The history of music history is unlike any other history because music speaks its own language. But because of its untranslatable nature, musical language is often erroneously considered to be universal. Interrogating Longfellow's axiomatic belief that music is “the universal language of mankind,” a recent Oxford conference, “The Universal Language of Mankind: Music and the Myth of Intelligibility” (May 2013), devoted a whole day to scrutinizing what the program described as “this influential yet problematical myth.” The myth of universality was a particularly acute feature of the imperial intellectual mind-set, determined, as it was, to rationalize mental, physical, and spiritual territorial acquisition through a philosophy of paternalistic teleological entitlement. Colonial Britain was not unique in this respect and, like other imperial powers, consolidated control as much through its cultural as its political will. Like other countries, however, the imperial campaign often yielded unexpected cultural fruit for both colonizer and colonized, and, as Bob van der Linden amply proves, music was among its chief cultural beneficiaries.

It is the myth of universal intelligibility—or the reality of localized musical languages—which ultimately lies at the heart of Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication. Divided into five conceptually linked chapters, Music and Empire seeks to untangle the complex snarl of Anglo-Indian cultural translation through a study of British and Indian composers, musicians, and ethnomusicologists, including, respectively: Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger, John Foulds and Maud MacCarthy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Arnold Bake, as well as Sikh sacred music. Linden structures his work around cultural traffic negotiating international communications between local and national identities, what he calls the “ideology of internationalism,” that is, “the doctrine that the common interests of nations are greater and more important than their differences” (14). Thus, internationalism explains the occult, theosophical modernism of British composer Cyril Scott; the Nodicist racialism of Australian-born composer and proto-ethnomusicologist Percy Grainger; the abidingly Indian influences immersed in the music of British composer John Foulds; the songs of Tagore; and Sikh kirtan, the sacred hymns of Guru Granth Sahib.

Internationalism, it would seem, comes invariably at a personal cost to British composers. Despite his prolific career as both a composer and an author, Scott, ostensibly “the father of modern British music” (33), remained a rank establishment outsider, too Eastern for the aesthetics of his day's more narrowly focused Western audience or readership. Hailed by progressives yet excoriated by traditionalists, Scott's unstinting brand of compositional internationalism may have invoked the merits of cross-cultural synthesis, but it lacked the aesthetically accessible and easily identifiable compositional voice of his more popular internationalist theosophical contemporary Gustav Holst. Grainger's brand of internationalism was stylistically less alienating, though in many respects as uncompromisingly modern, but then he worked less under arcane Eastern, Indian influences than Scott, and he maintained much closer links to conventional cultural sympathies, especially where collecting folk songs was concerned. It is arguably through his unreconstructedly conservative folk song–related compositions that he has been most widely known. At his musical peril, John Foulds, like Scott, imbibed the East and, apart from his relationship with musical Indianist and theosophical muse Mary MacCarthy, reaped in his compositional career the unsympathetic rewards of Indian internationalism. Unlike Scott, Foulds spent four years in India teaching, performing, composing, and writing for local newspapers, journals, and radio. Tagore's music also struggled under the guise of internationalism, combining a mutually excluding set of influences of Hindustani classical music, Bengali and Baul songs, and British folk songs. Sikh kirtan suffered similar historical disregard owing to its unfortunately indefinite stylistic position between Hindustani classical and folk music.

As these examples suggest, internationalist musical experimentation—linguistically interesting in itself—often produced disappointingly short-lived results. But as Linden is keen to point out, the imperial encounter had far-reaching effects, and because of internationalism today, we consider all music world music—or even world musics. No music, Linden opines, “any longer is exotic or ‘authentic’” (161). Given its driving conceptual importance, it is disappointing that the problematically ambiguous term internationalism receives such shallow theoretical attention, but so too do terminological uncertainties like Orientalism, exoticism, revival, or authenticity. Darwinism and Spencerianism, so fundamentally different where theories of musical origins are concerned, are also never adequately disentangled, nor are their ancillary evolutionary paradigms like progress, developmentalism, degenerationism, or teleology. And, while cosmopolitanism is only briefly distinguished from internationalism, there is no discussion of other salient postcolonial issues like hybridity or liminality. Even contentious terms as historically fluid as “folk song” are never rigorously interrogated. For example, why suggest that it arose in the late nineteenth century simply because that is when it first appears in dictionary entries, when the term actually existed in other types of material since the 1840s? And why give the historically inaccurate impression that it was Cecil Sharp who founded the folk music revival (“[a]s the founding father of the early twentieth-century English folk music revival” [3]), when modern folk song collecting began much earlier in the nineteenth century?

Basic historiographical concerns do mar what could otherwise be an engaging, if at times musicologically uncritical, book. There are very few musical examples, and what examples there are have extremely limited analytical content. And it is a shame Music and Empire was published before Lind had the opportunity to consult Sarah Collins's excellent recent biography of Scott, The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (2013). These and other problems mask the book's true originality and general value in probing internationalism through music and overturning music's wider neglect in the historiography of the British Empire. Seemingly more at home in Indian, rather than British, intellectual territories, Music and Empire in Britain and India provides an uneven read, however. Although an incontestable addition to the intellectual history of ethnomusicology, whether it succeeds beyond this basic aim—whether it, like music, can hope to speak as universally as possible—is entirely open to interpretation.