The conference brings together key aspects of musical globalization that are commonly associated with separate research perspectives and academic disciplines. To investigate questions of symbolic domination, creative innovation, and cultural change simultaneously is to provide a way of understanding the global flows and intercultural encounters triggered by music in the age of empire. When it comes to gaining insights into such overarching historiographical topics as colonialism, cosmopolitanism, modernity, and migration, several transcultural contexts have become especially significant and will provide the analytic framework of our collaborative thinking.

The development of global circuits of music consumption was accompanied by a dissemination of western instruments, live performance, and recorded music. At the same time, such globalized consumption thrived on the commercialization of cultural difference. The contact zones of the cosmopolitan city, on the one hand, and of settler colonial societies, on the other, exhibited an equally ambivalent mixture of musical cross-fertilization and rigid racialized divides. We do need to attend to the music cultures of different bourgeois elites, because they differed in their degree of Europeanization, historicism, and nationalism in unpredictable ways. The collection and invention of various folk musics is another area in which cultural vectors from ethnomusicology to anticolonial movements and the music industry converged. Finally, the emergence of transcultural compositional techniques, which has to be distinguished from earlier forms of exoticism, is a phenomenon that involved a great deal of translation work and should be more closely examined both within European art music and beyond.

The contributions at this conference do not intend to reify the global as an ontological factor in musical life. Instead, they aim at greater historical specificity in the study of globalization. Thus, by identifying areas in which major transformations in cultural expression took place between the 1880s and the 1930s, we will ask about how these developments may be attributed to transcultural interactions and under what conditions the politics of cultural globalization and localization played out in each case.

The history of music in a globalized world—which has recently attracted increasing attention—critically engages notions that originated in the paradigm of western music history such as the emergence of the high/low distinction and the transition from participatory to presentational and commodified forms of music. In line with the perspectives of a cultural study of music (which highlights the historical underpinnings and repercussions of musical life), the conference also inquires into the making and breaking of western art music’s cultural hegemony and explores the possibilities for creative appropriations across music cultures, whether such cultures be socially or ethnically defined.