Music, Longing and Belonging: Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm
With contributions from musicologists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary scholars, this book provides an interdisciplinary perspective on how different modes of musical sociability – ranging from opera performances to collective singing and internet fan communities – inspire “imagined communities” that not only transcend national borders, but also challenge the boundaries between the self and the other. While the relationship between music and nationhood has been widely researched, few comparative and transnational studies on music and identity exist.
The main focus of this volume, therefore, is on forms of musical belonging not bound by national identity, which take place in contexts of appropriation and displacement. The essays collected here address different modes of musical self-expression through the art of others and frame music as a unique medium of desire, which not only channels the experience of belonging during times of social and political upheaval, but also induces its opposite – non-belonging, detachment and dissent.
Magdalena Waligórska is a cultural historian and sociologist. She is currently an Assistant Professor of East European History and Culture at Bremen University, Germany. She is the author of Klezmer’s Afterlife: An Ethnography of the Jewish Music Revival in Poland and Germany (Oxford University Press, 2013).
"Beautifully organized, carefully considered, and bursting with thought-provoking original research, this book gathers eleven well-shaped essays on four major themes in the study of how culture is involved in the making of both individual and collective identities. This is a terrific collection of essays, and its introduction, as well as its intuitively sensible organization, make it accessible and useful in many different contexts."
– Celia Applegate, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University.
''Musical scholarship has long engaged the ways in which societies articulate the distinctions between self and other, but this volume brings a new generation of voices to reflect on a subject that is even more important in a world shaped by global processes of encounter and exchange. The perspectives of these new voices multiply as they draw upon the multiple disciplines of musical scholarship and the ancillary fields of historical, anthropological, and political inquiry. The experiences we witness in the pages of the volume reflect the roles of insiders as well as outsiders, the selfness of the local as well as the otherness of the global. The very nature of the musical realm itself comes under scrutiny, with questions posed about the centrality of music no less than the contingency of the social, the political, and the historical.''
– Philip V. Bohlman, Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago.
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