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‘What composer hasn’t flirted with this seductive temptress? ’ Louis Gruenberg, ‘Der Jazz als Ausgangspunkt’, Anbruch 7 (April 1925). The remarks of Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964) quoted above appeared in a Sonderheft of the Musikblätter des Anbruch, the in-house organ of Universal Edition, widely known for its publications of new music. Devoted entirely to jazz, the issue included articles by critics and composers including Gruenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Percy Grainger, representing Germany and the United States (through Gruenberg's German–American residence and training), as well as France and Britain. While the authors did not agree on the extent of jazz's influence on their compositions or the works of others, they all acknowledged a fascination with and desire to utilize this kind of popular music as a transnational aspect of 1920s musical modernity. In identifying jazz ‘as a point of departure’ for the composition of new music, Gruenberg drew upon long-standing views of popular culture and its music as accessible, irresistible, and personified as female. Coming into its own in the 1920s, jazz was thus not unlike another social phenomenon of the time, the New Woman. Both were perceived as youthful, urban, and free from past conventions of propriety and morality. While more women did enter the public workplace during the 1920s, and often in ways that utilized modern technology, the new woman of the modern city was in many respects an overdrawn fiction. Similarly jazz and its seductive temptations were also potent fantasies of modernism, fantasies that originated in the dichotomies of mind and body, classical and popular, cultural insiders and outsiders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE EMBLEMATIC ACTOR The acting of Expressionist performers such as those in Schreyer's Kampfbühne ensemble resembled the evocative art of the French Symbolists. It created images which signaled such a multiplicity of possible meanings that audience reading of the performances was unavoidably idiosyncratic. For the purposes of this final chapter, therefore, I should like to draw a theoretical distinction between this kind of Expressionist performance and yet a third type which I shall call “emblematic stage Expressionism.” The typically denotative imagery mobilized in this mode drastically curtailed ambiguity by reinforcing a single dominant idea. Denotative signification is most clearly operative in allegorical representation. The actors in the medieval morality play Everyman, for instance, do not play characters but rather abstract moral ideas. Assuming a production which stresses the play's allegorical quality, the actors must create images which denote those ideas. The images thus created become emblems of these ideas; and the aggregate of such images becomes a macroemblem of the whole production – the composite emblem, that is, of the production's dominant idea. In Everyman, the embodiment of the title character himself could most readily function as the macroemblem, into which all the other emblematic significations – such as those denoting the Seven Deadly Sins, Death, and so forth – are subsumed. The abstractionism of the late Expressionist theatre in Berlin utilized this allegorical method of reinforcing a predominant idea through the emphatic coordination of all production elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]