Author:
Stephen Downes Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, Highfield Rd, Englefield Green, Egham TW20 0BW, United Kingdom

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Abstract

In Bruno Monsaingeon's 2009 film portrait of Piotr Anderszewski cinematic technique, voice-over commentaries and musical performances combine to create an “affective” geography in which the pianist moves between significant Central Eastern European places. Anderszewski is filmed traveling in a special train carriage (including a grand piano) which, the director said, “as a place of meditation and reflection … would facilitate the use of flashbacks.” Memory, identity, and origins become central to the film's symbolism. After Freud, railway journeys can be interpreted as a privileged “analogy” for unconscious and repressed thought processes. Train metaphors may thus facilitate an imaging of the mental apparatus and its “lines of conduction.” The essay focuses on three symbolic locations in Anderszewski's journey – Warsaw, Budapest and Zakopane – and on performances of music by Chopin, Schumann and Szymanowski (the first heard in the railway carriage, the second in the Liszt Academy, Budapest, and the third in Szymanowski's house in Zakopane). Each of these sites and musical examples are interpreted primarily through Freud's notion of “displacement” to reveal counterpoints and conjunctions of displaced musical “voices” and identities. These hearings reveal the complexities and dissonances between Monsaingeon's French vision of “Eastern” Europe and Anderszewski's Polish-Hungarian self-identity as “Central” European cosmopolitan.

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  • Bachmann-Medick, Doris.From Hybridity to Translation: Reflection on Travelling Concepts,” in The Trans/National Study of Culture: A Translational Perspective, ed. by Doris Bachmann-Medick (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 119136.

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  • Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida [1980], transl. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2000).

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  • Czaja, Dariusz.Water, Time and a Dark-Green Coat: On Chopin’s Barcarolle,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 9 (2011), 283296.

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  • Downes, Stephen.Eros and Paneuropeanism: Szymanowski’s Utopian Vision,” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945, ed. by Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 5171.

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  • Downes, Stephen.Masochism and Sentimentality: Barthes’s Schumann and Schumann’s Chopin,” in Music – Psychoanalysis – Musicology, ed. by Samuel Wilson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 164182.

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  • Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams [1899], transl. by Abraham Arden Brill (London: Ware, 1997).

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  • Greyser, Naomi. On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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  • Kasunic, David M. Chopin and the Singing Voice: From the Romantic to the Real (PhD diss., Princeton, NY: Princeton University, 2004).

  • Kramer, Lawrence.Melodic Trains: Music in Polanski’s The Pianist,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).

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  • Labelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  • Lewis, Simon.Cosmopolitanism as Sub-Culture in the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Identities In-Between in East-Central Europe, ed. by Jan Fellerer, Robert Pyrah and Marius Turda (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 149169.

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  • Marcus, Laura. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  • Massicotte, Claudie.Mapping Memory through the Railway Network,” in Trains, Literature, and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails, ed. by Steven D. Spalding and Benjamin Fraser (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 159177.

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  • Monsaingeon, Bruno. Filmer la musique: Entretiens avec Guillaume Monsaingeon (Paris: Philharmonie, 2023).

  • Samson, Jim.Hearing the Nations in Chopin,” Musicology Today 10 (2019), 1335.

  • Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014).

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  • Stoker, Bram. Dracula [1897] (London: Penguin, 1994).

  • Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization and the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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Senior editors

Editor(s)-in-Chief: Péter BOZÓ (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

Review Editor: Lynn HOOKER (Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA)

Assistant Editor(s):
Patrick DEVINE (Maynooth University, Maynooth, IRL)
Anna LASKAI (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

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  • Anja BUNZEL (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, CZ)
  • William A. EVERETT (Conservatory University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA)
  • Denis HERLIN (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, F)
  • Vjera KATALINIĆ (HR)
  • Katalin KOMLÓS (professor emerita, Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, H)
  • Valeria LUCENTINI (University of Bern, CH)
  • Tatjana MARKOVIĆ (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, A)
  • Pál RICHTER (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)
  • László SOMFAI (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)
  • László VIKÁRIUS (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

 

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  • István Csaba NÉMETH (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

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Studia Musicologica
Language English
French
German
Size B5
Year of
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2007 (1961)
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Founder Magyar Tudományos Akadémia
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ISSN 1788-6244 (Print)
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