KJCKorea
Journal Central

As Hitler’s National Socialists came to power in Germany, they oppressed the modern music harder than needed: it was almost dying because of it’s dissonance and isolation from the audience. The hidden Ideology of this act was derived from the anti-Jewish-thought of the Nazis on the one hand; because the most of the best musicians of the modern music were Jewish. On the other hands the modern music revealed the emotion of being the German community as lie. In contrary to boycott against the dissonant modern music like the atonal music of Schoenberg, the Nazis supported contemporary music and the young musicians like Gerhard Müller etc., should express the movements of the Nazis and German national ideology. But, <Carmina Burana> of Carl Orff(1895-1982), premiered 1937 in Frankfurt a. M., could be the most successful music work presented the Nazi-aesthetic; first of all the monumental sound with insistent rhythms, ostinato repetitions, a complete abnegation of contemporary chromatic and alternation of major/minor that make an antimodern impression and the same time an modern one, furthermore, laudation to the health and the rejection of the illness which Nazis put in the praxis on the social and political dimension like “comfortable murder”. So the whole impression of music with “stagnated structure” is “barbarous” and “counteracted” modernism, similar to the Nazis pursued technique, tempo and modernism, while also emphasizing nature, romantism, “Blut and Boden”.

Aesthetics of Fascism, Aesthetics of Nazi-music, Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, Modern music boycott, modernity, Monumental music, reactionary