Steven Brown, Ulrik Volgsten, eds. Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. xxi + 376 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57181-489-0; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84545-098-4.
Reviewed by David Tompkins (Department of History, Carleton College)
Published on H-German (October, 2006)
The Use and Abuse of Music
As should be clear from its title, this volume seeks to understand both how music affects us, and how we in turn influence musical production and performance. Although the book's title seems promising to scholars interested in German-related issues, with its evocative conjuring of authoritarian regimes, it likely contains little of immediate interest to H-German readers. The volume includes one article devoted to the Holocaust, while another contains but a short section on the Third Reich as well as a paragraph on East Germany; the other contributions focus largely on contemporary Europe and the United States.
Steven Brown's introduction asks the question: "How does music work?" and examines music's functions and mechanisms, especially its role as an important cooperative device in human societies. Brown lays out a complex model that emphasizes music as a communicative system rather than art form, thereby setting the stage for a volume that looks at music's role in society. The following fourteen articles by authors from diverse backgrounds provide considerable evidence that music does have powerful effects on people, often without being able to explain precisely how this process functions. While at times the contributors take excessive pains to demonstrate the obvious, the articles are often fascinating and provide a strong factual basis for our understanding of the uses and abuses of music.
The volume is divided into two main sections, "Manipulation by Music" and "Manipulation of Music." The first three articles look at how people are influenced by music and examine the important place of music in the social activities and rituals of humans, stressing the idea that music is a key and fundamental aspect of human society and of individual and group identity. The next two articles look at "background music," or music used to support individual improvement or to influence people's purchasing behavior. Unsurprisingly, the articles find that music does affect personal well-being and can shape how much and what people buy, though the exact extent of this influence remains unclear. For example, one study, used as evidence by several authors, demonstrated that subjects shown a blue pen while hearing music they liked overwhelmingly chose that pen over a beige pen shown with music considered unpleasant. (No mention is made as to whether the study controlled for a potential antipathy to beige.) The third and final part of the first section examines music in the context of other media, considering its considerable manipulative effects in film, television commercials, and music videos, and stresses the power of music in advertising.
The second section of the volume looks at how music itself is manipulated through government control as well as the efforts of the business world. Ola Stockfelt contributes a meandering but interesting reflection on the use of classical music in advertising, conducting a critique of the myths surrounding this music along the way. Two other articles examine the power of the music industry to control musical production. In a thoroughgoing analysis of the contemporary music industry, Roger Wallis asserts that despite the digitization of music and thus ease of sharing this media, a handful of huge multinational firms have succeeded in maintaining significant control. A related article critiques current notions of copyright, asserting that it largely benefits the music industry rather than composers or consumers, and calls for an expanded definition that includes moral considerations.
Two articles on governmental control of music would seemingly promise to be most relevant to H-German readers, but they largely disappoint. An article on music censorship examines how religious and state authorities have condemned and banned music in Algeria, Afghanistan, South Africa, Nazi Germany, the former Soviet bloc and the contemporary United States. In providing so many case studies over lengthy time periods, the authors give a very superficial overview of numerous instances of censorship and little analysis. National Socialist Germany and the Soviet bloc receive less than two pages each, scarcely enough to sketch the general outlines of the repression of music under those regimes. In the latter case, the authors even get key facts wrong, mislabeling socialist realism as "social realism," and writing that Prokofiev died in 1951, rather than on the same day as Stalin, famously, in 1953.
In an article on music and the Holocaust, author Joseph J. Moreno of the Moreno Institute for the Creative Arts Therapies gives an interesting if muddled overview of the role of music in the persecution of the Jews. He focuses largely on the therapeutic role of music in the Holocaust, both as comfort to victims and as relaxing and distracting entertainment for the perpetrators. Disappointingly, however, the author rarely analyzes the many compelling examples, but simply organizes them loosely by their relationship to the Holocaust as a phenomenon. He suggestively highlights the seeming contradiction that camp guards could respond emotionally to beautiful music even as they sadistically engaged in mass murder, but gives little insight into this supposed paradox beyond the vague assertion of "distorted values and emotional compartmentalization" (p. 275). Although he offers countless anecdotes of situations where music offered hope and comfort for victims, Moreno provides little interpretation beyond the vague assertion that music is important to people and provides supportive group therapy at times of crisis.
The criticisms of these two German-related articles extend to the volume as a whole. The articles contain many fascinating examples, anecdotes, and references to relevant studies, but a frequent lack of greater analysis causes the volume to fail to answer satisfactorily its introductory question. The authors show over and over that music does have effects on human beings, but they could do much more both to show how music manipulates and to offer a deeper understanding of this influence.
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Citation:
David Tompkins. Review of Brown, Steven; Volgsten, Ulrik, eds., Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12386
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