Keyword »Onwards!« – The Playlist

With pithy words and a jagged melody, the staunch Communists Brecht and Eisler called on people in 1929 to join in the class struggle: »Workers in every country, join forces and you'll be free!« The use of their »Solidarity Song« in the 1932 agit-prop film »Kuhle Wampe«, which Brecht himself scripted, helped boost the song's popularity further. Thus Eisler distanced himself clearly from the highbrow bourgeois culture of his teacher Arnold Schönberg, so it was only logical that he wrote the East German national anthem 20 years later.

But Eisler cannot be summed up as simply as that: he also wrote film scores for Hollywood, and as an honorary citizen of East Germany he not only retained his Austrian passport, but kept his (self-) irony as well. He supplied the following performance instruction for his »Song of the Unemployed«: »This song is best performed as follows: with a cigarette in the corner of your mouth, your hands in your trouser pockets, bawling a little to make sure it doesn't sound too nice.«

This is an article from the Elbphilharmonie Magazine (issue 03/2021), which is published three times per year.

Few other inventions brought humanity as much progress as the steam engine – and probably no other one was set to music so often and so lovingly by various composers. Wherever railyway lines were put into operation in Europe, the appropriate music followed not long after, mostly bearing the genre title »gallop« to emphasise the enormous speed of the »iron horse«.

And this was the approach taken in 1847 by Hans Christian Lumbye, conductor and in-house composer of the orchestra of Copenhagen's Tivoli amusement park. The »Johann Strauss of the North« had a predilection for unusual instruments and sound effects anyway, so that his train piece delights the listener with wheezing and snorting, rattling and sounding its whistle. Incidentally: some 100 years later, the railway trend arrived in the world of jazz with »Chattanooga Choo Choo«, a tune made famous by the Glenn Miller Orchestra that Udo Lindenberg later used for his song »Sonderzug nach Pankow«.

We all move forward in time. We are born, we get older, we die. An inevitable process. This laconic fact is at the centre of Schubert's gloomy song cycle »Winterreise« - combined with the bitter punch line that the lyrical self actually seeks death himself. Stricken by heartbreak and social isolation, the hero of the piece totters for a total of 24 songs through a frozen world, with flickering thoughts and one sole certainty as a guide: »I must follow a path that no-one before me has ever returned from«. Schubert completed the »gruesome songs«, as he called them, shortly before his own premature death in 1827. Since then, scholars have been debating to what extent the composer, who enjoyed little success either professionally or in matters of the heart, identified with his hero. But in the final event, it doesn't really matter: his music remains immortal.

If one instrument embodies the motto »Onwards«, it's the sousaphone. After all, it was invented in the 1890s as a march-compatible substitute for the tuba, which was totally unpractical for use in a military band. It's certainly odd to look at, like a mixture of a Bronze Age lur and an oversize gramophone, and it is probably the only instrument that the player pulls over his head. The bell of the first model could be swivelled and could even be turned upwards, which earned the sousaphone the nickname »raincatcher«.

It was developed at the instigation of American composer John Philip Sousa. Sousa conducted the United States Marine Band, which played at every state occasion, for twelve years, and wrote many popular marches, among them »Stars and Stripes Forever«, a piece that went on to become as good as a second national anthem. It was an irony of history that Sousa gave up his post in 1892 to found a band of his own. In the next 40 years he gave a good 15,000 concerts – but only eight of them while marching.

Higher, faster, farther! In its almost compulsive endeavour to constantly evolve further, Western high culture reflects the unconditional belief in progress of today's industrialised countries. Take music for example: medieval Gregorian chant was sung in one part, and only gradually were additional intervals allowed. The kind of four-part setting found in Bach would have been close to blasphemy in the Middle Ages. Bach in turn would have shaken his head in dismay over  Richard Wagner's billowing harmonies. An alternative to this constant change and evolution can be found in Japan, where courtly Gagaku music has been performed almost unchanged for more than a thousand years.

Maximum escalation was achieved in 1908, when Arnold Schönberg invented atonal music, which does not contain any chords at all in the traditional sense of the term. As can be heard in his String Quartet No. 2, where he characteristically adds a soprano to the ensemble, who sniffs »the air of other planets«.

»You know what it's like when someone invites you to take a ride with them in a super Italian sports car, and afterwards you wish you hadn't accepted?« As an American, Adams was never lost for a witty comment, and this was his comment on the title of the orchestral piece he wrote in 1986, to a commission from the posh Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, no less. In a little more than four minutes, the music does indeed make the listener feel like a helpless passenger at the mercy of unbridled centrifugal force.

The engine in this case is a simple wooden block that drives both listeners and the orchestra in front of it at a relentless 150 beats per minutes – »including the fat old tuba and the double bass«, as the composer joked. Over this basis, Adams layers increasingly complex patterns in accordance with the principles of Minimal Music: at the end of the piece these are discharged in a fanfare »like the last stage of a rocket that has overcome gravity and is now floating towards outer space«.

Sometimes, backwards is the true forwards. The last verse of »Rain« – the B-side of the 1966 single »Paperback Writer«, for instance, sounds like pure gibberish. You have to play it backwards to understand the text. It's true that this creative stroke of genius only came about because John Lennon had smoked too many joints and put the tape that he wanted to listen to after the recording session into the machine the wrong way round.

But as the Beatles were fascinated by Karlheinz Stockhausen's electronic experiments at the time, they retained the effect – and triggered an unexpected avalanche. Henceforth, fanatical fans went through the entire hit parade in search of hidden messages, with a vivid imagination helping them to discover Satanic vows and calls to indulge in drug consumption. This new fad in turn prompted one or two bands to pull people's legs: if you play Pink Floyd's »Empty Spaces« backwards, you  hear this text: »Congratulations! You have just discovered the secret message.«

Text: Clemens Matuschek; last updated: 16.08.2021.