Coordinator: Makoto Harris Takao (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Mike Block (Cello player, Composer, Singer, and Educator)
The Idea: Motivations & Scope
Musics have traveled, mingled, and continuously evolved across histories of migration, displacement, and encounter. Across cultures, people shape sound into musical meaning, finding expression, connection, and creativity in ways that resonate with their worlds. In the 21st century the dynamics of interconnection, and cross-border exchange, along with the frictions and conflicts that shaped them, have increasingly informed the stories we tell about the millennia of our diverse musical pasts. With it, Global Music History, as a field attending to the regional and global entanglements of human musics, has emerged as a catalyst in the transformation of academic musicology.
In this pillar we explore how today’s forces of globalization and our daily experience of planetary interdependency are transforming our knowledge, study, production, performance and appreciation of diverse musics. As a Eurocentric understanding of the world’s musical heritage—and the increasingly undefendable conceptual monopoly it wields—crumbles and underrepresented voices emerge from the deep time of these global histories, we are presented with the opportunity to think, make, do, and appreciate human musics anew in our increasingly polarized, distracted, and violence-ridden world.
Guiding Questions
- What role has music played across human cultures in deep time? What can we learn from the comparison of our world’s music about the broad spectrum of their political, religious, social, aesthetic, or mental and medical effects? And about their patronage systems, educational practices and institutions, and media of transmission?
- How can engaging with the diverse musical traditions and voices of Eurasia, Africa, the Indigenous Americas, the Pacific Rim, and historically marginalized communities—including within the US—enrich our approaches to composition, performance, and the study of music?
- How can we disrupt and radically redefine the boundaries between musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory while also accounting for the various ways these disciplines both developed and are currently practiced around the world?
- How can different performance traditions and forms of musical and sonic knowledge contribute to the generation and dissemination of global music histories beyond the academy?
- What methodologies should we employ in the historical study of non-notated, oral, or mnemonic practices of sound and music?
- How can we leverage new conversations between scholars, composers, performers, and cultural activists for the flourishing of diverse music cultures, and for the greater good of human flourishing?
Goals & Actions
- Convene leading philologists of musical traditions from across the premodern world and, collaboratively, develop models for broader dissemination of their highly specialized and academic knowledge
- Confront how sound and music played a role in colonial violence, displacement, exclusion, and cultural loss—challenging us to critically engage with the forces that have shaped the world we inhabit today
- Shape global music history and music-making today as tools to appreciate human interconnectedness in an era of resurgent nationalisms and populisms
- Promote transcultural music-making and make opportunities for creative encounters between performers and music experts from the wealth of our world’s musics
- Create an advisory board of musicians, teachers, and scholars committed to advancing curricular and pedagogical approaches that foster inclusive institutional spaces for a diversity of global musics