Soundtrack # 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9kUveeBgdM
Soundtrack # 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsIATAaR-X0
Soundtrack # 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1dBg__wsuo
(Just a heads up, the "soundtracks" for this image is gonna keep you busy for a while, but it's well worth a listen, in my opinion. If you have even more time to spend and need an introduction to atonal music, I recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4niz8TfY794)

Entartete Musik was an exhibition set up by the Reichsmusikkammer in 1938, with listening booths playing examples of "degenerate music", along with slogans denouncing these composers. The reasons for music to be deemed as "degenerate" ranged from being composed by Jewish musicians or foreigners to works deemed to be too modernist and experimental.

Unlike its predecessor, the exhibition Entartete Kunst, this exhibition was fairly controversial at time time, even among musicians committed to the Nazi party. It got less publicity as a result and closed early. I'm not sure why the censoring of music was a more delicate matter than the censoring of art, but I think it has to do with how music is abstract by nature.

It's very hard to argue convincingly that a twelve-tone is gonna corrupt the youth or bring an end to civilization, it was very blatantly an elimination of all things different based on pure xenophobia and hateful ideology.

Some of the composers singled out where Felix Mendelssohn (for being Jewish), Arnold Schoenberg (for his radical, atonal approach to music), Igor Stravinsky (same), Ernst Krenek (for the opera Jonny Spielt Auf, about a black jazz musician) and Anton Webern (who was actually a fan of Hitler, but that didn't save him from getting his writings burned and his music banned.)

The history of music under the Reich is a topic that really sticks with me because of how directly it is about humanity and the struggle for different people and different ideas to even be allowed to exist.

As a coda, I can mention that Sophie Scholl, a member of the resistance group The White Rose, would go to the prison where her father was held and play a song on a flute, a German folk song called Die Gedanken sind frei, or, in English, "thoughts are free."

* * *

One thing I found doing research for this piece was an article ( https://www.theguardian.com/music/2.....rlins-homeless) about a plan in Berlin to use atonal music as a way to purge the rail station of homeless people that where thwarted by musicians organizing an outdoor concert at the S-bahn as a friendly protest.

Quote:
"The S-Bahn’s manager, Friedemann Kessler, turned up. He listened, and at the end said he hadn’t known what atonal music was and that he had learned something. He decided to drop his plans, so the protest was a success."

History is a big tide, and we're all chaught in it.