Conference Agenda

In recent decades, scholarly mobility has increasingly been framed as a driver of intellectual innovation. Yet the history of musicology suggests a more complex dynamic of mediation, adaptation, and institutional negotiation.

This paper examines the transatlantic careers of German émigré musicologists Willi Apel and Hans Tischler to explore how scholarly mobility shaped the emergence of American musicology in the mid-twentieth century. Based on an archival study of personal papers, editorial projects, and records of the American Musicological Society, I argue that the consolidation of the discipline was neither a straightforward European “transfer” nor a unilateral process of American professionalization.

Through case studies of their editorial work in early music, this archival research shows how these scholars contributed foundational research while simultaneously reshaping curricula, mentoring practices, and standards of scholarly rigor. These processes illustrate that the transfer of knowledge was not unilateral; rather, it was a negotiated co-production in which German philological traditions and American institutional structures mutually informed each other.

By foregrounding these reciprocal dynamics, this study reframes scholarly mobility as a constitutive element in the formation of disciplinary norms and professional infrastructures. It challenges simple narratives of “brain gain” and offers historical insight into the structural conditions that continue to shape musicological careers across national contexts. In doing so, it highlights the enduring significance of transnational exchange for both the intellectual development and the institutionalization of the discipline.

The commonly understood story of Béla Bartók’s voluntary exile from Europe during World War II typically emphasizes his uncompromising resistance to fascism, declining financial circumstances, and tragic illness. His immigration to the United States, which began as his third US concert tour, contributes to the image of self-sacrifice emblematic of his American years. As studies by Malcolm Gillies and Carl Leafstedt on Bartók’s finances and American estate have already begun to reveal, however, the story is more complicated. When Bartók and his wife, concert pianist Ditta Pásztory Bartók, traveled together to the US in 1940, they left behind not only many of Bartók’s irreplaceable personal possessions, but also their families, including their teenage son, Peter. The circumstances of Peter’s escape from Europe provide a fuller picture of Béla Bartók’s American years and the circle of fellow émigrés in which they operated while in the United States.

Drawing on numerous recently rediscovered archival sources—including Bartók family correspondence, photographs, and performance contracts, as well as Peter Bartók’s unpublished journal and commentary on his immigration experience—this paper offers a more thorough understanding of the Bartók family’s effort to make a life for themselves in the United States. In doing so, it demonstrates that, amid concert tours, ethnomusicological research, and compositional activities, Béla Bartók was engaged in a protracted effort to rescue Peter from war-torn Europe. While in alliance with Nazi Germany, Hungary had no diplomatic ties to the US, and all communication from Hungarian citizens came through Swedish authorities. Peter’s eventual arrival in New York City in April 1942 was the result of efforts by his parents and their extensive network of Hungarian émigré artists and professionals, including costly travel and visa processes. This paper ultimately reveals the extent to which securing Peter’s safe travel to the United States affected the family’s overall financial and emotional wellbeing, and it highlights Bela Bartók’s position not only as an artist refashioning a career for himself in a new country, but also as a concerned father attempting to reunify his family in a time of war.

The reception of the music of Gustav Mahler has gone through a long and complex series of phases. Some chapters in this story are familiar: the critical resistance, often tinged by antisemitism, his symphonies faced when they were new; the suppression of his music during the Nazi era; and the enthusiastic “Mahler boom” of the 1960s and 1970s. Other important episodes, however, remain understudied. Among these is a moment in the postwar reconstruction of Mahler’s reputation that may appear minor but is in fact rich in implications, namely the commissioning, editing and replacement of the article on Mahler for the major postwar German music encyclopedia, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

The original author of the article, Erwin Ratz, and the editor of MGG, Friedrich Blume, approached Mahler from sharply divergent musical and cultural positions. Blume regarded Mahler not as a modernist visionary but rather as a composer who “saw it as his task to preserve the legacy of Anton Bruckner and to develop it further.” In contrast, Ratz, who unlike Blume had behaved with true honor during the Nazi period, deplored the lingering influence of musical values and scholarly attitudes that had flourished during that era. He regarded Mahler as "the most important German symphonist of our century" precisely because his music represented a "new confrontation with the problems of humanity.” Thus, Ratz felt it imperative to redeem Mahler’s reputation and redefine him as a decisively modern composer for the postwar era. In the end, the disagreement between Blume and Ratz proved insuperable and Ratz’s article was rejected in favor of one by Hans Redlich.

Building on materials from the archives of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, including correspondence between Ratz and Blume and proofs of Ratz’s MGG article, this presentation argues that the disagreement between Ratz and Blume did more than shape a single encyclopedia entry. It was a formative moment in the reception of Mahler that articulated unresolved tensions in the cultural politics of music in the wake of Nazism and crystallized interpretive frameworks that continue to inform responses to Mahler’s music today.