Twentieth-Century Music and Politics

When considering the role music played in the major totalitarian regimes of the century it is music's usefulness as propaganda that leaps first to mind. But as a number of the chapters in this volume demonstrate, there is a complex relationship both between art music and politicised mass culture, and between entertainment and propaganda. Nationality, self/other, power and ideology are the dominant themes of this book, whilst key topics include: music in totalitarian regimes; music as propaganda; music and national identity; émigré communities and composers; music's role in shaping identities of 'self' and 'other' and music as both resistance to and instrument of oppression. Taking the contributions together it becomes clear that shared experiences such as war, dictatorship, colonialism, exile and emigration produced different, yet clearly inter-related musical consequences.

Pauline Fairclough is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on Shostakovich and Soviet music, and is currently writing her monograph on early Soviet musical culture, Classics for the Masses.

Contents: Foreword, Robin Milner-Gulland; Preface; Introduction, Pauline Fairclough; 'A world of Marxist orthodoxy'? Alan Bush's Wat Tyler in Great Britain and the German Democratic Republic, Joanna Bullivant; Stravinsky's Petrushka: modernizing the past, Russianizing the future, or, how Stravinsky learned to be an exile, Jonathan Cross; Détente to Cold War: Anglo-Soviet musical exchanges in the late Stalin period, Pauline Fairclough; Front theatre, musical films and the war in Nazi cinema, Guido Heldt; 'Those damn foreigners': xenophobia and British musical life during the first half of the 20th century, Erik Levi; 'An angry ape': some preliminary thoughts about Orango, Gerard McBurney; A bridge between two worlds: the founding years of the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Bogumila Mika; Winning hearts and minds? Soviet music in the Cold War struggle against the West, Simo Mikkonen; Preserving the façade of normal times: musical life in Belgrade under the German occupation (1941-44), Melita Milin; Musical commemorations in post-Civil War Spain: Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto Heroico, Eva Moreda Rodriguez; The radicalization and ghettoization of music in the General Government, Katarzyna Naliwajek; 'I only need the good old Budapest': Hungarian cabaret in wartime London, Florian Scheding; Irish nationalism, British imperialism, and the role of popular music, Derek B. Scott; Shostakovich as film music theorist, Joan Titus; Diaspora, music, and politics: Russian musical life in Shanghai during the inter-war period, Hon-Lun Yang; Select bibliography; Index.