Boundaries of the New: American Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Musical Modernisms," with Christopher Miller
Twentieth-Century Music 20.3, 2023
Drawing on “global modernisms” from literary studies, this special issue is the first publication to articulate and theorize “global musical modernisms” as a critical and ethically complex framework that is anchored in the relation between modernities and modernisms, as well as the colonial context underlying both terms. Fundamentally, global musical modernisms expand the temporal, spatial, and genre boundaries of “musical modernism” as it is conventionally understood. Navigating the disciplinary divide between musicology and ethnomusicology that has contributed to the late emergence of “global musical modernisms,” the introduction theorizes the term through the lenses of aesthetics, sociohistorical context, and the resistive self-consciouness that is related to multiple schools of European and global modernity/modernism studies, and central to the rethinking of musical modernism in global terms. But does global musical modernisms navigate coloniality in a way that replicates or ameliorates oppression, or both? This special issue provides readers with a range of perspectives on that question.
Current Musicology, 2007
This book reminds us how the creation, sound, and consumption of music-as well as the ways in which we produce located knowledges about music-are shaped by power relations with long histories. The regimes through which "the West" dominates, represents, and incorporates its "Others" lie at the heart of Timothy D. Taylor's intellectual project. Taylor is a professor of ethnomusicology and musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Positioned within and between two disciplinary formations, Beyond Exoticism is the follow-up to the excellent Strange Sounds (2001), which focused on the role of technology in the construction of musical imaginaries since World War II. As Taylor showed in that book, analogue and digital technologies have mobilized the tropes of exploration, and generated a host of fascinations with subjects and spaces beyond the physical and psychic borders of an imaginary West. To borrow a term from the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the West is a "desiring machine" that needs Others in order to define the contours of its own identity and subjectivities. The ordering of that relationship between Self and Other is one of the central threads that runs through the weave of Beyond Exoticism. Taylor himself suggests that this new book is more closely aligned with his earlier Global Pop (1997), written at the moment that "world music" had secured its place as a market category in the local megastore. Some of that book's emphasis on globalization discourse through case studies of particular musicians and their recordings informs the approach of Beyond Exoticism. But this project has a broader ambit, stretching from the seventeenth century to the present, beginning with the rise of tonality and opera and ending with world music in television advertising. The historical duree is periodized in terms of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, and Taylor stresses continuities as well as cultural and ideological shifts in Western music's engagement with the rest of the world. Before addressing the scope of his argument, some of its finer points, and possible limitations, it is important to acknowledge that Taylor deftly combines lucidity and nuance in a work of such breadth. Beyond Exoticism is crisply written, mercifully free of jargon, and addresses important concepts and issues in a vocabulary that graduates, undergraduates, and non-academic readers should be able to understand and apply in their own encounters
Twentieth Century Music in the West
Cambridge University Press, 2022
This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections – Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities – with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.
Crumbling Boundaries: Popular Music Appropriation and Assimilation Since the Modernist Period
While Western Art (or Classical) Music faces a steep decline in popularity, many contemporary composers are finding success reaching out to audiences through an appropriation and assimilation of American popular music genres. While such appropriation is not new, and has been a common element in music since Mozart and Brahms, such appropriation has seemed like a revolution in the wake of the Modernist Period. The Modernist music of composers after 1945 rejected melodic and harmonious content in favor of an atonal “serialist” approach to music. This compositional approach also had the effect of alienating mainstream audiences, a consequence welcomed by some with exclamations of “Who cares if you listen?” and favoring an art form by and for “composer-specialists.” Given this revolutionary new thinking about music that many composers were compelled to follow, including popular melodious composers such as Aaron Copland, the return to popular music appropriation by many of today’s Minimalist/Post-Minimalist and Post-Modernist composers seems equally revolutionary. This paper analyzes the works of some of these composers and their influences from genres such as Rock, Jazz, Hip Hop, and Electronic Dance Music, along with non-Western influences such as African drumming, Indonesian Gamelan, and Hindustani and Carnatic music. Through appropriation of these styles, composers are creating new and innovative music that has the potential to connect to a new generation of listeners and knock down the wall between “art” and “popular” genres. Through their appropriation, they acknowledge the interconnectivity between musics that points toward an egalitarian view where genres once seen as “high” and “low” become equally valid.
Music practices, products and educational periphery, which are widely associated with Europe or its cultural derivates, seem to be well integrated into present-day Asian cultures. They are part of it and merge in many cases with contemporary local developments deriving from musical traditions. The appropriation of the "West" in musical terms is accompanied by fast changes within culturally inherited schemes of values and measurements. The paper aims to introduce some provocative thoughts that dominate current musicological discourses about the construction of the musical "West" in Asian cultures. Questions of shifting identities, ethnic disbandment and re-versa. Frederick Lau, criticises the conservative one-way approach of ethnomusicologists such as Nettl, Kartomi, and Shiloah. He writes "These scholars focus primarily on the impact of Western music on indigenous cultures rather than on how this interchange has affected music of the West. Their objective, different from that of music analysts, is to establish a typology that would account for all possible musical responses as local musicians begin to incorporate Western music and sound ideals into their creations" (Lau, 2004:23). His critic seems to be understandable from the viewpoint of an "analyst", who looks predominantly into the sounding appearance and its potential of structural synergy. But does it include an understanding of musical meanings, and if so, what kind of meanings, whose meanings, of which time, of which part of the world?
Reflections on Music and Post-Orientalism
2024
This paper reflects on Post-Orientalism as a transformative approach to Iranian music, bridging tradition and innovation. Rooted in Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, it critiques the exoticization and ossification of Iranian music traditions, particularly the Radif. It builds on Ehsan Saboohi’s concept of Post-Orientalism, which challenges both Western stereotypes and internal rigidity, advocating for dynamic evolution. Post-Orientalism reimagines the Radif as material for creative exploration, integrating untempered intervals and hybrid soundscapes. The author contrasts dismantling with reconstructive methods, treating tradition as a living, evolving entity. This perspective transcends binaries of East versus West, fostering a unified artistic vision that embraces complexity and fluid cultural identities.
2015
The report considers the processes of interaction between the European composer's art and non-European traditional music in the second half of the XX century. The goal of the study is to demonstrate the parallel and cross topics in this process on the example of the musicians of eastern tradition. If the composers of western tradition integrated the eastern poetry, symbolism and philosophical wisdom, the composers of East Asian countries actively mastered the laws, genres, forms and advanced ideas of the European music composition. The process of mixing, extrapolation and synthesis of the western and eastern cultural traditions in the post-modernist epoch gave rise to the new cross-phenomenon, which made the identification of the markers of the national identity even more difficult in the system of cross-cultural associations. On the background of the presented problems, the report focuses on such events, as World music and Asian avant-garde.
2019
In popular and scholarly discourse, the term globalization is widely used to define the way things have shaped up in the contemporary world. The general agreement of the social scientists and researchers today hinges on the concept of a hybrid global culture. While the importance of this hybrid fabric becomes inevitable, cautious attention needs to be exercised towards the fact that the elements of hybridity do not become rigid constituents of an unaccommodating discourse. The inherent nature of this discourse on the one hand runs the risk of generating the constant urge on the part of the participants to modify and fit into this new and over-arching template, while on the other, its growing contemporary relevance might indulge in casting a shadow on the long history of give and take that have existed between cultures for a very long time. This paper suggests that cross-cultural encounters and mutual appropriations have been a regular feature even though they might have come with a ...