Olivia Bloechl
Olivia Bloechl is Professor in Musicology at the University of Pittsburgh, where her research focuses on the history of music and sound in early French and British Atlantic empires, French Baroque opera, and global music history. The author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, 2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Chicago, 2017), she is also a co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History. Today’s paper is from that handbook and her book-in-progress, Song and Music in the Seven Years’ War for Northeastern Native America.
University of Pittsburgh
Session
This panel brings together four papers based on chapters in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History, which explores the potential for doing music history otherwise offered by a globally oriented perspective. There is no consensus on what the emerging trans-discipline of global music history comprises, what its main methodologies are, or even where its disciplinary boundaries lie. Yet it has become a significant, even transformative development in music studies. A critical mass of research is showing that some of the most important changes in how peoples have created and conceptualized music stemmed from large-scale connective processes that reconfigured their lived musical worlds.
In honor of the conference’s theme and location, each of this panel’s papers addresses cross-border music histories and present-day perspectives involving Asia or the Pacific in some significant respect. Sarah Finley analyzes scenes of indigenous Mexican festive music-making on a late-1600s Japanese-New Spanish folding screen from an oceanic perspective that yields a more nuanced understanding of creole elites’ cosmopolitanism. Turning to the eighteenth century, Olivia Bloechl discusses comparisons of Anishinaabe, Tahitian, and Chinese Indonesian recitational singing with French operatic recitative in Bougainville’s Atlantic and Pacific writings, and argues that comparative accounts like these can be critically and creatively interpreted as contested sound worlding. The last two papers center on music in present-day Southeast and East Asian contexts. Buenconsejo’s paper makes the case for renewed attention to shared dimensions of divergent, even incommensurable music cultures, discussing indigenous Philippine instruments as objects in which universals and cultural particularity converge. Finally, Hedy Law points to the agency of Cantonese music creators in facilitating connections among listeners within and outside Hong Kong and offering meaningful frameworks for making sense of the 2020 National Security Law’s global reach.