Music, Power, and Politics presents sixteen different cultural perspectives on the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from around the world explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners, has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The essays included examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, and modern-day North Korea postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia and the Caribbean music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for recently empowered social groups in the UK and Brazil the subversion of racial stereotypes through popular music in the USA music as a tool of popular resistance to oppressive government policies in modern day Iran and the Bolivian Andes

"Music, Power, and Politics" presents thirteen different cultural perspectives on a single theme: the concept of music as a site of socio-political struggle. Essays by scholars from seven countries (England, People's Republic of China, Germany, South Africa, USA, the former Yugoslavia, and Iran) explore the means by which music's long-acknowledged potential to persuade, seduce, indoctrinate, rouse, incite, or even silence listeners has been used to advance agendas of power and protest. The cultural and historical scope of the collection is intentionally broad and includes essays that examine: music used to convey political ideology in Nazi Germany, apartheid-era South Africa, Mao's China, and modern day North Korea; propagandistic popular song in civil war-era USA; hegemonic processes in the folklorization of indigenous dance in Mexico; postcolonial musical efforts to reclaim ethnic heritage in Serbia, Bolivia, and Barbados; punk music as a means of establishing new cultural identities for women inthe UK; the subversion of racial stereotypes through Trinidadian music in the USA; music as a tool of popular resistance in modern day Iran; governmental control of music recording and broadcast in pre-unification East Germany; and strategies of surveillance and power relations within audio technologies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Scholars and students of music, politics, and cultural history will enjoy this groundbreaking collection.

Set in the American West during the California Gold Rush, "La fanciulla del West" marked a significant departure from Giacomo Puccini's previous and best- known works." Puccini and the Girl" is the first book to explore this important but often misunderstood opera that became the earliest work by a major European composer to receive an American premiere when it opened at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.
Adapted from American playwright David Belasco's Broadway production, The Girl of the Golden West, Fanciulla was Puccini's most consciously modern work, and its Met debut received mixed reviews. Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Gray Davis base their account of its creation on previously unknown letters from Puccini to his main librettist, Carlo Zangarini. They mine musical materials, newspaper accounts, and rare photographs and illustrations to tell the full story of this controversial opera. Puccini and the Girl considers the production and reception of Puccini's "cowboy" opera in the light of contemporary criticism, providing both fascinating insight into its history and a look to the future as its centenary approaches.
"Engrossing. . . . An eminently readable, ideally direct and information-packed book."--William Fregosi, "Opera Today
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