School of Music

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Benjamin Pierce is an accomplished low brass artist and teacher. He is a professor at the University of Arkansas, teaching a large studio of tuba and euphonium players and directing the tuba/euphonium ensemble. His studies took place at Bowling Green State University and the University of Michigan. His primary teachers were David Saygers, Velvet Brown, Fritz Kaenzig, and Wesley Jacobs.

Pierce has notably been the winner of some dozen international tuba and euphonium artist competitions held in the United States, Japan, Germany, Finland, South Korea, England, and Italy.

Benjamin Pierce can be heard on three recordings available from major online retailers. He is a Miraphone performing artist.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

With its jazz-tinged score, conspicuous display of technology, and scenes from modern, everyday life (including the notorious “bathtub aria” in which a naked soprano sings about the joys of modern plumbing), Paul Hindemith’s opera Neues vom Tage (News of the Day, 1929) seems to embody the Zeitgeist of Berlin’s “Golden Twenties.” The fact that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels denounced the opera in 1934 and the rumor that Hitler himself walked out of a performance, horrified by the sight of the bathing prima donna, only further cements the work’s association with Weimar modernist culture. For scholars today, the work primarily serves as a paradigm of Zeitoper, the Weimar-era genre of opera that dealt with contemporary issues.

Yet Hindemith’s biographer Heinrich Strobel would later claim that rather than a Zeitoper, Neues vom Tage was actually “eine Oper gegen die Zeit,” or an opera against the time. Hindemith’s publishers also complained that the opera had been misunderstood as a “glorification” of the Weimar Republic, instead of a “castigation and condemnation” of those years. Based on Hindemith’s correspondence with his publishers and contemporary music criticism, I suggest that Neues vom Tage expressed an ambivalent, even negative, stance towards modernity. Critics understood Hindemith’s signature “objective” musical style not as a rejection of pre-war romanticism, but as conveying the superficiality of modern mass culture. Likewise, the score’s pervasive jazz rhythms represented for many the increased mechanization of life, reflecting the concerns over rationalization and Americanization found in works such as Siegfried Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses (1930).

Re-evaluating Neues vom Tage challenges the standard portrait of Hindemith as the consummate musical modernist. It also sheds light on the larger anxieties in interwar German society regarding modernity and its signifiers (industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, and globalization), which in turn deflates the still-prevalent image of the Weimar Republic as a progressive cultural haven. Ultimately, the opera considered emblematic of the 1920s may have represented a statement against that very time.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the N. Edward Gary St. Garage by the Performing Arts Center.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.

Fee-based parking is available at the Pleasant St. Garage by the Music Building.