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Why Positionality Matters in Today’s Historiography
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PerchardTom, GrahamStephen, Rutherford-JohnsonTim, and RogersHolly, Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2022. xiv + 494 pp. ISBN 9781108481984 (hard cover); 9781108741736 (paperback); 9781108680899 (digital).
HeileBjörn, Musical Modernism in Global Perspective: Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet. Cambridge University Press, 2024. xvi + 286 pp. ISBN 9781009491709 (hard cover); 9781009491716 (digital).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2025
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Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.
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