Description
A key objective of global history has been to highlight connections and comparisons across vast distances and time-periods. Global music history shares that tendency, but also embraces relativistic studies of diverse local musical pasts that promote the de-centring of traditional historical-musicological focus. Within both fields, emphases on connectivity reflect an intricate relationship with studies on globalization produced since the late twentieth century. They also bring into sharp focus chronologies of large-scale networks, which in turn have implications for periodizations of ‘the global’. One view of this periodization is by historians Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, who have argued that until networks were sustained circumferentially, there was no ‘globalization’ per se (‘Globalization Began in 1571’, in Globalization and Global History, ed. Barry K. Gills and William R. Thompson (London: Routledge, 2006), 232-247). Of course, if that concept were applied to global music history, it would imply the relatively short timeframe of less than half a millenium. Another view of global connectivity sees it occurring not just through networks, but at a species-wide level. In an article of 2003 that examined different kinds of trans-state cultural processes, and anticipated many of the theoretical questions that global music historians have recently faced, Thomas Turino stated: ‘I want to reserve the term global to describe phenomena that literally encompass the geography and populations of the globe’, giving examples including climate change, life-cycle events, and radio (‘Are We Global Yet? Globalist Discourse, Cultural Formations and the Study of Zimbabwean Popular Music’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology 12, no. 2: 52-53). This paper explores a range of theoretical perspectives and examples in music history, and asks how re-engaging with the complex relationships between various kinds of connectivity and chronology across the longue durée might reveal new ways to contemplate human musical pasts in global terms.
| IMPORTANT | YES, I confirm I have read it. |
|---|
