ABSTRACT
Sport and music have a deep and abiding relationship, as other chapters in this volume clearly illustrate. But there is a further dimension to the sport/music dyad that I would like to explore: namely, the idea that music serves as a repository for history, that music, as Alan Merriam puts it, contributes to the continuity of culture, that it serves as ‘a vehicle of history, myth, and legend’.1 As Theodor Adorno has argued, music is linked to cognitive habits, modes of consciousness and cultural meaning, and therefore operates not only as a powerful force in the construction of personal and cultural life, but also in the transmission of cultural memory, even historical consciousness.2 The postmodernist transformation in the study of music in particular has led to a concerted attempt to uncover its socio-historical meanings and effects,3 to unravel what Abraham Lincoln once poetically called ‘the mystic chords of memory’.4 In other words, music has historical salience. It is not devoid of social representation and historical information; it is not, to use Susan McClary’s phrase, ‘an innocent accompaniment’.5 Rather, it is a discursive social practice that works in the manipulation of affect, the validation of ideology, the rationalisation of cultural practice and the perception of history.
