When creating any kind of social group, the members must decide who or what is included and excluded. If everyone was included in a group, there would be no sense of cohesiveness or social connection, the act of defining a community is the same as defining what the community is not. Creating distinctions between groups definitely causes conflict between people, especially in the case of defining nations. Many times the idea of who belongs to a group comes as simply as looking at the features of the majority population and defining the group by those characteristics, but that leaves a huge section of society out of the mainstream. Another issue with creating a nation is that the group of people it attempts to unite is so large there is no way to define the nation in a way that suits everyone. Many members of a nation will grow up with their own ideas of what the nation means to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anderson and Gellner write that the act of creating a nation involves a group of people imagining a common culture, history, story, etc. where there was previously none. (1) This inevitably leads to differing ideas of nation among the people of the same nation. This can be well illustrated by the nationalism of French composers between 1870 and 1920. Many of the leading French composers felt a strong desire to find a unified national sound to distinguish themselves from Germany, who they saw as the leading force in European music of the time. The issue arises because every composer has their own style, and many pick and choose from certain traditions and leave out others, leading to each composer defining what is “French music” differently. The most confusing aspect of this time to me is how each composer decided what to include and what to exclude in their definition of French music in an attempt to forward their musical agenda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n