Recontextualisation and fascist music

The vast majority of work examining identity and politics in musicology, and in popular music studies in particular, presumes and sometimes explicitly argues that music is personally and socially therapeutic – that since music enacts social identities it is a force for good, particularly in relation to marginalised groups. My chapter brings together two areas of critical examination: the sociological analysis of fascist music; and the concept ‘recontextualisation’, developed in discourse analytic literature, wherein the contents of one text reappear in another text. Meanings are formed in use; and so, through this process of ‘textual borrowing’, (partly) new meanings are produced. This chapter examines three ways in which this occurs in fascist song and music – through appropriation; through interpolation; and through ideological realignment – and will explore the functions that this, and the performance of song and music more generally, serves to fascist cultural projects