The Global Musical Modernisms blog is a forum for all forms of music created, received and appropriated as “modern” in any location around the globe, crossing the boundaries of post/tonality. Following previous issues that have included African diasporic (Akin Euba, Francis Bebey, Hale Smith), South Asian diasporic (Dinuk Wijeratne), Indonesian (Rahayu Supanggah), Brazilian (César Guerra-Peixe), Estonian (Helena Tulve), and Danish (Per Nørgård), as well as East Asian composers, the 2024 collection will be on the theme of “What is East Asia in Global Musical Modernisms?”
Extant music research on East Asia is still largely bifurcated into traditional and avant-garde musics. Following the recent publication of the “Global Musical Modernisms” special issue in Twentieth-Century Music (TCM), I would like to invite authors to contribute to “East Asia in Global Musical Modernisms” for the Global Musical Modernisms blog. While the articles are intended to contextualize a particular musical work, a number of questions raised by the TCM issue may be of relevance, chief among them is the recognition and disruption of mutually imbricated terms that originated under colonialism, particularly tradition and modern, as well as oft opposed musical methods that grew out of that distinction. Authors may consider musics and methods that have sometimes fallen between the cracks of Euro-North American categories and methodologies: such as tonal concert music by twentieth-century East Asian composers that is not avant-garde and hence regarded as anachronistic; or cultural studies of East Asian popular music (e.g. queer media representation) that fit neither with ethnography nor global music history, necessarily; or indigenous or minoritized music-makers; or modern remakes of traditional sounds, such as folk rock, or traditional opera with jazz harmony. For the familiar category of avant-garde music, there are hundreds of figures to be investigated beyond the handful of East Asian diasporic composers in the US and Germany who occupy the majority of Euro-North American articles on East Asian avant-gardism. Methodological indiscrimination is encouraged, with any method applied to any genre.
I would like to invite authors who wish to contribute to the 2024 collection of posts to write to me with (i) a brief self-introduction and (ii) a short proposal mentioning a specific work to be discussed in the blog post by Feb 17, 2024.
The published post of 1000-1500 words is an accessible piece of writing (with analytical graphs where appropriate) that is a scholarly guide to one work of modern music. There is no limit on the number of posts which may be published, provided they serve as well-written introductions to modern works. Posts can be can be viewed here:
Completed posts will undergo a peer editing process, where writers will be editors for each other’s posts, with an eye to adherence to academic conventions, including use of footnotes, videos, and (if applicable) lyrics and musical examples.