Read PDF Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society)

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) book. Happy reading Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Music and Identity Politics (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) Pocket Guide.
Music and Protest (The Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society) [Ian Peddie] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This volume of.
Table of contents

People in the nineteenth century experiencing the growing power of nation-states, the various conflicts within and beyond Europe, the hunger for colonial power, and the drastic changes brought about by economic and cultural connections beyond the local could only speculate, positively or negatively, about the future. They did not live through the trauma of world wars and the many nationalistic agendas that erupted during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Today one may be more accepting of cosmopolitanism as a tool to reflect on the nation in positive, if somewhat utopian, ways. But when looked at as a historical experience and practice, awareness of the potentials of cosmopolitanism as a sociopolitical tool and as a cultural practice is less straightforward.

The second challenge involves exploring cosmopolitanism specifically in the nineteenth century, for the period has been predominantly associated with the declining of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and with a teleological account of the nation-state and nationalism. I do not want to suggest that cosmopolitanism is a practice or an experience that comes from nowhere, or that it is a universalizing force that marks its presence everywhere.

Rather, my use of the term here is dependent on the understanding that cosmopolitan ideals surface in specific sociohistorical conditions that privilege particular places and times. As such, scholars have rightly pointed out the need to pay attention to the plurality of the concept, as cosmopolitanism s. They centralized music production and, most important, had the financial and political power to circulate music in markets across borders and oceans. Thus, addressing cosmopolitanism as an experience originating in Europe during an age of heightened nationalism, imperialism, and commercial expansion unavoidably leads to issues of power relationships, which are evident in the flow of music into and out of specific urban hubs in Europe.

At the same time, the musical practices associated with Europe, once outside their place of origin, could no longer be restricted to or conditioned by their sociopolitical and geographical origins or to cultural narratives of national belonging; rather, they became independently meaningful to large numbers of people in various places. As such, understanding the growth of nineteenth-century cosmopolitan experiences—experiences beyond local and national borders—can offer a historical grounding with which one can juxtapose our present.

Most important, the focus on cosmopolitanism allows us to address the nineteenth century not as a static, nation-centric century, but as a period when national borders, being shaped and constantly disputed, challenged traditional forms of belonging. In fact, scholars have shown that during the nineteenth century it was a challenge, rather than a given, for nation builders to forge national sentiments.

Patriarchy Gets Funky by Naomi Klein

It also entailed a gamut of possible aesthetic perceptions of the world, such as the limits between concepts of unity and diversity, between the rational and the illusory, between the real and social versus the ideal and reflective, between art and nonart, between the original and the copy. These dualities were not experienced as static concepts, but as challenges within a constantly changing and connected world. One should go further, then, and explore cosmopolitanism during the nineteenth century not merely as a concept intertwined with the nation-state, or an identity that paralleled or opposed the politics of nationalism, but as an experience and a practice that transcended utopian Enlightenment ideals.

In its various manifestations, cosmopolitanism became a most pervasive consciousness of the century, whether in the terms of commerce and forms of cultural currencies, as a tool to reflect on the possibilities of technology to transcend and reshape time and space, or as an expression of optimism for a bright world devoid of human disconnections.

Cosmopolitanism could be manifested in the form of a romantic self-detachment from a potentially larger world beyond oneself, or as a critical tool disguised as aestheticism; it could be articulated as a gloomy presage of an uncertain future without ties to locality or as a way to critique decadent bohemian escapism. Cosmopolitanism also became associated with an urban sphere of daily life, highlighting the role of the city in challenging and escaping the tentacles of the nation, politically and culturally, as the subversive Other.

As Tanya Agatholous pointed out, cosmopolitan experiences and practices thrived in cities exactly because cities allowed for an aesthetic perception that tied global perspectives to a localized, urban experience claiming to be unbound by nation-state ties. On the one hand, the city provided an experience of a world out of control, filled with rootless cosmopolitans.

Reflections on the Politics of Culture

On the other, it offered promises of a shared global imaginary, a space in which to display the forces of modernity as spectacles, to showcase nations and cultures in world exhibitions, and to reflect on Self and Otherness. Connections beyond the local and the nation unleashed a gamut of political, social, and cultural bonds among people from distant places, fueling everything from anarchist causes and antislavery movements to literary circles determined to detach themselves from the aesthetic grasp of nationalistic agendas.

But the urban bourgeoisie was not a monolithic sociopolitical group, and their response to cosmopolitanism was not one of wholehearted engagement. They were threatened by the emergence of socialism on a global scale and felt vulnerable before ideals of progress that relegated the past to a mythical state and overestimated the future in lieu of the present, leading to a sense of historical unpredictability, an angst that was manifested by expressions of detachment: from the local, from the city, from the nation, and from the possibilities of the universal. In the end, cosmopolitan experiences and practices encompassed more than privileged Europeans and intellectual travelers attempting to make sense of their own cultural identity politics.

They became part of the experiences of individuals and groups that, willingly or not, became connected to the political, commercial, and cultural expansions originating in Europe. Understood as a negotiated space of shared experiences and practices, the concept of cosmopolitanism has the potential to offer a fresh, context-based, historical interpretation of a nineteenth-century, European-centered music production through its multiple flows beyond its places of origin.

But the focus on cosmopolitanism can drive bolder ideas with implications that go beyond a mere suggestion of historiographical review.


  • Special offers and product promotions!
  • Navigation;
  • Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, Georgina Waylen, and S. Laurel Weldon.

They show how ideas acquired wings, as Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand realized in But Wagner also transformed his works, and his ideas about his works, into borderless commodities and had a strong hand in making them a worldwide phenomenon. The success of his enterprises shows his understanding of the sociopolitical and cultural transformations of Europe at midcentury and is a tangible example that not only ideas but also artistic works could navigate the complex forces of an increasingly connected nineteenth century.

As part of both a universalizing humanistic plot inherited from the eighteenth century and a corollary to the nineteenth-century political realization of the nation, the concept of cosmopolitanism can thus prove fruitful for explorations of a nuanced musical ecology during a time in which imperial expansion, technological advances, the growth of global capitalism, and the increasing complexities of urban life multiplied the possibilities and the needs for border crossing and facilitated cross-cultural encounters and reflections.

Conservatory at a Glance

It is telling, however, that the association of music with the politics of nationalism and the construction of national identity has taken precedence in explorations of nineteenth-century musical practices. Nonetheless, avoiding the entanglements of a cosmopolitan network and its contradictory position toward the politics of nationalism, twentieth-century discourses about music continued to approach cosmopolitanism in music during the nineteenth century as nothing but an opposite to nationalism, as a stigmatized term with snobbish or racial undertones, or as a practice that would eventually corrupt the lineage of pure national musics.

To be sure, the political force of nations and ideologies of nationalism did leave a strong mark on ways of understanding music practices during the nineteenth century, a topic that has been widely explored in the literature. However, more often than not discourses about music, nation, and culture in nineteenth-century Europe have been not only one-sided, but also, to an extent, contradictory.

The degree to which these anxieties intensified as the nineteenth century progressed paralleled the pace at which the cosmopolitan presence became more conspicuous—due in part to the technological improvements that enabled wider and faster circulation of information. As Bruce Robbins noted, the dynamics of music and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century were ultimately an outgrowth, or ideological reflection, of global capitalism, a context too often associated with a twentieth-century malaise.

Music and Identity Politics

The expansion of global capitalism during the nineteenth century led to a shift from localized and private to public support for musical practices, as well as to a growing relationship between music and markets shaped by fashion, geared toward profits, and dependent on new social relations and connections beyond local and national borders. Richard Wagner was not the first, and the only one, to attempt to make himself relevant and powerful within a complex, connected world that moved in unprecedented directions.

In general, musicians working in the theater, a commercial enterprise from its inception, understood the potential of music to seize the attention of various audiences and worked toward that goal. But composers devoted to instrumental music, a medium that can operate beyond the immediate context of verbal language, were also conscious of the need to blur the lines between and among nations and locality.

In fact, most artists and musicians during the nineteenth century, including those touted as pillars of national traditions, were confronted with and challenged by music markets and the need to make music meaningful both nearby and far away, and to navigate the borders of various spheres of their political, social, and cultural lives. But the concept of cosmopolitanism is most often evoked in music literature when musicians make incursions into European cities to find a cosmopolitan urban space, to become cosmopolitans, to re produce cosmopolitan musics, and in the end, to contribute to the growth of a dominant identity matrix centered on a few cities.

From this perspective, cosmopolitanism is touted as a static practice that is difficult to define in musical terms, unless it is tackled as a homogeneous musical style associated with one place and believed to belong to specific composers. The badge of cosmopolitan may serve as a new modus operandis within the quest for canonic recognition.

Limited Accommodations

One should assume that cultural hybridity happens. More often than not, these approaches tend to enforce what they are supposed to interrogate. And while this might be exactly the case in most instances, as a large literature has demonstrated, the dominance of cultural relativism in social sciences has offered very few tools to move beyond normative studies about cultural distinctiveness and to allow for considerations about larger patterns of cultural relationships. I believe that cosmopolitanism, as the concept has recently been re defined in the social sciences, is most productive to address nineteenth-century music practices when it is evoked as a way of confronting modernity and reflecting on its connected, shared cultural practices.

The cosmopolitan lens can serve to elucidate large and ever-changing patterns of cultural movements not bound by the nation or by locality, to explore cultural expressions resulting from shared perceptions of the world and shared spaces of cultural attachments and detachments that ultimately come to exist beyond the marketability of cultural capital. As a flexible signifier not bound by language, music can serve us particularly well in these explorations. What does the practice say about the music, about the process, and about those near and those far?

For example, Gillen Darcy Wood explores virtuosity as an outgrowth of and a response to both markets and technology. One can suggest that Italian bravura singing offered a take on the voice as part of the mechanics of the era, and composers dedicated melodies that emphasized the visual aspects of the culture of idolatry through the voice.

These welcome studies have opened paths for redeeming nineteenth-century modernity from the confines of the politics of nationalism. Considering cosmopolitanism as a nineteenth-century experience and practice allows us to contemplate music practices originating in Europe beyond its Europeaness.

But one should go further and address cosmopolitanism as an ideal that was articulated through a complex interplay of shared aesthetic modes of reflection and collective creativity. If markets and technological advances in communication made possible the crossing of borders, engagements with cultural difference, and the extension of social belongings, they also supported shared spaces of aesthetic expressions and perceptions of the universal. The relevance of cosmopolitanism for explorations of nineteenth-century musical practices rests on the assumption that not only musical production and consumption, but also aesthetic stances and creative solutions, were shared and negotiated by many beyond geographical boundaries and the confines of politics of national cultural belonging.

Papastergiadis proposes an exploration of the aesthetic dimension of cosmopolitanism, as well as a consideration of the cosmopolitan worldview that is produced through aesthetics. Alberto Nepomuceno — lived through the trenches of a complex nineteenth-century musical world. His personal and professional life also led to connections with Edward Grieg and Gustav Mahler. Like many of his contemporaries, Nepomuceno had aspirations to write music for a large audience, both local and far away, and to belong to a music world as he perceived it: one that was shaped in Europe and that, he believed, had the potential to be universal.


  • Diversity and difference in communication.
  • The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob [with Biographical Introduction].
  • This Is Me Growing up in My Country Montserrat, WI.
  • Introduction: Gender and Politics: A Gendered World, a Gendered Discipline - Oxford Handbooks.
  • Seaside (The Shadow Over Earth Book 1).
  • Identity politics - Wikipedia.
  • Monthly Review | Reflections on the Politics of Culture!

But Nepomuceno was not a citizen of, nor did he have political commitments to, any of the European countries in which he lived. At thirty years of age he moved across the Atlantic and spent his life far from European audiences in large concert and opera halls, away from the scrutiny of powerful publishers and critics. The few publications of his music during his lifetime seldom made it to the coveted venues in Europe; only a few of his works were heard in Europe, although some were performed in his home country, mostly as part of an imagined legacy that fulfilled local nationalistic agendas.

At the same time, Nepomuceno lived in a coastal capital city with a large port opened historically, politically, and commercially to Europe. Comte, who is so bitter an opponent of all anthropomorphism, even in its most evanescent shapes, should have committed the mistake of imposing upon the external world an arrangement which so obviously springs from a limitation of the human consciousness, is somewhat strange. And it is the more strange when we call to mind how, at the outset, M. The metaphor which M.