Music and the Politics of Sound: Nationalism, Citizenship, and Auditory Space

Abstract

The author argues that the distinctive properties of sound give music a very particular role in the organisation of social, economic, and political spaces. Music gains the cultural authority necessary for participation in such spatial processes through properties of sound, which are not fixed and universal but temporally and spatially specific, actively produced in the material/imaginal networks of musical performance. He examines theoretical arguments concerning the performative specificity of sonic experience and considers three ways in which the sonic properties of music are centrally involved in the production of cultural geographies. He draws examples from English music of the period 1880–1940 in order to explore how sound informs moral geographies of landscape, nation, and citizen.