Confronting the National in the Musical Past

This significant volume moves music-historical research in the direction of deconstructing the national grand narratives in music history, of challenging the national paradigm in methodology, and thinking anew about cultural traffic, cultural transfer and cosmopolitanism in the musical past. The chapters of this book confront, or subject to some kind of critique, assumptions about the importance of the national in the musical past. The emphasis, therefore, is not so much on how national culture has been constructed, or how national cultural institutions have influenced musical production, but, rather, on the way the national has been challenged by musical practices or audience reception.

Elaine Kelly is a senior lecturer in Music at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the intersections between music, culture, politics, and intellectual history in nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany, with a particular focus on the German Democratic Republic. She is author of Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (OUP, 2014), editor together with Amy Wlodarski of Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture (Rodopi, 2011), and has published her work in venues such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music, Kritika, and Music & Letters.

Markus Mantere is a lecturer of musicology at Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. His special areas are music history, musical performance studies, and T.W. Adorno’s music philosophy. Mantere’s most recent work is focused on the intellectual and social history of musicology in Finland. He is the author of The Gould Variations: Technology, Philosophy and Criticism in Glenn Gould’s Musical Thought and Practice (Peter Lang 2012) and editor together with Vesa Kurkela of Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions (Ashgate 2015). Mantere is the Chair of the Finnish Society of Musicology since 2014.

Derek B. Scott is Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds. His research field is music, cultural history, and ideology, and his books include Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (2008), and Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010). He was the General Editor of Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series for fifteen years, overseeing the publication of more than 100 books between 2000 and 2015. His present research is funded by a European Research Council advanced grant, and focuses on the reception in London and New York of operettas from the German stage, 1907–1938.