No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Why Positionality Matters in Today’s Historiography
Review products
TomPerchard, StephenGraham, TimRutherford-Johnson, and HollyRogers, Twentieth-Century Music in the West: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2022. xiv + 494 pp. ISBN 9781108481984 (hard cover); 9781108741736 (paperback); 9781108680899 (digital).
BjörnHeile, Musical Modernism in Global Perspective: Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet. Cambridge University Press, 2024. xvi + 286 pp. ISBN 9781009491709 (hard cover); 9781009491716 (digital).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2025
Extract
Over a quarter of a century ago, as an insecure doctoral candidate at a US university, I was faced with the overwhelming task of presenting my research progress as a stipendium fellow at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, in front of not only the Foundation’s supportive staff but also musicologists affiliated with the Foundation as members of the Board of Trustees. After I finished my less-than-satisfactory presentation on the German composer Wolfgang Rihm, whose music resists tightly knit modernist compositional language, one very prominent musicologist from a Berlin university made a comment that still resonates with me today, especially when I advise non-Japanese students on topics related to Japan’s musical culture: he said that I, as a Japanese person studying at a US university, was ‘brave’ for tackling ‘one of the most “German” composers of our time’. He also muttered that I would need to read Adorno (which I had done but did not incorporate into my presentation), since Adorno’s texts are key to understanding the ‘Germanness’ of Rihm’s music. Perhaps it was his way of kindly reminding me that I would have no chance of acquiring a career as a German music specialist. However, I was still taken aback, especially since my nationality had never been a factor in evaluating my research output in the US.
Information
- Type
- Review Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
References
1 Bhabha, Homi, ‘The Commitment to Theory (1988)’, in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), pp. 28–56 (p. 53)Google Scholar.
2 Gänger, Stefanie and Osterhammel, Jürgen, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking Global History , ed. by Gänger, Stefanie and Osterhammel, Jürgen (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 1–22 10.1017/9781009444002CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 1). Also see Crossley, Pamela Kyle, What Is Global History? (Polity Press, 2008)Google Scholar; The Prospect of Global History, ed. by James Belich and others (Oxford University Press, 2016); Conrad, Sebastian, What Is Global History? (Princeton University Press, 2016)10.2307/j.ctvc779r7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Christian Utz, Neue Musik und Interkulturalität: Von John Cage bis Tan Dun (Franz Steiner, 2002); Music and International History in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Jessica Gienow-Hecht (Berghahn, 2015); Decentering Musical Modernity: Perspectives on East Asian and European Music History, ed. by Tobias Janz and Chien-Chang Yang (Transcript, 2019).
4 Werner, Michael and Zimmermann, Bénédicte, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexibility’, History and Theory, 45.1 (2006), pp. 30–50 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00347.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Multiple Modernities, ed. by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (Routledge, 2002); Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
6 Osterhammel, Jürgen, ‘Explanation: The Limits of Narrativism in Global History’, in Rethinking Global History, ed. by , Gänger and Osterhammel, , pp. 23–46 (p. 23)10.1017/9781009444002.002CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ingarden, Roman, Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst (Max Niemeyer, 1962)10.1515/9783111717135CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carl Dahlhaus, Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Gerig, 1977); Goehr, Lydia, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. by Michael Talbot (Liverpool University Press, 2000); Davies, Stephen, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Clarendon Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Dodd, Julian, Works of Music: An Essay in Ontology (Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, ‘What We Are Doing Is Genuinely Authentic to Such a Small Degree That the Word Loses Its Intended Meaning’, Early Music, 12.1 (1984), pp. 13–16 10.1093/earlyj/12.1.13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taruskin, Richard, ‘The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory, Literalistic and Dehumanizing’, Early Music, 12.1 (1984), pp. 3–12 10.1093/earlyj/12.1.3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Fetterman, William, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces (Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar.
10 Decentering Musical Modernity, ed. by Janz and Yang; see particularly their introduction, pp. 9–40.
11 Cook, Nicholas, Music: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 119 10.1093/actrade/9780198726043.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For example, Agawu, Kofi, Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Fukunaka, Fuyuko, ‘When “Japanese” Music Became “World” Music: The Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik as Intercultural Agency’, in Musical Entanglements between Germany and East Asia , ed. by Cho, Joanne Miyang (Springer Nature, 2021), pp. 227–58Google Scholar.
13 Utz, Neue Musik und Interkulturalität; Contemporary Music in East Asia, ed. by Hee Sook Oh (Seoul University Press, 2014); The Aesthetics of Interculturality in East Asian Contemporary Music, ed. by Hilary Vanessa Finchum-Sung, special issue of The World of Music, n.s. 6.1 (2017).
14 Cho, ‘Introduction’, in Musical Entanglements between Germany and East Asia, ed. by Cho, pp. 1–22 (p. 17).
15 Bellman, Jonathan, The Exotic in Western Music (Northeastern University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Locke, Ralph P., Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. by Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Wesleyan University Press, 2004).
16 Pestel, Friedemann and Rempe, Martin, ‘Infrastructures of Musical Globalization, 1850–2000: Introduction’, New Global Studies, 19.2 (2025), pp. 1–23, doi:10.1515/ngs-2025-0003 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Ibid., pp. 2 and 3.
18 Heile, ‘Toward a World without Opposites: Hans-Joachim Koellreutter and Japan’, paper presented at the 7th Biennial Conference of the International Musicological Society East Asia (Tainan, 29 October 2023).
19 Dahlhaus, Carl, Foundations of Music History, ed. by, J. B. Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 33 10.1017/CBO9780511627309.005CrossRefGoogle Scholar.