ABSTRACT
Music in the Image of the Nation Music is a particularly malleable means for shaping a nation’s many images. It is the question of music’s malleability-the many ways in which it can and does represent the nation-that we examine in the next two chapters. Each chapter allows us to gather a larger set of perspectives on how music itself represents the nation. In the present chapter, we examine national music, and we follow that with a chapter on nationalist music. It will quickly become apparent that the distinctions between and among these two relations between music and the nation are both great and small, sometimes coarse but more often subtle. The genres and repertories that constitute national and nationalist music overlap at times, but at other times differ sharply from one another. In each case, nonetheless, the use of music to shape an image of the nation is conscious, and in both chapters we find that those who turn to music to shape that image do so because they recognize the power of music to enhance the power of the nation.
