How do the temporal features of sacred music affect social life in South Asia? Due to new time constraints in commercial contexts, devotional musicians in Bengal have adapted longstanding features of musical time linked with religious practice to promote their own musical careers. The Politics of Musical Time traces a lineage of singers performing a Hindu devotional song known as kīrtan in the Bengal region of India over the past century to demonstrate the shifting meanings and practices of devotional performance. Focusing on padābalī kīrtan, a type of devotional sung poetry that uses long-duration forms and combines song and storytelling, Eben Graves examines how expressions of religious affect and political belonging linked with the genre become strained in contemporary, shortened performance time frames. To illustrate the political economy of performance in South Asia, Graves also explores how religious performances and texts interact with issues of nationalism, gender, and economic exchange. Combining ethnography, history, and performance analysis, including videos from the author's fieldwork, The Politics of Musical Time reveals how ideas about the sacred and the modern have been expressed and contested through features of musical time found in devotional performance.

It is common to hear talk of how music can inspire crowds, move individuals and mobilise movements. We know too of how governments can live in fear of its effects, censor its sounds and imprison its creators. At the same time, there are other governments that use music for propaganda or for torture. All of these examples speak to the idea of music's political importance. But while we may share these assumptions about music's power, we rarely stop to analyse what it is about organised sound - about notes and rhythms - that has the effects attributed to it. This is the first book to examine systematically music's political power. It shows how music has been at the heart of accounts of political order, at how musicians from Bono to Lily Allen have claimed to speak for peoples and political causes. It looks too at the emergence of music as an object of public policy, whether in the classroom or in the copyright courts, whether as focus of national pride or employment opportunities. The book brings together a vast array of ideas about music's political significance (from Aristotle to Rousseau, from Adorno to Deleuze) and new empirical data to tell a story of the extraordinary potency of music across time and space. At the heart of the book lies the argument that music and politics are inseparably linked, and that each animates the other.

In 'Music as Social Life', Thomas Turino explores why it is that music and dance are so often at the centre of our most profound personal and social experiences.

This book discusses the political content of music over the past 200 years, from the classical to the hip-hop genres and everything in between. Beginning with Beethoven, Courtney Brown describes how Beethoven's music has been used to support a wide variety of political views across the entire ideological spectrum, both during Beethoven's life and long after. Then a provocative comparison of Bob Marley's music and Richard Wagner's "Ring" operas identifies striking similarities between the political ideas of these two composers relating to the idea of revolution. Nationalist music is then described and elaborated through examples, drawing from a wide range of national identities. Brown then turns to labor music by focusing on the legend of Joe Hill. Movement and non-movement related political music is then explored and compared, including the music associated with the Vietnam War. Finally, the political content of hip-hop is examined. Never before has a book covered such a broad spectrum of political music. This is a timely publication given the exponential growth of contemporary political music.

Ernst Krenek has been described as a “one-man history of twentieth-century music.” His vast compositional output encompasses many of its extremes and expresses many of its contradictions. Few have attempted, however, to contextualize Krenek’s compositional output because our understanding of classical music in the first half of the twentieth century still largely remains focused on the music of a few canonical figures. Responding to renewed interest from performers in Krenek’s work, particularly his operas, Peter Tregear’s Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style addresses this gap in the scholarly literature and makes an important contribution to our comprehension of the ways in which his music reflected and informed broader social and political debates in Austria and Germany at the time. Focusing on Krenek’s compositional path from the eclectic musical language of Jonny spielt auf to the austere twelve-tone technique of Karl V, Tregear provides an historical and critical context to this most historically significant period of Krenek’s creative life. His study also enriches our understanding of many of Krenek’s contemporaries, such as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg. This book should interest students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in modern opera, and contemporary classical music as well as early-20th-century German history more generally.

The story of one musician's journey to discover how music can be used as a political tool, for good and bad.

This volume brings together for the first time book chapters, articles and position pieces from the debates on music and identity, which seek to answer classic questions such as: how has music shaped the ways in which we understand our identities and those of others? In what ways has scholarly writing about music dealt with identity politics since the Second World War? Both classic and more recent contributions are included, as well as material on related issues such as music's role as a resource in making and performing identities and music scholarship's ambivalent relationship with scholarly activism and identity politics. The essays approach the music-identity relationship from a wide range of methodological perspectives, ranging from critical historiography and archival studies, psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, to ethnography and anthropology, and social and cultural theories drawn from sociology; and from continental philosophy and Marxist theories of class to a range of globalization theories. The collection draws on the work of Anglophone scholars from all over the globe, and deals with a wide range of musics and cultures, from the Americas, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This unique collection of key texts, which deal not just with questions of gender, sexuality and race, but also with other socially-mediated identities such as social class, disability, national identity and accounts and analyses of inter-group encounters, is an invaluable resource for music scholars and researchers and those working in any discipline that deals with identity or identity politics.