Soundscapes of ,Heimat‘: Mapping Musical Signatures

From my perspective of musicology, I intend to contribute to the clarification of the concept of `Heimat` (`homeland`) by showing how it is generated in terms of media and popular music, and influences a sense of collective identity and social affiliation. The medium of film has proven to be an essential constructive element of `Heimat` in German-speaking areas since the beginning of the 20th century. So far, in the research literature on Heimatfilme (sentimental film in idealised regional setting) and Bergfilme (regional mountain films) of Austrian/ German film productions, the significant role that music plays in these films has received little attention. My research project undertakes a survey of the compositional strategies for the representation of the landscapes, places and narratives assigned to the Heimatfilm and Bergfilm genre and constructed through media under the slogan of `Heimat`. With regard to the Heimatfilm, the study concentrates predominantly on Ludwig Ganghofer adaptations between 1930 and 1970. The literary works of hardly any other author have been translated so often for the cinema. They also played a central role in the `remaking` of the Heimatfilm in post-war Germany and in the 1970s. As regards the Bergfilm, this project focus on fictional and non-fictional productions of the 1930s and 1940s, especially on the works of directors Arnold Fanck, Luis Trenker and Harald Reinl. The objective is to reconstruct the musical repertoire for the representation of the Alps in these historically most enduring, German-speaking film genres. As a result, film-musical archival material will be analyzed for the first time in inter- and transdisciplinary research contexts and processed in digitalized form. In addition, the aim of the project is to analyse the transmedia marketing of the music used in the films, which will provide information about the generation of a specific musical knowledge of `Heimat`. Given the relevance of cultural identity in the midst of a dramatic increase in debates about migration and demographic changes, the study of these `Soundscapes` will provide important and new insights into the potent politics of this film historical repertoire and of culture as a whole. In addition, new theoretical and methodological models for the field of film and media music as a subject of popular culture are to be expected. 1

This project set itself the task of reconstructing the compositional strategies used in conveying a sense of home in German-language Heimat and mountain films between 1930 and 1970, and of showing how the music of this cinematic repertoire contributed to the creation of images of home that are still valid today. The music of the Italian composer Giuseppe Becce served as a case study. Becce specialised in scoring German-language Heimat and mountain films (19301970). The starting point was also a little-noticed partial estate of Becce in the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main. My analysis based on the musical archive material illuminates a permanent trace of the 19th century in the medium of film, which I reveal through various conceptualisations of landscape in Western art music. Through the choice of instrumentation or various musical topoi, Becce cemented a clichéd knowledge of familiar image-sound relationships in the expression of the idyll of nature, establishing a sense of home in the mass media. In my analysis of musical genre specifics of Heimat and mountain films, I have also included screenplays, wherein the conceptual precursors of the soundtrack become apparent. As it turned out, alpine-specific sonic clichés were already inherent in the screenplays, which results from the context of genre cinema. Incorporating the analysis of music in the scripts of Heimat and mountain films, the sound or even an ideology of Heimat in film turns out to be a sequence of choices and film music, as so often, a collaborative endeavour. This contributes to new insights into the ontology of film music and underlines the importance of production processes for the analysis of film music. My findings on the media analysis of Tonfilmschlager, contribute to the study of the relationship between audiovisual media and cultural memory. Furthermore, the project developed a transcultural perspective on the cinematic repertoire and its soundtrack by examining the multiple versions of Luis Trenker`s Alpine sound films. My project results show that the Alps, at the intersection of several countries and cultures, represent an important subject for cinematic cultural transfer and the establishment of early European sound cinema. With this research, I highlight Trenkers film activities in the context of transalpine cinema in the 1930s. Overall, my project shows that the longing for an ideal province, as articulated in the concept of Heimat and as an important emotional resource in German culture since the 19th century, lives on in audiovisual clichés in Heimat and mountain films as well as in the transmedial marketing of film music. My research project contributes new perspectives on the cultural-political significance of musical genre cinema and provides new research findings on Becce, who shaped a sound of Heimat in mass media over decades.