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open them up to re-negotiation (Sugarman 1997). The papers in this volume thus look behind this “taken-for-grantedness” to query the ways in which music is used in “identity work” (Walser 1993:134, DeNora 2000:62) – how music “accomplishes” (following Walser 1993:109) nation, race, gender, and other kinds of musicalized identities. In the following sections I first introduce the contributions briefly, tracing continuities between them and suggesting an itinerary through the book. I then return in greater detail to a few of the key themes running through the papers, including music and Norwegian cultural identity, the notion of Edvard Grieg as a humanist, and the relevance of postcolonial theory to the project this book represents. There are of course other possible itineraries through the volume; the reader will no doubt also recognize other common threads running through and uniting the different papers. Organization of the book The papers are divided into two large sections, one section focusing primarily on music and national identity in Norway, using the music of Edvard Grieg as a starting point, and the second section expanding this focus both to places beyond Norway and to other kinds of identities besides that associated with the nation. The papers in the first section, Music and Identity in Norway …, all use the music of Edvard Grieg – and the figure of Grieg himself – as a point of departure for discussions of identity in a Norwegian context. The contributors collectively interrogate how Grieg and his music have been, in the words of Aase, “nationalized” and appropriated in projects of building a Norwegian national culture, or as Weisethaunet argues with reference to Homi Bhabha (1990), how these projects “narrate” the Norwegian nation. The papers thus address the question of music and national identity through one specific case study and repertoire: the nation of Norway and the music of Grieg. In his paper “Music and National Identity: Grieg and Beyond”, an expanded version of one of the keynote addresses at the symposium from which this book is derived, Hans Weisethaunet interrogates relationships between music and the nation, using the life and music of Grieg as an example. Weisethaunet problematizes facile generalizations about how music represents national identity, and explores how relationships between music and the nation are Introduction 15

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