Transcultural Music History

This book engages with a transcultural history of music: with musical events, processes and discourses that happened because the world is not compartmentalised in national cultures. The musical experiences reported in these stories, distributed over several continents, were guided by a ‘transcultural consciousness’. This means that the historiographers of African music, the practitioners of military music, the proponents of Bach’s music in other continents, the creators and users of sound media, could act as they did because they were conscious of a globalised cultural environment. They participated in wider options but often insisted on their own diversity. A ‘global history of music’ (to quote the Balzan Musicology Project from which this volume originates) would be the sum total of musical histories, large and small, around the world. The focus of this book, however, is on musical processes and debates that have in themselves been conditioned by the transcultural consciousness of the modern era. Nineteen specialists of music history, ethnomusicology and cultural studies describe a surprising patchwork of local expertise and global significance. The people who have contributed to this patchwork are innumerable.