Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music

Since the state archives of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) opened after German reunification, artistic life in East Germany has become a thriving field of interdisciplinary investigation that encompasses the study of cultural bureaucracy as well as investigations into East German literature, theater, film, and the plastic arts. Contributing to a growing body of scholarship on East German music on both sides of the Atlantic, Elaine Kelly's Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic is the first full-length monograph in English dedicated to East German art music. Kelly cites the need for alternatives to current frameworks for the analysis of cultural life in the Eastern bloc, which often adopt the extremes of “totalitarian” and “everyday life” approaches to GDR scholarship (p. 2). As one possible alternative, Kelly embraces plurality. She puts sources from state archives and discussions of East Germany's founding historical narratives into dialogue with analyses of...