The Sound of Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland

In the early 1800s, Jonah Barrington, an Irish judge, bemoaned that the air chosen as the march for the Irish Volunteer Movement had “no merit whatever, being neither grand, nor martial, nor animating,” contrasting it with the zeal of French revolutionary music. The emotional impact of music might be a matter of taste, but such a statement is suggestive of an aesthetics, where political music, or music used for political purposes, should have specific qualities that could be identified and judged by listeners. This article explores how people in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland identified music as political, using theories of the effects and affects of sound during the period and a corpus of Irish political music as an access point into historical experiences of musical enjoyment. While the impacts of music on the body are challenging for historians to retrieve, scholarship from the history of emotions highlights the important role of normative frameworks of emotion in accessing embodied experience. Working from this perspective, this article argues that we can begin to access the sound of politics for audiences of this period, contributing to our understanding of the role of music in political life.

“THIS IS AMERICA”: Um Videoclipe estético e ativista social

In this text, we present an analysis of the videoclip “This is America” and its signage, including its artistic, aesthetic processes and its media relationship, making a brief historical contextualization of its poetics and technological evolution. We understand the body of the actor / rapper Glover as a kind of activist that develops his work as a new type of cultural agent, more aware of his role of artist and political activist, a kind of a new star system of the contemporary world within Cyberculture. We also investigate how the videoclip manages to articulate sound, imagery and performance aiming to achieve a status of leader and meaning producer. Departing from the theoretical conceptions of Jacques Rancière, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Chion, Arlindo Machado and Denise Azevedo Duarte Guimarães, among others, we focus on the aesthetic analysis of the videoclip and its relations with sociocultural contexts. “This is America” is an intelligent, social and political music video, acting against racism and media’s indifference to the topic.

On the Foundations of Dahlhaus’s Foundations

In the foreword to his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977), translated into English as Foundations of Music History (1983), Carl Dahlhaus names three reasons for writing the book: the lack of theoretical reflection in his own field; the problem of mediation between methodological maxims and their political implications; and the difficulties he encountered while preparing his history of nineteenth-century music. Each of the three reasons can now be understood more precisely and historically contextualized in light of recently uncovered letters and notes. Dahlhaus’s methodological critiques of political music as conceptually distinct from aesthetically autonomous works—contrary to a popular claim by Anne Shreffler (2003)—were directed mainly at the “Western left.” Moreover, in the 1980s this controversy became intertwined with historiographical questions regarding the concept of “event” that was reinforced in publications by the “Gruppe Poetik und Hermeneutik.” A postscript discusses the English translation of the book and the concept of “structural history” in late Dahlhaus.

Political Music in Turkey

Since the founding of the Turkish republic, music has been viewed and used as a nation-building tool by the state. Respectively, music has also been considered an instrument of opposition from the very beginning. This opposing character has expanded and diversified its vocabulary with a socialist and leftist tone over time, especially in the 1960s. During the end of the decade, we also see the emergence of Kurdish political music. During the early 1970s, Turkey witnessed the burgeoning of the ultranationalist music called Ülkücü music. While the 1980 military coup silenced all the dissident voices and music, musicians who received asylum from European countries continued creating music in exile. Leftist music after the military coup witnessed a popularization in the band music influenced by the Latin American musical genre Nueva canción, and solo musician Ahmet Kaya pioneered the leftist protest song scene. Kurdish political music bands called koms emerged by the end of the 1980s and became more prevalent during the 1990s. The 2000s saw the deradicalization, individualization, and depoliticization of overtly political musics in general. However, with the overpoliticization of the country during the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi regime, the dissident elements of protest music have also become dispersed into a wide variety of genres with a more moderate tone.

Introduction

The introduction outlines why Americans turned to music for political expression in the early republic and how music shaped Americans’ visions of the nation through performance, imagination, and print. It situates Americans’ use of music for political expression in long-established and transatlantic practices, including those used in Britain and before and during the Revolutionary War. It introduces the wide range of Americans who created, circulated, interpreted, and performed political music in the early nation. The introduction surveys the types of sources that circulated this music and the musical genres that were commonly used. Chapter summaries and the challenges of studying this music are included.

Conclusion

This conclusion traces how early American political music was used throughout the nineteenth century. While political music in the early nation was often ephemeral, some of it proved surprisingly durable. Not only were songs from the early national period still performed, printed, and compiled in the following decades, but their melodies were used to carry new lyrics responding to later political developments. At times, early American political music was adapted and repurposed for sectional and election purposes. Focusing on the example of Joseph Hopkinson’s “Hail Columbia,” this conclusion highlights how political music created in the early American republic was circulated in song collections, performed on varied occasions, and used to create new music through the end of the nineteenth century.