Participant Info
- First Name
- Martha
- Last Name
- Sprigge
- Country
- United States
- State
- CA California
- msprigge@music.ucsb.edu
- Affiliation
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Website URL
- http://music.ucsb.edu/people/martha-sprigge
- Keywords
- music, mourning, commemoration, trauma, music in the Cold War.
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am an associate professor of musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I teach courses on music and politics, trauma, memory studies, and memorial culture (along with the more typical music history surveys). My current work focuses on the role that music plays in mourning and commemorative practices in Europe after World War II, and I recently completed a book on musical mourning in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany). I’ve published essays on memory and tape, the composer Hanns Eisler’s funeral, musical responses to the Dresden Firebombing, and antifascist commemorative music in East Germany.
- Recent Publications
Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
“Dresden’s Musical Ruins.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association Vol. 144, No. 1 (2019): 83–121.
“Hearing the Nazi Past in the German Democratic Republic: Antifascist Fantasies, Acoustic Realities, and Haunted Memories in Georg Katzer’s Aide – Mémoire (1983).” In Dreams of Germany: Musical Imaginaries from the Concert Hall to the Dance Floor, edited by Thomas Irvine and Neil Gregor (New York: Berghahn Press, 2019), 249–271.
“Tape Work and Memory Work.” Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 14, No. 1 (2017): 49–63.
“Hanns Eisler’s Funeral and Cultures of Commemoration in the German Democratic Republic.” In Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic: Production and Reception, edited by Kyle Frackman and Larson Powell. Rochester: Camden House, 2015.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- East Germany (GDR)
- Expertise by Geography
- Germany
- Expertise by Chronology
- 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Holocaust & Nazi Persecution, Material Culture, World War II
