The Politics of Musical Identity ─ Selected Essays

This volume explores the way in which composers, performers, and critics shaped individual and collective identities in music from Europe and the United States from the 1860s to the 1950s. Selected essays and articles engage with works and their reception by Richard Wagner, Georges Bizet (in an American incarnation), Lili and Nadia Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Aaron Copland, and with performers such as Wanda Landowska and even Marilyn Monroe. Ranging in context from the opera house through the concert hall to the salon, and from establishment cultures to counter-cultural products, the main focus is how music permits new ways of considering issues of nationality, class, race, and gender. These essays - three presented for the first time in English translation - reflect the work in both musical and cultural studies of a distinguished scholar whose international career spans the Atlantic and beyond.

The recipient of the 2011 Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, Annegret Fauser is a cultural musicologist whose research focuses on music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular that of France and America. She is the author of Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair (2005) and Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (2013). Her book with Mark Everist, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1830-1914 (2009) was awarded the Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society, and from 2011-2013 she was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.