Eastern European National Music as Concept and Commodity at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Although national music was a frequent topic of Austro-German aesthetic and critical discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contemporary commentators were often unable to distinguish particular national styles in representations by Austro-German composers. I argue specifically that representations of a variety of eastern European national musics were often received equivocally, for a number of different signifieds were potentially implied by a shared set of stylistic signifiers. Such representations may best be understood not as imitations of discrete national styles but as translations of the broader perception of eastern Europe and of its music as rooted in an undoubtedly largely imaginary past. The translation into music of the ideology of folkloristic simplicity, naturalness, and artlessness, furthermore, was a very marketable one, catering to the tastes and abilities of amateurs in a way that imitations of specific national musics could not have done.