Reviewed by: Composing for the State: Music in 20th-Century Dictatorships ed. by Esteban Buch, Esteban Buch, and Manuel Deniz Silva Ivan Moody Composing for the State: Music in 20th-Century Dictatorships. Edited by Esteban Buch, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva. (Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2.) Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016. [x, 224 p. ISBN 9781472437495 (hardback), $110; ISBN 9781315573236 (e-book), varies.] Music examples, index. This collection of essays deals with, as is left in no doubt by its title, music and politics, but it does not do so in a narrow sense. Indeed, the overarching impression left by reading it is of tremendous breadth, both of approach and of understanding. As the editors point out in their introduction, "The study of artistic production under dictatorships is a relatively recent phenomenon, especially in relation to music. The novelty of the approach derives from the combination of historical evidence and the living memory of these regimes, whose transformation has by no means ceased with the beginning of the twenty-first century" (p. 3). Indeed, discussion of this topic cannot be done in black and white. Rather, it demands a method that is aware both of the frailty of artists and their frequent willingness to be manipulated (or at least complicit) and of the resonances of the legacy of the dictatorial regimes under discussion to the present day. The obvious way to deal with such a vast topic is by a series of case studies, and by the time one has read through to the end of the book, the benefits of this approach are clear, not least in the way the similarities and differences between the cases discussed rise to the fore. The book is therefore divided into three sections: "Music for the People," "Composing for the Dictator," and "State Commemorations." The first of these begins with a chapter by Yannick Simon that deals with the role of music under the Vichy regime, in particular the employment of the story of Joan of Arc as part of the activities of the very short-lived arts association Jeune France. "Eleven composers were involved in these projects," writes Simon, "including the most important names of the period. The corpus raises the question of musical aesthetic continuity in the context of war and an undemocratic political regime. All the evidence suggests that the sound palette of French composers generally shrank in the aftermath of the defeat" (pp. 28–29). This narrative of failure is not the only aspect of the story, of course, as Simon recognizes, but it is indicative of the kinds of consequences of politically driven aesthetics. Those consequences in the case of Heitor Villa Lobos are analyzed by Analia Chernavsky, who deals specifically with the Dança da terra (1943) created for the celebrations of the fatherland held under the regime of Getúlio Vargas, placing the composer's willingness to collaborate in the promotion of this era as a "time of redemption" beyond any doubt (p. 48). While these kinds of activity were widespread as promotional tools for authoritarian regimes, China's engagement with the arts was on a massive scale, as recent research has increasingly shown. Hon-Lung Yan's chapter deals with the The East Is Red, a "song and dance epic" (p. 52), or what the author calls "a showcase of socialist grandiosity" (p. 53). Yan provides a detailed context that is essential for interested Western readers to understand how such mammoth displays of apparently anonymous collective work could come about, and she clarifies that this particular show was in fact an initiative of Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, in 1964. In the second section of the book is a fascinating discussion, by Katherine L. FitzGibbon, of the Deutsches Heldenrequiem (1934) by Gottfried Müller (1914–1993). Müller was a favorite of [End Page 285] the Nazi regime, and Adolf Hitler exempted him from military service so that his life would not be endangered; his most notorious work is Führerworte (1944) for choir and orchestra, set to words by Hitler. The Requiem is a similarly monumental work, attempting a kind of heroic historical background for the regime in a style suggestive...