Visual Music

Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic

Michael J. Schmidt - Schmidt.m.james@gmail.com
Jazz’s sensational appearance in Europe during the interwar period was a major event in European sound culture. The tours and residencies of American bands and musicians—such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Sam Wooding—fundamentally disrupted and transformed the sonic aesthetics of European popular culture. Focusing on jazz as sound culture, however, can obscure the larger character of jazz and the nature of its production and perception.

This article argues that jazz, in fact, was primarily a visual and textual phenomenon in Germany during 1920s. Most Germans, it shows, did not have access to live performances of jazz or radio and gramophones. Instead, they encountered it in newspapers and visual culture. This article explores what it meant for jazz to be visual and textual in the Weimar Republic. It also uses jazz as a window onto the larger history of the senses.

A number of scholars have argued that the human senses were separated within modernity. This study argues that, within a growing media society such as early twentieth century Germany, the senses did not necessarily remain singular or divided. As this history of Weimar jazz suggests, modern media culture often promoted synaesthesia and perceptual mixing.

Oxford Journals / Arts & Humanities / German History / Volume 32, Issue 2Pp. 201-223
read more: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/content/32/2/201.abstract