Abstract

Music influences political movements and rituals and politics imparts its impact on contemporary music. Music turns out to be a powerful link, with rhythm and tone, between the expressively loaded inspirations of a political thinker and the listeners. If politics is considered to be the blood that nourishes society with the energy to go forward, then to political transformation, music is a vital ingredient because music is so amusing that it bears such immense effectiveness for political manifestation. This paper seeks to analyze the impact of music on politics and influence of politics on music. From Beethoven to hip-hop, the association between music and politics is analyzed from a wide-angle view in this paper.

Correlation between Music and Politics

Introduction

The correlation between music and politics, particularly in political expression is strong and influencing. These musical expressions can be used anti-establishment of protests theme includes antiwar song, pro-establishment idea could also be used, for instance in national anthems country patriotic song, and politics campaigns. Most of these songs could be portrayed as topical song.

For a very long time, music and politics have been buttoned together with one another. Music is engraved with political message. The connection between the Politics and Music can be observed by any nonchalant listener of any type of music. For instance, the African-American youth belonging to the urban cities of United States employed hip- hop music as a medium to record their protest against social and political repressions against them.

In the same manner, during the Vietnam War and the movement for the acquisition of civil rights in United States in the decades of 60's and 70's, music has underlying and reflective political views. The music of the country at that time was extensively tied with visible patriotic harmony and overtly based on political grounds. For centuries, music has also been an arena for expressing reflective political views. Various composers like Verdi, Beethoven, Mussorgski, Wagner, Sibelius, Copeland, and numerous others have contributed a lot in this regard.

Dissimilar to other music, political music does not portray ambiguity, and used to describe a theme that contains political messages. While the political messages in political music is obvious, it has the strong political contexts of the time of compiling that made people understand the historical event and time that inspire the musical essential to full understand the messages in the political music. Since political music made to listen, it mostly got popularity.

Discussion and Analysis

Approaches for Expression of Political Content Via Music

Music and politics are inter-related to each. There are two preliminary approaches to express the political content through music. One of the approaches is termed as representational approach while the other one is associational political music. The former one is direct way of connecting music with a political point of view while the later one is the product of action of people who are not directly involved in the composition of political music. Representational political music illustrates a visibly defined political perspective that matches up with the composer's intention regarding the ...