Ph.D. candidate Samantha Heinle gives a dissertation talk. 

In my dissertation, “Kafka and the Crisis of Musical Communication,”  I consider music as a medium of communication in three settings of texts by Franz Kafka composed amid the upheaval of World War II and its aftermath—Ernst Krenek’s 1938 song cycle, Fünf Lieder nach Worten von Franz Kafka, Hans Werner Henze’s 1951 radio opera, Ein Landarzt, and Gottfried von Einem’s 1953 staged opera, Der Prozeß. I argue that Kafka’s work acts as an entry point into three different questions of musical communication: whether or not music can, and should, convey a message of political engagement; what violence is done to a musical message in the process of transmission; and how music’s interpretive polyvalence can be deployed as an expedient communications strategy.