iPaper - side 14discursively constructed and changeable over time. The paper addresses over a century of musicians’ practices and the receptions and interpretations of critics, audiences, and musicologists, from Grieg’s ambivalent statements about the relationship between his Norwegian identity and his artistic agenda as a composer, to the specifics surrounding the composition of Grieg’s Slåtter, to the status of Grieg and Grieg’s music in contemporary Norwegian society. Weisethaunet applies a critical interpretive approach to important primary textual sources, including extensive quotes from sources such as Grieg’s correspondence and commentary by others on Grieg’s music during and after his lifetime. The author draws on postcolonial theory (particularly the writings of Homi Bhabha) to show how the Norwegian nation is “narrated” through discourse about Grieg’s music, as well as addressing issues in the practice of historiography, asking why music is assumed to be “national” in the first place. Susan McClary’s contribution “Playing the Identity Card: Of Grieg, Indians, and Women” creates an interesting and useful dialogue with Weisethaunet’s paper, since both papers deal with the same repertoire (Grieg’s Slåtter), but from different and complementary disciplinary and interpretive perspectives. Weisethaunet uses a textual-critical approach to explore the circumstances of – and ideologies behind – the collection and transcription of the melodies from a “folk” musician and Grieg’s subsequent use of these melodies in composition. In contrast, McClary employs music-analytical methods, including close analysis of the musical text itself (in the form of the score, with reference also to recorded performances of the “original” tunes played on the Hardanger fiddle, paired with performances of Grieg’s setting of them for piano) in order to explore Grieg’s creative transformation of the fiddle tunes. Focusing in particular on the expanded harmonic vocabulary Grieg employed in his setting of the melodies, McClary shows how Grieg’s inventive use of harmony, derived from the modal characteristics of the musical material itself, challenged the boundaries of European compositional practice at the time. McClary embeds this close reading of Grieg’s musical text within a critical discussion of how marginalized identities (women, Native Americans, a composer in a nation on the European periphery) struggle within the systems of power and representation that would dismiss their contributions to culture and society. McClary’s paper was also one of the invited keynote speeches at the symposium. 16 Music and Identity in Norway and Beyond |