Europe Nationalism in Music and the United States

Music history in the nineteenth century has generally been perceived in terms of "mainstream" traditions continuing from the late eighteenth century, the general rise of Romanticism across these mainstreams, and the splintering into a variety of "nationalist" musics in the later part of the century. But nationalism lay at the heart of all facets of this master narrative, from the maintenance of the "mainstreams" to Romanticism and, most especially, to the narrative perspective. The principal task of historical musicology, for much of the time since about 1850, has been the promotion and development of a historicist canon to support a particular nationalist ideology. Moreover, as European nationalism, especially in Germany and Italy, led to two world wars in the twentieth century, some of its victims who fled to the United States (especially in the 1930s) established the American scholarly tradition in musicology, teaching the same history they had been taught and thus perpetuating the view that the most important musical tradition was German, which was to be understood as the least nationalist and most universal (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, etc.), trailed by Italian opera and older Italian traditions, a few isolated "cosmopolitan" geniuses such as Chopin, and various "national" schools at the margin of respectability, whose legitimacy was cast in doubt not least because their music was widely enjoyed.