This paper will explore music, motherhood, and national/cultural identity in two short stories depicting two prominent revivalist movements in modernist literatures in English, namely, the Irish/Celtic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance. Although he is not directly associated with the Irish Revival, James Joyce responded to the movement particularly in his short story titled “A Mother” from Dubliners (1914). In this story, Joyce displays how music (dis-)functions as a retrospective tool for restoring the Irish cultural heritage and revitalizing the national identity of the Irish through the young pianist girl Kathleen and her mother. Two decades after the publication of Dubliners, Langston Hughes published his short story collection titled The Ways of White Folks (1934), in which he condenses the Harlem Renaissance movement to an emerging black female pianist in his story “The Blues I’m Playing”. In contrast to Joyce’s “A Mother”, music in Hughes’s story is not a tool for a nationalist cultural revival, but offers a multi-voiced and internationalist resource for the depicted black Harlemite’s career as a solo pianist, who is supported by a wealthy white female patron. While both stories depict the role of music in national/cultural identity through young female pianists, the network connecting the musicians with the mothers/motherly figures, society, and music displays the similarities and differences between the Irish/Celtic Revival and the Harlem Renaissance. The aim of this study is to investigate whether music stabilizes or destabilizes the mentioned network, and discuss the relationship between music and national/cultural identity in Joyce’s and Hughes’s stories.