Music and the Racial Imagination

Rating:
Summary: The Case for the Prosecution
Review: The editors argue that music lies at the foundation of conceptions of race. Their contributions to this book make a case for that view, but the contention is sometimes more asserted than proven, and there are some crude generalizations that blunt the argument (e.g. "the European racial imagination", p. 27, as if there could be but one European way of thinking about race). In remaining unpersuaded, of course, I am not claiming that there is no connection between the ideas of music and race, rather that it may not be exactly of the kind the editors describe. The best contributions to this volume, then, are those that focus on more specific cases and those that deal also with music as music. (A few treat song lyrics without much sense of how the words are sung, which surely makes a difference to their expressive impact.)

Still, if the case feels sometimes overstated or a little unmusical, it is nonetheless very intriguingly put in some of the chapters, which are contributed by leading scholars in several fields.