Studies on a Global History of Music: A Balzan Musicology Project

This volume of essays both seeks to take an innovative approach to music history and has an unusual history of its own. In 2012 musicologist Reinhard Strohm received the Balzan Prize from the International Balzan Prize Foundation (Milan/Zurich), an award presented to major scholars and scientists with the intention that half of their prize money should be used to support midcareer researchers working on a specified program. Strohm, as project leader, “opted for a project on global music history and, together with a Steering Committee, decided to invite researchers of historical musicology and ethnomusicology for study visits at six participating institutes to carry out or to complete their researches on the music of different world regions” (xiv). With the support of the Balzan Musicology Project, the authors included in this volume “studied the relatedness and the singularity of historical musics around the world,” seeking to articulate in different ways “a panorama of controversy, resilience, and at the very least, interaction.” This volume aims “to promote post-European historical thinking,” “based on the idea that a global history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history” but “rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe a history of many different voices” (xiii).The resulting collection of essays is collaborative in the sense that it is the outcome of “selected and peer-reviewed research writings” (xiv) produced as a result of study visits to participating institutes, as well as a series of international workshops held at institutions across Europe and England. Only the introduction to the volume, authored by Martin Stokes, was commissioned separately (xiv). Three essays placed immediately after the introduction historicize this intellectual venture and articulate the importance of the Enlightenment as the historical touchstone of the idea of a global music history. Of these essays, David R. M. Irving's interrogates early modern concepts of music in comparison to those of the ancient Greek; Estell Joubert's addresses early global ethnomusicological analytical encounters; and Philip V. Bohlman's concerns musical thought in the global Enlightenment.The remaining sixteen essays are sorted according to the general geographical location of their subject matter, which includes East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Given the prominence of Africa as a site for early historical work in ethnomusicology, as well as in the field of oral history, not to mention the European colonial presence on that continent from early dates, the exclusion of African case studies and the omission of musicologists and ethnomusicologists studying Africa are surprising. The final essay by Tina K. Ramnarine does explore in part connections established through “past imperial spreads,” drawing on “cultural survival in Caribbean plantation contexts and the legacies of African enslavement” (439).Seven of the essays focus on East Asia, most addressing musical encounters across or beyond that region. These include musical encounters between Latins, Mongols, and Persians ca. 1250–1350 (Jason Stoessel); musics along the Silk and Maritime routes in transcultural perspective (Max Peter Baumann); adaptation of Western music education after the Meiji Restoration in Japan (Rinko Fujita); bidirectional flows of Western and Japanese musics (Oliver Seibt); entangling and intercrossing of European music in Korea (Jin-Ah Kim); interchange of Korean, Japanese, and American musical terminology in Korea post-1945 (Keith Howard); and a general essay on East Asian musics in global historical perspective and the epistemological problems of cross-cultural global approaches (Nicola Spakowski).Three essays discuss musics of South and Southeast Asia: the modernization of old bamboo instruments in Bandung, Indonesia (Henry Spiller); cultural autonomy and the “Indian exception” (Matthew Pritchard); and the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians (Suddhaseel Sen). The final group of articles discuss different regions and topics from the Americas, including two focusing on Jesuit missions and the appropriation of European practices along with creative adaptation of indigenous practices in South America (Leonardo J. Waisman and Tomas Jeż). Four others approach, respectively, musical topoi representing landscape in Argentine art music (Melanie Plesch); pentatonic scales in the musical representation of the Peruvian Andes (Julio Mendivil); political dimensions of street vendors’ cries in Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas's early works (Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus); and the use of indigenous musical materials such as the waltz and danza in a Venezuelan masterpiece of musical nationalism (Juan Francisco Sans). The final contribution compares two ethnographic examples related to festivals from the Caribbean and Canada (Tina K. Ramnarine).Martin Stokes's introduction to this volume is probing and useful, querying who would want to construct a global history and why and situating the Balzan project in conversation with earlier engagements alongside historical studies in comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, postcolonial studies, globalization theory, and sound studies (4). However, for this reader, Nicola Spakowski's essay, encountered only midway through the volume at the end of the East Asian section, provides both the clearest map “to the new field of ‘global history,’” a clarifying explanation of the “relation between area studies and the global disciplines . . . in understanding the ‘distant’ and its relation to the West,” and the “conceptual variations in large-scale and connective history” (221). Spakowski's contribution is an important one that acknowledges the difficulty in setting aside Eurocentrism despite the best intentions to do so and sounding a challenge to area studies approaches despite their ubiquitous presence in the volume.Studies on a Global History of Music is an impressive volume on the level of the individual case studies; it covers a great deal of musical time and space, as well as multiple methodologies. While most of the essays seek to decolonize music history and to at least establish dialogues with musics in different eras and locales, the study of global music history provides a substantial challenge in this regard both for its individual authors and for the group as a whole. For the reader from ethnomusicology, as gently hinted in Stokes's introduction (8), the Balzan Musicology Project's volume reviewed here may not seem so new an approach, given the longtime global reach of research in historical ethnomusicology. There are rich offerings in ethnomusicology, as was succinctly surveyed more than thirty years ago in a volume dedicated to a “pioneer in the study of modern music history,” Bruno Nettl (Blum, Bohlman, and Neumann 1991). At that time, the coeditors of that volume, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, also acknowledged that their project to document “world history” had its roots in eighteenth-century Europe. Like the Balzan volume, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History addressed a wide array of music histories from multiple continents, endeavoring to approach “historically situated human subjects” (7) critically by focusing on the manner in which music and its study are perceived differently by both insiders and outsiders, by exploring who holds authority in acts of historical interpretation, by documenting brokers and mediators between and among different musics, and through exposing how music is reproduced and renewed through a multiplicity of factors, both local and global, over the course of time. The search for a global history of music clearly has been and continues to be a subject of deep interest across music disciplines, and Studies on a Global History of Music provides additional case studies and yet more cross-cultural dialogues for those committed to this genre of a broader musical scholarship.

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