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Date: December 13, 2024
From: Dr. Erol Köymen
Re: Report on Global Western Art Music Symposium, held November 11-13, 2024, Chicago, IL
Musicology is in the midst of a “global turn” heralded by a collection of ground-breaking volumes, journal colloquies, and book series. The Global Western Art Music Symposium, held at the University of Chicago from November 11-13, 2024, articulated an important step forward in this disciplinary paradigm shift. If “global musicology” and “global music history” might appear at times to be uncritical and depoliticized superstructural scholarly manifestations of global political economic processes, the Global Western Art Music Symposium sharpened the global turn’s line of inquiry by training it on a key axis of global musicking: Western art music.
The symposium’s title was apt: at the panels, roundtable discussions, plenary talks, and informal discussions held over its three days, participants drawn from subfields of ethnomusicology, (historical) musicology, and music theory probed questions including: What is globality? What defines the distinctive approach of global musicology? How do we understand “the West”? How do we define art music? Most importantly, the participants plied the spaces between these questions by exploring their various and sundry permutations. Presentations and conversations clustered in particular around themes of conceptual and theoretical frames, media and materialities, and genre, spanning diverse cultural, historical, and geographical contexts.
Imperiality and encounter between empires emerged as a key conceptual axis: Western art music has often accompanied and articulated arcs of Western imperial expansion; at the same time, as a cultural formation and set of practices, it has afforded modalities of resistance and cultural identity in non-Western and post-colonial contexts. Participants explored these dynamics across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and (South)east Asia. A provocative conclusion here came from Lestern Hu in his paper on Rossini’s gamme chinoise and its ostensible Chinese origins: Hu suggested a need to “provincialize” global musicology by peering underneath the surface of the twenty-first century North American intellectual context in which it has taken root, suggesting that a perceived loss of American hegemony may have been a key unconscious impetus for its flourishing.
Materialities, media, and disciplinary histories were another key thread for exploring how global (Western) art music exchanges. Panel presentations on South Asian were particularly noteworthy here, such as Pramantha Tagore’s talk on instruments as a medium of exchange in late-nineteenth century India. The symposium’s two keynotes were also situated in this conceptual realm. In the first of these, distinguished ethnomusicologist and Cairo native Salwa el-Shawan Castelo-Branco located global Western art music in the specific materialities of the opera houses of Cairo, Egypt. In her talk, Castelo-Branco traced the various sites and architectural forms of opera houses in Cairo from the mid-19th century and their influence on practices of art musicking in that city. In the symposium’s second keynote, Thomas Christensen explored possibilities for a global music theory, drawing on his current project and graduate seminar on this topic at the University of Chicago.
The genre of opera became an important site for probing global Western art music. Inquiry here took the relatively traditional musicological form of non-Western (Japanese) influences on Euro-American opera, but also examined opera as a site of geopolitical maneuver in early twentieth-century Sino-Soviet conflict and the complex negotiation of gender through opera in post-revolutionary Iran. Opera also emerged in discussion as an interesting site for applied global Western art music projects, including organizing performances of non-Western operas (for example, Turkish operetta), as well as commissioning new operas on global themes.
Finally, on this note, the symposium included an applied dimension through workshops by the University of Chicago’s South Asian and Middle Eastern music ensembles. Distinguished ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman provocatively framed these workshops by tying them to colonial musical encounter at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held just outside the symposium venue and challenging us to think of the stage at that exposition as a site at which categories of “Western” and art music were mediated and constructed.
One of the most satisfying aspects of the Global Western Art Music symposium was the intellectual arc that it afforded. This was punctuated by the lively roundtable discussions that opened and closed the symposium. A key point that emerged from this arc was the question of scale and a conception of the global and global musicology as a dynamic tacking back and forth between global dynamics and local contexts. Another consensus that emerged especially in the concluding roundtable is the need to take the global spread of Western art music seriously as an historical and contemporary phenomenon for empirical study, while also remaining attentive to the cultural work done by invocations of “the West” and the ways in which this category is continuously constituted and undermined in diverse global contexts. Perhaps most importantly, the symposium revealed how the study of global Western art music moves the dial forward by articulating a specific, salient, and critical avenue for global musicological study.