Music and Politics: An Introduction. By James Garratt

Abstract

‘Writing about music and politics can sometimes feel like a no-win game’ (p. xiii). James Garratt’s assessment in Music and Politics: A Critical Introduction will be appreciated by many readers. The relationships between these fields are multifaceted, and inseparable from the wider composition of society. An illustrative example from Garratt’s text is North Korea’s public rallies and parades, where ‘the state’s musical beat is drilled daily into its citizens’ through months of rehearsals (pp. 124–5). Perhaps the success of this strategy in securing ‘complicity’ is now less ‘puzzling’ (if not less ‘objectionable’) (p. 125) to readers from Britain who in 2020 witnessed (or participated in) ten weeks of Thursday night ‘clapping for carers’, as the historically underfunded NHS strained to respond to the ‘first wave’ of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the initiative arose outside of government and was widely seen as apolitical, the musical spectacle, with hundreds of thousands of...