2026-06-25 –, Room 304 PC Desk (Seats 36)
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.
Sounding Indigenous Music from Early Modern Mexico City: A Global Approach to Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador (c. 1690)
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:My presentation takes a global listening approach to local sonic practices depicted on a late seventeenth-century biombo—a Mexican (or New Spanish) adaptation of Japanese folding screens that entered the viceroyalty through the Manila Galleon trade. The biombo that I examine features an Indigenous wedding that invites interpretations of its ethnographic and festive dimensions. Musical traditions associated with early modern Mexico’s autochthonous population are prominent, including the mitote, the danza de los voladores and a courtly entertainment known as the juego del palo. With this wealth of sonic material in mind, my presentation explores how oceanic flows of ideas, sounds and material culture shaped portrayals of non-European sound traditions in Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador. I conclude that the folding screen performs the consumption of Indigenous musical practices as part of an emerging cosmopolitan identity, particularly among the region’s urban elite.
Title for Additional Participant 2:Worlding through Recitational Song in Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s North American and Pacific Writings
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:This paper reflects on recitational song practices and their intercultural interpretation as world-making acts during and after the Seven Years’ War (1754-63). In it, I discuss several micro-encounters reported in Bougainville’s North American and Pacific writings. I focus on the earliest report, in his 1757 campaign journal, of an episode in which an Anishinaabe warrior stood in his canoe and chanted a dream given by his manidoo. Riding with them was Bougainville, whose journal entry described the warrior’s singing as récitatif obligé, a French operatic style of orchestrally accompanied, declamatory song. Bougainville referred to recitative again in his Voyage autour du monde (1771), describing Tahitian and Chinese Indonesian singing. I argue that these song practices and their colonial misrepresentation were instances of sound worlding: how peoples in inter-imperial relations have used song to shape the contested geographies and temporalities of global history.
Title for Additional Participant 3:A Convergent Vision for a New Science of Global Music History: The Case of Indigenous Philippine Bamboo Flute and Zither Music
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:In current musicology, music is presumed to be socially constructed, yet this leaves the science of finding universals at a dead end. I propose an alternative route to current global music history that is overly concerned with cultural particularism. In this paper, I revisit the conundrum of human cultural difference, positing a convergent vision of cultural formations as unique workings-out of universal facts of nature in time or history. My use of "universal" does not repeat the nineteenth-century Eurocentric concept but allows for particular music knowledge systems that may be incommensurable, yet remain constrained by universals. This alternative route, I argue, is best served by an ecological approach to music experience, where the universal facts of biology and physics are "translated" creatively by cultures in global music history. To illustrate my argument, I offer the examples of indigenous Philippine lip-valley flutes and bamboo zithers.
Title for Additional Participant 4:After the Global Hush: Reconfiguring the Present through Time Travel in Journey of Spirits (魂遊記) (2021)
Abstract for Additional Participant 4:This essay takes the global geographic coverage of the National Security Law (NSL) of Hong Kong, China, effective July 1, 2020, as a legal background for what I call elsewhere a “global hush”—discretion exercised by all, regardless of their whereabouts, regarding any comments that the Chinese authorities may take as threats to China’s national security. While this law has successfully stamped out dissenting views, key music practitioners have also used music to re-establish connections with listeners inside and outside Hong Kong. This essay examines a nine-minute music-narrative-video project, Journey of Spirits (2021), released less than a year after the enforcement of NSL. I argue that genres of music help audiences to experience a global moment by presenting various temporal scales while reframing the comprehension of an all-encompassing law in a scope that one may find manageable.
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.
forthcoming
forthcoming
forthcoming