Music, Power, and Politics

"Music, Power, and Politics" presents thirteen different cultural perspectives on a single theme: the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from seven countries (England, People's Republic of China, Germany, South Africa, USA, the former Yugoslavia, and Iran) explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The cultural and historical scope of the collection is intentionally broad and includes essays that examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Mao's China, and modern day North Korea; propagandistic popular song in civil war-era USA; hegemonic processes in the folklorization of indigenous dance in Mexico; postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia, Bolivia, and Barbados; punk music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for women in the UK; the subversion of racial stereotypes through Trinidadian music in the USA; music as a tool of popular resistance in modern day Iran; governmental control of music recording and broadcast in pre-unification East Germany; and strategies of surveillance and power relations within audio technologies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Scholars and students of music, politics, and cultural history will enjoy this groundbreaking collection.

Annie J. Randall

INTRODUCTIONAnnie J. RandallCHAPTER 1A Censorship of Forgetting: Origins and Origin Myths of "Battle Hymn of the Republic"Annie J. RandallCHAPTER 2Discipline and Choralism: The Birth of Musical ColonialismGrant OlwageCHAPTER 3Power Needs Names: Hegemony, Folklorization, and the Viejitos Dance of Michoacán, MexicoRuth Hellier-TinocoCHAPTER 4The Power to Influence Minds: German Folk Music During the Nazi Era and AfterBritta SweersCHAPTER 5The Making of a National Musical Icon: Xian Xinghai and his Yellow River CantataHon-Lun YangCHAPTER 6Dancing for the Eternal PresidentKeith HowardCHAPTER 7"Después de 500 Años" [After 500 Years]: The Role of Saya in Bolivia's Black Cultural MovementRobert W. TemplemanCHAPTER 8The Power of Recently Revitalized Serbian Rural Folk Music in Urban SettingsJelena JovanovicCHAPTER 9Hands off my instrument!Helen ReddingtonCHAPTER 10Barbadian Tuk Music - A Fusion of Musical CulturesSharon MeredithCHAPTER 11There Goes the Transnational Neighborhood: Calypso Buys a BungalowMichael EldridgeCHAPTER 12Fighting for the Right (to) Party? Discursive Negotiations of Power in Pre-Unification East German Popular MusicEdward LarkeyCHAPTER 13Who's Listening?Bennett HoggCHAPTER 14Subversion and Counter-subversion: Power, Control and Meaning in the New Iranian Pop MusicLaudan Nooshin