Year: 2020
Type: editorial
Abstract: Music histories on a larger scale are appealing to many of us right now.In the past decade, two major global music history research projects, led by Katherine Schofield and Reinhard Strohm, have received prestigious multi-year grants.Respectively, these are 'Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean' (MusTECIO), with a focus on the period c-, which was funded by the European Research Council (-), and the Balzan Prize Research Programme in Musicology, 'Towards a Global Music History' (-), which had a broad chronological focus.Several musicological societies have recently formed dedicated global-history study groups, in addition to the Society for Ethnomusicology's longstanding Historical Ethnomusicology section: the American Musicological Society (AMS) Global Music History Study Group and the AMS Global East Asian Music Research Study Group; the International Council for Traditional Music Study Group on Global History of Music; and the International Musicological Society Study Group 'Global History of Music'.And 'global' approaches to the world's musical pasts seem to be attracting talented graduate and postdoctoral scholars, which is important for the future of this emerging area.Just one indicator was the large and notably junior turnout at the first meeting of the AMS's Global Music History Study Group on October in Boston ('"Global Music History": Rethinking Questions of Knowledge and Access'); the enthusiasm that my co-convenors and I sensed was consistent with similar events at the AMS and other conferences.At the events I have attended, one of the core questions that emerges in discussion is that of what a 'global' history of music might beor, perhaps better, what it might aspire to be.Often such questions reflect the relative unfamiliarity of world-history/global-history approaches in our field.In many cases, though, they seem to carry a sense of the possibility that 'globalizing' music history may have a democratizing effect on our fields (a hope that has been especially prominent in conversations with historical musicologists).If 'global' historiographies address the significant involvement of past musics and sound art worldwide in larger-scale processes, this does repudiate the premises of European exceptionalism and white supremacy that lurked beneath many nineteenth-century historiographies of music, particularly nationalist ones.If these epistemological changes are paired with changes in participation and framingchanging who decides how the world's musical pasts are historicizedthen they hold genuine democratizing potential.These aspirations are among the reasons why I have advocated critical, cross-border approaches in my own work, beginning with a postcolonial study of music in early English and French efforts to colonize North America, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).In the s, I pivoted towards more explicitly decolonial and global approaches to music history, still emphasizing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the transatlantic world.I liked the fact that these approaches offered more powerful models for how colonial social structures of race and racialized gender affected European music history, even at a distance from the colonies.Without these approaches, for example, it would have been difficult to explain the French habit of Africanist impersonation in ballet and opera before the Revolution, as I set out to do in a essay, 'Race, Empire, and Early Music' (in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed.Olivia A. Bloechl, Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), -).More recently, I have drawn on global historical approaches to the body as a 'contact zone', in work on Innu-French sonic interactions in seventeenth-century Canada.I am also in the second year of offering an undergraduate course on 'Global Music History', which introduces non-majors to music's involvement in historical processes and changes worldwide.As no textbook currently exists, I am using the feminist textbook by Merry
Source: Eighteenth Century Music
Author: OLIVIA BLOECHL
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4234370944