Global Musical Modernisms – edited by Gavin S.K. Lee

Our 2022 collection of posts on African (Akin Euba), Afro-French (Francis Bebey), South Asian/Canadian (Dinuk Wijeratne), Chinese (Zhi Shirui), Indigenous Mexican American (Mari Esabel Valverde), Israeli (Paul Ben-Haim), and Swedish composers (Laci Boldemann) is up!

Global Musical Modernisms is a forum for all forms of music received and appropriated as “modern” in any location around the globe, crossing the boundaries of post/tonality and musical genres. The focus is on art, avant-garde, experimental, modernist, and popular music, by global (African, Middle Eastern, Central/ South/ Southeast/ East Asian, Latin American, Australasian etc.) music-makers, minority music-makers from the West, and music-makers from the peripheries of Europe and North America.

Authors in each annual collection serve as peer editors for each other, shaping each post into an accessible piece of writing (with analytical graphs where appropriate) that is a scholarly guide to global musical modernisms and a multi-media teaching resource.

Editor: Gavin S. K. Lee researches and teaches Sinophone, black and Sino-Afro, US minority, and queer/trans composers, with a special focus on 20th-century tonal and avant-garde music. In addition to championing underrepresented composers, Lee has been among the first to advance emerging ideas and approaches such as East Asian ways of knowing music, global musical modernisms, global philosophy of music, global music history pedagogy, and queer/trans music theory. His publications include the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation (UMich), and two edited volumes, Queer Ear (Oxford), and Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music (Routledge). Lee has collaborated with around 200 researchers in editing 2 books and 3 special journal issues, and convening 31 conference panels. Since 2020, Lee has presented 10 guest lectures on three continents in the US, Australia, Taiwan, and China, including a keynote for the Musicological Society of Australia 2023 conference. In addition to serving as editor of IMS Musicological Brainfood, he is a member of the Indiana Theory Review editorial board, SEM Council, and SEM 2023 conference program committee. In 2022-3, Lee is virtual visiting scholar at Western Sydney University’s Australia-China institute.