Western Music and Race

Edited by Julie Brown
Cambridge University Press, 8/30/2007
EAN 9780521838870, ISBN10: 0521838878

Hardcover, 308 pages, 25.5 x 18.3 x 2.3 cm
Language: English

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 Germany, 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.

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 Wagner's Parsifal John Deathridge
6. Otto Weininger and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna Julie Brown
7. Ancestral voices
anti-Semitism and Ernest Bloch's racial theories of art Klara Moricz
8. Percy Grainger and the American Nordicists Malcolm Gillies and David Pear
9. Race and hybridity
Kaikhosru Sorabji's '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
1900–33 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 (1915–36) 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.

'... a densely packed and annotated, but hugely readable, survey. ... All in all, a tremendous read, edited to a high standard.' Gramophone