Global Music History

Abstract

The “global turn” is an indisputable leitmotif of 21st-century scholarship. In looking to the ways in which we tell stories about our musical pasts, the confines of national narratives have progressively given way to regional, comparative, transnational, and global histories. As much as these approaches are themselves interconnected and mutually constitutive, they offer differing lenses to observe global linkages and developments across space and time. As the Anglo-center of musicology awakens to its own provincializing moment, scholars are increasingly engaging with the modern field of “global history” to navigate the imperial legacies of their craft and its attendant theories, methods, and biases. To this end, historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists alike find parallel aspirations in overcoming the 19th-century relics of methodological nationalism and Eurocentric models and myths of universal progress. In other words, they are increasingly asking how we are to navigate a terminal point in these imperial legacies and to foster post-Eurocentric frameworks for the historical study of our world’s musics. Much like the more established field of global historiography, global music history (sometimes referred to as, and used interchangeably with, a global history of music) is not a clear signifier as such and shares analytical terrain with other approaches to music concerned with forms of transfer, interaction, entanglement, and cross-border exchange. While consideration of music histories on a larger scale is thus by no means new, the rise of the “global” as a specific epistemological premise, rather than as a mere complementary view, has led to this burgeoning field most prominently over the past decade. But it is perhaps its polysemous identity that has fostered such momentum, with an increasing number of scholarly publications, university courses, and professional study groups coalescing around these three words. Being conscious that this Anglophone term (and its exclusionary potential) must be scrutinized within multilingual and multilateral contexts, the field is not without its challenges. This bibliography therefore balances its overviews and case studies with important literature that highlight these roadblocks as well as paths forward. Wherever possible (and within the limits of my own abilities), this bibliography engages with relevant non-Anglophone scholarship, but acknowledges the limitations of what is presented here. I have also been conscious to select publications in English that themselves enter into more meaningful dialogue with historiographies of and through a diversity of geocultural settings and associated perspectives. As a field in the throes of continued debate and maturation, it is not my intention to ossify any singular definition, but rather to shed light on the various scholarly priorities, practices, questions, and concerns that fall within its purview. The categories below are thus articulated as navigational tools and are not designed to re-inscribe any sense of disciplinary, linguistic, or regional division. On the contrary, it is hoped that they will facilitate a greater degree of collaboration (whether between people or disciplines) and the fostering of decolonial approaches to this growing field.