Western Music And Race

Edited by Julie Brown

This contributory volume, the first book of its kind, provides a snapshot of the ways in which discourse about Western music and race overlapped and became intertwined during the period from Wagner’s death to the rise of National Socialism and fascism elsewhere in Europe. At these two framing moments such overlapping was at its most explicit: Wagner’s racially inflected ‘regeneration theories’ were at one end and institutionalised cultural racism at the other. The book seeks to provide insights into the key national contexts in which such discourses circulated in the interim period, as well as to reflect a range of archival, historical, critical, and philosophical approaches to the topic. National contexts covered include Germay, France, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and North America. The contributors to the volume are leading scholars in the field, and the book contains many illustrative music examples and images which bring the subject matter to life.

Bibliographic Details

11 b/w illus. 1 map 21 music examples

Contents

• Preface: Music, history, trauma: Western music and race 1883–1933 Julie Brown
• Part I. Overviews and Critical Frameworks: 1. Erasure: displacing and misplacing race in twentieth-century music historiography Philip V. Bohlman
• 2. Secrets, lies, and transcriptions: revisions on race, black music and culture Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jnr.
• 3. Gypsy Violins and Hot Rhythms: race, popular music and governmentality Brian Currid
• 4. The concept of race in German musical discourse Pamela M. Potter
• Part II. Racial Ideologies: 5. Strange love, or, How we learnt to stop worrying and love Wagners Parsifal John Deathridge
• 6. Otto Weininger and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna Julie Brown
• 7. Ancestral voices: anti-Semitism and Ernest Blochs racial theories of art Klara Moricz
• 8. Percy Grainger and the American Nordicists Malcolm Gillies and David Pear
• 9. Race and hybridity: Kaikhosru Sorabjis Oriental Orientalism Nalini Ghuman Gwynne
• Part III. Local Contexts: 10. Race, identity, and difference: musical acclimatisation and the Chansons populaires in Third Republic France Jann Pasler
• 11. The anti-Semitic strain in German writing on music: 1900–1933 Erik Levi
• 12. Italian music and racial discourses during the Fascist Period Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala
• 13. Romanticism, technology, and the masses: Honegger and the aesthetic allure of French Fascism Jane F. Fulcher
• 14. The concept of race in Spanish musical literature (1915–1936) Gemma Perez-Zalduondo
• 15. Manuel de Falla, flamenco and Spanish identity Michael Christoforidis
• 16. The old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell: racial discourses and the American reception of British music 1895–1945 Alain Frogley
• 17. Re-thinking the Revue negre: the critical reception of black musical shows in twenties and thirties Paris Andy Fry.