Featured Graduate Student Research: Benjamin Ory

Uncovering Musicological History in the Freiburg and Bonn University Archives

Thanks to the generosity of The Europe Center, I was able to do important research for my dissertation in Germany during the 2018­–19 academic year. I spent a month in Freiburg and Bonn in February and March 2019 examining otherwise inaccessible documents in university archives. The insights I gleaned have become fundamental to a chapter I am writing about the twentieth-century reception of mid sixteenth-century music.

The fates and fortunes of musicologists in early twentieth-century Germany largely rested on the interpersonal connections they maintained and politics they hewed to, or in some cases, did not. I focused my attention during this trip on Hermann Zenck, a musicologist trained in Leipzig and who taught in Göttingen, and Joseph Schmidt-Görg, a sixteenth-century expert in Bonn as well as a renowned Beethoven scholar. Zenck and Schmidt-Görg’s importance owes in part due to their research on the composers Adrian Willaert and Nicolas Gombert, respectively. Neither scholar has a Nachlass, or set of collected papers. Both were responsible for a collected works edition after the war.

Freiburg was my first stop and I had high hopes: they have one of the more extensive online presences among university archives in Germany, and the head of the archives was responsive and helpful when I contacted him in advance. What Freiburg had in abundance were papers relating to denazification (Zenck had been a member of the NSDAP), and organizational materials (e.g., who taught what when and how much they were paid). But some details here I had to track down. When Zenck died in 1950, much of his work was left unpublished. It then fell to Walter Gerstenberg, a professor of musicology in Berlin and eventually Tübingen, to publish these materials. I suspect that Freiburg would have kept them (by comparison, the Nachlass of Zenck’s colleague Wilibald Gurlitt is full of his research materials, which I also examined), but Gerstenberg probably took them with him. I will need to make another research trip to locate these documents. What I had not expected to find was a large amount of materials (in the Musicology department papers) related to Zenck’s appointment in 1941. It was surprising to learn that what I expected to be the most important criterion for Zenck’s candidacy, his Willaert research, was only the second, or maybe even the third, most important aspect. Above all, the committee valued Zenck for his scholarship on the German, Reformation-era composer Sixt Dietrich. Scholarly emphasis does change over time: since that time Dietrich’s importance has waned considerably.

German university archives vary in their level of organization, their openness to researchers, and the speed with which they can procure materials for researchers. Bonn has somewhat less of an online presence than Freiburg, but once there, the archives were incredibly helpful. Like Freiburg, Bonn was bombed during the war, but the archives in Bonn caught fire in 1944 and suffered dramatic losses (the cover of one folder I examined was half-burned off!). Schmidt-Görg, who was the same age as Zenck, lived over thirty years longer, and as a result, there were more documents of his. His files gave a better sense of the interpersonal politicking of the 1930s: on numerous occasions his colleagues tried to sideline him on account of his Catholicism and since he was not a party member. I was disappointed that there was nothing relating to Schmidt-Görg’s participation in the infamous 1938 Music and Race conference, but this furthered my understanding that what matters in an archive can include both what has been preserved and what has not. What I did find were two fascinating and revealing speeches Schmidt-Görg gave during the war that blurred the line between sixteenth-century research and national-socialist propaganda; these have become integral to my dissertation chapter. I was not able to examine further files of Schmidt-Görg’s in the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, as it was currently undergoing renovations and was closed. I plan to return.

As a DAAD grant recipient this upcoming year, I will have the opportunity to chase down further leads at university archives across Germany. The Europe Center student grant has allowed me to examine some of the most important materials of Zenck and Schmidt-Görg, while also fueling a new phase of my research. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity.

Benjamin Ory is a PhD candidate in Musicology.