摘要：After his three-year imprisonment as a Communist under the Nazi regime, composer Kurt Schwaen worked as a pianist for an experimental dance theater in Berlin. This experience, combined with the influences of Hanns Eisler and Eastern European dance music, intensified Schwaen’s sensitivity to the kinetic power of rhythm in music, with its potential to support or undermine collective ideology. Best known for his collaborative work with Bertolt Brecht and for his songs composed for school children in the German Democratic Republic, Schwaen was also a prolific composer of music for voice, piano, instrumental ensembles, theater, and film. This article investigates Schwaen’s 1957–1979 song cycle set to politically inflected poems by Günter Kunert, Liebsame Beschäftigung , with attention to stress-accentual irregularity as a form of Brechtian estrangement. In many vocal phrases, Schwaen places a normally unstressed syllable on a downbeat or rising point in the melodic line, or draws out a preposition melismatically instead of emphasizing more semantically weighted speech units. This undermining of speech rhythm disrupts familiar kinetic-linguistic pacing to keep both performers and listeners from passive receptivity. A dialectical approach to text and music in Schwaen’s cycle applies Fredric Jameson’s point, in Brecht and Method , that reification of familiar elements can work in a homeopathic way to “dereify” them. As these musical settings draw attention to syllabic patterns normally taken for granted, they disturb the received, bourgeois Liederabend experience and foreground the sung text as an unnatural response to the horrors of war.
