Music has always been political — used by states to consolidate power, by communities to resist oppression, and by individuals to negotiate their position within larger social structures.
MUSIC AS POLITICAL TECHNOLOGY
Every government that has ever attempted to control music — and many have, including Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union, Maoist China, apartheid South Africa, and contemporary authoritarian states — understood instinctively that music is not politically neutral. Music creates solidarity among people who share it. It encodes group identity. It can reinforce authority or undermine it. It reaches people who don't read. It survives in memory when written texts are burned. Political systems that feel secure rarely need to regulate music; those that feel threatened often do.
The history of music censorship is also the history of music's political power.
NATIONAL ANTHEMS AND STATE MUSIC
The national anthem is the most explicit form of state musical deployment. The history of national anthems from the late eighteenth century onward — the Marseillaise (1792), the Star-Spangled Banner (1814), and hundreds of post-colonial anthems composed in the twentieth century — demonstrates how music is used to construct national identity, to mark inclusion and exclusion, and to mobilize emotional commitment to the state.
Philip Bohlman's "The Music of European Nationalism" (ABC-CLIO, 2004) analyzes how national anthems function not as expressions of pre-existing national identity but as constitutive acts — the anthem helps create the national identity it claims to express.
Bruno Nettl's concept of "westernization" and "modernization" in music analyzes how newly independent post-colonial states have used musical institutions (conservatories, national orchestras, music education) as tools of nation-building — often in ways that paradoxically marginalized the indigenous musical traditions they were supposed to celebrate.
MUSIC UNDER FASCISM
The relationship between music and fascism has been analyzed most thoroughly in the German context. The Nazi state had explicit music policies: Jewish composers were banned, modernist music (Entartete Musik, "degenerate music") was prohibited, and German Romantic music (particularly Wagner) was promoted as a vehicle of German national greatness.
The case of Richard Wagner is particularly complex. Wagner's anti-Semitic writings ("Das Judenthum in der Musik," 1850) and Hitler's personal admiration for his music create an inextricable association. But the music itself is not "Nazi music" — and after the war, a whole generation of Israeli musicians refused to perform it for reasons that are not about the music's content but about its historical associations. The question of whether music can be "contaminated" by its political uses is genuinely difficult.
Dmitri Shostakovich's experience of Stalinist censorship — detailed in his controversial "Testimony" (Solomon Volkov, ed., Harper & Row, 1979, still debated as to authenticity) and in more sober analyses by musicologist Laurel Fay — illustrates how composers navigated between artistic expression and political survival. His Fifth Symphony (1937) is simultaneously a public recantation (responding to Stalin's criticism) and a private subversion (the "triumph" of the finale is, to many listeners, so bombastic as to constitute irony).
PROTEST MUSIC AND RESISTANCE
Music has been as consistently used for resistance as for domination. The history of protest music in the United States — from labor songs (Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie) through the Civil Rights movement (We Shall Overcome, a gospel hymn adapted through the union movement) through Vietnam-era protest (Bob Dylan, Country Joe and the Fish) to hip-hop's tradition of social criticism (Public Enemy, Kendrick Lamar) — demonstrates music's capacity to build solidarity, articulate grievance, and sustain movements over time.
Outside North America: the nueva canción (new song) movement in Latin America (Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, Mercedes Sosa), the anti-apartheid music of South Africa, Zeca Afonso's song "Grândola, Vila Morena" (broadcast as the signal for Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution), and the role of music in the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia all demonstrate music's capacity to carry political meaning in compressed, emotionally direct form.
Victor Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter tortured and killed in the 1973 Pinochet coup, is the most extreme example of what can happen when musical resistance is taken seriously by the state. His story is also a reminder that the political power ethnomusicologists analyze has real-world consequences.
MUSIC INDUSTRY AND CULTURAL POLICY
The global music industry — dominated by three major corporations (Universal, Sony, Warner) that together control approximately 70% of the global recorded music market — is itself a political structure. Decisions made by these corporations about which music is promoted, which artists receive contracts, and which sounds are distributed globally shape musical culture in ways that have nothing to do with musical quality.
The World Trade Organization's treatment of music as intellectual property (TRIPS agreement, 1994) subjects cultural expression to commercial legal frameworks that were designed for manufactured goods. The resulting system — in which a corporation can own a song for seventy years after its composer's death — creates profound tensions between the commercial and cultural functions of music.
SOUTH AFRICA AND THE ANTI-APARTHEID MOVEMENT
The role of music in the South African anti-apartheid struggle (1948–1994) is one of the most thoroughly documented examples of political music in modern history. The song Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika ("God Bless Africa"), originally composed by Enoch Sontonga in 1897 as a Xhosa-language hymn, became the anthem of the African National Congress and ultimately part of the national anthem of post-apartheid South Africa. Miriam Makeba, who left South Africa in 1959, was barred from returning in 1960 and testified against apartheid at the UN in 1963, carried South African musical traditions to international audiences while functioning as one of the most visible voices of anti-apartheid politics. Hugh Masekela, Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand), Letta Mbulu, and others continued this work in exile. Within South Africa, the mbaqanga tradition, the marabi piano tradition, isicathamiya choral singing, and gospel music all developed in dialogue with the political conditions of apartheid. The cultural boycott of South Africa called by the UN General Assembly in 1980 created a global cultural-political framework in which questions of musical participation and complicity became urgent.
CIVIL RIGHTS MUSIC AND THE FREEDOM SINGERS
The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s used music systematically and self-consciously. The Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, led by Myles Horton with educators such as Septima Clark and Guy Carawan, taught freedom songs to activists who would carry them into Southern campaigns. We Shall Overcome — adapted from a gospel hymn by way of the union song movement of the 1930s — became the movement's anthem. The SNCC Freedom Singers (which included Bernice Johnson Reagon, later of Sweet Honey in the Rock) toured the country building support for civil rights work. Songs functioned simultaneously as morale-builders for activists facing violence, as fundraising vehicles, as rhetorical tools in marches and meetings, and as expressions of theological belief that civil rights work was a form of religious witness. The historian and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon has produced the most thorough scholarly accounts of this body of music.
MUSIC AND THE STATE: CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES
The contemporary People's Republic of China has invested heavily in musical institutions as instruments of cultural policy. The Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Shanghai Conservatory, and other elite institutions train Chinese musicians in both Western classical and traditional Chinese music to the highest international standards. The state's promotion of specific minority musical traditions, the regulation of musical content (Cui Jian's rock music was viewed with suspicion during the 1989 Tiananmen events), and the deployment of musical spectacle in events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony all demonstrate how musical institutions remain instruments of political power even in contexts that present themselves as primarily commercial or cultural.
THE AESTHETIC AS POLITICAL
Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher and musicologist, argued in his "Philosophy of New Music" (1949) that the formal characteristics of music — not just its lyrical content — are politically significant. Adorno's analyses of jazz, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and popular song have been criticized for elitism and Eurocentrism, but his core insight — that musical form itself encodes ideology — has shaped subsequent thinking about the politics of musical aesthetics. Susan McClary, Christopher Small, and George Lipsitz have developed these ideas in directions that are more empirically grounded and culturally inclusive than Adorno's own work.
EXERCISE: ANTHEM ANALYSIS
Find the full text and music of three national anthems: one from the colonial era (before 1900), one from post-World War II decolonization (1945–1975), and one from a post-Soviet state (1990s). For each: what images and values does the text invoke? What musical style is used — march, hymn, something else? What does the choice of musical style communicate? How does the anthem construct national identity? Write three paragraphs of analysis, using Bohlman's framework.