Twentieth-Century Music recently published a special issue on “Global Musical Modernisms.” In this conversation, contributors examine the stakes of the project.

Gavin Lee: What is global musical modernisms? Musicology is usually concerned only with Western modernist composers, and a small handful of East Asian composers. What about Nigerian, Indian, Indonesian, Brazilian, Indigenous, or African American composers? Can global musical modernism be considered to be an expression of the whole of global modernity–a question vexed by the definition of modernity itself? An immediately obvious intervention of global musical modernisms lies in its bracketing of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Satie as belonging to the European “province” of the globe, as it were, pointing instead to Takemitsu, Michiko Toyama (see Brigid Cohen’s article), and avant-garde gamelan composer Panda Madé Sukerta etc. But I think the relocation of modernism to global sites also breaks us out of the prison of diachronic Western music history. In Republican China (1912-1949), for instance, Beethoven, Schoenberg, Christian hymn tunes, jazz, and Peking opera were all concatenated in a cacophonous modernity that indirectly sounded out the presence of Europe and its military power in East Asia, shaping the musicking of the Chinese who thought they needed Western sounds (which were hybridized with Chinese sounds), along with Western guns. For me, noisy Chinese modernity raises the question of whether modernism with its disruptive aesthetics is a concentration of broader disruptions in soundscapes and landscapes that began with the Spanish conquests of the 16th century.

Sergio Ospina-Romero: To me, a category like Global Musical Modernisms opens so many fascinating avenues to unearth a great assortment of characters, repertoires, scenes, and ideas. It is particularly encouraging in the way of “provincializing” Europe and North America as well as in the sense of providing a framework to understand those characters, repertoires, scenes, and ideas in their own terms, and not simply as derivatives or spin-offs of the Western Classical canon. But that’s also my concern. The extent to which Global Musical Modernisms may develop into a tokenistic grouping, simply to make room for “other,” “alternative,” and ultimately, non-normative musical modernisms, which would simply legitimize Western modernity as the norm, and the others as “anomalies” that we have to accept into the family for the sake of diversity and inclusion. It is indeed tough to find a good balance, but making sure that we keep an eye on the colonial maneuvers that have framed Western modernity and the colonial legacies that continue to shape our understanding of “modernism(s)” is, I believe, a step in the right direction.

Christopher J. Miller: In focusing on Javanese gamelan musician and composer Rahayu Supanggah’s disavowal of labels such as “kontemporer”-which, paired with his unambiguous connections to canonical modernist ideas and practices, made him an especially compelling test case-my article is animated by the ethnographic impulse instilled in me by my disciplinary training. This impulse must, I believe, inform any adequately global understanding of musical modernism. As Chris Cutler observed, speaking of the term avant-garde, “words live in communities of use, which can never be wrong, no matter how perplexing and contradictory.” Yet remaining attentive to how the term modernism is used-including among scholars of music of all stripes, our own community of use-does not mean acquiesing to the narrowly formalist or canonizing definitions that still prevail. There are other instances where it makes sense to apply the framework of modernism, even when the term itself is not used within a given community. The value of our special issue’s intervention, I believe, has to do with how many of the contributions poke around at the edges of musical modernism as it is conventionally understood. More of this kind of work is needed, but so are arguments that build up and forward new definitions and understandings. Musical modernism should be understood more broadly. But how broadly? Are there cases where musical modernity or some other frame is more helpful? Building momentum around terms is important, but so is the kind of agility that comes with not putting too much stock in them.

Gavin Lee: I think Sergio is absolutely right about the complexity of global, alternative modernities and modernisms, which I think have to be located within coloniality. The key question might be formulated as, where is countercolonial resistance, if global modernists are “in” coloniality? Are there spaces “outside” of coloniality from where resistance is mounted? What strikes me as interesting is that there is a whole genre of music conference papers that examine (racial, gender, and sexual) difference in detail and then sharply pivot to claims about how difference is resistive–without analyzing the mechanisms of resistance. An alternative way of working is to recognize that, as Giddens reminds us, agency is always exerted within (colonial) structure. For many global modernists, this has often paradoxically meant protesting European coloniality using Western sounds, as in 19C black South African composer John Knox Bokwe’s Plea for Africa. I heed Abu-Lughod’s warning against the “romanticization” of resistance, when the latter is used as a matter of course without qualification. I also heed her insistence on analyzing the functioning of complex power structures instead. To my mind, one of the things that is most crucial to global musical modernisms is that alternative modernity itself can (following Dilip Gaonkar) be defined as the critical consciousness of one’s place in (colonial) history. Thus recognition of one’s place in global or alternative modernities/modernisms is itself a call to action (in that regard, see especially Kira Thurman’s article).

Sergio: I think Gavin brings up a really good point with potential ramifications that exceed the scope of our dossier but that, ultimately, seem to underscore its relevance and the significance of these matters beyond musical modernisms and even music in general. The question of what takes place inside and outside coloniality is as intriguing as potentially unsolvable. For me, it inspires two thoughts, seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable, but somewhat concurrent in the historical picture. First, as Myriam Chancy so eloquently puts it in her book Autochthonomies, the cultural identities of individuals in the African diaspora are much more than what coloniality has made of them. In other words, it is true that our fixation with the doings and resilience of imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism oftentimes clouds our vision to keep in perspective other cultural facets and other scenarios of cultural formation in Afrodiasporic communities that bypass coloniality altogether. That is, precisely, the unique value of Chancy’s book. Second, however, when digging deeply into the rhythms of history it seems to be plainly evident that, maybe more than anything else, coloniality has been the leitmotif of history. This is one of the most interesting lessons that I’ve learned recently while delving more and more into the realm of the so-called “new imperial studies,” and the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. While I engage with Chancy’s ideas in my article on “The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean” in the dossier that summons up this conversation, the second issue is actually at the core of my forthcoming book, Talking Machine Empires, a book that I’m still writing, and this is an issue that I’m still grappling with. I’m fascinated with the clash of both perspectives just as I am with each one of the articles that make up this dossier.

Chris: I agree that recognizing the particular ways in which modernity manifests and is experienced globally is of paramount importance to our project. To me that means not only recognizing the pervasiveness of coloniality-and that there is no modernity without it, as Mignolo and others have taught us-but equally recognizing other forces at play. Chancy’s study, that Sergio points to, offers an important counter perspective in drawing attention to the ongoing importance to Africans and African Diasporics of their African origins and culture, even through histories of displacement and reconstitution. Supanggah and his gamelan-playing colleagues are an example of a less contested case, where a local music continued to function as a nearly total frame of reference. To be sure, they worked within the condition of coloniality, but this did not entail contending with the dominance of Western art music and its modernist extensions within Indonesia’s elite cultural spheres. Western art music’s presence in Indonesia was, and still is, even more circumscribed than where musical modernism is more readily recognized. If an attachment to gamelan was a form of resistance, it was instead to the overwhelming ubiquity of popular music. As a form of cultural expression fueled by the forces of mediation, capital, and industry, and shaped from the start by global circulations of people, money, and ideas, popular music is, as much as anything, an inescapable vehicle for almost everyone’s experience of modernity. (But is it therefore modernist?) These forces and circulations define modernity at large, as Appadurai puts it, and while they had their roots in the colonial era, coloniality is not by itself sufficient in understanding their import. Likewise with musical modernity. (And with musical modernism?) Which brings me back to the questions of the usefulness of different frames I pose above. I do hope that formulations such as vernacular modernism will be built up and gain traction, so that they do not merely tokenize-a concern Sergio understandably raises-but instead more effectively provincialize the narrow understanding of musical modernism that has prevailed. We have just begun that process with the formulation global musical modernisms. May that work continue.

Gavin: Our conversation above is a microcosm of the special issue, which showcases a multiplicity of approaches including historiography, ethnography, and music analysis. I look forward to further conversations, particularly with global music historians who have broached “global Baroque,” or “global eighteenth-century.” I wonder if our approach in this special issue, that is entangled with the vast literature on the theory of global modernities and modernisms, may spark conversations about the nature of the global. In particular, we place emphasis on a critical globalism, encompassing not just entanglement, but also coloniality and extra-coloniality, discursive communities and resistance, disruption, temporality, aesthetics, and a healthy dose of skepticism towards methodological messianism (see especially Chelsea Burns’ article). I anticipate future intersections of global musical modernisms with other fields of music research.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Musical Modernisms by GAVIN S. K. LEE and CHRISTOPHER J. MILLER