Cannon Consumption: Food Advertising as a Contribution to a Global Cultural History of Music
Numerous advertising clips from the international food industry around the turn of the millennium demonstrate that the established musical repertoire – particularly in the field of musical theatre – has been integrated into new narratives through multimedia and recontextualised in cultural-historical terms. By examining changes to the music and lyrics, one can trace a process whereby the underlying music-historical material is embedded within new semantics.
This not only produces new contexts of meaning, but also results in the blending of familiar musical theatre scenes – or at least recognisable melodies – with alternative audiovisual narratives. The relationship between the supposedly ‘original’ work, its cultural-historical context and the audience is thereby readjusted; at the same time, there is occasionally a grotesque exaggeration of established clichés and stereotypes of the ‘Global South’. Whilst the function of advertising clips may initially appear clearly defined – as they primarily serve to market specific products – they can also be interpreted as vehicles of cultural-historical significance.
This lecture centres on the following questions, which will be discussed using selected case studies: At what levels does the described reframing of excerpts from the art music repertoire actually take place? To what extent does this affect aspects such as the canonisation and deconstruction of music-historical repertoires? Finally, a critical examination will be undertaken to assess the extent to which the described embedding of music-historical repertoires within multimedia advertising contexts can contribute to the global history of music or, conversely, run counter to its aims.
Carolin Krahn is a musicologist and has been Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Kassel (DE) since 2024. From autumn 2020 to 2024, she worked as a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome. Following three years as a university assistant at the University of Vienna, she worked there on her second book on ‘early music’ as a key concept in the process of nation-building in Italy. Carolin Krahn studied musicology, early church history and Romance languages at the University of Würzburg, the Institut Catholique de Paris and the University of Vienna on a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. After graduating with a Master’s thesis on Eros and Thanatos in Richard Strauss’s orchestral songs, she was awarded a visiting fellowship and a DAAD scholarship at Harvard University. From 2011 to 2013, Carolin Krahn was a PhD candidate and a fellow of the European Recovery Programme at Stanford University. In 2017, she was awarded her doctorate for a thesis on the image of Italian music in the German-speaking world around 1800. She also completed a postgraduate programme in music education and music management at the Detmold University of Music and has been working as a freelance music dramaturg for over ten years.