The books listed in this column address music as it relates to political expression or focus to a significant degree on power relationships between individual musicians or musical communities and a governing authority. Readers are welcome to submit additional titles to musicandpolitics@umich.edu for possible inclusion in the next issue.


  • Adlington, Robert, ed. New Music Theatre in Europe: Transformations between 1955–1975. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Armstrong, Andrew B. 24 Bars to Kill: Hip Hop, Aspiration, and Japan’s Social Margins. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019.                
  • Asthana, Sanjay. India’s State-Run Media: Broadcasting, Power, and Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 
  • Avila, Jacqueline. Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico’s Época de Oro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Bick, Sally. Unsettled Scores: Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 
  • Buch, Esteban, Igor Contreras Zubillaga, and Manuel Deniz Silva, eds. Composing for the State: Music in Twentieth-Century Dictatorships. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Burn, David J., Grantley McDonald, Joseph Verheyden, and Peter De Mey, eds. Music and Theology in the European Reformations. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019. 
  • Butler, Katherine. Music in Elizabethan Court Politics. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2019. 
  • Butler, Margaret R. Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019. 
  • Cain, Michael Scott. Folk Music and the New Left in the Sixties. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2019. 
  • Camal, Jérôme. Creolized Aurality: Guadeloupean Gwoka and Postcolonial Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 
  • Cardoso, Leonardo. Sound-Politics in São Paulo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Cohen, Aaron. Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 
  • Collins, Sarah. Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  • Collins, Sarah, ed. Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 
  • Coulter, Colin, ed. Working for the Clampdown: The Clash, the Dawn of Neoliberalism and the Political Promise of Punk. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
  • Custodis, Michael, and Arnulf Mattes, eds. The Nordic Ingredient: European Nationalisms and Norwegian Music since 1905. Münster: Waxmann, 2019.  
  • Dave, Nomi. The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
  • Dolp, Laura, ed. Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 
  • Elphick, Daniel. Music Behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 
  • Fanning, David, and Erik Levi, eds. The Routledge Handbook to Music under German Occupation, 1938–1945: Propaganda, Myth and Reality. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Fast, Susan, and Craig Jennex, eds. Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Goldberg, K. Meira, Walter Aaron Clark, and Antoni Pizà, eds. Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song and Dance: Spaniards, Natives, Africans, Roma. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. 
  • Goldschmitt, K. E. Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
  • Guilbault, Jocelyne, and Timothy Rommen, eds. Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 
  • Hagen, Trevor. Living in The Merry Ghetto: The Music and Politics of the Czech Underground. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Ho, Wai-Chung. Popular Music, Cultural Politics and Music Education in China. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Hödl, Klaus. Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Translated by Corey Twitchell. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 
  • Horne, Gerald. Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019.    
  • James, Robin. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Kalman, Julie, Ben Wellings, and Keshia Jacotine, eds. Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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  • Katz, Mark. Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Kim, Gooyong, From Factory Girls to K-Pop Idol Girls: Cultural Politics of Developmentalism, Patriarchy, and Neoliberalism in South Korea’s Popular Music Industry. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.            
  • Klenke, Kerstin. The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Kraaz, Sarah Mahler, ed. Music and War in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • La Chapelle, Peter. I’d Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 
  • Lasser, Michael. City Songs and American Life, 1900–1950. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019.
  • Lovesey, Oliver, ed. Popular Music and the Postcolonial. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • Mazierska, Ewa, Les Gillon, and Tony Rigg, eds. Popular Music in the Post-Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology. London, Bloomsburg Academic, 2019.     
  • Mazierska, Ewa, and Zsolt Győri, eds. Eastern European Popular Music in a Transnational Context: Beyond the Borders. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 
  • Mboya, T. Michael. Popular Music, Ethnicity and Politics in the Kenya of the 1990s: Okatch Biggy Live at “The Junction.” Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019. 
  • Onyebadi, Uche T., ed. Music and Messaging in the African Political Arena. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2019. 
  • Pollock, Emily Richmond. Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Ramos-Kittrell, Jesús A., ed. Decentering the Nation: Music, Mexicanidad, and Globalization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.           
  • Rauhut, Michael. One Sound, Two Worlds: The Blues in a Divided Germany, 1945–1990. Translated by Jessica Ring. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019.        
  • Ritchey, Marianna. Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
  • Saito, Yoshiomi. The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Diplomacy and “American Music.” New York: Routledge, 2019. 
  • Seinen, Nathan. Prokofiev’s Soviet Operas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  • Sullivan, James. Which Side Are You On?: 20th Century American History in 100 Protest Songs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Tausig, Benjamin. Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Vito, Christopher. The Values of Independent Hip-Hop in the Post-Golden Era: Hip-Hop’s Rebels. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.   
  • Williams, Gavin, ed. Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Wilson, Alexandra. Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Wolf, Stacy. Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 
  • Woodfield, Ian. Cabals and Satires: Mozart’s Comic Operas in Vienna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.