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.

This chapter details and expands current research on Messiaen’s response to, engagement with, and inculcation of Surrealism in his music. In particular it examines the poetic and ethnological context of Messiaen’s work, and also introduces a discussion of the occult and psychoanalytical trauma as Surrealist contexts for Messiaen’s work in the late 1940s.

Since its first moments of relatively wide visibility in the 1990s, black metal music has been one of the most controversial and artistically fecund subgenres of metal. In particular, a rash of serious crimes perpetrated by Norwegian black metallers boosted its visibility, and the salacious details of this period were well-covered by journalists, cultural critics and academics. Following this period, however, black metal musicians around the world took a wide range of approaches to the genre. However, one persistent aspect of black metal’s musical practice is the foregrounding of geographic location and local cultures within both the music and visual artwork. This chapter explores on black metal in the United States’s Mountain West, where the musical and ideological tropes of Norwegian black metal are recontextualised into forms that honour this new location while still retaining key points of Norwegian black metal’s worldview. The focus is particularly on the Colorado band Wayfarer’s interrogations of settler colonialism and the cowboy mythos of Hollywood westerns, but the chapter also touches on broader currents of environmentalism and indigenous activism in North American black metal.

This chapter shows how ethnic concepts became prominent in Bohemian debates about Mozart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter first explores the writings of Mozart’s first biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek to show that around 1800 regional identity in Prague was dominated by the ambiguous concept of Bohemian patriotism. With the rise of Czech and German ethnic nationalism in the ensuing decades, Prague’s critics and musicologists mined Mozart’s operas, as well as works by his eighteenth-century contemporaries and predecessors, such as Stamitz and Gluck, for inherent qualities associated with Czech and German-Bohemian cultures, especially folk music. In the 1930s, Czech and German-Bohemian musicologists used racial criteria to prove that Gluck’s and Mozart’s music was inherently Czech or German (or Sudeten German, as many Czechoslovak Germans identified themselves by then). These ethnocentric preoccupations were further emphasized by Czech Marxist musicologists in the post–World War II period.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.

“The Song” takes as its subject the material, visual, and sonic circulations of a ballad written about the Kizer and Johnson lynching. The chapter focuses in particular on its first recording, a 1960s single by the folk musician J. E. Mainer. By looking at its circulation first as a performed and then recorded song, the chapter examines the sonic and visual circulations of the ballad as a signifer of southern authenticity. By delving into discourses on authenticity and folk culture, “The Song” points to an evolution in the meaning of racial violence as a constitutive part of a white southern identity. Further, the study examines how this emblem of white southernness came to represent a particular form of personal authenticity for a new generation immersed in the folk revival movement of the 1960s. In this way the chapter serves as a study of both the racist ideology of some countercultural movements as well as the evolution of lynching's meaning in the late twentieth century.

Musical Romanticism and nationalism are both concepts closely tied to the idea of ‘the folk’. This chapter considers the twisting and turning relationships in music between Romanticism, nationalism, and the folk. It treats first the origin of the concepts. Next it takes up the importance of music as a folk ‘language of nature’, and the effect of German musical hegemony during the nineteenth century in spurring different configurations of ‘national’ and ‘folk’ music. It also looks at the realities that complicate many Romantic claims about national music, such as the presence and contributions of ethnic minorities. The chapter argues that Romantic musical nationalism in music is ultimately a series of reception tropes, and summarises five key approaches. It concludes with a study of a single piece, Smetana’s The Moldau, to show how these different tropes can converge and play off each other.

Turning to folk music, in Chapter 11, Michael Brocken focuses upon the British folk revival to consider both the traditional marginalisation of women’s voices and the contemporary emergence of a more open folk scene in which women’s voices ‘figure’. Blending an auto-ethnographic and an ethnographic approach, Brocken considers not only his own growing awareness of gender issues within the folk scene as a male researcher, but also draws upon interview material with folk musician Emily Portman and folk and acoustic music promoter Rose Price.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

The dedication of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German intelligentsia to collecting and consuming folk music was fostered by a belief that a repository of wisdom lay with the common people and that, by drawing together the peasant songs of various regions where German was spoken, one could grasp a German national identity [see Ch. 26 ‘Politics and Religion’] where, politically, none existed.