Award for Third Reich Concert Hall project
Southampton's Professor Neil Gregor (History) has just been awarded a £40,000 Leverhulme Trust Research Grant for a two-year project on The Symphonic Concert Hall in the Third Reich. The work blends the social and cultural history of concert-going with anthropology of the senses to answer the question 'how did Germans consume classical music in the Third Reich?'
The project aims to move our understanding beyond repetition of assumptions derived from one or two prominent, but highly unrepresentative, orchestras playing in the auratic confines of late 19th-century symphonic concert halls. Consideration of the wider variety of regional, civic and local orchestras - often playing on the professional/amateur border - which sat at the centre of social practices quite distinct from those of prestigious institutions will help dissolve clichés not only about Germans and music, but also about culture life during the era of National Socialism more generally, and thus to open up space for an anthropology of concert-going that critiques the workings of power in far more productive ways.
The funds will support Neil's travel to 12 archive repositories as well as teaching relief.
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Professor Neil Gregor
Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton.
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