Imagined Musical Geographies in a Global Age: Views from Jodhpur, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, c. 1870-1930: Introduction (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally – a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic.
Querying 'Global' Music History: Significant Geographies between Goswami Pannalal and Queen Victoria
Royal Music Association Research Chronicle, 2024
Global music history projects have become increasingly popular in recent years. Going global has its advantages: it develops conversations between researchers working on disparate regions; it sheds light on larger frameworks that are less evident on smaller scales of analysis; it decentres how we teach music history; and it retraces a global hinterland for music systems that have conventionally been called 'Western'. At the same time, the global history approach raises challenges for researchers working on the world beyond Europe. In particular, there is the danger of unintentionally reinstating Eurocentrism, either by uncritically exporting research questions based on the European experience to the wider world, or by narrowing our focus onto those musicians and scholars who engaged with European ideas and practices, especially in colonial settings. This work is valuable, but it also comes with risks. This essay considers these problems through a case study: a largely forgotten music scholar, Goswami Pannalal, who travelled and taught across north India in the late nineteenth century. Examining his musicological study in Hindi, the Nād Binod ('Sonic Delight', 1896), I consider how far asking 'global' questions might shed light on his work, and offer an alternative reading based on a 'significant geographies' approach.
A Cross-Cultural Study of Music in History
International Journal of Culture and History (EJournal), 2016
Music lives in every culture, yet most investigations into music are based on Western music and Western listeners. This has not only ignored the cultural richness in music itself, but has also limited the impact of research on large varieties of societies. In reality, music is multi-cultural, multilingual and multi-facet. Evident in communication, education and healthcare systems, multi-cultural challenges have also merged into many aspects of our historical and contemporary societies. Moreover, rapid changes of the society and fast evolutionary development of media and technology have enriched world wealth of music. In this paper, we demonstrate that music has a rich but cross-cultural foundation in history with significance in linguistics, health and art. Consequently, we present a multidisciplinary or multi-cultural study of music in history, revealing its significance in linguistics, health and wellbeing.
Book review_Studies on a global history of music: a Balzan musicology project
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2022
As it is difficult for any single scholar to offer a meaningful review of every chapter of this book that covers musics from different continents on the globe, we propose that scholars from different regions of the world should articulate their voices by reviewing books of this kind jointly. This volume should inspire scholars to rethink how historiography can influence scholarship in music. As Martin Stokes in the introduction suggests, writing global music history should connect the globe, rather than divide it.
2011
Edward Said's two recent books Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Musical Elaborations (1991) are variations on common themes, and both are made more resonant by being read in relation to each other. The reasons for this are not simply circumstantial, but emanate from the internal logic of the texts and from the ways each can be seen to comment upon the ideas and methods of the other. Each operates within an explicitly musical mode of discourse, and each contributes to a cultural critique which is premised upon specifically overlapping aesthetic and hermeneutic understandings. This essay reads each text separately for its particular illuminations and then reads both together as integral parts of a comprehensive whole. It seeks to trace some of the deeper correspondences between the two texts and, in extrapolating from this polyvocal reading, to argue for a similarly polyvocal aesthetic and methodology in music and in musicology, as well as in expressions and interpretations of i...