ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with questions of value and power in music, and, in particular, with the role of value and power in the processes through which cultural identities arise. Despite the considerable attention cultural studies has given recently to issues of nationhood and national and cultural identities, it nonetheless remains customary in everyday common sense to think of national and cultural identities as having an existence or ‘substance’ over and above that produced by the specific social processes through which they are constructed and reproduced. Nowhere has this notion of substance or ‘essence’ been more influential than through the terms in which questions of national or cultural identity in music have been couched.
