| Abstrakt: |
Throughout, the relationship to America - both musical and political - forms a continuous thread, giving rise to unexpected paradoxes as a genre originating from US folk music reoriented itself towards a state typically seen as existing at the polar opposite to American democracy. Indeed, musicians did not remain as spectators to the imagining of democracy, but were primary agents, contributing to the refashioning of political culture in numerous ways - for instance, by rethinking working relations within their field; by the experimental creation of compositional "models of democracy"; and by collaboration with activists and politicians eager to advance their idea of democracy through musical means. The so-called "third wave of democratisation", commencing with Portugal's Carnation Revolution in 1974 and extending to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, was widely received as marking an inevitable process towards liberty, even (to use the resonant prediction of Frances Fukuyama) "the end of history".[1] Yet historical research has more recently demonstrated that the processes of transition from authoritarianism undergone by countries around the world was troubled and incomplete, and marked by sharp conflicts over what democracy was to look like. [Extracted from the article] |
