length market analysis of the Schlager productions of the Czech state record label Supraphon during the years 1949–66, which is also evaluated in terms of the social patterns of perception reflected in them (Kotek and Fendrych Reference Kotek and Fendrych1969a, Reference Kotek and Fendrychb), that social, economic or technical aspects can play a major role, albeit while binding them to the concept of genre to the music's sonic configurations.

In an essay published in 1974, co-authored with Ivan Poledňák, Teorie a dějiny tzv. bytové hudby jako samostatná muzikologická disciplína (Theory and history of so-called vernacular music as an autonomous discipline of musicology) (Poledňák and Kotek Reference Poledňák and Kotek1974), this approach is taken one step further: the existence of an autonomous sphere of music is now assumed, in which the mass musical genres are located, and for which a separate musicological subdiscipline is also needed. Based on a distinction between primary musical functions ‘incorporating music directly into social existence, into the process of satisfying basic human needs'; and secondary musical functions ‘incorporating music more into social consciousness, here its cognitive function is emphasised (Poledňák and Kotek Reference Poledňák and Kotek1974, p. 335); two clearly differentiated but dialectically interrelated spheres of music were established, especially during the 19th and 20th centuries. Since musicology as a discipline had addressed so far only the sphere of secondary musical functions, a separate musicological sub-discipline was needed to address the sphere of primary musical functions residing in music associated with basic social and human needs. Although we are not talking about Popular Music Studies here owing to its completely different terminology, something similar is meant. This new sub-discipline is defined by its methodological pluralism: ‘In methodological terms, the discipline of the theory and the history of vernacular music belongs to those musicological disciplines that work with non-specific methods. Their specificity consists in the selection of the methods, their interconnection and adaptation for the objectives of this new discipline. If it is a question of not transferring the procedures and criteria a priori from art music, then the dominant feature here is the necessity of a complex approach’ (Poledňák and Kotek Reference Poledňák and Kotek1974, p. 339). Sociological, socio-psychological, economic and organisational methods are then listed alongside traditional musicological ones, such as music theory, aesthetics and music historiography. Kotek and Poledňák, along with Jiři Fukač, Antonín Matzner or Lubomír Dorůžka, have attempted to implement this approach in a large number of essays and books, and in the process have further developed it, although as far as the object of investigation is concerned, a clear preponderance of jazz cannot be overlooked.

In the 1980s, a central project of Czech popular music research became the four-volume Encyklopedie jazzu a moderní populární hudby (Encyclopaedia of Jazz and modern popular music) (Matzner et al. Reference Matzner, Poledňák and Wasserberger1983ff), published in its first edition between 1980 and 1990. Under the direction of Antonín Matzner, Ivan Poledňák and Igor Wasserberger, a collective of almost 40 scholars, including a number of the country's best-known popular music researchers (Ivan Cafourek, Miroslav Černý, Nina Dlouhá, Lubomír Dorůžka, Petr Dorůžka, Leo Jehne, Josef Kotek, Vojtěch Lindaur, Aleš Opekar, Jan Rejžek, Jan Křtitel Sýkora, Stanislav Titzl, Jaromír Tůma and Josef Vlček), worked together with scholars of other East-Central European countries to write entries on almost 1000 representatives of all genres of jazz and popular music, running to over 2500 printed pages. What is remarkable about this mammoth project is the analytically detailed reference to the respective musical characteristics and achievements of the personalities under consideration. It goes far beyond mere biographical information, distinguishing this project from comparable lexicographic publications such as the Encyclopaedia of Popular Music (Larkin Reference Larkin1992), which appeared in its first edition in 1992.

The limitations of the Czech methodological model with its distinctly musicological orientation were addressed in an essay on the musical analysis of jazz and rock music by Lubomír Dorůžka for the Austrian journal jazzforschung/jazz research (Dorůžka Reference Dorůžka1977) as well as in his book Populárna hudba – priemysel, obchod, umenie (Popular music – industry, business, art, Dorůžka Reference Dorůžka1978). The meta-level, with conceptual constructions such as ‘mass music genres’ or ‘non-artificial music’ or ‘vernacular music’, bypasses the examination of the concept of music itself – that is, the question of how sound functions as music in the respective cultural contexts of music-making, of how socially, culturally and discursively organised frame of reference sound is made the medium of music-making. The consequence is that, regardless of the autonomy granted to popular music, the analysis of its musical material is carried out with a set of instruments that is borrowed, right down to the basic terms for describing musical facts, from a concept of music that, as already mentioned, can by no means claim universal validity.

It was Simon Frith who pointed out this problem when he argued: ‘one reason why so much musicological analysis of popular music misses the point: its object of study, the discursive text it constructs, is not the text to which anyone listens’ (Reference Forét1990, p. 97). If it remains unexplained or unclear in what way sound functions as music in each of the cultural contexts of music-making, in what socially, culturally and discursively organised frame of reference sound is made the medium of music-making, then there is the danger of extrapolating musical facts from the sound event that have no, or at least no relevant, correspondence to the cultural contexts in which the sound structures function as music, even if they seem to have equivalences in the sound parameters themselves. In Dorůžka's essay, this methodological dilemma is particularly strikingly expressed. Thus, he suggests that popular music, in particular jazz, is ‘an artistic phenomenon of its own kind that deserves analytical attention’ (Reference Dorůžka1977, p. 67). As a connoisseur of jazz and rock music, he uses these examples to point out the impossibility of making use of musicological analytical instruments that are based on a text fixed in musical notation. For him, however, this does not raise the question of the fundamental cultural and aesthetic paradigms of the functioning of sound as music – that is, the question of whether, for example, the analytical term ‘triad’, which denotes not only a chord with three tones but with specific inner relations of the three tones to each other, already presupposes an aural perspective based on an inner musical frame of reference that does not correspond to the music under consideration. For Dorůžka, as for the ‘musicology of popular music’, this is a purely technical problem of analytical access to unscripted music, for which musical notation can be used by means of transcription, even if musical notation was historically created for sound forms that functioned quite differently.

With the recognition of two different spheres of music, non-artificial and artificial music, art music and vernacular music, the normative concept of music deployed in musicology has been subverted, even if this circumvents the basic question of the appropriately valid paradigms, according to which sound becomes the material or medium of making music. However, this opened a perspective on the genres of popular music, while Marxist music historiography remained blind to the diversity of musics (plural) within one (national) culture. Only the synthesis of sociology of music and history of music, as advanced by János Maróthy in Hungary, made this new perspective possible.

Popular musicology in the GDR

As in Czechoslovakia, popular music received attention from Marxist musicology in the GDR as early as the early 1960s. Here, however, the musicological study of popular music remained a rare exception for a long time, lacking the institutional basis to take on a systematic character. The dominance of ideology in the theoretical treatment of art, culture and music, which was still prevalent in the GDR until the 1970s, prevented any methodological and theoretical debate that could have opened the doors to popular music research. This led to the paradoxical situation, under Marxist auspices, that the social relevance of GDR musicology was constantly losing ground and that, in matters of popular music, it was simply considered incompetent, not only by musicians but also by the politicians, because it was completely out of touch with reality.

Georg Knepler, a university professor of musicology at East Berlin's Humboldt University between 1959 and 1970, initiated many ground-breaking scholarly projects that were remarkably open and receptive to self-correction. He took the first steps towards popular music research in the GDR, devoting a chapter to popular music in his two-volume Musikgeschichte des XIX. Jahrhunderts (History of music of the XIX century, Knepler Reference Knepler1960/1961), which is considered a standard work of Marxist music historiography. Knepler was viewed as an authority on Marxist musicology throughout the Eastern Bloc, not least because, as an Austrian who had emigrated to the GDR, his commitment to Marxism was credible, despite the Stalinist dogmatisation to which he had committed himself in the 1950s.

Under the heading Glanz und Elend des bürgerlichen Musiklebens (Splendour and misery of bourgeois musical life), the popular music of the century is subjected to a music-historical examination. However, the terms ‘light music’ or ‘dance and entertainment music’ are used only for what is accessible to the traditional musical understanding and instruments of the musicologist through performance practice and musical notation, such as the dance music of the Strauss family or the genre of operetta. Everything else is not even considered. The musical and aesthetic peculiarities even of this music are not understood as genre specific, but, following the Marxist dogma of the hostility of capitalism to art, declared to be the result of the subsumption of this music under the capitalist market and commodity exchange. Thus, it becomes a phenomenon of class society to be overcome. In summary, he states that ‘many essential characteristics’ of dance and light music are ‘so intimately connected with the structure – with the basis and superstructure – of capitalism’ that this music ‘can only be overcome with it’ (Reference KneplerKnepler 1960/1961, p. 494). Even if Knepler later revised this position and, as a university professor, tried to stimulate research projects that would open up a more objective and less ideological approach to popular music, his unchallengeable authority as a Marxist musicologist and his history of the music of the 19th century established a Marxist view of popular music that took a long time to overcome.

Following Knepler's history of the 19th century, the first musicological monograph on a genre of popular music in the GDR, Der Schlager. Ein Panorama der leichten Musik (The Hit Song. A panorama of light music) by Peter Czerny and Heinz P. Hofmann was published in 1968. It was originally planned as a dissertation project supervised by Knepler, but in view of the two authors’ careers in the GDR's cultural administration, it was not completed. One part of the text, published as the first volume under the title Herkunft des Schlagers – Ursache seines Entstehens (Origin of the Schlager – Cause of its emergence), directly follows Knepler's 19th century history, but first traces the musical–technical characteristics of this popular song genre without prejudice. A second volume, which was to be devoted to the Schlager under socialism, never appeared. Instead, the first volume focuses on the musical product. However, the Schlager is treated as a simplified version of the art song. ‘Light music’, Czerny and Hofmann find, ‘which originally had no other meaning than to be easily comprehensible music, became light music in the sense of the superficial and shallow’ (Czerny and Hofmann Reference Czerny and Hofmann1968, p. 128).

The last dissertation supervised by Knepler at the Humboldt University, but not completed until after his retirement in 1974, the second under his aegis as a university lecturer to be written on popular music, was Caroline Gerlach's Untersuchungen zur Tanzmusik in der DDR (Investigations into dance music in the GDR, Gerlach Reference Gerlach1981), in which ‘dance music’ functions as a generic term for Schlager and rock music. She derives the musical–aesthetic characteristics of both genres from the production, distribution and reception contexts peculiar to each, described as a functional system. This was the first objective and ideology-free examination of popular music in the GDR. It did not start from a concept of art, but from a concept of product. Sound aesthetics is understood here as a product property resulting from the specific interaction of musical–technical production conditions in the recording studios, the distribution mechanisms in the media, and the relevant reception conditions in each case. This was also the first work on popular music in the GDR that had an elaborate theoretical concept behind it.

In the GDR, this remained the exception in the 1960s and 1970s. Not only were the institutional conditions lacking for the continuation of such projects, but there was also a lack of systematic elaboration of the theoretical-conceptual and methodological problems associated with popular music. Discussion of such issues did not begin until the second half of the 1970s (Wicke Reference Wicke1975, Reference Wicke1978, Reference Wicke1980). The importance that this research had in the GDR, even in the 1970s, can be seen not least in the fact that it took seven years before Caroline Gerlach's doctoral dissertation, submitted for publication in 1974, finally had its turn and could appear. A systematic scientific examination of popular music on a broader and, above all, institutional basis did not occur in the GDR until the foundation of Humboldt's Centre for Popular Music Research in 1981.

Popular music in Marxist sociology of music

Although popular music in Marxist musicology was long considered to be a social or ideological form – that is, non-aesthetic and therefore not really an art form, the sociology of music, to which popular music forms had been delegated, was also highly controversial within the Marxist camp. For some, it was simply superfluous; there was no need for a separate study of music in the social and institutional contexts of musical life. Thus, in 1961, Georg Knepler claimed: ‘Treated as a separate field, sociology of music is a bourgeois science and has no future’. For him, the sociology of music was ‘the bad conscience of bourgeois music historians’ because they insisted on the autonomy of music development yet had to concede that there were relevant social factors outside the music itself that were delegated to the sociology of music (Knepler Reference Knepler1961, p. 12).

For others, however, the sociology of music was the core of Marxist musicology, because the dialectic of musical and social structures that was central to their understanding of music could not be grasped without the interlocking of aesthetic and sociological questions, which fell within the field of Marxist sociology of music (Mayer Reference Mayer1963). Since the Marxist sociology of music was also derived as a theoretical edifice from historical materialism, it remained difficult to delineate as a subdiscipline of Marxist musicology. However, both the theoretical and the political reservations about the sociology of music disappeared around the turn of the 1960s. Even empirical sociology, which had previously been strictly rejected as positivist, eventually gained legitimacy. In Hungary in particular, the broad-based sociological research that began in early to mid-1960s, earlier than in other socialist countries, proved to be a decisive impetus for the emergence of scientifically grounded approaches to popular music (Ignácz Reference Ignácz2017b).

The Marxist sociology of music, like Marxist musicology, also had its starting point in the Soviet Union. Its foundations were laid in Soviet musicology of the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, everyday music (бытовая музыка, literally everyday music), as popular musical forms were called, also became the focus of musicology. In particular, the Russian composer and musicologist Boris Assafyev pleaded for a Marxist sociology of music in his 1927 draft, О ближайших задачах социологии музыки (On the Immediate Tasks of the Sociology of Music, Assafjew Reference Assafjew1927), published under his pseudonym Igor Glebov. He argued that it must include the ‘study of everyday music’, since without it ‘there would have been no Beethoven and no Mahler’, because as an art form it was part of a process that absorbed everyday music (Assafjew Reference Assafjew1927, p. 18). In the text written as a preface to the Russian translation of essays by the German music historian Hans Joachim Moser, Assafjew states that the social character of music not only requires an examination of the institutions of musical life (such as the music business and music management) (Assafjew Reference Assafjew1927, p. 14), but also musical creativity itself had to be understood as a social and thus collective process, which culminated in the representatives of the sound art and their works. As a result, there were also remarkable empirical projects in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s that approached music in everyday life without prejudice (Nowack Reference Nowack2015). However, these beginnings of a Marxist sociology of music quickly came to a halt under Stalin. Only after Stalin's death in 1953 and the process of de-Stalinisation initiated with the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 was sociology, which had previously been defamed as ‘bourgeois’, also rehabilitated. With the associated reorientation of Marxist art and cultural studies, there were now efforts to create a Marxist sociology of music. However, like Marxist musicology, this remained a very heterogeneous scientific concept. It is true that at the First International Seminar of Marxist Musicologists in Prague in 1963, Marxist sociology of music was explicitly discussed, and an attempt was made to establish a unified concept (Mayer Reference Mayer1963; Mokrý Reference Mokrý1963), but neither then nor later did this succeed. Marxist sociology of music understood itself as a method for analysing the social conditionality of music, the interrelationships between social–cultural, economic, technological and musical processes, or – in Marxist terminology – the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production on the terrain of musical culture (Nowack Reference Nowack2006). Even if this essentially amounted to an extended social history of music, the Marxist sociology of music, with its focus on the structure of social–cultural processes outside the musical work of art, it could not avoid the everyday musical life of the classes, social groups and strata creating musical life.

The first sociologically oriented work devoted to mass cultural phenomena on a Marxist basis came from Poland and was presented in 1964 by Antonina Kłoskowska, later president of the Polish Sociological Society, with the book Kultura masowa. Krytyka i obrona (Mass Culture. Criticism and defence, Kłoskowska Reference Kłoskowska1964). It was extremely influential and has been reprinted several times, the last time in 2005. Although conceived as a work of cultural sociology, it takes an anthropological approach, tracing the formation and development of mass culture against the background of the changes in people's relationship to their culture triggered by the Industrial Revolution and by the technical means of mass communication, and pointing to the diverse aesthetic worlds that emerged as a result. Music plays only a marginal role in her analysis of the formation of modern mass culture. However, the shift of focus from artistic products to the cultural orders, symbolic systems and practices from which they emerge removed the ground from dogmatic and ideology-based views of art, culture and music. This resulted in a de-ideologisation of the concept of ‘the people’ and gave way to a differentiated understanding of society that, in addition to the traditional class structure, now also began to recognise the diversity of social groups and strata in the society. The sociology of music was thus now confronted with the task of taking stock of the actual musical reception behaviour of the various social groups and strata under socialism.

While cross-sectional analyses of music reception were repeatedly presented in the mass media, especially in Czechoslovakia (Forét Reference Forét1990), this proved to be an extremely Janus-faced undertaking in the GDR, since such studies were confronted with the expectation that they would reflect political injunctions to repress the influence of Western music and to overcome the gap between art and the people. However, reality did not conform to the political targets, so empirical sociology in the GDR remained an extremely explosive undertaking. The Central Institute for Youth Research, founded in Leipzig in 1966, conducted an empirical sociology of music, which recorded the musical interests and behaviour of young people in the GDR at regular intervals until 1989 (Friedrich et al. Reference Friedrich, Förster and Starke1999). The results of these surveys, however, were subject to secrecy and were kept from the public until 1990, thus playing no role in the development of popular music research in the GDR. The demand for secrecy, as soon as it came to the realities of musical live, had to do, among other things, with the fact that all forms of popular music, from folk music to Schlager, were burdened between 1933 and 1945 by their instrumentalisation for National Socialism, especially when they were free of direct political or ideological implications (Frommann Reference Frommann1999; Wicke Reference Wicke, Horn and Middleton1985b). For the post-war period, this meant that, apart from the songs of the workers’ movement, there were de facto no popular musical traditions in the GDR to which an unproblematic reference was possible. This did not mean, however, that popular music disappeared from musical life, but rather that music from the West, which was easily accessible via the stations of the occupying foreign powers in West Germany, especially the American Forces Network (AFN) and the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), took up a particularly large amount of space. This was thought entirely undesirable, but it was reflected in every sociological study, including those of the Department of Listener Research at the GDR Radio, which was established in 1965.

Nonetheless, a sociology of music emerged in the GDR that, under (pseudo)Marxist auspices, redefined sociology in such a way that it became a normative construct of reality instead of depicting it. Thus, in the second half of the 1950s, a research focus on ‘musical reception research’ conducted at the University of Halle resulted in three international conferences between 1959 and 1963. The topics of the conferences were later aptly summarised by Natalia Nowack: ‘no mass surveys, no sensitive questions, and no “sociology”’ (Nowack Reference Nowack2006). By assigning sociological research the task of ‘using scientific methods to point out the ways in which people can be educated in a planned, meaningful way’, a sociology was pursued that pretended to ‘investigate the musical interests of young people and working people’ (Bimberg Reference Bimberg1963, pp. 550, 551), but completely ignored popular forms of music, despite the fact that they were central to music reception in the GDR. It was also the case of the PhD thesis ‘Rezeptionskundliche Untersuchungen zur Tanzmusik in der DDR’ (Reception studies of dance music in the GDR) by Fritz Bachmann (Reference Bachmann1972), defended at the University of Halle in 1968. Here, reception research stands for the analysis of the artistic and ideological content of ‘dance song’ to be received, not for the analysis of the reception itself. For this, a normative concept of reception is set, which constructs a model of reception based on an abstract concept of dance music tailored to the communication of ideology.

Similar assumptions also underlie the PhD ‘Der westdeutsche Schlagerkult um 1960: Eine soziologische, ästhetische und experimentell-musikakustische Studie’ by Veit Ernst (The West German Schlagerkult around 1960: A sociological, aesthetic and experimental-music-acoustic study, Ernst Reference Ernst1965), written under the aegis of Georg Knepler at the Humboldt University and defended in 1965. Here, a normative reception construct serves to ‘prove’ the manipulative character of Schlagers produced under capitalist market conditions. However, Ernst not only analyses the musical and textual characteristics of the Schlager as the reception substrate, but also compares the sonic parameters of selected Schlager, their ‘range, gradation, and temporal disposition of the sound pressure’ (Ernst Reference Ernst1965, p. 102), with those of selected works of classical music. The result, a marked difference in the amplitudes of the higher frequencies in the case of Schlager, is said to support the thesis that the culture industry manipulatively generates a listener demand by deliberately ‘provoking addictive demands for Schlager’ (Ernst Reference Ernst1965, p. 126). For the development of popular music research in the GDR, this was not only unproductive, but decidedly obstructive, since this work had a reputation for a lack of seriousness, just as the subject of the research was already considered aesthetically questionable in musicology. Ernst's doctoral thesis remained unpublished.

In Hungary, on the other hand, the influence of Marxism on the sociology of music significantly advanced the study of popular music, as Ádám Ignácz has pointed out (Barna and Ignácz Reference Barna and Ignácz2018; Blüml and Ignácz Reference Blüml and Ignácz2022). Pioneering work in popular music research was done at the Institute of Musicology, established in 1969 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, with the Department of Sociology led by János Maróthy, and in the research groups led by Iván Vitányi at the Institute of Culture and the Centre of Mass Communication Research. Iván Vitányi, a student of Georg Lukács who was appointed director of the Hungarian State Institute of Culture in 1972, followed a cultural anthropological approach that corresponded to Antonina Kłoskowska's concept of mass culture in Poland. Although Vitányi's work as a sociologist focused on the field of cultural education (Vitányi Reference Vitányi1977), he also co-authored the first informative book on beat music in Hungary (Bácskai and Vitányi Reference Bácskai and Vitányi1969). The concept of a ‘general art’ developed in his first book A könnyű műfaj (The light genre, Vitányi Reference Vitányi1965), assumes cultural anthropological constants similar to Kłoskowska. They represent the basic social, cultural and communicative needs of people to which the ‘general arts’, as he calls the popular arts, link. They are therefore not, as claimed by many, especially Marxist authors, a commercial deformation, but rather the basis of artistic creation and must be considered and examined in their fundamental function.

In 1973 he published, together with Júlia Lévai, the study produced as part of a larger research program he directed at the Centre of Mass Communication Research of the Hungarian Radio and Television Miböl lesz a sláger? (What makes a hit, Lévai and Vitányi Reference Lévai and Vitányi1973), in which 231 Hungarian hits from a period of 40 years are subjected to melodic, harmonic and thematic analysis, providing a detailed sociological picture of the musical tastes of the Hungarian population. András Tokaji, whom Vitányi brought to the Institute in 1975, began to study such a ‘light genre’ – the mass song – for the first time under Vitányi's auspices. The result of this research was a five-volume monograph on the mass song in Hungary between 1945 and 1956, which included a collection of the songs of the period in question, designed to be a complete, comparative analysis of the song texts, documentation of their use, an outline of the history of the term and concept of the mass song, and an analysis of the popularity and dissemination of these songs. The summary fifth volume was submitted by Tokaji to the renowned Hungarian musicologist József Ujfalussy as a dissertation thesis and was published in two volumes in 1981, first in German and two years later in the Hungarian original also as a book (Tokaji Reference Tokaji1981, Reference Tokaji1983).

Musically situated between folk music and popular songs, this propagandistic mass song originated in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s and was intended to support the party's agitation and propaganda work. Its importance in the countries of state socialism was correspondingly great until well into the 1950s. Since the mass song is committed to popularity to fulfil its propagandistic function, it remains caught in the contradiction between musical content that is popular and that is revolutionary. Even if Tokaji, following his mentor Vitányi, remained committed to the idea that ‘true popular. music must come from the masses, whose path to it must also be paved by a comprehensive cultural and musical education’ (Tokaji Reference Tokaji and Horn1985), he nevertheless precedes this argument with an analysis of popular music, of the mass song, that is as comprehensive as possible.

While Vitanij's Institute of Culture was an independent institution attached to the Hungarian Ministry of Culture, János Maróthy worked at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. As early as 1962, at a time when he was still working at the Academy's Bartók Archives as a sociologist of music, he initiated a project to study the musical needs and reception behaviour of workers at a Budapest machine-building factory. The project was realised by the sociologist Ágnes Losonczi (Losonczi Reference Losonczi1970), who is considered one of the founders of sociology in Hungary and who, as a member of the Sociological Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1963, participated in the first step towards institutionalising sociology as an academic discipline in Hungary. She was among the first in Hungary to present reflections on the tasks and methodological foundations of the sociology of music (Losonczi Reference Losonczi1964). The results of this project were incorporated into the analysis of Hungarian musical life after 1945 and published as a book in 1969, which also appeared in German in 1980 (Losonczi Reference Losonczi1969, Reference Losonczi1980). It was the first study of its kind to draw a differentiated and cross-genre picture of the structure and development of musical life using Hungary as an example.

The basis for this was a theoretical concept that related musical needs, the social functions of music and the respective aesthetic characteristics of the various musical types and genres. This not only followed the Marxist demand for a connection between theory and empiricism, but also aimed at a cross-genre approach that sought the social constituents behind the aesthetic differences. The empirical material for this came in part from her study of factory workers in Budapest, and was collected in the form of surveys and interviews on everyday music in the countryside in several Hungarian villages, and by statistical analysis of music performances in concert halls. Folk song, jazz and dance music are not only given their due place, but, like ‘serious music’, they are conceived as products of socially different forms of cultural practice. The unfruitful juxtaposition of ‘serious’ and ‘light’, of ‘popular’ and ‘artificial’ music is thus avoided. In the context of a sociology of music conceived in Marxist terms, this gave music research new perspectives for dealing with music in people's everyday lives and the popular forms of music circulating within it.

Maróthy, who became the head of the Sociology Department of the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1969Footnote ² in the course of the transformation of the Bartók Archives into the Institute of Musicology, was one of the most important pioneers of popular music research in Hungary with his works (Ignácz Reference Ignácz2017a, Reference Ignácz, Alisch, Binas-Preisendörfer and Jauk2018), at least some of which became accessible in translation outside Hungary (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1968, Reference Maróthy1974, Reference Maróthy1981). As a consistent Marxist, he followed an approach that considered the sociological and the historical method as only two different sides of a holistic social–historical understanding of music. In his work Music and Bourgeois, Music and Proletarian (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1974), which was published in the Hungarian original in 1966 and received considerable international attention, he placed the social roots of musical practice at the centre of his portrayal and saw in genres such as urban folklore, working-class music, jazz or folk revival the products of a socially constituted collective creativity, from which the individual creativity of the creative musician rises.

For Maróthy, musical culture unfolds between the poles of collective and individual creativity, between which there are multiple transformation processes (Maróthy Reference Maróthy1981). Jazz, dance music, folk music and the music of the concert hall are understood by him as socially differently constituted spheres of musical practice, which can only be analysed in reference to each other. Their consideration took place embedded in the totality of musical life, which is characterised by the manifold interrelations between the various forms of music and the classes and strata that support them. This was linked to the cultural–political goal, which was entirely in line with the party, of overcoming the existing contradictions between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music through aesthetic education. Every form of commercially mediated music is also seen here, like the commodity–money relationship in Marxist thought as a whole, as a product of capitalism to be overcome. Thus, although popular music has been legitimised as a self-evident object of music research, it did not become an independent object of research in the process. Nevertheless, it was Maróthy who, with his books, numerous articles and conference appearances, laid a foundation for popular music to become the subject of independent research by a younger generation of researchers whom he brought to his department from the mid-1970s onwards, people such as Anna Szemere or Erzsébet Szeverényi.

They represented a generation throughout the East socialised with popular music. In the understanding of this generation, popular music forms were not only a musical expression of certain social classes and strata to be accepted intellectually and theoretically on a Marxist basis, which were to be ‘repealed’ in a dialectical sense in a harmonised, future socialist musical life. This music was made the object of research by them, without using a Marxist theoretical edifice as legitimation for it. For example, Anna Szemere, who left Hungary in 1987 to pursue a doctorate in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, provided an overview of international popular music research in a 1984 essay that introduced the academic world in Hungary to the variety of theoretical concepts and research approaches to popular music that had since emerged in the West. In it, she argued for an interdisciplinary approach that reached beyond the boundaries of musicology (Szemere Reference Szemere1984). She herself worked under Maróthy's direction on Hungarian pop and rock music (Szemere Reference Szemere1983, Reference Szemere and Horn1985b, Reference Szemere1985c), but also on Hungarian operetta (Szemere Reference Szemere, Domokos and Berlász1979) and musical theatre (Szemere Reference Szemere1985a). Meanwhile, Erzsébet Szeverényi focused on jazz (Szeverényi Reference Szeverényi, Melinda and Domokos1980), folk music (Szeverényi Reference Szeverényi, Melinda and Domokos1981) and the relationship between musical taste and musical development (Szeverényi Reference Szeverényi1985).

Rock music as catalyst for popular music research

Anna Szemere wrote very aptly in 1984:

An entire generation of researchers in both the West and the East came to popular music research via rock music. Both the social significance of this music as a generation-specific medium of expression for young people and its cultural and political aspirations, which had little to do with the entertainment function of traditional forms of popular music, led to the insight that this music had to be considered in the context of the cultural practice of the young people from which it emerged. The fact that the generation that was now coming into the light of academic publicity was now working on rock music, the music with which they themselves had been musically socialised and the music by which their generation defined itself, resulted in a fundamentally different understanding of music and music research.

In the socialist countries, too, rock music opposed the ruling establishment, even when it did not locate itself in the underground and in the political opposition (Wicke Reference Wicke and Garofalo1992). Here, too, it functioned as the central medium of a youth culture that was characterised by the claim to cultural self-determination and self-assertion. The methodological instruments that dominated Marxist music research, which, even if sociologically oriented, placed the musical artefact, the piece of music in its sonic specificity, at the centre of consideration, were not suitable for this music and its sound aesthetics, given the degree of its technical mediation, its affinity with the media, and the music-industrial contexts in which it was embedded. While the first generation of Marxist musicologists and music sociologists still saw their task as making Marxist thinking fruitful for music research, this younger generation was primarily concerned with examining their music as a legitimate cultural expression of young people and developing a methodological and theoretical toolkit suitable for this purpose. Instead of adapting the object of investigation to the sacrosanct Marxist method, or selecting the object of investigation accordingly, it was now a matter of adapting the methods of investigation to the object to be investigated, rock music. The methodological and analytical tools of British cultural studies became of great importance, especially since some of the most influential protagonists of popular music research as it was developing in the West were directly connected to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.

With rock music as a catalyst, popular music research received a massive boost in the GDR, or rather found an institutional basis that made systematic research possible in the first place. Thus, in 1981, an institution unique in its kind came into being at East Berlin's Humboldt University, the student self-governing Centre for Popular Music Research. At the Institute for Musicology of the Humboldt University, there had been an assistant position for ‘Dance and Light Music’ since 1974, which the author of this essay held. It existed until the end of the GDR and was transformed into a chair for the theory and history of popular music in 1991. The structure of East German universities allowed these positions, normally assigned as assistants to professors and their chairs and thus located at the lowest level of the academic hierarchy, to be assigned to institutes with independent status, instead of professors. If the holders of the posts had doctorates and habilitations, they could even supervise diploma theses and dissertations, provided that a professor could be found to take the final examinations or at least to give the examination documents an official status with his or her signature, since only professors were authorised to sign. Thus, an extensive group of students and doctoral candidates formed around the assistant position for ‘Dance and Entertainment Music’. They founded the Centre for Popular Music Research as a self-managed project and as an annex to the assistant position for ‘Dance and Entertainment Music’.

Student self-administration projects were very rare, but the only way in the GDR to obtain an institutional framework for research on popular music without an elaborate and, in the matter of popular music, hopeless approval procedure. Institutional backing, however, was indispensable for a meaningful development of research under GDR conditions, because institutions were granted completely different opportunities than private individuals, a status which included students. Institutions could easily establish contacts with partners at home and abroad, could enter cooperative relationships with institutions, and could organise guest lectures with visitors from abroad, the West included. An absolutely central point was the possibility, granted in the 1980s in view of the chronic lack of hard currency, for scientific institutions to be supported by Western companies with, among other things, free books, sound recordings, etc. Such contacts were forbidden to private individuals, and mailings to private addresses were confiscated without exception.

The Research Centre quickly developed into a base for diverse research activities with a collection of materials and, most importantly, a unique library of Popular Music Studies literature that was virtually unavailable in other libraries due to lack of funding. These activities were tolerated by the board of directors of the Institute of Musicology because it kept popular music research, which was considered politically explosive, at a distance by outsourcing it to a semi-independent department. Thus, between 1981 and 1990, more than 70 diploma (master's) theses and 14 doctoral dissertations on diverse aspects of rock music were written and supervised at the Research Centre. Among the professors whose signatures made this research possible as graduate or doctoral theses was Günther Mayer, Professor of Aesthetics at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University, who as Senior Academic also served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music between 1981 and 1987.

This unorthodox institutionalisation of popular music research in the GDR remained almost unchallenged, not least because of a special feature that was not foreseen in the institutional structure of the GDR scientific establishment and thus did not encounter any direct control mechanisms. The Centre for Popular Music Research was commercially organised. Thus, it not only remained largely self-sufficient in its activities, but with international study programmes and an offer of study visits on a commercial basis for scholars and students from Western countries, it was de facto untouchable given the GDR's chronic shortage of hard currency. With the organisation of meetings and conferences, the regular publication of working papers along the lines of the Working Papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the organisation of public lecture series featuring many representatives of Popular Music Studies from the West, especially from the UK, various Scandinavian countries and the United States, popular music research now was visible in the GDR as a theoretically and methodologically independent field of research.

The theoretical model underlying the Research Centre's work was based on the assumption that the sonic specificity of rock music was a result of social, economic, technological and cultural processes that needed to be analysed in terms of their aesthetic consequences. It was influenced by the approach developed at Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the late 1960s under the direction of Stuart Hall. The research itself was organised around five interrelated foci. At its core was the elaboration of a theoretical concept that sought to escape the methodological dogmas of Marxist musicology through a radically interdisciplinary, or rather non-disciplinary approach. The aim was to uncover the constituents of cultural practices that generate structures of meaning and values within overarching social, political, and ideological relations, and which find a medium of mediation in the sounding artefacts – rock songs. This was a significant difference from the developments of popular music research in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Methodologically, it was an approach that transcended the boundaries of musicology, circumventing the tenets of Marxist musicology and developing a cultural-analytical model that bypassed the unproductive debates about the music-historical and aesthetic significance of popular music that still played a significant role in the GDR. At the same time, this model was kept open to sociological, psychological, semiotic, economic and media studies approaches. The boundaries of academic disciplines were transcended by a consistent orientation towards the questions posed by rock music in theory and practice. Instead of being discipline-oriented, the work was object-oriented, for which the institutional construction of a research centre provided an almost ideal basis since it allowed uncomplicated partnerships with all academic disciplines. How rock music as a sounding artefact was constituted as music in each of the different cultures and subcultures was the central question.

This seemed at first to lead away from the internal sonic organisation of music, and was aimed instead at finding the parameters on which the internal sonic organisation of this music was based, or, to use Simon Frith again here, to reconstruct ‘the text to which anyone listens’ (Frith Reference Frith1990, p. 97). The theoretical foundations for this have been developed in numerous essays (Wicke Reference Wicke, Middleton and Horn1982, Reference Wicke1983a, Reference Wicke1983b, Reference Wicke1984, Reference Wicke and Horn1985a, Reference Wicke1987a) and presented in book form (Wicke Reference Wicke1987c, Reference Wicke1990b). The core, however, remained an understanding of popular music as a hybrid networked cultural practice mediated by specific sound patterns. This was connected with the development of an adequate terminology, whereby the concept of popularity – also in its historicity as a discursive constituent of the cultural-musical field – was of central importance (Bloss Reference Bloss1990; Wicke Reference Wicke1987b). Of particular theoretical and methodological significance in this context was the examination of the commodity character of music in commercially organised music cultures, a topic which had barely been developed since the Frankfurt School. This entailed a form of music-economic thinking that would do justice to the close interlocking of economic, aesthetic, and creative processes in popular music (Kriese Reference Kriese1988, Reference Kriese1989).

A second focus of research at the Centre was on the institutional infrastructure of the musical process, both in theoretical-methodological and empirical-analytical terms. Here were studies that addressed the institutionalisation of musical creativity in the apparatuses of commercial music production (Jereczinsky Reference Jereczinsky1988; Penzel Reference Penzel1986, Reference Penzel1989). Naturally, the focus was on the examination of mass media and media concepts (Engelmann Reference Engelmann1985; Görnandt Reference Görnandt1989).

The third focus was the social use of rock music by GDR youth and the cultural values and meaning constructs conveyed through rock music. These were cooperative projects with the Central Institute for Youth Research in the GDR and the Department of Sociological Research at the Radio of the GDR, which were at the same time integrated into the International Communication and Youth Cultural Consortium supported by UNESCO, and commissioned to investigate the globalisation effects on music and youth culture (Robinson Reference Robinson1991). This was followed by studies that distilled the underlying cultural value patterns in dealing with music from the analysis of the fan mail of a popular GDR rock group (Voos Reference Voos1985a, Reference Voosb) or theoretically modelling the youth-cultural conditions of young people's music reception in the GDR (Schmidt Reference Schmidt1985). The first ethnographically based study was the aforementioned study of dance events, which surveyed attendees – such as musicians and DJs – about their value and behavioural preferences (Strulick and Meyer Reference Strulick and Meyer1983). Empirical cross-sectional studies that mapped the use of popular music by young people as a whole, both quantitatively and qualitatively, also emerged in this context (Felber Reference Felber1991).

The fourth axis of research, which formed a focal point at the Research Centre, was devoted to the sonic, visual, and performative dimensions of rock music. This focused on the aesthetics of this music, and aimed to sketch out a multidimensional musical aesthetics. Studies on the various styles and modes of playing rock music emerged. These were often linked to corresponding theoretical–methodological considerations of the development of suitable analytical instruments (Baumgarten Reference Baumgarten1989; Binas Reference Binas1989; Zocher Reference Zocher1990). Music video (Vater Reference Vater1987; Wagner Reference Wagner1988; Wicke Reference Wicke1989). Cover design of recordings (Hartmann Reference Hartmann1988, Reference Hartmann1990) also featured here, as did the analysis of performance and the staging of rock concerts (Hoffmann and Mischke Reference Hoffmann and Mischke1987). On the theoretical level, the main focus has been on the examination of aesthetic standards and stereotypes as well as the cultural symbolism associated with popular music forms (Lehmann Reference Lehmann1988; Wicke Reference Wicke1990a).

In contrast to the Czech Encyklopedie jazzu a moderní populární hudby, the first edition of the Handbuch der populären Musik (Handbook of popular music, Wicke and Ziegenrücker Reference Wicke and Ziegenrücker1985), the latest version of which was published in 2011, attempted to provide a lexically structured comprehensive account of popular music in all its historical and contemporary manifestations, in its technical, economic, cultural and musical dimensions. It is based on technical terms, not entries on personalities, but it is neither in scope nor in music-analytical depth even remotely equivalent to its Czech counterpart, especially since it was aimed at a wide readership.

The documentation and reappraisal of rock music history in the GDR was the focus with the greatest practical relevance, anchoring the Research Centre in both the cultural–political and practical aspects of this music in the GDR. In view of the difficulties of publishing in the GDR, the work of the Research Centre was made accessible to a limited public from 1987 onwards in the form of hectographed working papers, beginning with a discographic documentation of GDR rock music (Rauhut and Friedrich Reference Rauhut and Friedrich1987), which was gradually continued. A complete publication of this discographic endeavour was not possible until 1999 (Rauhut and Rauhut Reference Rauhut and Rauhut1999). The focus of the Research Centre's working papers was on the analysis of the various musical and stylistic manifestations of GDR rock music such as early beat music, alternative rock, heavy metal etc. Somewhat marginal in terms of theoretical relevance, but of extraordinary explosiveness at the time and conceivably of the greatest public impact, was a comprehensive empirical analysis of the working and living conditions of rock musicians in the GDR, initiated by the country's musicians in 1988, in order to document the desolate and untenable conditions that the economic decline of the GDR had caused and published in the working papers of the Research Centre (Mischke and Hoffmann Reference Mischke and Hoffmann1988). Admittedly, the study came too late; it was made irrelevant and obsolete with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the GDR's accession to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990.

Against the backdrop of the activities of the Centre for Popular Music Research at Humboldt University, research on popular music also began at other GDR universities in the 1980s, although they remained discrete one-off projects which did not lead to a continuous study of popular music. In 1983, for example, Jürgen Heiß presented a PhD thesis at the Potsdam University of Education on the connection between rock music and social movements in the United States, which focused on the influence of the American civil rights movement on rock music and the repercussions it had on the civil rights movement (Heiß Reference Heiß1983). From cultural studies came works that reflected theoretically on the discotheque, which was new in the GDR at the time (Hansen Reference Hansen1984; Lehmann Reference Lehmann1983). These individual projects also included the work of the Leipzig cultural scientist Bert Noglik on jazz (Noglik Reference Noglik1986, Reference Noglik1990).

The rock music research that was established in the GDR was unique in the East in its scope and breadth. The Centre for Popular Music Research was one of the very few academic institutions from the GDR that not only survived German reunification but through the Chair for Theory and History of Popular Music at Humboldt University continued to provide a basis for Popular Music Studies in Germany for another 25 years.