Song Beyond the Nation Translation, Transnationalism, Performance

Within classical music, much writing on the Western song tradition since 1800 has assumed a direct link between musical cultures and national literatures, and song has typically been interpreted as one of the means by which constructions of nationalism and nationhood have been pursued in the cultural sphere. Yet song can also be a mobile and cosmopolitan genre and form of cultural practice, able - through performance, publication, and translation - to cross boundaries between cultures and languages.

This volume brings together musicologists, literary scholars, linguists, and cultural historians to examine the ways in which song creation, practice, and interpretation has been defined by, and in turn defines, conceptions of nationalism and the transnational. It focuses on four key poets - the Persian Hafiz, German Heine, American Whitman, and French Verlaine - and examines how their poems have been 'translated' into song, and how music can challenge the seemingly organic relationship between language and nation.

Philip Ross Bullock is Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in Russian at Wadham College. As well as teaching at the University of Wales, Bangor, and University College, London, he has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Paris Institute for Advanced Study.

Laura Tunbridge is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine's College. She taught at the Universities of Reading and of Manchester. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, and Columbia University, New York, and currently holds a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.