Though not often highlighted in literature on music aesthetics, the Saint-Simonians, a group of French Romantic socialists, exerted widespread influence on politics, philosophy and the arts after 1830. Their conception of music as a political-affective tool in the hands of an artistic avant-garde impacted the aesthetics and practice of musique populaire, a category embracing ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ music. Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the most popular writer of chansons in this period, declared his sympathy for the cause of radical social change in song, while his friend the working-class socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux influenced music aesthetics through his alliance with the novelist George Sand (Aurore Dupin). Drawing on Leroux’s writings for its philosophy of history, Sand’s major ‘music novel’, Consuelo, advocated for musique populaire, as its operatic singer heroine finally abandons the stage and becomes a travelling folk musician.

A gap divides modern ideas of genius from the sentimental conceptions of the 1760s and 1770s. Though talent was a common feature, musical genius for Rousseau and Diderot was integrally related to expression, affective identification with a community, and an orientation towards ‘the people’. Also important was ‘enthusiasm’, originally a type of religious inspiration fostered after 1700 within radical Protestant groups such as Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians, who radically challenged contemporary ideas of masculinity, sexuality and religious faith. Enthusiasm’s secularization with Goethe and Herder initiated the countercultural ‘period of genius’ (Genieperiode) later known as the Sturm und Drang. Its composers, such as J. M. Kraus, Neefe and Reichardt, lavished attention on popular, commercial forms such as German comic opera and ‘popular song’ (Volkslied) – priorities only challenged when the movement’s opponents such as J. N. Forkel tactically redefined ‘genius’ to centre it on technical mastery rather than inspiration and expression.

The establishment of an objectivist, anti-Romantic tradition in early twentieth-century aesthetics was no purely philosophical breakthrough, nor (as some have argued) a resigned response to the disasters of twentieth-century history, but in significant part an expression of elitism, fascism, and contempt for the masses, one already prominent before 1914. Writers from Schenker to Adorno insisted aggressively on the immanent structural virtues of master-composers’ scores and the irrelevance, or danger, of listeners’ own feelings. The same music-analytical prejudices still vitiate many contemporary attempts within the so-called ‘affective turn’ to theorize emotions and their history in music, not just in musicology but also in psychology. The very end of the book turns toward popular music and cultural studies as more productive embodiments of affective relationality, showing the resonances and continuities these possess with the sentimental-Romantic traditions explored in the book’s chapters.

This chapter considers practices of Indigenous language singing in the place now known as Australia, framing it as both an overt act of resistance to settler-colonisation and key to the maintenance of reciprocal Indigenous relationships with landscapes. In response to deliberate and sustained government attempts to diminish the use of hundreds of Indigenous languages, song has emerged as core to Indigenous language revitalization efforts. Renewed interest in Indigenous songs has also motivated increasing numbers of Indigenous community-directed ethnomusicology studies involving the repatriation of audio recordings. In describing the dynamic intersection of popular music and Indigenous song forms since the mid twentieth century, this chapter draws links to longstanding Indigenous practices of sharing songs across vast geographic and cultural boundaries. Discussing the inherent complexity of revitalizing, maintaining, and innovating within Indigenous traditions, the authors emphasise the relational nature of song and the inherent responsibilities singers carry.

The chapter traces the long, unheralded history of Black women electric guitarists in the United States from the 1940s to the present century. It identifies the unique challenges they face striving to work in an American music landscape that adores Black women as singers but largely overlooks them when they strap an electric guitar onto their bodies. It uses historical research and oral history interviews with intergenerational artists in blues, gospel, and rock to explore how race, gender, and genre conventions manifest and intersect to create barriers and opportunities.

This chapter surveys the interaction between Puccini’s works and various forms of popular culture since the mid-twentieth century. The author examines how Puccini’s music quickly came to be widely absorbed into the popular musical memory through a wide variety of genres. It surveys early recordings of Puccini’s arias and their association with particular recording stars such as Caruso. A discussion of the use of Puccini’s music in films from the 1930s to the present follows, analysing the ways in which it has been employed as a device in films ranging from gentle romances to violent Hollywood blockbusters, sometimes symbolising the essence of Italianness. The author then discusses how excerpts from Puccini’s music have been incorporated into popular songs of a wide range of types and how Puccini arias have made their way into the world of popular television via talent shows, sports programming (notably the use of ‘Nessun dorma’ for the Italia 90 World Cup), chat shows, and advertising.

The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

This chapter examines the diverging ways that minstrelsy used Haiti as source material. Minstrelsy took direct and mocking aim at the aspirations of African Americans, even as its turn to Haiti implicitly acknowledged the transformative power of racial revolution. In popular transatlantic plays like M. M. Dowling’s Othello Travestie, minstrelsy used Haiti to reimagine the rising hopes and transgressive desires of the Black Atlantic. By the 1850s, minstrelsy used Haiti as an empty signifier, a marker of ludicrous and disruptive Blackness.

In the hundred years that saw the widest effects of industrialisation and immigration to Wales, the popular music of the country embraced an increasingly passionate and secular adherence to traditions derived from choralism and eisteddfod culture on the one hand, and the development of commercial popular music on the other. ‘Popular music’ was defined not by repertoire but by the circumstances of its performance. Major features of this story include the first conspicuous appearances of Welsh choralism outside Wales, the world’s first virtuoso private brass band, Welsh manifestations of music hall and romantic theatre music, the rise of tourist entertainment and the projection of Welshness in the early years of broadcasting. One of the more interesting features of the period is the way Wales digested broader trends in popular music, modified them and projected them in distinctive ways. The chapter paints a picture of Welsh musical life that is seldom seen, in which strong musical traditions steeped in the culture of the Welsh language coalesce with popular modernism and new types of musical commerce and consumerism.

Shifting to an examination of identity formation from below, Chapter 4 observes popular culture through music and opens a discussion on the nature of Iranian identity. Music is not only a cultural expression; in Iran it has also been used as a political tool and as part of resistance movements. Iranians voiced their allegiance with the revolution and their identity as Shiite Muslims through song-like protest chants and musical tracks. Protest chants and group singing heighten the meaning of words and help facilitate a sense of unity. These techniques were employed as an emotive force during the revolution and by later generations to proclaim their identity and as a form of resistance after the controversial election of 2009. The Green Movement is a pertinent example of how popular music is utilized by Iranians as a mode of expression. Consequently, popular music can be used as a tool for investigation in order to facilitate a better understanding of contemporary Iranian identity and society.

This chapter introduces the drum, song and dance tradition gwoka, from Guadeloupe, tracing its evolution and development through an analysis of gwoka’s most celebrated musicians. By presenting gwoka as a model for unravelling Guadeloupe’s complicated colonial past, the chapter indicates the critical contributions intangible cultural objects like gwoka can make alongside written sources as tools for research.

Chapter 1 explains the rationale for the book and the principles underlying its methodology. It introduces the two artists covered, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and the theorists used to contextualise their work: R. Serge Denisoff, Fredric Jameson, J. Anderson Thomson and Clare Aukofer. It summarises the concepts underlying each chapter – dual biography, protest music, history and spirituality – and explores the connections between these themes.

Nineteen Eighty-Four does not seem to offer the most promising material for singers, rock stars, and opera performers. There is, nevertheless, a vast history of adaptation and appropriation of Orwell’s text, a sub-genre referred to here as ‘rock’n’prole’. This afterlife in music encompasses a wide range of forms and styles, from albums such as David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974), Rage Against The Machine’s The Battle Of Los Angeles (1999), and Muse’s The Resistance (2009) to individual songs such as John Lennon’s ‘Only People’ (1973) and Radiohead’s ‘2+2=5’ (2003). There is also the controversial opera 1984 (2005), composed by Lorin Maazel, which demonstrates yet another vector for musical response to Orwellian dystopia. This chapter traces the history of these responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to consider how musical adaptation brings into focus a key tension in dystopia more generally: that between entertainment and instruction. Does the act of taking Orwell’s novel as source material strip it of its critical content, once transmuted into song? Or does the act of adaptation reveal and make possible new kinds of criticism, aided and abetted by the confluence of text and music?