Tyranny and Music ed. by Joseph E. Morgan and Gregory N. Reish (review)

This collection of essays explores tyranny and music through a wide variety of subjects, geographic locations, decades, and political contexts. Tyranny and Music is the result of a 2015 conference organized by editors Joseph E. Morgan and Gregory N. Reish. They frame this collection within the overarching themes of oppression and resistance, citing the tyrannical influence of Napoleon Bonaparte on European music. In the introduction, Morgan states, "as a tyrant, the impact of Napoleon suffered no apparent boundaries. It is for this reason that I did not seek a more specific theme for this essay collection" (p. xi). Because of this approach, the thirteen essays in the collection are organized without sub-groupings, emphasizing the plurality of tyrannical topics and methodologies employed by each author. In spite of this presentation, themes of war, American subjects, and communism are found throughout the book, hinting at the potential connections between chapters.

The first chapter presents a communist entrapment in an American context. Here, James E. Parsons explores the political entanglements of Hanns Eisler in post–World War II Hollywood, connecting Eisler's personal struggles with one song in his Hollywooder Liederbuch. According to Parsons, "the succession of events that yielded 'Nightmare,' the only Liederbuch song for which Eisler wrote both words and music (the former in English), came to a head in mid-October 1946 when front-page newspaper accounts reported that the composer's older brother, Gerhart, was the top agent of the Communist World Party (CP) in the United States" (p. 5). In the second chapter, Brent Wetters shifts the focus to World War II in the concentration camp Terezín, engaging in speculative readings of poetry by Friedrich Hölderlin from the vantage point of oppressor (Nazi soldier) and oppressed (concentration camp prisoner and composer Viktor Ullmann). American popular music written in response to the Gulf War is the focus of chapter 3, in which Jessica Loranger highlights references to the Vietnam War, pointing toward wartime cultural collectivism while acknowledging a divide in protroop and antiwar messages. In chapter 4, war emerges in a completely different context as Sienna M. Wood discusses the works of sixteenth-century composer Noé Faignient as "vehicles of political propaganda parallel to early rebel writings that identify the state-run Inquisition as the shared enemy of both Protestants and Catholics" during the Dutch Revolt against Spain (p. 55).

Chapter 5 returns to an American subject, as Molly Williams underscores composer William Billings's use of composite texts from sacred and spiritual sources for his anthems in Revolutionary-era America, expressing sentiments against imperial British rule. In chapter 6, the American theme continues: Thomas J. Kernan evokes John Wilkes Booth's rumored cry of "Sic semper tyrannis" during the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to position how Booth is portrayed in a variety of musical genres, including Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's musical Assassins (p. 106). Subsequently, a pair of chapters focusing on different aspects of communist China begins with chapter 7 by Max Noubel, who provides a close reading of act 2, scene 2 of John Adams's Nixon in China. Noubel argues that the characters "are linked to archetypes of the representation of the tyrant and his victims that are to be found in various forms in the history of the opera" (p. 113). In chapter 8, Mei Han considers efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to revive interest and expertise in traditional Chinese instruments, positioning Wang Changyuan's Zhan Taifeng [Battling the Typhoon] as "a perfect example of 'people's' music, and a new model for Chinese instrumental music composition" (p. 125).

In chapter 9, communism is explored in a different geographical area as Anna Oldfield discusses the musical legacy of Azerbaijani ashiq bards, whose oral traditions were promoted and manipulated by the Soviet Union to disseminate communist propaganda through traditional Azerbaijani folk music. The first contemporary topic of this essay collection...