Europe Nationalism in Music and the United States

While musical nationalism could adopt a variety of specific profiles according to the "nation" involved, these all had a number of features in common. Many nationalist musics relied on folk idioms that, however inaccurately, could be claimed as a national heritage. Opera and program music lent themselves easily to national themes; and opera also had recourse to rousing choruses, which could not only evoke the character and presence of a people—most notably "Va, pensiero" in Verdi's Nabucco (1842) and the coronation scene in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1872)—but also cross over into popular currency. Ethnographic studies could either add legitimacy to native folk idioms or form the basis for a nationally conceived exotic "other" to be assimilated and synthesized in national terms. Thus, "Spanish" music provided both Russian and French composers an opportunity to indulge in coloristic orchestration that was itself a source of nationalist pride; such as in Carmen (1874) by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and Capriccio Espanole (1887) by Rimsky-Korsakov. Similar use was made of Asian sources (e.g., in Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherezade, 1888), analogous to the earlier tradition regarding the "Turkish" topic. Eventually, ethnographic research evolved from a kind of colonialist interest in the "other" into another vehicle for nationalist endeavor, with some ethnomusicologists holding that only "authentic" members of a group ought to conduct research into its musical traditions.