Hella Brock


Hella Maria Brock, née Siegmund-Schultze, is a German music educator, musicologist and Edvard Grieg scholar.

Life

Brock was born in the daughter of the lawyer and mayor of Schweinitz, Hans Siegmund-Schultze, and his wife, the teacher Ida née Böhme, attended the elementary schools in Magdeburg and Legnica and, from 1934 to 1939, the Lyzeum in Liegnitz, where she passed the Abitur in 1939. Afterwards she was called up for the Reichsarbeitsdienst. From 1940 to 1942 she studied musicology, piano and English literature at the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, and from 1942 to 1944 at the University of Vienna and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where she passed the Staatsexamen for teaching at secondary schools in the subjects of musicology and music practice in March 1944. Afterwards she continued her studies of English language and literature in Breslau until the war-related evacuation in 1945.
After the Flight and expulsion she moved to Wegeleben in February 1945. At the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg she passed the external Staatsexamen in English language and literature for the teaching profession at secondary schools in March 1945, and in the autumn the pedagogical examination for the studienassessor for the higher teaching profession in music and English. From 1946 she worked as a secondary school teacher at schools in Halle and Merseburg and from 1947 as a lecturer in English and German at the of the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1952, Brock began an aspirancy at the Institute for Music Education of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where she was awarded a doctorate in 1955 with a dissertation on the Dramaturgy of the of the 20th century by Fritz Reuter.
In 1959 she became the founding director of the Institute for Music Education at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald, where she taught the subjects methodology of music teaching, work analysis and music history. In Greifswald she habilitated in 1960 with a thesis supervised by Fritz Reuter on "Inhalt und Funktion des deutschen Schulliederbuches von der Gründung des Deutschen Reiches bis zum Ende des 2. Weltkrieges" and was appointed professor for theory and methodology of music education in 1963. In 1972 she was appointed professor of cultural studies and German studies at the Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig. Brock worked for many years on the commission for the development of study programmes for music education in the GDR and was temporarily head of this commission. She retired at the end of the spring semester 1980.
From 1967 to 1971 she was a member of the Volkskammer in the parliamentary group of the Cultural Association of the GDR.
Brock has a daughter and a son. Her brother Walther Siegmund-Schultze was also a musicologist.

Grieg research

Brock first dealt with Edvard Grieg in Greifswald, when she invited the Norwegian musicologist Olav Gurvin to a lecture on Grieg during the. In 1985 she received permission to travel to Oslo for research purposes. In the following years she completed her knowledge of the Norwegian language and collaborated with Grieg researchers from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Brock published basic works in the German language.
Brock was significantly involved in the preservation of the former place of work of Edvard Grieg in Leipzig. In October 1998 the association Grieg Meeting Place Leipzig was founded with the aim of establishing a memorial and meeting place for the composer in the house built in 1874 by Otto Brückwald for the Edition Peters at Talstraße 10. Brock was elected the first president of the association. Thanks to the initiative of the association, the dilapidated private rooms of the publisher families Max Abraham and Henri Hinrichsen, in which Edvard Grieg was often a guest, were renovated and opened in 2005 as Grieg meeting place.
Under Brock's leadership, the association held two Grieg conferences with international participation in 2004 and 2008. For reasons of age, she resigned in 2008 as president of the Grieg meeting place Leipzig and was later elected its honorary president.

Awards