The Viennese-born musicologist Georg Knepler (1906-2003) was one of the most important music scholars of the twentieth-century. Being both Jewish and a Communist, he emigrated to London in 1934 and returned to continental Europe after World War II. He was active for many years as a pianist and conductor, and, for a short while, as cultural secretary of the post-war Austrian Communist Party. His most enduring contribution to music history, however, was as a musical thinker. He produced a series of significant musicological studies in the years following his move to the German Democratic Republic in 1949. Inspired by the work of East German philosophers and scientists, he developed a paradigm of historical-materialist musicology and music anthropology that combined the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels with modern interdisciplinary research fields such as cybernetics, semiotics and bioacoustics. The essay resituates Knepler’s work and ideas in the context of twentieth-century debates about the aims and assumptions of Marxist and critical aesthetics and revisits previous interpretations of his relationship to New Musicology. At the center of the discussion is Knepler’s notion of music as an evolving system of communication linked on the one hand with social and material conditions, and on the other with biological and anthropological universals. In developing my argument, I explore Knepler’s critique of several intellectual threads of his time, including the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism, the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, and post-structuralism.

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Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies