MUSI 006C: Music & the Battle Between Good & Evil

Oxford Music Online includes Grove Music Online with scholarly articles and excellent bibliographies. Search terms such as social realism, nazism, cultural revolution, or composers' last names.

Under the dictatorships of the twentieth century, music never ceased to sound. Even when they did not impose aesthetic standards, these regimes tended to favour certain kinds of art music such as occasional works for commemorations or celebrations, symphonic poems, cantatas and choral settings. In the same way, composers who were more or less ideologically close to the regime wrote pieces of music on their own initiative, which amounted to a support of the political order. This book presents ten studies focusing on music inspired and promoted by regimes such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, France under Vichy, the USSR and its satellites, Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Maoist China, and Latin-American dictatorships. By discussing the musical works themselves, whether they were conceived as ways to provide "music for the people", to personally honour the dictator, or to participate in State commemorations of glorious historical events, the book examines the relationship between the composers and the State. This important volume, therefore, addresses theoretical issues long neglected by both musicologists and historians: What is the relationship between art music and propaganda? How did composers participate in musical life under the control of an authoritarian State? What was specifically political in the works produced in these contexts? How did audiences react to them? Can we speak confidently about "State music"? In this way,Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth Century Dictatorshipsis an essential contribution to our understanding of musical cultures of the twentieth century, as well as the symbolic policies of dictatorial regimes.

"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."

"Music & Politics is a peer-reviewed electronic journal. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the impact of politics on the lives of musicians and musical communities, music as a form of political discourse, the influences of ideology on musical historiography, and pedagogical issues and strategies pertaining to the study of music and politics in the classroom. Because Music & Politics is an on-line journal, authors are welcome to take advantage of the media capabilities of the web (sound files, hyperlinks, color images, and video). Many issues also include a book list of items published in the last six months in the area of music and politics."

"Music, Power, and Politics presents sixteen different cultural perspectives on the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from around the world 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 essays included examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and modern-day North Korea postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia and the Caribbean music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for recently empowered social groups in the UK and Brazil the subversion of racial stereotypes through popular music in the USA music as a tool of popular resistance to oppressive government policies in modern day Iran and the Bolivian Andes"

A bibliography in the Garland reference library of the humanities series. Even though it dates from 1993 the references may still be useful.