Politics and resistance

The past European socialist regimes and the recent rise of equally authoritarian populist nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean foreground questions of freedom of expression and cultural diversity. The notion of market censorship may be connected in addition to a broader field of “new censorship” that refers to various regulative, constitutive and structural aspects of legislation and professional practices which affect freedom of expression. The field of mass communication is one area whose practices are pivotal in this respect. All censorial forms of the sacred and the profane have their musical manifestations, and quite often these are associated with the epithet “popular.” The political resilience and continuities should not be underestimated though; the ideological basis of early ethnomusicology was founded on an unwavering belief on the existence of certain unequivocally national characteristics of music, particularly regarding European musics.