Hebert and Kertz-Weizel's collection of essays examine various ways worldwide that nations approach the idea of instilling love for the motherland through school-based music education. This is a very topical focus, and it has resulted in essays that can be divided into two types: those that describe national education systems more generally and those that provide more personally grounded reflections on key expressions of their own nation in music, most particularly national anthems. This bifurcation makes the volume appealing to a wide range of readers, interweaving broader historical overviews and engaged, personal accounts. Many nations are examined, with essay-length treatment accorded to: Germany, Australia, Taiwan, the USA, South Africa, Singapore, the USA once again, Canada and Finland. There is a minor predominance of English-speaking countries in this list, but it's a good range, including nation states with extensive historical particularities and those where national formation remains very much an ongoing project.

In his Introduction, Hebert identifies two in-built challenges for research in this area. First, although patriotism and nationalism are hard to distinguish from each other in terms of either the practices or values they invoke, each term can be used in markedly distinct ways. That is, a commentator sympathetic toward the values demonstrated will typically describe them as patriotic, while one who suspects the sentiments to be uncritical, biased, prejudiced or a stimulus to violence will tend to use the term nationalistic (p. 2). As this infers, the same musical interventions can be interpreted both positively and negatively, resulting in a challenge for music educators charged with a role in instilling a positive sense of national identity but anxious not to contribute to xenophobia. Second, the more recent theories of music education are energetically cosmopolitan, pushing us to build upon music's ability to inculcate intercultural understandings. Nevertheless, practice in many countries occurs still within educational contexts that are primarily focused on building a sense of national belonging (p. 7). Again, many a music teacher is advised one way by leading writers and pushed in quite another by national statutory expectations.

Kertz-Welzel's chapter offers a very stimulating first case study. Kertz-Welzel begins her history of German music education with an account of sentiments preceding the political unification of Germany in the 1870s. Not surprisingly, there was considerable emphasis on shared German heritage in the music education of this period. After a phase where the musical symbols of German statehood became thoroughly inscribed, a process further intensified in the Nazi era, there was then an abrupt shift post-1945, when embarrassment over Germany's past and the role played then by music education led to the emergence of a contemporary music education that actively avoids expressions of national symbolism. Yet the avoidance of such symbols in state music education-directed contexts in Germany may leave them even more open to seizure by less mainstream groups with interpretations of their own.

Jane Southcott's account of Australia is similarly historical in perspective, but here the history itself is almost diametrically opposed, involving a long process of emergence from British colonial rule, and as a result, a self-conscious attempt to construct suitable musical symbols of nationhood. Those Southcott analyses include the contrasting resonances of a set of candidates for the Australian national anthem and the rise of ANZAC Day commemorations, in which classes of school pupils can take a musical role. Several of the later chapters look at national anthems too, among which Carlos Abril's study of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ fits particularly well as a counter to Southcott's writing. Abril describes how in 2005 members of the US National Association for Music Education tried to build on a wave of American patriotism to garner support for music in schools: patriotism drawn upon to serve music education, as it were, rather in distinction to Southcott's instances of music education serving patriotic expression. (Amy Beegle, later in the volume, looks at the same US initiative in a longer historical context, and so the complementarity extends that way as well.)

Taiwan, like Australia and the USA, has a colonial past. But Taiwan's nationhood, as studied by Wai-Chung Ho, exemplifies quite a different set of problems as compared with these countries, remaining contested within Taiwan itself and under claim by the neighbouring Chinese state. Ho looks at recent years primarily, charting a change of emphasis within state-sponsored music education away from use of materials that present China as a centre for cultural content and toward those that celebrate Taiwanese traditions. In fact, there are interesting trends in Taiwan not embraced here, for instance the involvement of music educators in the so-called ‘mother-language’ tuition programmes (using song to teach Taiwanese, Hakka or aboriginal dialects as opposed to the Mandarin Chinese much more widely used in schools) and the great dominance in music education of Western music genres, which makes arguments over Chinese vs. Taiwanese cultural identity reported here something of a side-show in daily practice, notwithstanding its considerable symbolic value.

If thinking about Taiwan allows us to consider a third type of nation, Ambigay Raidoo Yudkoff's reflections on growing up as a member of the Indian minority in apartheid-era South Africa provides a third perspective on the employment of national anthems. Here, school pupils (and then music teachers) like Yudkoff were required to sing a national anthem that proclaimed their ‘freedom’ at a time when the state itself was the main impediment to any such experience (p. 101). The example is a salutary reminder that nationalism's force is often directed within the state, its rituals demanding daily displays of obedience from the nation's disempowered.

The remaining chapters fill out further perspectives, although I found Eugene Dairianathan and Chee-Hoo Lim's discussion of Singapore had less to offer, suffering from a lack of structure and focus. Kari Veblen contributes perspectives on Canada, writing in a way that engages with both of the volume's emergent sub-themes, and Marja Heimonen and David Hebert give a case study on music education in Finland. This might have been positioned earlier in the collection so that overlap between the definitions of patriotism in Hebert's Introduction and those here felt developmental rather than reiterative.

The editors conclude the volume with a series of questions and recommendations, proposing that music educators put an emphasis on reconciliation rather than nationalism in times of war (p. 176). Individual music teachers will want to decide for themselves how far they can push against governmental or societal expectations, and those who train teachers will need to reflect on how well they prepare student teachers for such a role (see also, p. 17). Taken as a whole, the volume charts the variegated history of patriotically orientated music education and identifies the perils of a nationalist music education. These include a reduction in the quality of education (interesting music from elsewhere being downplayed) and the building of misleading claims to cultural coherence and heritage (diversity long present within so many nations becoming wilfully ignored, p. 175). It has a little less to say about whether there are any positive aspects to such learning and teaching. Can the cohesion forged through the performance of national songs provide common ground for otherwise opposed social factions? Does music invoking home offer tangible encouragement in times of national distress? Should existing (national) musical strengths be built upon in a country's curricular efforts?

Patriotism and Nationalism in Music Education provides a stimulating series of case studies that trace music education's ethical, unethical and unexpected consequences: one could readily design a university-level course around the best chapters. Perhaps most of all, the book contributes by bringing its topic into explicit view, a step which allows all of us who work in music education to consider our own emplacement in the nation's music-related educational imperatives.