DFG project "Time has come today"

The project "Time has come today. The intrinsic times of pop music chronotopes and their contribution to the temporal differentiation of lifeworlds since the 1960s" was part of the priority program 1688 "Aesthetic intrinsic times. Time and Representation in Polychronic Modernity " of the German Research Foundation. It began its work in April 2014 at the University of Lüneburg, was active at TU Dresden from June 2015 and completed its work at the end of September 2017. Nevertheless, several publications from the project will follow. The prociple investigator was Prof. Dr. Dominik Schrage, the postdoctoral researcher was musicologist Dr. Holger Schwetter and the doctoral student was sociologist Anne-Kathrin Hoklas.

What is it all about?

Certain places are particularly important for pop music and culture at certain times, "something" happens there, you have the feeling of being "at the forefront" or being part of something "important". In these places and at these times, the performance and experience of music take center stage, while at the same time certain behaviors, languages or fashions become established and have an effect on the outside world. We call these multi-layered entanglements of space, time and experience "chronotopoi", taking up a term coined by the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. They are not identical with a place, a musical style or a definable form of performance, they are their harmonious coincidence in definable situations. We are looking for chronotopoi that emerged in the period from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s in the Federal Republic of Germany and became socially and culturally significant. In addition, we want to shed light on their significance for the biographies of those involved (whether as protagonists or in the audience) and, on a further level, for social and cultural change. After all, pop music has accompanied this change since the 1960s, symbolizing the social pluralization and emancipation processes of the time - but to what extent has it helped shape this social change?

The progressive rural disco

From the mid-1960s, dance halls, music clubs or discotheques called "discos" sprang up in many places in the West German provinces, where young people from a wide catchment area met to listen to and dance to "progressive" music. At the time, "progressive" was a collective term for various types of rock music that were regarded as an authentic expression of musical personalities. For the first time, protagonists of a youth culture that initially developed in private created publicly accessible spaces that enabled a special experience of music and sociality. Some of these venues still exist today. The "progressive rural disco" stands for the widespread establishment of youth and subculture since the mid-1960s and has shaped identities, life plans and life courses in a variety of ways.

Ruins of negativity

From the mid-1970s, new pop-cultural ideas and movements emerged, which were defined above all by the vehement rejection of a "hippie culture". Musical styles such as punk, new wave and industrial emerged. Formerly progressive discotheques often provide spaces for these experiences, but completely different, urban and off-the-beaten-track spaces are also discovered and used. Uncompromisingness, rejection, aggression and "no future" on the one hand and an affinity for aestheticization, art and artificiality on the other are also formative for a certain fashion and other cultural forms of expression in the 1980s. We call the chronotopoi that emerged in this context "ruins of negativity". They were replaced at the end of the 1980s and/or merged into new developments that are not (yet) the focus of our project.

Approach

Based on an extensive study and analysis of journalistic, biographical and literary texts, TV reports, documentary and fictional films as well as musical works, pop music chronotopoi will be described and made tangible. In addition, they will be made accessible through interviews and an ethnographic approach.
The project will be accessible to the general public through the interactive map application Poptraces, on which interested parties can enter places, events and memories that they associate with their own pop music experiences. In this way, they make their knowledge of past chronotopoi available to the project.

Publications

© Springer

• Dominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter: 'Times of awakening' and the chronotopos of the rural rock disco. Pop music as a catalyst for social change in the 1960s to 1980s, in: Dominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter, Anne-Kathrin Hoklas (eds.): "Zeiten des Aufbruchs". Pop music as a medium of social change, Wiesbaden 2019, pp. 73-120.
  
  Review by Beate Peter in: Popular Music, Vol. 39, Issue 3-4 , 12/2020 , pp. 722-724.
• Anne-Kathrin Hoklas, Holger Schwetter: Dancing, diving, breaking up. On the testing of new social orders in the interaction of musical design and physical musical experience in the rock disco of the 1970s, in: Dominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter, Anne-Kathrin Hoklas (eds.): "Zeiten des Aufbruchs". Pop music as a medium of social change, Wiesbaden 2019, pp. 287-343.
• Holger Schwetter: Progressive rock music as dance music. Chronotopic music analysis as an approach to musical experience and musical design, in: Wolfgang Fuhrmann (ed.): Zuständigkeiten der Musiksoziologie?, Wiesbaden 2019 (forthcoming).
• Holger Schwetter, Dominik Schrage: "Time has come today". Zum Epochenbewusstsein in der Rockmusik 1960er bis 1980er Jahre, in: Helmut Hühn, Sabine Schneider, Reinhard Wegner (eds.): Eigen-Zeiten der Moderne. Regimes, Logics, Structures, Hanover 2018 (forthcoming).
• Dominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter, Anne-Kathrin Hoklas: "Time Has Come Today". Die Eigenzeiten popmusikalischer Chronotopoi und ihr Beitrag zur temproalen Differenzierung von Lebenswelten seit den 1960er Jahren, in: Michael Bies/Michael Gamper (eds.): Ästhetische Eigenzeiten. Bilanz der ersten Projektphase, Hanover (Wehrhahn Verlag) 2019, pp. 259-281.
• Holger Schwetter: A song that you can make good use of. Pop music productivity and its connection to marketing and reception, in: Holger Schwetter, Hendrik Neubauer, Dennis Mathei (eds.): Die Produktivität von Musikkulturen, Wiesbaden 2018, 99-124.
• Dominik Schrage, Anne-Kathrin Hoklas: Sociology, in: Daniel Morat, Hansjakob Ziemer (eds.): Handbuch Sound. History - Concepts - Approaches, Stuttgart 2018, 155-161.
• Holger Schwetter: Every man for himself, but together. Musik-Erleben in der Rockdiskothek, in: Dietmar Elflein, Bernhard Weber (eds.): Aneignungsformen populärer Musik. Sounds, networks, history(ies) and wild learning, Bielefeld 2017.
• Dominik Schrage: Between culture industry and subculture. Sociological perspectives on the connection between social change and popular cultural forms in the 20th century, in: Thomas Kühn, Robert Troschitz (eds.): Populärkultur: Perspektiven und Analysen, Bielefeld 2017, 63-74.
• Michael Ostheimer, Dominik Schrage: Space as the Aesthetic Formation of Time. Bachtins Chronotopos-Begriff in Literatur und sozialer Wirklichkeit, in: Michael Gamper, Eva Geulen, Johannes Grave, Andreas Langenohl, Ralf Simon, Sabine Zubarik (eds.): Zeiten der Form - Formen der Zeit, 1st ed. 2016, 83-110.
• Holger Schwetter: Change and new permanence. Progressive Landdiskotheken in Norddeutschland, in: Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie. Thematic issue: Music and Rural Society, vol. 64, no. 1, ed. by Gunter Mahlerwein, Claudia Neu, 2016, 55-70.
• Dominik Schrage, Holger Schwetter: "Tomorrow we go to the concert - or to the vernissage?"Chronotopoi of aesthetic experience and the limits of art autonomy, in: Uta Karstein, Nina Tessa Zahner (eds.): Autonomie der Kunst? On the topicality of a social model, Wiesbaden 2016, 329-350.
• Holger Schwetter: Progressive across the country. Landdiskotheken in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren, in: Musikforum, vol. 2, ed. by Deutscher Musikrat, 2015, 38-39.