Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization

The monograph Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization, first published in 2014 in German, discusses effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st centuries. Since the beginning of the absorption and transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900 music history basically has to be conceived globally a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. The book provides foundations of such a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. In addition, case studies of interculturally accentuated composing in Europe, America, and Asia are investigated in detail. Relations between East Asia (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea) and the West are at the center of the discussion but are repeatedly extended by other geographical contexts such as Africa, the Philippines, or Indonesia. A crucial field of tension, in which composers in the global context (inter)act, can be observed between the standardization of compositional practice according to Western criteria and the search for new impulses for artistic and aesthetic self-determination in non-Western countries, at times taking on the shape of (neo-)nationalisms. This makes it necessary to embed compositional techniques and decisions in broader contexts, taking into account political, social, and cultural developments in the respective countries and their transnational entanglement. The six chapters of the book develop theoretical foundations for such an approach and offer detailed music-historical case studies, integrating a plethora of analyses of individual musical works in intercultural contexts. This includes works and impact by composers such as Luciano Berio, Henry Cowell, Chaya Czernowin, Maurice Delage, Wolfgang Fraenkel, Ge Ganru, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, José Maceda, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Shukichi Mitsukuri, Isabel Mundry, Yuji Takahashi, Toru Takemitsu, Tan Dun, Isang Yun, Hans Zender, and Zhu Jianer. The relationship between music and broader changes in society are placed at the center of attention and considered a pivotal music-historical dynamic. Particular emphasis is placed on the early periods of intercultural musical encounter (exile, late colonialism, internationalization since 1900, universalist models) as well as on developments of the last three to four decades. Narratological interpretations that associate musical structures to political, aesthetic, and literary ideas, connect the diverse layers of research. An account of 20th- and 21st-century music history, that is consequently transnationally based, is facing complex methodological problems that this book for the first time faces proactively and coherently. The translation offers a revised and expanded version of the 2014 text that in many instants integrates the widened state of research over the last five years. The book is going to be published in printed form as well as in Open Access with the publisher transcript, which guarantees an ideal form of distribution and availability.

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