Nationalism (in Music)

For much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, the leading musical styles in Europe came from Italy, France and German-speaking lands. In the 19th century, as nations across Europe asserted their identities, composers elsewhere began to build styles of their own from their country's folk music, dances, languages, history and legends. This movement is called musical nationalism.

How composers made music sound "national"

• Folk melodies and dances, quoted directly or imitated: their scales, modes, rhythms and ornaments.
• National subjects for operas and program music: legends, heroes, landscapes, rivers.
• The sounds of local instruments, imitated by the orchestra or piano: bagpipe drones, folk fiddles, guitars.
• The rhythms of the language, shaping vocal melodies.

Important composers

• Poland: Chopin's mazurkas and polonaises turned Polish dances into concert music.
• Russia: Mikhail Glinka is often called the father of Russian music. The group known as "The Five" (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin) set out to create a Russian style independent of Western training.
• Bohemia (Czech lands): Bedřich Smetana (Má vlast, "My Country," including Vltava) and Antonín Dvořák (Slavonic Dances).
• Norway: Edvard Grieg, whose Peer Gynt music and piano pieces draw on Norwegian folk idioms.
• Finland: Jean Sibelius, whose Finlandia became a symbol of Finnish independence.
• Spain: Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados and Manuel de Falla.
• Hungary: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies drew on popular Hungarian styles; later, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály collected thousands of peasant folk songs with recording equipment and built them into modern styles.
• England: Ralph Vaughan Williams collected English folk songs and used them in his music.
• United States: Dvořák, while working in New York, urged American composers to draw on the country's own musical traditions; his Symphony No. 9, "From the New World," was written there. Later, Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and Rodeo created an "American" sound.

Authentic or imagined?

Nationalist composers often presented their own idea of the folk, polished for the concert hall. Bartók, by contrast, insisted on studying folk music as it was actually sung in villages. Both approaches produced lasting music.

Hearing it

Listen for dance rhythms, modal melodies and drone basses in a nationalist piece, and compare the original folk song when you can. The Modes worksheet introduces scales that many folk traditions use.