Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building ...

A “nation” is in fact only an idea of a communal grouping, one in which people conceive of themselves as united across social divides on the basis of a shared, distinct culture, with common rights and duties for all members of the community. Part of this conception is that the community is entitled to rule itself politically through such means as territorial autonomy or its own state. The quotidian understanding of “nation” is that a nation such as the United States, France, or Brazil has had a distinct identity throughout its entire history, and that nations are real things that exist independently of what people think about them. This understanding is demonstrably deficient, however: historiography shows a process of “nation building” by which a group of people are inculcated with the idea that they belong together as members of the same nation. Nation building also involves the establishment and inculcation of ideas about what the cultural characteristics are that constitute the nation. This book’s subject, as per its subtitle, is nation building through music in the nineteenth century.

There is, however, some dispute among scholars of nationalism about precisely how long nations have existed. One school of thought, known as the perennialists, holds that there are certain nationlike features, extending all the way back into ancient history, that help define a people.¹ So, the ancient Greeks, perhaps, might have been close to a nation. Perennialists believe that there are certain raw materials of identity, history, and culture that have persisted into the modern period; these raw materials serve as building blocks of national groupings today. The other major, and dominant, scholarly school of thought is known as the modernists. Modernists hold that the very idea of the nation (as per my aforementioned definition) is something that did not exist until roughly the eighteenth century.² Most modernists identify the French Revolution as the birthplace of the national idea, though some scholars look back earlier, for example, to sixteenth-century England.

Regardless of the historical timeline of nations, both modernists and most perennialists agree that nations do not just exist naturally and objectively. They thus dismiss the now historically obsolete claims of primordialists, according to whom nations are eternal, omnipresent, and objectively real (if sometimes latent) in a people’s consciousness.