Defining musical nationalism

Grieg has been widely acknowledged as a central figure in the emergence of a distinctively Scandinavian tone in nineteenth-century music. The precise nature of his ‘Norwegianness’, however, is less clearly understood. This is partly because the relationship between music and nationalism remains a problematic issue. As Celia Applegate has suggested, the difficulty is partly one of definition: ‘the meanings of the key terms in the debate, nation and nationalism, are by no means self-evident, particularly when one descends to the ground of specific historical experience’. In any such discussion, there is inevitably a tension between different levels of historical experience. To what extent can we regard Norway as a special case study, as opposed to part of a broader European phenomenon? Even more fundamentally, perhaps, it is unclear how such tensions could be articulated in Grieg's music, and how justified we are in retrospectively hearing Grieg's work as the individual expression of a collective Norwegian musical identity. Given the complexity of these questions, a brief survey of recent writing on nationalism and associated forms of cultural practice is necessary before we can proceed to more detailed consideration of folklorism and landscape in nineteenth-century Norway and their influence on Grieg's music. The aim is not to offer a comprehensive critique of the concept of national identity in music, since such a project is arguably beyond the scope of any single book.