This book series is designed to provide a platform for innovative and transformative scholarly research (monographs and edited collections) and embraces cultural and historical, analytical and theoretical, as well as interdisciplinary and performance-based approaches. One of its main objectives is to challenge the notion of nationhood through music in the full knowledge of the complex imperial and regionally fragmented historical nature of the lands called Germany and Austria. This includes reframing the customary twinned formulation that places Austria and Germany as a single cultural entity, and pursuing deeper understanding of immigrant and emigrant individuals and peoples through the lens of music. Another is to rethink the interrelationship between music and wider cultural issues underpinning the undeniably linked geo-political arenas of these two nations, which hitherto have been viewed almost universally as being at the epicentre of Western musical repertoire. The question of what ‘Austrianness’ and ‘Germanness’ might have meant in musical terms and in the context of historically volatile socio-political landscapes, lies at the heart of the series.
