[When] the word race, as applied to man, is spoken of, the English mind wanders immediately to distant countries; to Negroes and Hottentots, Red Indians and savages. (1850)

It is our hope that the musicologies might rise ... to the occasion and find their way in the emerging national and international conversation on race, for it is in music that the racial resonates most vividly, with greatest affect and power. (2000)

I should begin by declaring immediately my standpoint that there is no such thing as race. Race and, by extension, racism may have a social reality but they have no sound scientific grounding whatsoever. No convincing biological evidence has ever been produced that establishes the existence of different human races. DNA analysis offers little support to theories of genetic difference, and has revealed that even the most geographically separate social groups vary in only 6 to 8 per cent of their genes. Race does not present a medical problem when it comes to organ transplants. My research questions are, therefore: When and why did the idea of ‘race’ arise, and how did this fiction affect the production and consumption of music in the nineteenth century? In seeking answers, I make illustrative references to Liszt's Gypsy, Wagner's Jew, Celtic music, African-American music and American Indian music.

Anyone who ventures into the vastness of German song territory encounters a juggernaut almost immediately. Over and over again, the supplier of the words is identified as Heinrich Heine - a very great poet, to be sure, but other great poets did not leave the same mammoth imprint on the history of song as this man. Günter Metzner's catalogue, Heine in der Musik (Heine in Music), consumes twelve oversize volumes, and both Peter Shea and I have found settings that are not cited in this Herculean source. Those who peruse Ernst Challier's Grosser Lieder-Katalog (Great Song Catalogue) of 1884 discover that nineteenth-century composers frequently chose Heine for their op. 1 entrée onto the scene, as if setting Heine to music was a rite of passage, a guarantee that attention would be paid.

Although definitions of orientalism and racism seldom achieve consensus, the significance of their interplay is universally acknowledged amongst theorists of non-Western cultures. Tony Ballantyne, in his recent Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, describes their relationship in terms of mutuality, and Ziauddin Sardar, in Orientalism, describes them as ‘circles within circles’. Edward Said, of course, deals with their relationship exhaustively in Orientalism, and describes them as inextricably linked. Writing of the nineteenth century, he suggests that ‘Theses of Oriental backwardness, degeneracy, and inequality with the West most easily associated themselves early in the nineteenth century with ideas about the biological bases of racial inequality.’

Present-day players of the ‘English’ concertina (see Fig. 1) must make a number of important decisions when delving into and performing the large repertory of art music that was written for the instrument in Victorian England. These decisions become especially critical for those who would perform the music in a manner that may at least approximate the way it may have sounded in the nineteenth century.

What influence did contemporary attitudes towards empire and towards ‘Other’ peoples exert on musical works, especially when those peoples were perceived as being of a different race?

The answer surely varies with the genre and also with the complexity of the given work. The late Edward Said – the most prominent and controversial figure in cultural critique of this sort – put it well: a work that is ‘rich in … aesthetic intellectual complexity’ must not be treated as if it were a crudely ‘jingoistic ditty’ – or, for the present context, a racist one. Said's specific example of a complex literary work, in that passage from his important book Culture and Imperialism, is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, with its occasional, resonant references to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean and thus also to the British slave trade.1 The problem becomes even more intense in music (of equivalent aesthetic complexity). Instrumental works are particularly difficult to interrogate on any ‘extra-musical’ basis, for an obvious and much-discussed reason: the relative inability of music, without verbal or visual anchors, to denotate and to narrate.2

As is well known, Wagner began creating the cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen by writing a three-act dramatic poem entitled Siegfrieds Tod, the story of a mythical hero, Siegfried, and his downfall. But Siegfrieds Tod was burdened by extended moments of static, explanatory narrative, and Wagner's dramaturgical instincts ultimately led him to write three works that would precede the tragedy of Siegfried's fall. Der junge Siegfried, ultimately retitled Siegfried, presents the rise of the hero, Die Walküre the hero's origins, and Das Rheingold serves as a one-act prologue to the Ring-trilogy. The character of Siegfried was, thus, the generative impulse behind Wagner's cycle and is central to its dramaturgy. The opera Siegfried focuses upon the upbringing and, more importantly, the coming of age of this pivotal character.

To discover that one of popular music's most famous and enduring composers wrote a march-characteristic called ‘The Red Man’ immediately arouses curiosity about the nature and substance of such a work, the reasons for writing it, and how audiences received it. John Philip Sousa composed ‘The Red Man’ in 1910 for his world tour and, like much of his music, it is still played and recorded today. I will attempt to answer these questions by examining this lesser-known but highly distinctive Sousa composition in detail. That necessarily involves seeing the piece through a variety of lenses. Since the way in which audiences listen to music has fundamentally changed in a hundred years, the closest we can come to hearing the piece through ears of 1910 is to explore a variety of critical responses from the time published in newspapers in different countries. Since these accounts are written in a stylistic language considerably different from the way modern critics write about music, the responses need to be seen in context. Many were rooted in notions of race and ethnicity prevalent among the middle- and upper-class audiences for which Sousa composed. Moreover, Sousa's audiences listened with a host of associations that accrued during the nineteenth century and are lost to us today. This was enhanced by the type of programmes on which ‘The Red Man’ was performed, which encouraged the perception of music through a national or exotic lens, or through the filter of a narrative. The musical language of this ‘Indian’ piece is hardly unique, since it owes many of its metaphors to Sousa's contemporaries. For all his originality, Sousa was also an expert assimilator. There isn’t space here to examine every derivation in this work, but by exploring a few of them we can learn much about his music and his audiences.

Alan Tyson (1926–2000) was one of the most remarkable, influential and prolific Beethoven scholars of his generation. Yet his achievements ran wider than Beethoven, and even wider than music: he studied psychoanalysis, practised as a psychiatrist, and learnt German specifically in order to translate many of the writings of Siegmund Freud. Even before the claims of his musicological researches finally won over his medical career, he was the first to demonstrate the importance, and indeed authenticity, of many English editions of Beethoven. He published a huge amount of bibliographical material on Beethoven, both articles and books, particularly (in collaboration with Douglas Johnson and Robert Winter) a complete catalogue of Beethoven's sketchbooks. Not content with that, however, he turned his attention to Mozart, becoming the prime authority on the paper types and watermarks of Mozart's autograph manuscripts. Shortly before his death a Festschrift was dedicated to him, in which the complete bibliography of his publications occupies nine full pages.

According to jazz scholar Howard Rye, when considering public representations of African-American music and those who made it at the turn of the last century, ‘the average jazz aficionado, and not a few others, conjures up images of white folks in black face capering about’. We could extend this to include white minstrels singing so-called ‘coon songs’, which feature reprehensible racist lyrics set to syncopated rhythms. Traditional representations assign the blacks no role in the public performance of these scurrilous ‘identities’, which essentially banished them from the literature as participating in careers in the performing arts. As a result of the problems with the representation of blacks in texted music from the turn of the century, historians have tended to write vocal performance out of the pre-history of jazz, in favour of the purely instrumental ragtime. However, recent research reveals that African-American vocal entertainers did take agency over representations of themselves and over their careers, in a space unencumbered by the problematic history of race relationships in the USA. That space was Europe: beginning in the 1870s, and in increasing numbers until the ‘Great War’, troupes of African-American singers, dancers and comedians travelled to Europe, where they entertained large audiences to great acclaim and gained valuable experience as entrepreneurs, emerging as an important market force in the variety-theatre circuit. Above all, they performed the cakewalk, the late-nineteenth-century dance whose syncopated rhythms and simple form accompanied unnatural, exaggerated dance steps. By introducing Europe to the cakewalk, they prepared audiences for the jazz craze that would sweep through the continent after the war and enabled Europeans to experience the syncopated rhythms and irregular movements whether as dancers or as spectators.

From the earliest reviews, the trope of music has shaped the image of Tennyson for critics and readers. Tennyson's talent is one that joins voice and ear:

Nature […] has taught Mr. Tennyson to sing as a poet should sing, – she has taught him to throw his whole soul into his harmonies.

He has a fine ear for melody and harmony too – and rare and rich glimpses of imagination. He has – genius.

Perhaps as a consequence of the late-nineteenth-century tendency to differentiate Brahms from the Wagnerian coterie at all costs, his enduring interest in exoticism has received little attention. This is not unreasonable, since his untexted works show no evidence of any foreign links further than Hungary. In addition, for obvious reasons, the specific tropes associated with exoticism, or more specifically orientalism, manifested themselves most clearly through art-forms better equipped to portray specific verbal content, such as opera, literature and painting, none of which is strongly associated with Brahms. Biographically, it is even harder to reconcile Brahms with exoticism, since the connotations of sensuality sit oddly with the bürgerlich North German Protestant work ethic that generally defines perceptions of him. Still, the effect of over 30 years in cosmopolitan Vienna cannot be overlooked; also Brahms was a friend and supporter of artists as well as of musicians. Although Max Klinger and Adolf von Menzel spring primarily to mind, his interest in German painters dated from his early twenties, following his visit to the Schumanns in Düsseldorf. In particular, from the mid-1860s onwards he expressed constant interest in the works of the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Interestingly, both Brahms's and Feuerbach's concept of orientalism, specifically through the Persian poet Hafis, was mediated by the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer. This study will explore the simultaneous burgeoning of interest shown by Brahms in his Hafis settings and Feuerbach in his works Hafis vor der Schenke and Hafis am Brunnen in the mid-1860s, as well as the background of the poet who inspired them both.