Recent Books On Music and Politics

 

EUNICE SCHROEDER

 

The books listed in this column address music as political expression or focus to a significant degree on relationships between individual musicians or musical communities and the state. All of the works listed here were published within the previous half year. For a few citations, brief annotations are provided to help clarify political themes not implied by the titles. The list was compiled from a variety of bibliographic tools such as databases of book vendors, online catalogs, and Global Books in Print. Readers are welcome to submit additional titles to the editor (schroeder@library.ucsb.edu) for possible inclusion in the next issue of this journal.

 

Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific. By Heidi Carolyn Feldman. (Music/Culture.) Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. [xi, 306 p. ISBN 978-0-8195-6814-4. $45.]

 

“Chaos statt Musik”: Dimitri Schostakowitsch, die Prawda-Kampagne von 1936 bis 1938 und der Sozialistische Realismus. By Marco Frei. Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2006. [342 p. ISBN 978-3-89727-330-6. € 30.]

 

Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953. By Kiril Tomoff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. [xiv, 321 p. ISBN 978-0-8014-4411-1. $57.]

           

Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo. By Claire Fontijn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [xx, 372 p. + 1 CD. ISBN 978-0-19-513538-1. $45.]

After attempting to divorce her husband, Bembo (c. 1640–c. 1720) left Venice and settled in Paris, where she gained the sponsorship of Louis XIV.

           

Extended Handshake or Wrestling Match?: Youth and Urban Culture Celebrating Politics in Kenya.  By Fibian Kavulani.  (Discussion Paper, 32.) Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute, 2006.  [66 p.  ISBN 978-91-7106-567-4.  £7.95.]

           

Gurudev’s Drumming Legacy: Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan. By James Kippen. (SOAS Musicology Series.) Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. [xvi, 246 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-5424-7. $99.95.]

           

Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism. By Margaret Notley. (AMS Studies in Music.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. [vi, 245 p. ISBN 978-0-19-530547-0. $55.]

Listening Awry: Music and Alterity in German Culture. By David Schwartz. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [xxii, 216 p. ISBN 978-0-8166-4449-0, $75 (hbk.); ISBN 978-0-8166-4450-6, $25 (pbk.).]

Examines two centuries of German music in light of societal and cultural change, with emphasis on post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. One of five themes the author considers is German war songs and the subversion of German music by the Nazis.

 

Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. By Mark Evan Bonds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xx, 169 p. ISBN 978-0-691-12659-3.  $29.95.]

A study of changing conceptions of listening to instrumental music around 1800. Focuses on the symphony as political expression of German nationalism.           

 

Music Musique: French and American Piano Composition  in the Jazz Age. By Barbara Meister. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. [163 p. ISBN 978-0-253-34608-7. $29.95.]

Considers the development of French and American musical styles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within political, social, and economic contexts.

 

Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich. Edited by Nikolaus Bacht. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. [xi, 315 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-5521-3. $99.95.]

           

Musical Democracy. By Nancy Sue Love. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. [x, 168 p. ISBN 978-0-7914-6869-2. $50.]

 

A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi Germany. By Brian Currid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. [ix, 279 p. ISBN 978-0-8166-4041-6,   $69 (hbk.); ISBN 978-0-8166-4042-3, $23 (pbk.).]

           

Noten nach Plan: Die Musikverlage in der SBZ/DDR: Zensursystem, zentrale Planwirtschaft und deutsch-deutsche Beziehungen bis Anfang der 1960er Jahre. By Bettina Hinterthür. (Beiträge zur Unternehmensgeschichte, 23.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006. [574 p. ISBN 978-3-515-08837-4. €76.]

           

O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage.  By Amanda Eubanks Winkler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. [x, 232 p. ISBN 978-0-253-34805-0. $39.95.]

Analyzes seventeenth-century English stage music as direct or metaphorical representation of British subjects and their relation to the state.

 

Opera and Ideology in Prague. By Brian S. Locke. (Eastman Studies in Music, 39.) Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006. [xix, 431 p. ISBN 978-1-58046-228-0. $75.]

           

Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific. By Daphne Pi-Wei Lei. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History.) [xi, 348 p. ISBN 978-1-4039-7327-6. $69.95.]

Considers social and political parameters of performing Chinese opera in various multicultural venues.

 

Perspectives on Korean Music. Vol. 1, Preserving Korean Music: Intangible Cultural Properties as Icons of Identity. By Keith Howard. (SOAS Musicology Series.) Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2006. [228 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-3892-6. $99.95.]

 

Popular Music Censorship in Africa. Edited by Michael Drewett. (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series.) Aldershot, England: Ashgate,  2006. [xii, 228 p. ISBN 978-0-7546-5291-5. $89.95.]

           

Ruth Schonthal: A Composer’s Musical Development in Exile. By Martina Helmig. Translated by Vanessa Agnew. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. [vii, 372 p. ISBN 978-0-7734-5736-2. $129.95.] Originally published as Ruth Schönthal: Ein kompositorischer Werdegang im Exil (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1994).

           

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. By Elizabeth Wilson. 2d ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xxiv, 631 p. ISBN 978-0-691-12886-3. $24.95.]

           

Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. By Amanda J. Weidman. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. [xiii, 349 p. ISBN 978-0-8223-3631-0, $84.95 (hbk.); 978-0-8223-3620-4, $23.95 (pbk.).]

           

The Songs that Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945. By John Bush Jones. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006. [xiv, 338 p. ISBN 978-1-58465-443-8. $29.95.]

           

Von Schlachthymnen und Protestsongs: Zur Kulturgeschichte des Verhältnisses von Musik und Krieg. Edited by Annemarie Firme and Ramona Hocker. (Beiträge zur Popularmusikforschung, 35.) Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006. [301 p. ISBN: 978-3-89942-561-1. €28.80.]

           

William Byrd and His Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph. By Philp Brett. Edited by Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xiii, 252 p. ISBN 978-0-520-24758-1. $39.95.]

Includes all of Brett’s writings on Gradualia, in which he illuminates Byrd’s magnum opus as political expression.