Music Politics Research Articles

Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser, and: The Musical Legacy of Wartime France by Leslie A. Sprout (review)

Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II. By Annegret Fauser. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xv, 366 p. ISBN 9780199948031 (hardcover), $39.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France. By Leslie A. Sprout. (California Studies in 20th-Century Music, 16.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [xxiii, 280 p. ISBN 9780520275300 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520955271 (e-book), $65.] Music examples, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. While the Second World War once loomed as hard caesura in twentieth-century musical life, two recent books reveal the wartime years as anything but silent. Annegret Fauser's Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II and Leslie Sprout's The Musical legacy of Wartime France expose the often-surprising continuities between musical life before, during, and after one of the most disruptive periods in human history. Despite significant disparity between the wartime experience in the United States and France, much can be gained by reading Fauser's and Sprout's books with an eye toward overlapping concerns and productive tensions. In treating an era recent enough that numerous survivors remain to enrich the historical record with their testimony, both books necessarily contend with the issue of selective memory. For Fauser, the iconic sounds of the American experience during the Second World War mainly derive from popular sources: Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrews Sisters. Yet classical music also played significant role in the war effort, and the context of the war defined the sounds of classical music in crucial ways that we have forgotten (sometimes intentionally). Fauser advocates defamiliarizing the soundscape of this (p. 9) to get past sonic representations in popular culture that distort the historical record. Sprout, too, excavates what are often intentionally suppressed memories about the soundscape of the war. She focuses on the fraught and at times perilous wartime experiences of France's most prestigious composers, including several whose wartime music became iconic in the postwar era. In Sprout's account, aesthetic choices, historical narratives, and critical debates typically understood as exclusive to the postwar period are recontextualized as echoes of musical politics during the war. Taken together, the work of Fauser and Sprout corresponds to the second phase of postwar critical trajectory theorized by Maja Zehfuss (Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011]). In the first phase, society memorializes the recent past in order to move on from (or remember) the finer details of pain and suffering experienced during the war. Constructing war monuments and consecrating battlefields, throwing ticker tape parades, and publicizing award ceremonies--these all involve what Zehfuss suggests is more about forgetting than remembering (p. 63). Eventually, however, the opposite is necessary: scholars like Fauser and Sprout find themselves in position of haring to forget or challenge layers of unreliable memory in order to remember the finer historical details of the war--including uncomfortable truths that contradict received narratives. For Fauser and Sprout, such truths include the politicized framework in which music was produced and consumed; the propaganda value that classical music held for the governments of the United States and France, just as it did in Nazi Germany; and the continuing influence of Depression-era institutions and policies on music making during the war. Fauser opens Sounds of War not in 1939 but in 2009, with the performances of Aaron Copland's wartime music that took place in Washington, D.C. around President Obama's first inauguration. The continued relevance of that music to listeners in 2009 (in the middle of another war) and its use as a political gesture rallying Americans . …

Pulse of the people: political rap music and black politics

Pulse of the people: political rap music and black politics

Flowing Beyond Sectarian Ethno-politics: Ethnography of Jewish and Arab Rap in Israel

This article addresses the meaning of political music by drawing on the relationships between Jewish and Arab rappers in Israel. However, this article aims to go beyond the concerns of resistance and hegemony that are central to the power-relations paradigm typical of studies of both Israeli society and rap. Instead, it emphasizes how cross references made by rappers transgress social and political oppositions. Based on data gathered from various venues and interviews with performers in the local scene, the author seeks to explain why political music, even in its most scathing guise, should never be taken for a mere ‘musical politics’.

Musical politics of North Korea - Focusing on five revolutionary operas -

북한의 음악정치는 김정은 시대에도 중요한 선전 선동 수단으로 활용되고 있다. 북한의 3대 후계자로 김정은의 등장을 처음 알린 것은 김정은을 찬양하는 노래 중에서 가장 먼저 발표된 <발걸음>이 2009년 10월 9일 밤 북한 관영 조선중앙TV에서 합창되는 장면이다. 이후 <발걸음> 노래는 조선인민군공훈합창단이 신년음악회에서 합창곡으로 연주하는가 하면, 모내기 작업 중 인민들을 대상으로 <발걸음>을 지도하는 장면이 방영되었으며 각종 스포츠대회와 집단체조 아리랑, 수중발레, 태양절의 열병식 음악으로 이용되고 있다. 북한에서 음악은 예술이 아니다. 그것은 무기이며 투쟁의 수단이다. "일종의 정치"인 것이다. 북한의 음악은 “대중 교양의 훌륭한 수단”의 하나로 간주되며 사상교양을 강조함에 따라 가사를 통한 의사전달이 가능한 성악곡을 중시한다.

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Collaboration, Principle, and Compromise: Negotiating the Links between Music and Politics

Collaboration, Principle, and Compromise: Negotiating the Links between Music and Politics<i />

Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival

Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth, and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival

Music and Politics

Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Feminist Revolutionary Music Criticism and Wagner Reception

Abstract Histories of progressive musical politics in mid-nineteenth-century Germany often center on the writings of Richard Wagner and Franz Brendel, relegating contributors such as the feminist and author Louise Otto (1819–95) to the periphery. However, Otto's lifelong engagement with music, including her two librettos, two essay collections on the arts, and numerous articles and feuilletons, demonstrates how one contemporary woman considered the progressive movements in music and in women's rights to be interrelated. A staunch advocate of Wagner, Otto contributed to numerous music journals, as well as her own women's journal, advising her female readers to engage with the music of the New German School. In the context of the middle-class women's movement, she saw music as a space for female advancement through both performance and the portrayals of women onstage. Her writings offer us a glimpse into the complex network of Wagner proponents who also supported women's rights, at the same time providing evidence for what some contemporary conservative critics saw as a concomitant social threat from both Wagnerian musical radicalism and the emancipated woman.

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Music and Politics in the Spain of the 1960s: The Case of Tomás Marco

Music and Politics in the Spain of the 1960s: The Case of Tomás Marco

Music as Propaganda of Fascist Italy (1922–43)

Music and politics are both expressions of a given society, whose values they reflect and translate into action. This society's ideals are taken on in music theory and politics, and put into practice in music products and in the formulation and enforcement of laws and administrative measures. However, artists and politicians may also grasp in advance the social change in preparation, identifying important goals, and promoting them through their works. In doing so, they encourage and lead artistic and/or political movements that aspire to guide the evolution of society towards the desired goals. Because of the effect that music and politics have on society, and circularly suffer from it, I hypothesized and proved a circular relationship among them: 1) influencing the emotions of individuals and groups, music can stimulate them to take a specific political behavior, and 2) politics may affect the behavior of those who make music or listen to it, favoring or opposing the production and dissemination of certain styles or genres. Methodology: the research used either primary sources (writings, music pieces, and theatrical plays published by politicians, cultural exponents, and musicians) or secondary sources (works of historians, politicians, and musicologists).

The Scholar behind the Medal: Edward J. Dent (1876–1957) and the Politics of Music History

ABSTRACTThis article engages with issues of musical historiography and politics – mainly in the 1930s and 1940s – through the example of Edward J. Dent, a towering figure of international musical and musicological life during that period. Dent's career was tightly interwoven with musical and musicological practice both in Britain and in the wider Western world. It offers a fascinating access point to European musical modernism on the one hand, and to mid-century concerns with the uses of music history on the other. In this article, I focus on these aspects of Dent's career and their intersections by exploring first Dent's involvement with the International Society for Contemporary Music, before turning to two further and closely related issues: Dent's scholarly work of that period – especially his turn to Handel – and his involvement in international cultural politics during the 1930s and 1940s.

The Process of Transition in the Musical Politics of the USSR in the Khrushchev Years

The Process of Transition in the Musical Politics of the USSR in the Khrushchev Years

Totalitarianism and music in the context of the 20th century

The article Totalitarianism and Music evaluates the system of totalitarianism and realization of its ideologies in arts. The article does not aspire to provide comprehensive and detailed analysis of totalitarianism, its purpose is to create an informed impetus for further in-depth studies of totalitarianism, the objectives are to (1) comprehend the totalitarian systems and the musical culture politics established in 1930ies by the most notable examples of totalitarianism – USSR and Germany (3rd Reich), (2) to compare these examples, highlighting the main ideological conceptions of the realization of the aforementioned culture politics (socialistic realism, songs of masses, degenerate music, censorship, ceremonial, music outside the law, et al), (3) to observe differences and similarities in the perceptions of the ideological criteria of “correct” art (principle of party and principle of nationalism), (4) to define the place and role of the artist – creative personality – in these systems. The work employs methods based on research of scientific and journalistic sources, audio and video documents that capture processes of the given time period, personal competencies of composer and conductor, as well as other available materials. The conclusion of the article offers a comparison of similarities and differences of music politics in totalitarian systems. Fundamentally, several similar totalitarian ideologies and mechanisms of artistic control exist; differences hide within their realization and concept of priorities, as well as in the general perception and view of culture politics. Music and arts are subject to control exerted by party and ruling elite; the term music outside the law is clearly defined. Musical and ideological upbringing objectives facilitate its purpose for wide social strata (music in factories, for town squares, for working people, etc). The relative competence of the leaders (Y. Stalin and A. Hitler) in music history and musical processes, their general interest in music and arts, as well as desire and pleasure to act as “enlightened rulers” facilitated spreading of specific musical taste and comparatively proficient evaluation of musical tendencies, as well as valid concept definitions. The “ideological” composer of both systems was Beethoven, confirming the universal nature of his music. In the Soviet Union the mass musical education was realized through new music of social realism, reflecting the ideology of the regime. The culture politics of the 3rd Reich prioritized values of classical music. The USSR differentiated music and art according to their ideological characteristics, declaring the aesthetics of social realism and mass songs the cornerstones of its culture ideology. In Germany, however, music and arts were differentiated according to national characteristics (degenerate art). In contrast with the communist ideology of ceremonial and commissioned music, Germany forbids composition of dedications to individuals or to party. The juxtaposition of mass song and academic music, as well as the contrasting attitudes towards innovative elements in art are the most significant differences between both totalitarian culture politic systems.

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Recent Books on Music and Politics

Book review: Music and Politics

Book review: Music and Politics

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music by Sally Macarthur (review)

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music by Sally Macarthur (review)