Cultural Brokers and the Making of Glocal Soundscapes, 1880s to 1930s

Abstract

In September 2014, the European Network in Universal and Global History hosted the Fourth European Congress on World and Global History at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Of themore than 150 panels dealing with all imaginable aspects of modern global connectivity, there was but one dedicated to the field of music, out of which this special issue grew. It is no exaggeration to state that global history has been a largely silent undertaking so far, interested neither in music nor sound more generally. Few historians care (or dare) to address music and the arts as an integral part of social analysis, let alone the political or economic dimensions of musical life. Those who have done so have very rarely explored the transcultural repercussions. A good many musicologists, for their part, have been more accustomed to look beyond the aesthetic qualities of their subject to its wider social and cultural context. Most scholarly efforts, however, centre exclusively on western classical music, and are more reluctant to investigate the global reach of other musical styles and their significance for the history of transcultural contact in general. Finally, ethnomusicologists, whose historical inquiries embrace everything but classical music, see the latest wave of globalisation and the rise of the world music discourse as an opportunity to gain new significance. As Bruno Nettl puts it in his interview for this issue, the field has become “more a part of the modern world, of modern living.” Indeed, the recent call for an “historical ethnomusicology” as a new subfield within the discipline is indicative of its dominant orientation towards the present in the last twenty-five years or so.