Historiography and Complexities

Why is music ‘National’?

Authors

  • Hans Weisethaunet University of Oslo Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i2.169

Keywords:

historiography, music histories, role of the nation in relation to music

Abstract

The article examines key issues in attempts to construct popular music and popular music histories in terms of nationality and ‘national’ identity. Moving from historiographical issues to an in-depth discussion of the uses and problems of ‘nation’ as an overriding category in music history writing, it draws on a number of theoretical sources, including historiography, social theory, popular music studies, music anthropology, postcolonial theory, and current questions in cultural theory concerning globalization and cosmopolitanism. As pointed out by Homi Bhabha and others, our understanding of ‘nation’ “is by nature ambivalent” (Bhabha 1990). The article brings into debate issues from the author’s study of music criticism in the USA, UK and the Nordic countries, and examples ranging from West-African popular music, to ideas of ‘Nordic’ jazz and journalistic and academic struggles to construct popular music as ‘American’ in the US. Why is music so easily and ubiquitously taken to represent something ‘national’? In order to account for music’s relevance in the proximity of history, the author argues that it is necessary to broaden the horizon of these writing strategies and be critical and reflexive about the ‘nation-building’ project, common linear narratives within such histories and the mythological tropes that colour these writings.

Author Biography

  • Hans Weisethaunet, University of Oslo

    University of Oslo

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 1999. ‘The Interpretation of Culture(s) after Television.’ In The Fate of ‘Culture’: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry Ortner, 110–35. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Alter, Peter. 1994. Nationalism. London: Edward Arnold.

Alterhaug, Bjørn, et al. eds. 2002. Challenges in Norwegian Jazz Research. Conference Report. Trondheim: Institutt for Musikk, NTNU.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2000. ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination.’ Public Culture 12/1: 1–19.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1968. Rabelais and his World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

—1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press.

Basso, Keith, and Steven Feld, eds. 1996. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. London: Wildwood House.

Battaglia, Deborra, ed. 1995. Rhetorics of Self-Making. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Polity Press.

Beck, Ulrich. 2006. Cosmopolitian Vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Benestad, Finn, and Dag Scheldrup-Ebbe. 1999. ‘Edvard Grieg.’ In Norges Musikkhistorie, Romantikk og Gullalder 1870–1910, ed. Arvid Vollsnes, 21–101. Oslo: Aschehoug.

Berger, Harris M., and Michael Thomas Carroll, eds. 2003. Global Pop, Local Language. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Berkaak, Odd Are. 1996. ‘Om “norsk nerk” og “virtuelle selv”: Noen refleksjoner omkring kulturarv og formidlingsideologier.’ Norsklæreren 4/96: 5–14.

Bertrand, Michael T. 2005. Race, Rock, and Elvis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Bhabha, Homi K. 2004 [1994]. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

—2004. ‘Preface to the Routledge Classic Edition.’ In Bhabha, ix–xxv. London: Routledge.

Bhabha, Homi K. ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.

Bohlman, Philip V. 2003. ‘Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture.’ In Clayton, et al., 45–56.

—2004. The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.

Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. 2000. Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

—1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2002. Cosmopolitanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Calhoun, Craig. 1997. Nationalism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

—1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, eds. 2003. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge.

Cohn, Nik. 1969. Pop from the Beginning. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Cook, Nicholas. 1990. Music, Imagination, and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

— 2003. ‘Music as Performance.’ In Clayton, et al., 204–14.

Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. Between Romaticism and Modernism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

—1989. Nineteenth-Century Music. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

—1993. Dissemination. London: The Athlone Press.

Feld, Steven. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

—2005. ‘Musical Citizenship Post 9/11.’ Unpublished paper.

—In press. ‘Sound and Sentiment in Rainforest Country.’ In Global Country, eds Aaron Fox and Christine Yano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock Publications.

—1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon.

George, Nelson. 1998. Hip Hop America. London: Penguin.

—2004. Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and before That Negroes). London: Pemguin.

Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

—1997. Nationalism. New York: New York University Press.

Gendron, Bernard. 1999. ‘The Cultural Empowerment of Popular Music: Once Clearly Separate from “High Culture,” It’s Now Irreversibly Interwoven.’ In Research Profile: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate School 21/1. Accessed at http://tinyurl. com/2bayvz.

—2003. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

—2004. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge.

Guilbault, Jocelyne. 2006. ‘On Redefining the “Local” through World Music.’ In Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, ed. Jennifer C. Post, 137–46. New York: Routledge.

Hannerz, Ulf. 1992. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1975 [1778–1779]. Stimmen der Völker in Liedern and Volkslieder, 2 vols. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Herskovits, Melville J. 1941/1990. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press.

—1966 [1945]. The New World Negro. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1986. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. London: McMillan.

Kapferer, Bruce. 1990. ‘From the Periphery to the Centre: Ethnography and the Critique of Anthropology in Sri Lanka.’ In Localizing Strategies, ed. Richard Fardon, 280–302. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kramer, Lawrence. 2002. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press.

Leyshon, Andrew, David Matless and George Revill, eds. 1998. The Place of Music. New York: Guilford Press.

Lilliestam, Lars. 1998. Svensk Rock. Göteborg: Bo Ejeby Förlag.

Lindberg, Ulf, Gestur Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet. 2005. Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers. New York: Peter Lang.

Marcus, Greil. 1975. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music. New York: Dutton.

—1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—1995. The Dustbin of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Michelsen, Morten. 2004. ‘Histories and Complexities: Popular Music History and Danish Rock.’ Popular Music History 1/1: 19–36.

—2005. ‘Danish Rock Culture from the 1950s to the 80s.’ Website presentation: http://www. rockhistorie.dk/conference/project.asp

Michelsen, Morton, et al. eds. In press. Rock, rul og rap: Studier i dansk rockkultur. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum.

Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

—2000. ‘Musical Belongings: Western Music and its Low-Other.’ In Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, eds Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 59–85. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge.

Negus, Keith. 1996. Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nettl, Bruno 1985. The Western Impact on World Music. New York: Schirmer Books.

Nicholson, Stuart. 2005. Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address). New York: Routledge.

Radano, Ronald, and Philip Bohlman, eds. 2000. Music and the Racial Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reinertsen, Maria. 2005. ‘Nasjonalisme på norsk.’ Morgenbladet 39/2005, 30 September–7 October.

Roach, Martin. 2002. 50th Anniversary NME, Top 100 Singles. London: Chrysalis.

Robertson, Roland. 1995. ‘Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.’ In Global Modernities, eds Mike Featherstone, Scott M. Lash and Roland Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage.

Shepherd, John. 1985. ‘Definitions as Mystification: A Consideration of Labels as a Hindrance to Understanding Significance in Music.’ In Popular Music Perspectives 2. Papers from the Second International Conference on Popular Music Studies. Reggio Emilia, 19–24 September, 1983, eds David Horn, et al., 84–98. Göteborg: IASPM.

Smith, Anthony. 1971. Theories of Nationalism. London: Camelot Press.

—1998. Nationalism and Modernism. London: Routledge.

—2001. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen.

Starr, Larry, and Christopher Waterman. 2003. American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MTV. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stendahl, Bjørn. 1987. Jazz, Hot & Swing: Jazz i Norge 1920–1940. Oslo: Norsk Jazzarkiv.

Stokes, Martin, ed. 1994. Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg.

Stone, Ruth M., et al. eds. 1998–2002. The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. 10 vols.; New York: Routledge.

Strachan, Robert. 2004. ‘Editor’s Introduction,’ Popular Music History 1/1: 5–8.

Taruskin, Richard. 2001. ‘Nationalism.’ In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 17: 689–706. 2nd edn; London: Macmillan.

Taylor, Timothy D. 1997. Global Pop. World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge.

Tomlinson, Gary. 2003. ‘Musicology. Anthropology. History.’ In Clayton, et al., 31–44.

Toop, David. 1999. Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World. London: Serpent’s Tale.

Tucker, Michael. 1998. Jan Garbarek: Deep Song. Hull: University of Hull Press.

Turino, Thomas. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vollsnes, Arvid, ed. 1999–2001. Norges Musikkhistorie. 5 vols.; Oslo: Aschehoug.

Walser, Robert. 1995. ‘ “Out of Notes”; Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis.’ In Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard, 165–88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Waterman, Christopher. 1990. Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weisethaunet, Hans. 1998. The Performance of Everyday Life: The G?ine of Nepal. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

—2002. ‘Popular Music Studies—Simply a Fan Club?’ In Looking Back, Looking Ahead: Popular Music Studies 20 Years Later, eds R. Leydon, K. Kärki and H. Terho, 142–49. Saarijärvi, Finland: IASMP Norden/Cummerus Printing.

Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. New York: Pendragon Press.

Wicke, Peter. 1990. Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana Press.

Interviews

Alpha Blondy (musician), interviewed by Hans Weisethaunet, Norway, 26 July, 2006.

Richard Bona (musician), interviewed by Hans Weisethaunet, Norway, 10 August, 2006.

Greil Marcus (critic), interviewed by Hans Weisethaunet, Seattle, Washington, 17 April, 2004.

Published

2007-12-19

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Weisethaunet, H. (2007). Historiography and Complexities: Why is music ‘National’?. Popular Music History, 2(2), 169-199. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i2.169