De Musica Disserenda, XII/1, 2016: Nineteenth-Century Music in Central Europe: Paradigms and Popular Canon

Nations and nationalism have been a main research topic for decades, but the last few years have witnessed noticeable growth in these studies. The perspective generally accepted in the humanities – that demands for political independence of the nations in nineteenth-century Central Europe were premised on a sense of cultural identity – has also been taken up by contemporary musicological thought. Essays by philosopher and social anthropologist Ernest Gellner on “invented nations” in Nations and Nationalism (1983), or by historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson on “imagined communities” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1991), supported …