According to Reinhard Strohm, ‘today, the question of a conceptual framework for a history of music that pays due attention to global relationships in music is often raised’. As he continues, such work should ‘aim to promote post-European historical thinking [… and be] based on the idea that a global history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history’.Footnote ¹ Nowhere is this demand more evident than in modernist studies. There are two reasons for this. First, musical modernism – dated here to the period from around 1910 to the present dayFootnote ² – has been contemporaneous with a period of intensified global encounter, covering the heyday of empire, decolonisation and accelerated globalisation. Far from being accidental, this historical parallel has profoundly affected the nature and meaning of musical modernism. Specifically, I argue that the global diffusion of musical modernism and the ensuing encounters between modernist music and its various counterparts across the world transformed both. Second, despite or because of this explosive cultural and geographic expansion, many modernist composers, musicians and critics have embraced universalism. As a result, more even than earlier periods of the Western classical tradition, musical modernism appears placeless. Indeed, it was often defined as an ‘international’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ movement in opposition to supposedly rooted national or vernacular traditions.

This, at least, is the impression given by textbooks on modernist music, which overwhelmingly focus on ‘genius’ (and, more often than not, white male) composers and their masterworks, buttressed by notions of influence and technical innovation.Footnote ³ The cultural-geographic origin of the music is, if at all, reflected only in the earlier chapters, whereas, after the World War II watershed, music appears to become untethered from any specific places. Although centres, such as Darmstadt, Paris and New York, continue to loom large, the innovations associated with them are depicted as being of universal significance. Moreover, there is at best fleeting recognition of the world beyond Europe and North America, as if the remarkable flowering of modernist composition and performance in Latin America, East Asia, Australasia and parts of Africa and the Near and Middle East never happened or is of no particular significance.Footnote ⁴ While a topic such as ‘globalisation’ has had a profound impact on popular music studies, until recently, no comparable effect has been registered in modernist music studies.

In this book, I propose an alternative model according to which musical modernism is constituted by a global diasporic network of composers, musicians and institutions. While modernist music is embedded in specific places, the nodal points of the network, it is the manifold entanglements between those points that make it what it is. This network has similarities with the Deleuzian rhizome: there is no absolute centre, and the relations between points are dynamic and subject to constant change.Footnote ⁵ At the same time, not all points are necessarily equal: the network is the result of unequal power relations, many of which persist to this day. To sketch this network, I will be exploring some of the transnational connections and contact zones through which modernist music has been transmitted and where ideas about musical modernism have been negotiated.

It follows that ‘musical modernism’ as used here is a discursively constructed concept that is contingent on specific contexts. I will therefore not be providing a formal definition with a list of features, because the question is not how I define the term but how it has been understood in different places and at different times. This raises the question to what extent we can speak of ‘this concept’, given that the term itself is a recent coinage specific to Anglophone musicology.Footnote ⁶ It is therefore employed here as an umbrella for broadly equivalent terms in different languages. On one level, there is nothing new in this: we have long spoken of Béla Bartók, Heitor Villa-Lobos or Toshiro Mayuzumi, in addition to, say, Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, as ‘modernist’ composers, and it is generally understood what is meant by that. More specifically, I am following the Global Musical Modernisms Forum that likewise employs the term for a wide range of composers across the world who were active at different times and who share certain qualities (although note the plural ‘modernisms’, which I am not adopting).Footnote ⁷

Charles Wilson and I have previously described musical modernism as ‘an artistic response to the social changes wrought by modernity’, arguing further that, for modernists, ‘the means of expression have to be adequate to the spirit of the age and to what is being expressed’, which implies a ‘highly self-reflective and critical approach towards style and technique’, including viewing ‘inherited tradition with suspicion’ (which does not, however, necessarily mean discarding it).Footnote ⁸ While this characterisation was admittedly primarily informed by Western modernist music and Western theorists, it may serve a more global perspective too, once we accept that ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ can take different forms. We further advocated conceiving of ‘musical modernism as a series of family resemblances, whereby different members of the family may share certain features but none is common to all of them, and where distant members may be connected by a chain of resemblances without sharing a single feature in common’.Footnote ⁹ This allows for a considerable diversity of expressions and styles across the network, while ensuring an underlying kinship and recognisability. Furthermore, what makes musical modernism global are transnational links. This is the key difference between a diasporic network as I have described it here and parallel national and regional histories. As will be outlined in more detail, globality, then, is not a question of comprehensiveness of coverage but attention to relationality and transnational entanglements.

Chapter 3, on the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), will highlight some of these issues, since the ISCM was faced with precisely the problem of negotiating between different musical cultures and coming to an agreement about what ‘contemporary music’, the operative term, might mean in different contexts. As a result, what we have come to know as musical modernism has been shaped by the ISCM and similar institutions like it. In this sense, musical modernism is defined by a transnational and transhistorical dialogue.

My approach builds on the ‘spatial turn’ that musicology has recently undergone and that has acted as a corrective to the blind spots in scholarship on musical modernism identified here. Among a diverse list of examples, important work by Brigid Cohen, Dana Gooley, Tamara Levitz, Sarah Collins and Amy Bauer as well as an edited collection on music and cosmopolitanism can be singled out.Footnote ¹⁰ In addition, there has been a novel focus on modernism in national and regional music history that often complements and occasionally challenges universalist accounts.Footnote ¹¹

The inspiration for this book did not only come from music studies, however, and my approach is also influenced by discourses in neighbouring fields, such as critical cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism and decoloniality. In literary studies, in particular, the notion of ‘global modernism(s)’ has been common currency for many years.Footnote ¹² For instance, in an influential article, Susan Stanford Friedman has spoken of ‘polycentric modernities and modernisms at different points of time and in different locations’, an idea that led to her concept of ‘planetary modernisms’.Footnote ¹³ From another perspective, Franco Moretti’s novel ways of depicting cultural transfer, such as ‘graphs, maps and trees’, hold hitherto unrealised promise for a reconceptualisation of the cultural geography of musical modernism.Footnote ¹⁴

If it had been my intention to adopt this notion of global modernism for musicology, I was beaten to it, however. Largely while I was writing this book, there has been a spate of publications in global musical modernism, inaugurating it as a recognisable field. In most cases, however, the theoretical framework has been borrowed not from global (literary) modernism but global history, just like many of the contributions seem to be concerned more about music historiography than modernist studies. In any case, what was quite a fragmented area drawing on diverse disciplinary and theoretical traditions has started to coalesce into a couple of interrelated, widely held positions or overarching concepts, without however congealing into orthodoxy. If, in the following, I attempt to sketch a theoretical framework on this basis, it is important to bear in mind that this did not exist at the outset but is to a certain extent a retrospective imposition.

An important role is played by Christian Utz’s Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization (the German original of which was published in 2014, although the enlarged English translation did not appear before 2021). Although it is situated more in the field of intercultural composition, this is arguably the first systematic and comprehensive attempt to conceptualise modernist composition on a global level (albeit with a strong emphasis on East Asia). The aforementioned Balzan Musicology Project on A Global History of Music, which has yielded three collected volumes as well as associated activities and publications, has also acted as a catalyst, not least through its challenge to traditional Eurocentric music historiography.Footnote ¹⁵ Having said that, due to the project’s emphasis on ‘traditions’, very few contributions directly addressed modernism, which, as mentioned, has tended to have a complicated if not necessarily antagonistic relation to tradition.

Last but not least, there have been three collected volumes on aspects of East-Asian music in relation to (countries within) the West, adding to the focus already established by Utz.Footnote ¹⁶ Beyond the eye-opening nature of their contributions, what is significant about these books is that they bring together researchers from or working in Western and East-Asian countries. Thus, ‘the West’ has been decentred here also at the practical, disciplinary and institutional level, and it is the ‘how’ of knowledge production that is as innovative as the ‘what’ of the knowledge produced. While, by contrast, I have in this book acted as the ‘lone wolf’ that Daniel Chua has warned about and thus talk about different world regions from the perspective of the Western academy,Footnote ¹⁷ I will be guided as much as possible by local scholars.

Salutary though this activity in the study of the musical relations between East Asia and the West is, it raises the question of other world regions, such as Latin America or Africa. Although I make no claim to represent the world equally, all are covered in the book, so the theoretical framework should be applicable without the ‘epistemic violence’ of imposing alien paradigms. To the extent that I am able to judge, the work being carried out in the study of Latin-American and African musical modernism(s) is no less important and innovative as that on East Asia and many contributions will be discussed in the following chapters, but it tends to at least ostensibly follow the tradition of regional or national music history, rather than global musicology. That said, events such as the online conference on ‘Global Musicology – Global Music History’, co-organised by Amanda Hsieh (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Vera Wolkowicz (then based at the University of Buenos Aires), indicate a convergence between regional perspectives and traditions that had previously tended to act more in parallel than in dialogue.Footnote ¹⁸ One of my intentions is to further this process of connecting these disparate perspectives and insights to create a fuller picture of musical modernism(s) around the world. While I realise that this liberty to roam freely across countries and continents is a Western privilege, I can only hope that the results will benefit scholars more widely. Problematic though this position may be, it seems preferable to the alternative of focusing on the Western Self as if the Other and the long and often painful history of interactions between the two did not exist. Likewise, while there is no view from nowhere and I therefore write from the perspective of an academic born and bred in Germany and employed by a Scottish university, I seek to reflect on my own positionality.

Elements of a Theory of Global Musical Modernism

At the risk of generalisation, the contributions named in the previous section and many others like them allow sketching a preliminary theoretical framework. One of the key problems of any such framework is how to conceptualise the relations between musical modernism(s) in different regions to one another and to ‘the West’. According to traditional models focused on innovation such as the textbooks discussed at the outset, modernist music is necessarily Western, by implication rendering any instances from outside the West inauthentic imitations. Such historical models prioritise ‘centres’ (or ‘cores’), where most of the innovations have been introduced, over ‘peripheries’ (or ‘margins’), where they have been adopted after a certain time lag. As proponents of postcolonialism and decoloniality have argued, the spatiotemporal logic of this paradigm replicates that of colonialism, in which the metropolis is both at the centre and ‘more advanced’ than the colony.Footnote ¹⁹ It is therefore not surprising that the centre–periphery model has been widely criticised as inherently Eurocentric.Footnote ²⁰ It could be argued that even the apparently indisputable fact that musical modernism originated in the West is ultimately a consequence of the concept’s (Western-derived) definition, which prioritises compositional techniques such as harmonic organisation or non-periodic rhythm associated with European and North-American composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Scriabin and Ives, over, say, the expressive modulation of ‘a note’ (itself a Western concept) in performance or practices involving improvisation and communal music-making. Nevertheless, this argument has been rarely made. Instead, there has been an effort to decouple origin from primacy or essence: just because musical modernism may be of Western origin does not mean that it will necessarily always stay that way or that this is part of its innermost nature. Accordingly, instead of accepting a model of ‘dissemination’ or ‘diffusion’ that relies on imitation or passive adoption in ‘the periphery’, global music scholars have emphasised that ‘cultural transfer’ is an active process that requires musicians and composers to translate innovations in their specific contexts which involves a complex negotiation between local traditions and imported models. Furthermore, as the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has argued, what he calls ‘mimicry’ disrupts the authority of the colonial discourse by ‘disclosing its ambivalence’.Footnote ²¹ In other words, imitation has the power to exceed and subvert the original. At the same time, Leonhard B. Meyer, for one, has criticised ‘innovation history’ as long ago as 1983, although this does not mean that it did not remain influential.Footnote ²²

The critique of ideas and concepts such as the centre–periphery model or diffusion does not necessarily make them entirely obsolete, however. It is difficult to deny that there have been centres of musical modernism and, despite the negative connotations, this implies the existence of peripheries. Likewise, it has been more common for people, styles, techniques and ideas to travel from the centres to the peripheries than vice versa. The point is, though, that these relations are not fixed but dynamic. Alongside long-standing centres, such as Vienna, Paris, New York and Moscow, newer ones, such as Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Shanghai, have emerged, just as the status of these international metropoles is rivalled by provincial towns, such as Darmstadt (home of the International Summer Courses in New Music) or Tongyeong (birthplace of the composer Isang Yun and host of the Tongyeong International Music Festival). Likewise, the ‘cultural flows’ connecting these centres to peripheries, however defined, are not necessarily unidirectional. This is a complex issue to which I will return, but what defines centres is their ability to attract people and ideas, prior to transmitting them.

As has already become apparent, I have not been able to entirely avoid these terms despite their problematic nature, but this should not be equated with acceptance of unequal power relations or the belief that they are immutable. A similar point can be made about ‘the West’ and the ‘non-Western world’ (or ‘the rest’). These terms imply an extraordinary degree of simplification, reducing what are extremely heterogeneous regions to monolithic entities and erecting an apparently impermeable border between them (which is why I feel compelled to use scare quotes, although they don’t solve the problem). This nomenclature largely replaced an earlier and now widely discredited one that distinguished between the ‘First’ and the ‘Third World’ (the ‘Second World’ was represented by the now-defunct Warsaw Pact and allied countries), and it is now in turn often supplanted by the supposedly more value-free distinction between the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’.Footnote ²³ These concepts are not exactly synonymous, and they all have specific histories and associations. Whatever terms we use, however, the real injustice consists of the division of the world and the power differential between its different parts. These facts must be acknowledged.

One theoretical paradigm that has been adopted by many theorists of global modernism is that of Multiple or Alternative Modernities, which gained traction in the social sciences around the turn of the millennium. According to the definition by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Jens Riedel and Dominic Sachsenmaier, ‘[t]he core of multiple modernities lies in assuming the existence of culturally specific forms of modernity shaped by distinct cultural heritages and sociopolitical conditions. These forms will continue to differ in their value systems, institutions, and other factors.’Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, according to Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘[t]he idea of “alternative modernities” holds that modernity always unfolds within specific cultures or civilizations and that different starting points of the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes’.Footnote ²⁵ The attractiveness of these ideas appears obvious: if there are forms of modernity that differ from the Euro-American model, it follows that musical modernism is not necessarily a Western import and that it can emerge in different places and cultures and can take different forms. It is no surprise, then, that they have been embraced, for example, by Utz, Janz and in my own earlier work.Footnote ²⁶ In response, Fumitaka Yamauchi has launched an ‘argument for a singularity of global colonial modernity – with its different manifestations in divergent contexts fully acknowledged …’. As he continues:

Yamauchi is influenced by Dirlik, but the multiple modernities paradigm has had many critics, including Fredric Jameson and Walter Mignolo, who, although appearing to come from opposite ends of the spectrum, converge in the view that the notion of multiple or alternative modernities celebrates ‘superficial variations’ (Mignolo) but overlooks or obscures the extent to which Western colonialism (Mignolo) and capitalism (Jameson) have effectively fashioned the world in their image.Footnote ²⁸ Conversely, though, Jameson and Mignolo can be accused of monocausal determinism that flattens the diversity among the world’s cultures.

On reflection, I would now side with Yamauchi (although not with Jameson or Mignolo). Charles Wilson and I have previously argued against conceiving of musical modernisms in the plural, pointing out that ‘[t]he very fact that modernism can be recognized across … diverse terrains suggests that the concept retains sufficient coherence to be graspable in its essential impulses, even when its cultural manifestations differ’.Footnote ²⁹ The ‘terrains’ we were thinking of were not only culturally or geographically defined, but, in the present context, it also seems crucial to me that, as Yamauchi proposes, we conceive of global musical modernism as a network of diverse but recognisably related – in terms of family resemblances – expressions of one underlying phenomenon. Although the connections between modernity (the underlying social and cultural structures) and modernism (specific artistic expressions) are complex, it seems most productive to consequently consider modernity to be an internally differentiated and manifold but singular phenomenon.

The most significant theoretical innovation, in my view, is the concept of Entangled History (or Histories). The concept is widely used and debated in historical studies and has been introduced to musicology by Jin-Ah Kim, Nicola Spakowski, Tobias Janz and Chien-chang Yang and myself, apparently independently of one another.Footnote ³⁰ It has also been taken up by Utz, and a book edited by Joanne Miyang Cho has used it as a theoretical point of departure.Footnote ³¹ Kim provides a useful definition: ‘“Entangled histories” direct our attention to the inner multiple intertwinings, dependencies, and interferences between “European” and “non-European” societies and cultures, between empires and colonies, as well as between peripheries and centres, and so tend to transcend any Eurocentric perspective.’Footnote ³²

For my purposes, the significance of Entangled Histories lies in bridging the gap between supposedly universal (and implicitly Eurocentric) music history and national or regional accounts, the twin approaches that have hitherto dominated music historiography. Entanglement is a more specific concept than relationality, but it is worth noting that the latter is being seen as the distinguishing element of a global perspective by Daniel Chua and Sanela Nikolić. Here’s Chua: ‘With the global, Western music is defined in its relation to other cultures … The West is as much about the East (or the North about the South) as it is about itself.’Footnote ³³ And here Nikolić:

This emphasis on relationality and connectivity, which also underpins my approach, may seem little more than commensensical, but this would overlook the largely unquestioned dominance of ‘methodological nationalism’ (and, to a lesser extent, regionalism) hitherto.Footnote ³⁵ This is not to suggest that regional, national or local music histories are flawed or unimportant. Clearly, they make invaluable contributions, on which entangled or global music histories often rely, since they have to attend to and be grounded in the local. Yet, the normative nature of national and regional music histories and their institutionalisation as academic fields have arguably resulted in a disciplinary bias in favour of isolation and separation and against relationality.

By way of illustration, I will not mention examples of national or regional music history (which would be easy but self-defeating) but cases where an ostensible global dimension was undermined by an unreflected preference for national or regional perspectives. The Modernist World is a grand project encompassing sixty-one chapters that ‘examines modernist histories and practices around the globe’, covering all major regions and art forms.Footnote ³⁶ It seems to have been largely overlooked in musicological discussions, but the music-related chapters have been written by some of the most renowned specialists on the respective regions. As one might expect, the contributions are generally informative and authoritative, although it is noticeable that the concept of modernism(s) applied by the authors is not simply diverse but also incompatible, ranging from variations of or responses to Western modernism in the case of Latin America or East Asia (not to mention Europe) to distinct local traditions in the cases of South Asia and Africa, although there have also been parallel developments to those in Latin-American and East Asia in these regions (and vice versa). The problem here is not that there are legitimate discrepancies but that they are not acknowledged or discussed, so that an unsuspecting reader may not be aware that the authors are not talking about the same or even similar things. But the wider issue is that no points of connection or means of comparison are offered between the different chapters on music or, for that matter, between the different art forms within one region. Thus, the commonalities and specificities of musical modernism in particular places around the world remain elusive. The results are parallel regional perspectives that fall short of a global dimension in the sense of relationality as established by Chua and Nikolić (I should stress that insofar as I blame anyone, it is the editors, not the authors).

Even the Balzan Musicology Project, which explicitly focused on transnational connections and undoubtedly achieved much to transform the discipline, did not always live up to the claim of a ‘global history’ (an admittedly all but impossible task). While some authors have clearly taken the overall objectives to heart, others withdrew into the comfort zone of national or regional frameworks. This may be partly due to the nature of the project, which involved large numbers of individual contributors, making it difficult to enforce a coherent agenda even if that had been the aim.Footnote ³⁷ But therein may have lain a problem too: as the publishing blurb to one of the volumes puts it: ‘A global history of music … would be the sum total of musical histories, large and small, around the world.’Footnote ³⁸ The sum of the parts may fall short of the whole if there is no process, such as a more explicit methodological or theoretical framework, through which the individual parts are integrated. Methodological nationalism is deeply ingrained, and, as in the geopolitical domain, competing national(ist) perspectives are unlikely to unite in a global vision without a direct challenge.

The final component of this theoretical toolset is hybridity/hybridisation. It has been coined by Bhabha for a form of cultural mixing that would undermine essentialist claims to ‘purity’ and, consequently, open up a ‘Third Space’ (also an ‘in-between’ or ‘liminal’ space) through which ‘we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves’.Footnote ³⁹ It has since been a key concept in postcolonialism. Although Utz, for instance, discusses the concept’s origin in some detail, it is often used fairly generally for all kinds of stylistic mixtures, fusions, amalgamations and syntheses, particularly between Western, modernist and local, traditional styles.Footnote ⁴⁰ This fairly loose usage of the term characterises Cho’s definition: ‘Hybridity does not mean the erasure of tradition but instead the synthesis of the old and the new. In the context of transnational history, it aims at identifying a new way of analyzing historical relations between the West and the non-West, based upon mutual exchange, cooperation, and cross-cultural communication.’Footnote ⁴¹

In this sense, the significance of the term is obvious: it is something like the counterpart at the microlevel of musical style for notions such as multiple modernities or modernisms on the macrolevel.Footnote ⁴² It has also been widely criticised however, for instance, by Jonathan Friedman, who argues that it results in new essentialisms.Footnote ⁴³ In some of my earlier work, I applied the notion to new music as such, in the West as well as in other regions: ‘New music is not universal … and it is not a synthesis of Orient and Occident, but it is a hybrid, and non-western composers took part in the process of hybridization every bit as much as their western counterparts.’Footnote ⁴⁴ In my later publications, it continues to play a, generally positive, role.Footnote ⁴⁵ I have since become more sceptical and my criticism now is related to Friedman’s: the notion of hybridity is typically applied to non-Western composers, and it creates an almost normative expectation. It is assumed that their cultural origin will or should be perceptible in their music, something that is not applied to Western composers, thus creating an imbalance. Furthermore, all music is the result of cultural transfers, influences and mixtures, and is therefore hybrid. Kofi Agawu has expressed this brilliantly: unless we accept processes of transplantation and cultural appropriation as natural, he argues, ‘we would have to insist, every time we hear the Beethoven Violin Concerto, that the violin originated in the Middle East, that strictly speaking, it is not a European instrument, and therefore that all compositions for violin by Europeans are hybrid at the core, always already marked as “oriental”’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Of course, such a heightened awareness of the inherent hybridity of the Western classical tradition might be a productive response to Bhabha, but this is not how the term ‘hybridity’ has primarily been used.

Although the theoretical framework as I have sketched it here makes no claim to comprehensiveness or universality, as previously mentioned, there is an apparent convergence and widespread agreement among recent publications. What is noticeable is a certain omnivorous eclecticism, borrowing terms and concepts from history, sociology, postcolonialism and cultural studies. This may not necessarily be a problem and has a long tradition in musicology, which has tended to rely on neighbouring disciplines. As a result, however, what I described as a ‘framework’ lacks the coherence of a theory or system, and there may be occasions when incompaticle terms are used in conjunction. Moreover, while, as outlined, there is a high degree of theoretical reflection in most scholarship, occasionally terms appear to be used without wider awareness of their theoretical context. There are also some areas of continued disagreement which are worth outlining.

Short Case Studies

Some brief, recent examples may illustrate or occasionally problematise some of the ideas outlined so far.

The Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos (Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments, OEIN) calls itself ‘a unique kind of contemporary music ensemble … [that] works with traditional Andean musical instruments, bringing the ancestral pre-Columbian Andean roots to the present’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was co-founded in La Paz (Bolivia) in 1980 by the composer and conductor Cergio Prudencio. Prudencio was classically trained but alienated by the National Conservatory and similar institutions, seeing little connection between the music promoted by them and the wider culture.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bolivia has one of the largest indigenous populations in South America, who increasingly make their voices heard. According to Ximena Soruco Sologuren, however, official high culture has traditionally been entirely Western, or, as she puts it, ‘colonial’. She therefore celebrates what she regards as a ‘decolonising’ approach. This is exactly the wording chosen by Prudencio, who argues that this work has to be grounded in indigenous culture but point towards the future: ‘In political discourse, decolonisation is found as a vindication of social, political structures, but in terms of culture, decolonisation is only a path of invention. … The OEIN not only recognises the indigenous world in its values, knowledge, wisdoms and elaborate ways of thinking, but – above all – effectively incorporates it into the living process of contemporary culture.’Footnote ⁶⁰

The Orchestra gives commissions to leading composers in Bolivia, the rest of Latin America but also Europe: for example, on its Soundcloud site, there are recordings of works by Miguel Llanque, Alejandro Cardona, Canela Palacios, Mesias Maiguashca, Beat Furrer, Mischa Käser, Tato Taborda, Daniel Calderón, Carlos Gutiérrez and Prudencio himself.Footnote ⁶¹ Accordingly, the orchestra perform both at home and in festivals all over the world. Many of these composers are associated with the modernist avant-garde, and they are generally exploiting the sonorities produced by the traditional instruments, both played conventionally and using extended techniques. In this way, the OEIN bypasses the tradition associated with Western classical music. The ‘experimental’ in the title can of course be related to the primarily Western tradition of ‘experimental music’, but it can also be understood literally, as adopting an experimental approach to the composition for and playing of traditional instruments, and there is nothing specifically Western about that. To be fair, the OEIN largely observes other Western conventions, such as the division between composer, performers and audience, the use of notation and the role of the conductor. In that sense, the work is clearly the result of a musical entanglement, but it would not be fair to speak of an ‘imposition of Western music’ or of a wholesale import that is only addressed at the urban, Westernised elites. Indeed, one can argue that in the work of Prudencio and the OEIN, there is a convergence between the decolonial and the avant-gardist critiques of the Western classical tradition.

The OEIN’s motto ‘from ancestral, pre-Columbian Andean roots to the present’ chimes in with that of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago: ‘Great Black Music from the ancient music of Africa to the music of the future’, and their ethos and educational programmes are in many ways similar.Footnote ⁶² As an orchestra of traditional instruments performing both traditional and newly composed music, it resembles more the orchestras of traditional instruments set up in East Asia from the 1920s onwards, however. This phenomenon is best-known in China, but there were parallel developments in neighbouring Korea. The modern Chinese orchestra typically divides the instruments into four sections – wind, plucked strings, bowed strings, and percussion – on the basis of the Western symphony orchestra, and it also adopts similar seating arrangements, with a conductor in front. The use of staff notation is likewise common.Footnote ⁶³ The repertoire varies: while the original intention was to preserve or ‘improve’ traditional music, some orchestras also perform new compositions, popular music or arrangements of Western classical music. Chinese orchestras have also performed works by modernist composers; Tan Dun’s Xibei zuqu (Northwest Suite, also Yellow Earth Suite, 1986, rev. 1990) is an early example.Footnote ⁶⁴ As will be seen in Chapter 5, the National Orchestra of Korea likewise lays great emphasis on collaborations with composers; Younghi Pagh-Paan’s Das Universum atmet, es wächst und schwindet for traditional Korean instruments (2007) was written for the ensemble.

What unites the cases is that it makes more sense to speak of ‘modernisation’ than of ‘Westernisation’. These are primarily innovations undertaken within particular traditions, even if Western influence has played an important role. At the same time, however, this binary distinction, which has been influential at least from the work of Bruno Nettl to the recent Balzan Musicology Project, seems unsatisfactory in the present context.Footnote ⁶⁵ The history of musical entanglements between Latin America and East Asia on one side and the West on the other is so long and their results in the work of the OEIN or similar avant-garde compositions for East-Asian traditional orchestras so complex that it no longer makes sense to categorically distinguish between Western and local elements or influences.

A similar point can be made about the ‘Bow Project’, which was the brainchild of the South African composer Michael Blake and realised from 1999. Blake was fascinated by the performance of the legendary Xhosa uhadi (the Xhosa musical bow) player, Nofinishi Dywili (1928–2002). Under the auspices of NewMusicSA, the South-African section of the ISCM, of which he was President at the time (see Chapter 3), Blake asked a group of composers from a diverse range of musical traditions and ethnic communities to first transcribe one song each and, in a second step, write new compositions for string quartet on the basis of the material. The results were performed at NewMusicSA’s Indabas, its regular meetings.Footnote ⁶⁶ Over the years, more compositions were added, eventually totalling twelve. The resulting double-CD, produced through an exchange with the Faroese ISCM section (re-)unites the compositions with Dywili’s original recordings.Footnote ⁶⁷

The process is reminiscent of the nationalisms of the early twentieth century, and, in his liner notes, Blake quotes Gwen Ansell stating that ‘the bow should be South Africa’s national instrument’.Footnote ⁶⁸ But, while these earlier nationalisms were often exclusionary and treated folk songs and dances as anonymous material, the Bow Project clearly sought to be as diverse and inclusive as possible and celebrated Dywili’s artistry. Furthermore, at the musical level, composers are inspired not only by tunes and rhythms but also by the unique sonorities of the bow and Dywili’s extraordinary voice as well as the resulting polyrhythmic textures. In contrast to the preceding examples, these compositions are for string quartet, a Western classical ensemble, although the collaboratively composed contribution by Jürgen Bräuninger and Sazi Dlamini, Jiwé, adds an ugubhu, the Zulu musical bow. In this example too, then, Western and local elements and influences, traditions and modernities, are complexly intertwined in ways that cannot easily be dis-entangled and that go beyond typical notions of hybridity.

My final example is also based on a specific local tradition. Uwalmassa are a trio of musicians, consisting of Harsya Wahono, Randy Pradipta and Pujangga Rahseta, who are part of the arts collective and label DIVISI62 in Jakarta, Indonesia. On their album Malar, they create what has been called ‘deconstructed gamelan music’ by recording themselves playing traditional gamelan instruments and technologically modifying and defamiliarising the recordings as well as subtly adding synthesised sounds.Footnote ⁶⁹ The result is somewhere between musique concrète, electronica, trance and EDM. Once again, indigenous heritage is reclaimed through avant-garde approaches and using both traditional and technological means. While the importance of the gamelan for Western modernist composers has long been recognised, the modernising and avant-gardist tendencies within the tradition have attracted much less attention.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like the other examples, this one speaks to a long history of entanglement, where the local and the Western can no longer be isolated.

The examples discussed share some commonalities. They have strong roots in local traditions, so it would make little sense to speak of a ‘passive adoption’ of Western techniques and materials or the ‘diffusion’ of Western modernism from its ‘centres’ to the respective ‘peripheries’ in La Paz, East Asia, South Africa and Jakarta. Nevertheless, the musicians employ techniques and approaches that we can recognise as modernist or avant-gardist. This aspect cannot be regarded as inherently Western either, although Western influences play more or less important roles. In the Bow Project, the string quartet is obviously a Western genre, and many of the compositions are recognisably Western in nature, whether in terms of the process (e.g. involving the use of staff notation) or sonic result (e.g. musical syntax based on recognisable models, such as melody and harmony or polyphony, in whatever form of modernist abstraction). This is less obvious in the case of the OEIN, but, as we have seen, the way the ensemble operates is informed by Western models, and a similar point can be made about East-Asian orchestras of traditional instruments. The Western impact is perhaps least obvious in the Indonesian example, although the apparent influence of musique concrète and electronica, among others, was mentioned (to the extent that these are Western themselves). At the same time, it feels like searching for Western influence is asking the wrong question, or at least taking a one-sided perspective that overlooks the agency of the musicians involved. These musics are clearly the result of a complex and long history of entanglements, as virtually all musics are in an increasingly interconnected world, in the metropolitan West as much as in its former colonies.

This process started long before the musics themselves came into being. Another element they share is that they are responses to a threat or loss, caused by the encroachments of the West or modernity – which may or may not be the same in the respective cases. The OEIN’s project consists at least partly of a recreation of indigenous music, which had been destroyed by the colonisers. Chinese and Korean orchestras were attempts to modernise traditional music in the face of Western competition. This is not directly articulated, but the same may well be true of the South African traditions of bow playing. A similar argument has been made about Uwalmassa: ‘Instead of preservation, they take on the initiative of bringing Indonesian arts and culture into more explorative and imaginative sonic realms. Simultaneously, this opens up the path for more thorough research into the parts of Indonesia’s musical knowledge and history that have been lost.’Footnote ⁷¹ The similarity to the approach taken by Cergio Prudencio and the OEIN is striking. In other words, the impacts of the West and of modernity are perceptible not only in the way the music is put together, but also in the motivations of the musicians.

Finally, all the examples are of a collective nature and, although individuals played significant roles, they primarily concern groups, institutions and larger projects. This may be partly coincidental, but the shift in emphasis from individual composers and their works as the embodiment of music history to larger groups and social forces is intentional.

Having said that, this book will also feature more conventional examples of diffusion from the centre to the peripheries, such as the dissemination of twelve-note technique. For one thing, it would be wrong to suggest that these processes have not occurred or that they are not in need of analysis, but I also hope to show that they have less to do with passive adoption and are more complexly entangled than may at first be apparent. Likewise, I will analyse individual works by selected composers, to show how cultural and historical processes are reflected in musical details and how individuals respond creatively to the contexts in which they find themselves.

About This Book

Part I, ‘Rethinking the Historiography of Musical Modernism’, presents three case studies exemplifying some of the transnational connections and contact zones. Chapter 1, ‘Echoes of The Rite in Latin-American Music and Literature’, discusses the impact of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on composers and critics in Latin America. While, in Europe and North America, the work’s ‘primitivism’ was mostly regarded as a non-specific reference to the Other, in Latin America, Stravinsky’s evocation of the pagan Scythians fed into Indigenism, the celebration of the Continent’s pre-Columbian heritage (more than its existing Indigenous population). Stravinsky’s work therefore seemed to suggest an alternative path to modernity based not on European but Indigenous models.

One of the primary transnational encounters through which modernist music has been disseminated is migration. In Chapter 2, ‘Exile, Migration and Mobility’, I therefore argue that modernist music is the music of exile. This argument takes many forms: from a discussion of philosophical approaches to exile that often depict migrants as an avant-garde through a statistical approach that reveals the migration of composers as a mass phenomenon that has engendered what Scott Malcolmson and Bruce Robbins call ‘actually existing cosmopolitanism’ to a study of the ‘Dodecaphonic Diaspora’, the transnational network of the twelve-note composers, many of whom were migrants and who established local schools on different continents which often corresponded with one another. Overall, musical modernism would not be what it has become without the experience of migration and exile that so many composers underwent.

Part I is concluded by Chapter 3: ‘Institutionalised Internationalism: The International Society for Contemporary Music’. The ISCM was one of the most important agents in the globalisation of modernist (or contemporary) music. Its explosive growth from a small number of West and Central European countries to over fifty members on all continents except Antarctica can be seen to parallel the expansion of musical modernism itself. Furthermore, it is through the encounters between its far-flung members during the Annual Festivals and General Assemblies that relational notions of musical modernism had to be negotiated, and that initially monolithic, Eurocentric criteria were progressively supplanted by others that stressed relativity and diversity. As will be seen, however, the Society embodies the failures of global modernism as much as its successes. Although it played a more important role at its ‘peripheries’ than at the ‘centre’ (here the terminology is almost inescapable), in that entry into the Society and performances at its Annual Festival, not to mention hosting the Festival, are typically regarded as significant events in national music histories, non-Western members found it hard to make their voices heard. Similarly, while challenging Eurocentrism has become part of the Society’s discourse, in practice, over 70 per cent of the membership is from ‘the West’, and this overwhelming dominance is reflected, with minor variations, at every level: from the Society’s Executive Committee through the international juries of the Annual Festivals to its programmes. Like Chapter 2, this chapter uses mixed methods, combining an investigation of archival documents, such as reports from the Annual Festivals and General Assemblies, with a survey of the membership, interviews with key individuals and a statistical analysis of the representation of different countries and regions in terms of the membership, executive, juries and programming.

While Part I focused primarily on the macrolevel, such as wider historical developments, geopolitics and major institutions, and, consequently, relied primarily on historiographical tools, Part II is concerned with the microlevel of individual composers and their work, and, accordingly, is mostly situated within analysis and criticism. My hope is that the two approaches broadly complement one another, the first sketching the wider contexts and the second analysing in detail how creative individuals respond to these situations in their work. There is no way that two people can be representative of the vast spectrum of modernist composers around the world and across the time period covered in this book. At the same time, the choices are not arbitrary: both composers, Nigerian-born Akin Euba (1935–2020), the focus of Chapter 4, and Korean-born Younghi Pagh-Paan (b. 1945), featured in Chapter 5, migrated to the West – Euba successively to Britain, Germany and the USA, Pagh-Paan to Germany – so their personal biographies reflect some of the issues outlined in Chapter 2. They also experienced the conflicts between a deep attachment to their respective native traditions and their commitment to musical modernism which they perceived as ‘Western’. They found different creative solutions. Euba pursued the ideas of ‘African Art Music’ and ‘Intercultural Composition’, which he did not appear to see as contradictory. For her part, Pagh-Paan has sought to integrate Korean elements in an avant-garde language, pointing out, with Hölderlin and Kristeva, that ‘one’s own [culture or musical language] has to be learned as much as the foreign’.

In terms of the analytical methodology, just as in the short case studies earlier, I saw little need to employ the terminology of hybridity or, for that matter, that of fusion, synthesis and the like, and I remain concerned that they inadvertently essentialise Western modernist and Korean or African (Yoruba or Pan-African) traditional components, respectively. In different ways, both composers strove to undermine such binarisms, and their work implicitly illustrates the long history of mutual musical entanglements between the respective regions as a consequence of which Korean and African music are ‘always already’ Westernised or modernised, just like Western modernism has been inflected through its myriad interactions with world musics. This will become particularly apparent in the convergence between the reference to traditional Korean playing techniques and the Western avant-gardist preference for extended techniques and unusual sonorities – itself arguably at least partly the result of non-Western influence – in Pagh-Paan’s work.

There are other connections to the chapters in Part I, such as the role of the ISCM or the dodecaphonic diaspora, but these will be for readers to explore.