Baroque enables—arguably, itdemands—a radical rethinking of historical time—and a rethinking of familiar history. It permits a liberation from periodization and linear time, as well as from historicism. [. . .] Baroque brings discrepancy and rupture, not simply harmony: the shattering of what was taken for granted. This is not a question of linear time: baroque is always already contemporary.¹

Helen Hills

Professor Emerita of Architectural and Art History University of York

“Of all the terminology borrowed from art historians as labels for periods of music history, none has been more troublesome in its vagueness if not its inappropriateness than the word Baroque.”² So opens George J. Buelow’s history of music from Monteverdi to Bach. In tracing such incipient designations as Rudolf Wustmann’s “baroque century” in 1909 to Curt Sachs’s formulation of “baroque music” a decade later, we can recognize by the mid-twentieth century, with the work of Manfred Bukofzer, an attempt to legitimize and unify a coherent notion of 2the Baroque for both scholarly and pedagogical applications.³ Indeed, the story of this term’s “imperfect” beginnings as an anachronistic import from a parallel discipline is, by now, but a truism. And yet, while periodizing concepts are widely recognized as subjective constructions that are inevitably susceptible to change,⁴ the lingering persistence of an uncritical “baroque” as a chronological bookend and a stylistic moniker in music history surveys alerts us to a broader state of curricular stasis.⁵ In the words of Leonard B. Meyer, musical conceptualizations (in terms of the events that constitute both a certain music as well as its history) are too often “interpreted in the light of the axiom of 5inertia.”⁶ Some four decades later, we find ourselves facing a moment of reckoning that lays bare the colonial vestiges of cognitive imperialism and Eurocentric modes of knowing that continue to occupy our classrooms of higher education.⁷ Crisis, as a critical juncture of “choice,” “judgment,” or “decision making” (as in the ancient Greek 7krisis/krino), thus compels us to motion. As teachers, such disciplinary and institutional flashpoints are opportunities for systemic change and for us to embrace new ways of seeing, thinking, and responding as historians of music.⁸

In recent years, the field now most commonly referred to as “global music history” has increasingly found a scholarly foothold, particularly (though not exclusively) among musicologists researching the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,⁹ as a space to cultivate post-Eurocentric frameworks for studying the histories of our world’s musics. Less present, however, has been a public-facing discussion of what this field means for our students and the curricula by which they are taught.¹⁰ This article, and the special issue in which it appears, is an invitation to such dialogue, confronting the implications and limits of global music history as a decolonial praxis and how it can critically reframe a singular Baroque as a multiplicity of “baroques” that centers Indigenous contributions to and ownership of these musics. It takes as its starting point Gary Tomlinson’s earlier call to seek out “revisionist alternatives” in music history that resituate Europe in its broader global-historical contexts.¹¹ This is not, however, a matter of eradicating the teaching of “Western art music” but rather, as Catherine Haworth has articulated, a “stepping back” to a critical vantage point from which we can see “broader [global] patterns and alternative ways of conceptualizing, organizing and pushing forward the critique of difference.”¹² As a guide to my accompanying syllabus, this article reflects on the course’s intent, inception, and implementation. And while this ultimately intersects with ongoing discussions about the continued (ir)relevancy of a compulsory music history sequence, it is beyond its scope to fully engage with these debates.¹³ Nevertheless, the ideas explored here are intended to shed light on thinking “global” in music history and on related curricular and pedagogical “unbindings” relevant to both undergraduate and graduate contexts. Throughout, I reflect on my own experiences with and modeling of a music history without (or, rather, against) chronology and how this invites students to make meaningful connections to a baroque that is at once transcultural, transhistorical, and global.

Unbinding Time and Temporality: Teaching Through a Series of “Connected” Vignettes

In the spring of 2020, I was asked to develop and teach a course that would serve both upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. According to my school’s curriculum, the course was to be designated as “period studies in musicology,” involving the “intensive study of the music of a specific historical period.” The geographical scope of such courses (in contrast to those designated as “regional studies in musicology”) has generally been set at the implied borders of Western Europe and North America. As a scholar invested in the field of global historiography, I took on this assignment as a challenge: to rethink dominant structures, concepts, and methods in music history pedagogy that arguably isolate not only world regions from one another but also considerations of the past from those of the present. Stefan Tanaka’s approach to “making a mess” vis-à-vis a “history without chronology” has been a critical inspiration in my thinking through his incorporation of “the multiple times and various temporalities that simultaneously operate in our world.”¹⁴ My point of departure was asking how we might attend to these through the baroque and thus how we might in turn rethink the baroque for our study of music. The course that emerged was founded on the possibilities of the “global turn” in the humanities to reconceptualize both these spatial and temporal dimensions, problematizing the uncritical use of the baroque as a fixed category of musical style and periodization. Thinking across, between, or beyond chronologies nevertheless necessitates recognition of them. As art historian Helen Hills emphasizes, the “issue of temporality and of a history that is not historicist [thus] emerges as central.”¹⁵ Herein lies the first of my “unbindings”: 15to consciously experiment with time and temporality in a global-historical context.

At the crossroads of Tanaka’s chronological “mess,” I have found resonance with Timothy Brook and his commitment to an understanding of the past without reproducing the present as its necessary outcome.¹⁶ In doing so, Brook prioritizes the seeking out of “keyhole moments” that cut across timelines without replicating them. In a similar fashion, I designed this course as a series of vignettes that pull at the periodizing threads of the baroque, stretching it back into the sixteenth century and forward beyond the turn of the nineteenth century and into our present moment. This is an attempt neither to redefine nor to reinforce a sense of the baroque as temporally bounded but is rather intended for students to familiarize themselves with the conventions of European chronology in order to think beyond them. Every vignette in this course, as grounded as it is in specific geographies, is designed as a self-contained module with its own historiographies, epistemologies, priorities, and materials. Each week’s lecture establishes these critical contexts to ensure students can engage more directly in a subsequent seminar discussion of related and extended scholarships. But these vignettes do not exist in isolation. As much as Brook’s “keyhole moments” cut across timelines, historians such as Tonio Andrade have advocated for the use of those very same keyholes as lenses through which to observe the global interconnections of individual lives—what he calls a form of “global microhistory.”¹⁷

In a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a monumental painting by the musically minded Robert H. Colescott (1925–2009) caught my attention (see figure 1): “Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: Some Afterthoughts on Discovery.”¹⁸ The longer I spent with the painting, the more Colescott’s own subversion of the “baroque” revealed itself. From the way he destabilizes the conventional subjects and forms of European “Old Masterworks” to his presentation of history as a series of disordered snapshots, Colescott brings the past, present, and future into conversation so as to connect the US racial traumas of the 1980s to the barbarism of the nation’s colonial origins and its associated myth of discovery.¹⁹ In teaching our musical pasts, we too cannot escape from our present moment. When we lean into an unbounded sense of time and temporality (further elaborated in the following section), our students are confronted with the “past present continuous”²⁰ nature of any music history. Indeed, a classroom reading, interpretation, and discussion of Colescott’s painting in the first module can offer a productive reference for students to understand how they will learn to work with and against inherited ideas of time and teleology. So, what is there to gain in returning to the “baroque” if, by now, musicologists have so heavily critiqued it for yielding little conceptual authority? In what follows I shift the focus of this concern to ask, instead, what is at stake, and especially 20for whom, if we do away with the baroque in our thinking, researching, and teaching of a global-historical approach to our world’s musics.

Unbinding the Baroque: From “New World” to “Global” Conceptions

America, continent of symbiosis, of mutations, of vibrations, ofmestizajes, has been baroque from the start. [. . .] And why is Latin America the promised land of the baroque? Because all symbiosis, all mestizaje, gives rise to baroqueness.²¹

Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real” (1976)

Rethinking the baroque from “the South” has long been practiced by Latin American authors who have sought to reclaim the term as a “trope or adjective for the region’s complex ethnic and artisticmestizaje (‘racial mixture’) rather than as a reference to exclusively Western cultural forms.”²² Celebrated Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, a central figure of the literary “New World Baroque,” further embraced the term in his writing for its “disjointed form of temporality.”²³ And it is this very temporal play, as outlined above, that I have found useful in my own teaching. Carpentier, perhaps lesser known for his musicological contributions, offers us an important parallel for consideration.²⁴ In the title of his untranslated collection of essays, 24Tientos y diferencias (Tientos and Variations), he invokes a Spanish (and later Latin American) form of instrumental music, somewhat analogous to the English fantasia, that at once reaches backward to its sixteenth-century origins and forward to its compositional revival in his own time.²⁵ Not only by implication of the tiento’s imitative form, but also in Carpentier’s setting of it against a set of “variations” (25diferencias), a specific postcolonial position is established through musical metaphor. Carpentier’s sense of the baroque here is not, however, a mimetic one but, as literary scholar Monika Kaup posits, a “device for the creation of new worlds, new collective identities, and new forms of expression.”²⁶ In this, we begin to see a tripartite formulation of the Baroque (as “representation”), the New World Baroque (as “transculturation”), and the Neobaroque (as “counter-conquest”).²⁷

In moving towards a conception that is both transcultural and autochthonous, I have sought to include narratives in my classroom that, in their unfolding, reveal such disjointed forms of temporality and a destabilizing of (post)colonial dynamics. In Module 8 (the syllabus for my “Towards a Global Baroque” follows below) for instance, we explore theTrujillo Codex (or the Codex Martínez Compañón), ca. 1782–1785, a depiction of colonial Peru’s ethnic diversity in nine volumes, including 1,411 watercolor paintings (thirty-six of which depict dance and music-making) and twenty transcriptions of secular and sacred Peruvian musics in Western notation. The latter offer important insight into the largely oral music traditions of eighteenth-century Indigenous and Afro-Peruvian communities as well as their baroque hybridities forged through Spanish influence. More specifically, this primary source centers contemporary discussions of cultural loss, dispossession, and ownership of the baroque—not least through the song “Tonada del Chimo,”²⁸ which exists as the only preserved musical example of the extinct Mochica language. It is for this reason that discussion of the codex’s ongoing legal status parallels the kind of cross-chronological brushstrokes rendered by Robert Colescott in his paintings. Debate continues over 136 of these watercolors, which the Spanish Ministry of Culture has declared a critical piece of 28Spanish heritage, preventing their sale to the Museo de Arte de Lima in Peru. To this end, the museum’s director Natalia Majluf has bemoaned that “[d]ue to the very nature of the colonial situation, there is a whole chapter of Latin American history that is not represented in local collections [. . .]. That is why it has been so hard to see Spain withhold this volume [from us].”²⁹

Other vignettes in this course further our consideration of the “past present continuous” nature of these histories as embodied in contemporary performance practice. Module 13, for instance, sheds light on Ensamble Moxos. Directed by Raquel Maldonado, this ensemble originated from the primary music school in San Ignacio de Moxos (revitalized in 1994), a former Jesuit mission in the Bolivian Amazon. Ensamble Moxos presents an invaluable “keyhole” through which to explore the complex intersection of music, temporality, heritage, indigeneity, and postcolonialism. Indeed, the hybridity of their repertoire—it places seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers and works associated with the Jesuit missions alongside Indigenous instruments and oral music traditions—speaks to a baroque that is at once transcultural, transhistorical, and an act of “counter-conquest.” Edgard Vela, a violin teacher in San Ignacio de Moxos, describes this hybridity as the “European baroque [that] was taken by indigenous people, who made it their own, [and] this is what now identifies us.”³⁰ While Vela characterizes their practice as an indigenized baroque that “is still alive,” Maldonado is clear that it “is not about trying to colonise the indigenous people. . . it is about giving importance to the local music, so the local people can identify with [it].”³¹ This sense of preserving musical heritage and giving power to both Indigenous musicians and audiences alike is a sentiment shared among other former missions elsewhere in the Bolivian region. Juan Vaca, an archivist in Concepción (Santa Cruz), for instance, works intimately with preserving musical scores from these missions and is driven by the belief that “[t]he Baroque is our tradition here.”³²

Also in Module 13, students explore the ethnographic work of Suzel Ana Reily in southern Minas Gerais, Brazil. By unpacking the construction of “historical consciousness” in the former mining town of Campanha, they encounter the multiple forms of temporality at play in contemporary Holy Week celebrations, as well as the limitations of the “baroque” as a stylistic measurement. Reily’s work deals with a musical repertoire that is conventionally “preclassical and [fosters] classical influences,” but is often grouped under the indistinct umbrella of “colonial music.”³³ By contrast, she demonstrates that its role in structuring sensuous ritual experiences transforms this repertoire into something that can only be understood as “baroque”—that is, these multimedia festivities give rise to a “Carpentien” sense of baroqueness. Through such examples, we begin to see the necessity of thinking across chronologies as well as through and from non-Eurocentric geographies that connect music with space and place and other forms of expression that shape them. To this extent, there is potential for us to work with a decentralized idea of the baroque that furthers its “provincialization.”³⁴ This reorientation represents the second of my “unbindings”: 34to shift from a “New World” to a “global” conception of a transhistorical baroque.

My framework thus far clearly draws on the work of literary scholars and art historians who “weigh Old World Baroque forms against their New World uses” specific to Latin American histories and realities.³⁵ But it is my intention to apply such thinking to a broader geography. And while the course may currently favor certain regions across the Americas, I have attempted to lean further into the globality of the baroque that connects not only past with present, but Mexico City with Nagasaki and Goa, London with Kolkata and Jamaica, and Beijing with Manilla and Paris. That is, this course embraces the global as a concept that brings together time and space, whereby “global spatiality implies global history and vice versa.”³⁶ Thinking about music history in a global context thus challenges what we mean by history, as it compels us to move beyond conventional ideas of space such as the nation-state. As Julia McClure has noted, a “connected” approach to global history is a critical contribution to decolonized curricula that resituates a decentered Europe as part of an interconnected world.³⁷ Her reassessment of the “Renaissance” and the “Enlightenment” as products of broader global processes intersects with recent work in the field of global music history that has sought to emphasize these same processes as central to what we know as “European music” or “Western art music” in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.³⁸

To return to Helen Hills’ assessment of the baroque as a bringer of “discrepancy and rupture” as much as it is one of “harmony,” we can see in it the need for an unbounded approach that exposes not only deep connections between world regions but also critical points of disjuncture and upheaval. Situating the baroque in its global contexts thus allows us to focus on “subjugated Indigenous voices, knowledges, and philosophies” as well as the “material dimensions of colonialism.”³⁹ Teaching a global baroque is therefore a restorative move that reformulates what students typically understand as “baroque music”—that it is a product of global processes of (dis)integration, entanglement, and friction brought about by imperialism (both European and non-European), colonialism, missionization, and mercantilism. And while this intersects with recent moves to “diversify” early music (in terms of what constitutes “early music,” how it is performed, and by whom), I would argue that it draws an important heuristic line in the sand by acknowledging that 39the baroque was always already global. That is, this shift is less about nominal “inclusion” and more about a restorative historiography that focuses on the peoples, practices, and places who have largely been un(der)represented as orchestrators (both literally and figuratively) of the baroque in music history curricula. As much as it is an appeal to take seriously Indigenous contributions to the histories of these musics, this impetus is also a recognition of ownership as central to sounding communal identities and forging present links with the past and vice versa. Processes of decolonizing knowledge and knowledge production are thus not, and cannot be, only about diversifying our syllabi; they must also be about exposing these deeper entanglements that have hitherto been obscured.

In embracing this conception of the baroque as transcultural, transhistorical, and global, students confront the entanglement of a diversity of musical practices, acoustemologies, and ways of reckoning with time.⁴⁰ Module 4, for instance, introduces students to the study of intercultural contexts that existed outside the forces of European settler colonialism. While each week does offer audiovisual examples that might seemingly place an emphasis on “works,” students must critically connect those works to extra-musical 40networks and, in this module, extend their focus to non-notated “musical” practices that tend to fall between disciplinary cracks. Specifically, through my own scholarly work, students come to learn about sung narrative traditions indigenous to Japan and how they came to be adapted by Catholic converts in the sixteenth century.⁴¹ Exploration of such hybridities establishes the groundwork to then consider the kind of chanting styles fostered by Japanese Crypto-Christian (41kakure kirishitan) communities from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, whose practice survives to this day. And as these communities dwindle, study of their vocal traditions is a critical means of heritage preservation.⁴² This focus on Japan’s so-called “Christian Century” (1549–1650) also allows for students to grapple with culturally and historically situated differences in the experience, conceptualization, and recording of time. To the extent that they will be familiar with Gregorian approaches to the calendar, students also encounter here such systems as Japan’s twenty-four “micro-seasons” (42sekki) and the occurrence of hours, months, days, and years in a specified sequence according to the East Asian sexagenary cycle (jikkan jūinshi), which is associated with the five primal elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, and water) of Chinese cosmology as well as its twelve “zodiac” animals.⁴³

Modules 5 (China) and 6 (India) both offer critical insight into the eighteenth-century practice of “proto-ethnomusicology,” the politics of transcribing non-European “melodies” in Western notation, and how the scholarly study of such Asian musics at the time shaped self-understandings of “European” music and identity. In Module 5, students explore examples of Chinese music history, theory, and organology during the late Ming (1368–1644) and early Qing (1644–1912) Dynasties through such primary sources as the 1746Lülü zhengyi houbian (“A Supplement to the Correct Interpretation of the [Twelve] Pitches,” 律呂正義後編). Simultaneously, by looking to the compositions and transcriptions of such Beijing-based Catholic figures as Teodrico Pedrini and Jean-Joseph Marie Amiot, forms like the violin sonata are critically assessed alongside Chinese instrumental compositions as part of the imperial court’s complex sonic identity as a baroque, cosmopolitan center shaped by the aesthetic interests and priorities of emperor Kangxi (r. 1662–1722) and later emperors Yongzheng (r. 1723–1735) and Qianlong (r. 1736–1795).⁴⁴ In the following week, students are met with familiar names that have formed the bedrock of European music history textbooks over the last century: George Frideric Handel and Arcangelo Corelli. By recontextualizing these figures through the prism of colonial Kolkata (Calcutta), students begin to grasp the former’s 44Messiah and the latter’s violin and trio sonatas as temporally and geographically mobile. Indeed, this consideration of Corelli connects students back to the previous module wherein discussions of Pedrini’s own violin sonatas in eighteenth-century Beijing are informed by his importation of Corelli’s music to China at that time.⁴⁵ Indeed, we can seek out “revisionist alternatives” to how we teach the history of European composers that, at the very least, begin to resituate familiar names in their broader global-historical realities.⁴⁶ In this course, Corelli himself is unbound as but one corrective to the dominant Eurocentric narratives generally associated with his life and music.⁴⁷ Verily this line of thinking once more demonstrates the utility of seeking out “keyholes” (be they people, musical “works,” or practices) that can reveal the global interconnections of individual lives across time and space.

Lastly, a global approach to the baroque necessitates working with a polycentric model. That is, Beijing and Kolkata, for instance, can be considered as much baroque epicenters as their Parisian, Venetian, or Roman counterparts. In so doing, not only do we capture the musical activities of such individuals as Pedrini (who would be largely overlooked if we focused solely on his native Italy), but equally those musicians, historians, and intellectuals indigenous to all of these global metropoles. Inasmuch as students focus on Corelli and Handel in Module 6, they also engage with how their music indirectly influenced the development of the Carnatic tradition of violin playing through the figure of Baluswami Dikshitar. Further still, students follow Baluswami’s older brother Muthuswami Dikshitar (1776–1835), one of the “Carnatic Trinity,” in his writing of the late eighteenth-centuryNottuswara Sahithya.⁴⁸ These melodies draw on Celtic reels, European children’s songs, and British anthems, among others, revealing the ways in which Carnatic musicking was a baroque site of transculturation and counter-conquest. In a similar fashion, Module 7 places emphasis on such Mexican-born figures as Manuel de Sumaya [Zumaya] (ca. 1678–1755) to unpack the idea of “composing Indigeneity,” which deals with not only the works of Indigenous peoples trained within the conventions of the Spanish baroque but also those colonial compositions (namely the villancico) that communicated early modern taxonomies of race and the racialization of sound and language. Module 9 centers the life, letters, and music of African-born British writer, composer, and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho (ca.–1780). Here, students are challenged to rethink the categories of space within which we write, teach, and study music history—specifically, how a focus on the Atlantic Ocean moves us beyond seeing the nation as a spatial referent and attends to how the forces of the British slave trade laid the foundations for a culture that would be at once African, American, Caribbean, and British, i.e., what Paul Gilroy famously calls the “Black Atlantic.”⁴⁹ In doing so, these discussions further those from the previous Module 8, in which students study the presence of Black musicians in the 49Trujillo Codex and their revealing of a broader history of African-Iberian music in the Andean regions of South America and beyond.

It has not been my intention to offer a particularized account of how this course was taught week by week (a general sense of this can be gleaned from the syllabus alone). As such, there are vignettes and module components that have been excluded from discussion in this article in the interest of space. What I have intended is to explore in more detail how a conscious experimentation with time and temporality motivates a productive conception of the baroque as at once transcultural, transhistorical, and transregional. In the space that remains, I briefly reflect on the challenges associated with teaching a course of this nature as a party of one. As much as the paradigms of doing global history have brought a critical eye to the limits of single-authored research to date, so too must we confront the limits of how it can and should be taught.

Unbinding the Professor: Centering Subjective Formation

How can I, a specialist of region X in century Y, teach a course in global music history? In informal conversations I have often encountered expressions of uncertainty or even skepticism in answering to this hypothetical design. Though these concerns are not unwarranted, much of this suspicion is arguably born out of confusion over what constitutes global music history in the first place. My approach, like many others in this growing field, is to employ the “global” as a specific epistemological premise. That is, thinking about the global is not so much about pursuing a universal scope (i.e., this is not a “world history” or a “universal history” approach to music), but is rather a way of seeing and situating specific local, regional, national, or even oceanic spaces in the context of global structures and transformations.⁵⁰ By so doing, we are better placed to account for the circulation, exchange, and flow as well as disruption and suppression of musical ideas, practices, peoples, and commodities between groups and societies.

In thinking about this essentially creative hand of the professor in curating course content, I am reminded of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who once jibed that “[i]n history, more than in any other discipline I know, the finished product of research disguises the nature of the work that produced it.”⁵¹ Here, Kuhn hits at the sore spot of subjectivity, understood to be fought at every stage by the historian in their rendering of an “objective” account of the musical past. One might argue that it is in the very nature of music history surveys and textbooks generally to communicate to students a similar sense of History with a capital “H.” And yet, as Susan Crane reminds us, subjectivity informs every choice we make, it is intimately connected with objectivity, and “we could never attempt one without the other.”⁵² Just as Philip Bohlman characterizes musicology as a “reflexive process” that moves “music into discourse,” so too can we lean into that very process in the act of teaching.⁵³ Herein lies the third of my “unbindings”: 53to make transparent the seams of the syllabus and the formation of the instructor’s subjectivity.

As a scholar trained as a historian of religion with a background in Asian Studies, my approach to musicology is perhaps an unconventional one. This is something I center in my classroom, and I make clear how the “product” (that is the course and its syllabus) is an outcome of this, thus attempting to lift the veil of objectivity. Making transparent my disciplinary, linguistic, and geocultural positionalities invites students themselves to engage as self-reflexive members of a learning community who actively question how they approach and relate to each week’s module. The syllabus, as it is presented here, is but a snapshot in time that captures my thinking at its point of creation, and it will doubtlessly change as I continue to teach this course and mature as a scholar. Indeed, it is my intention for others to use it as a starting point from which to amplify their own regional foci, disciplinary skillsets, interests, and needs. Nevertheless, it is important to briefly address the pedagogical limits in navigating the ongoing global turn in music history curricula at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

I have been fortunate to draw on the generosity and knowledge of colleagues both on campus and further afield as occasional guest lecturers in my own courses, allowing students to gain valuable access to perspectives and specializations other than my own.⁵⁴ As much as the future of global music history beckons a greater degree of collaboration in research, so too must we think strategically about how it can be taught.⁵⁵ Perhaps we might look to a kind of “polyphonic pedagogy” (what I see as a consciously synergistic form of group teaching) that reflects not only the imperatives of the field’s multilateralism (both in terms of geographical and disciplinary diversity) but also its increasing need for multilingualism. Certainly, the latter touches on one of the many challenges (in my case) of teaching a course of this nature in a largely monolingual institutional setting.⁵⁶ In spite of such challenges, we must still strive to develop strategies in the classroom that make space for “epistemological equity.”⁵⁷ Indeed, the implication for non-Indigenous and/or “systematically 57privileged” educators, as articulated by Soenke Biermann, is to think critically about how to center a multiplicity of knowledges, philosophies, and forms of scholarship in our curricula, in our classrooms, and in how we structure teacher-learner relationships.⁵⁸ Aside from providing students with translations of scholarly materials in languages other than English (which is an often unrecognized, undervalued, and time-consuming form of labor), it is important to assign materials in English which themselves enter into meaningful historical and contemporary dialogue through a diversity of geocultural settings and associated perspectives. In realizing a more equitable practice for global music history, especially as it increasingly finds a curricular foothold, it is crucial that we foster in students a “transcultural consciousness” that unites perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, history, and the social sciences while pursuing and maintaining regional diversity and scholarly participation without hegemony.⁵⁹

Unbinding the Curriculum: Beyond “European Chronology with Tangents”

We are at a critical juncture where conservatories and schools of music are beginning to reckon with the historically Eurocentric focus of their curricula and the underlying relationship between colonialism and the production of knowledge.⁶⁰ Concomitant with broader efforts to decolonize education in the humanities, such moments of reformation have been increasingly emboldened by student-led initiatives advocating for a greater representation of non-European musics, musicians, and musicologies. Yet we must be wary of what Walter D. Mignolo calls the “gesture of decentering and delinking” from Europe and coloniality that invariably lacks a genuine “relinking” to both aesthetic and political Indigenous structures.⁶¹ To this extent I wish to reiterate a central question I posed earlier: What is at stake and for whom in our thinking through the concept of a global baroque? This leads me to the last of my “unbindings”: 61to “delink” from the fictions and frictions of a Eurocentric musicology in order to foster a curriculum that favors a global approach to music history.

For Mignolo, decolonial thinking breaks away from “imposed dichotomies in the West, namely the knower and the known, the subject and the object, theory and praxis.”⁶² As has been emphasized throughout this article, consideration of the baroque in a global context necessitates the collapsing of these aforementioned dichotomies. Indeed, as we have seen, students in the course at hand encounter the varied ways in which musicians and communities from southern Japan to the Andean regions of South America today delink from a colonial baroque (as representation) to embrace one which “relinks” (as transculturation and/or counter-conquest) them to “their own memories and legacies, thereby securing modes of existence that satisfy them.”⁶³ Applying Mignolo’s decolonial thinking to our own consideration of music history is to consciously part ways with the baroque as “uni-global, uni-form, [or] homogenous” while also avoiding the transformation of decoloniality into yet another “global design.”⁶³ In other words, advocacy for a global baroque that is both transcultural and transhistorical is one that de-emphasizes “the Baroque” as a stylistic and periodizing universal and, instead, makes room for a multiplicity of articulations that relink with Indigenous agencies across and between space and time. What is at stake and for whom is thus a question of what Mignolo calls “delink[ing] in order to re-exist.”⁶⁴ As the vignettes in this course illustrate, each baroque is as much about a present “re-existing” and preservation of local legacies as it is about a record of the past.

This article began by acknowledging the origins of musicology’s uncomfortable relationship with the baroque. Inasmuch as we may look to our peers in art history to account for its conceptual baggage, it is arguable that they, along with scholars in the field of literary studies, are a pace ahead in finding productive ways of working with and through this discomfort. Certainly, we are facing a prime opportunity to fully embrace our global moment in the study of all musics and their histories. In this, we would be wise to gain insight from how the field of global historiography has, in recent years, navigated its own trials and tribulations in rethinking course offerings and curricular priorities. To this extent, J. Laurence Hare and Jack Wells offer critical reflections that resonate with how we might stipulate paths of study for undergraduate students majoring in music:

Schools should no longer be content to broaden students’ horizons and break the grip of Euro-centrism by mandating surveys and by stocking up on non-Western regional courses. [. . .] They should first recognize the unique challenges of global history research, and second implement its principal lesson that world regions do not exist in isolation. Above all, universities and colleges, in order to demonstrate a true commitment to world [global] history, must find a way to cultivate its presence across the curriculum.⁶⁵

Here we find a parallel call to transform the spatial frameworks we use in teaching that move us from isolated nationalisms to more connected (music) history curricula.⁶⁶ At the same time, the authors highlight the problem of taking a “deficiency” approach to diversifying an undergraduate core—that is, the offsetting of a required sequence of “Western” history courses with a number of “non-Western” electives and how this ultimately fails to remedy the underlying issue. Alan J. Singer has similarly been critical of teaching global history in name only, which effectively preserves “European chronology with tangents.”⁶⁷ A conscious experimentation with time and temporality, a hallmark of recent global-historical thinking, has thus been a through-line in this article that brings us full circle: “baroque is always already contemporary.”⁶⁸ What started with my being assigned to a “period studies in musicology” course ultimately led me to embrace a series of pedagogical unbindings that make space for the “past present continuous” nature of the music histories I teach. Moreover, endorsing a baroque that is transregional, transcultural, and transhistorical is not only a restorative positioning that resituates familiar names, works, and practices within their global contexts, but it is also a reflexive positioning that invites students to understand their own relationship to these histories. If we are, as educators, invested in cultivating global citizens, then the way we approach teaching our world’s histories of musics must accordingly respond to today’s needs.⁶⁹ Now, more than ever, the crises of globalization compel us to work with a global-historical approach to the study of music that can help students understand our pasts, make sense of our present, and think critically about our future.

SYLLABUS: Towards a Global Baroque: Music, Power, and the (More Than) “European” Tradition

Module 1: The Global Turn in (Music) History

Lecture

What is Global History?

Seminar Readings

1. Neus Rotger, Diana Roig-Sanz, and Marta Puxan-Oliva, “Introduction: Towards a Cross-Disciplinary History of the Global in the Humanities and the Social Sciences,”Journal of Global History14, no. 3 (2019): 325–34.
2. Sebastian Conrad,What is Global History?(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–16; 62–89; 162–64.
3. Thomas David, Anne-Isabelle Richard, and Pierre Singaravélou, “Is Global History Global? Convergences and Inequalities,”Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions(2023): 1–12,https://doi.org/10.1017/s0165115323000293.

Module 2: Conceptualizing a Global Baroque

Lecture

Sewing the Global Seams of “Western Music” in the Early Modern World

Seminar Readings

1. David R. M. Irving, “Rethinking Early Modern ‘Western Art Music’: A Global History Manifesto,”IMS Musicological Brainfood3 (2019): 6–10.
2. Olivia Bloechl, “Music in the Early Modern Colonial World,” inThe Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music, ed. Iain Fenlon and Richard Wistreich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 128–55.
3. Lois Parkinson Zamora, “New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms,”PMLA124, no. 1 (2009): 127–42.

Module 3: Sounding Japan’s Christian Century

Lecture

Musical Hybridities in Japan’s Catholic Past and Present

Seminar Readings

1. Makoto Harris Takao, “‘In Their Own Way’: Contrafactal Practices in Japanese Christian Communities During the 16th Century,”Early Music47, no. 2 (2019): 183–98.
2. Christal Whelan, “Religion Concealed: The Kakure Kirishitan on Narushima,”Monumenta Nipponica47, no. 3 (1992): 369–87.

Audiovisual Sources

1. “Tantum ergo,”Manvale ad Sacramenta ecclesiae ministranda(Nagasaki: Jesuit Mission Press, 1605), performed byタコタコシンガーズ(Tako-Tako Singers):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxS8rjFToNA.
2. “Gururiyoza” (ぐるりよざ) chant among thekakure kirishitan(hidden Christian) of Ikitsuki Island, from Tatsuo Minagawa,Yōgaku torai kō[A Study on the Introduction of Western Music to Japan] (Tokyo: Japan Traditional Cultures Foundation/Victor Entertainment, 2006):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHPgEWFXCcs.
3. Comparison between “O gloriosa Domina” and “Gururiyoza,” performed bykakure kirishitan(hidden Christian) members of the Yamada District, Ikitsuki Island:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWTC6xa-3i8.

Module 4: A Chinese Imperial Baroque

Lecture

The Kangxi Emperor at the Harpsichord: Music in the Age of Chinese Intercultural Exchange

Seminar Readings

1. Joyce Lindorff, “Missionaries, Keyboards, and Musical Exchange in the Ming and Qing Courts,”Early Music32, no. 3 (2004): 403–13.
2. Yoko Nii, “The Jesuit Jean-Joseph-Marie Amiot and Chinese Music in the Eighteenth Century,” inEurope and China: Science and Arts in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Luis Saraiva (Singapore: World Scientific, 2013), 81–94.
3. Qingfan Jiang, “In Search of the ‘Oriental Origin’: Rameau, Rousseau, and Chinese Music in Eighteenth-Century France,”Eighteenth-Century Music19, no. 2 (2022): 125–49.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Teodorico Pedrini, Sonata Op. 3 No. 1,Dodici Sonate a Violino Solo col Basso del Nepridi(ca. 1711–1746, likely published in China), performed by Julia Glenn, Madeleine Bouïssou, Elliot Figg, and Paul Morton:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZLSNQwqE7g.
2. Excerpts from Jean Joseph Marie Amiot,Divertissements chinois ou Concerts de musique chinoise(Peking [Beijing], 1779), performed by Le Baroque Nomade (dir. Jean-Christophe Frisch):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1FQBgVx2x4.
3. “Shui Long Yin” [水龙吟, “Call of the Water Dragon”], Xian Di Pipa Pu [絃笛琵琶譜,Scores for Sanxian, Dizi, and Pipa] (1770), performed by François Picard:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJGUp1Od00k.
4. Paul Hindemith, “Turandot (Scherzo),”Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber(1943), performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (dir. Claudio Abbado):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH3W_cGj070.

Module 5: Colonial India in the Age of the “Hindostannie Air”

Lecture

The Baroque in Colonial India and the Politics of Transcription

Seminar Readings

1. Ian Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air’: English Attempts to Understand Indian Music in the Late Eighteenth Century,”Journal of the Royal Musical Association119, no. 2 (1994): 189–211.
2. Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music ca. 1780–ca. 1890,”Yearbook for Traditional Music20 (1988): 51–73.

Audiovisual Sources

1. William Hamilton Bird, trans., “Rekhtah: Mutru be khoosh nuwa bego” (also rendered as “Mootrib I khoosh nuwa bigo”) [مطرب خوشنوا بگو],The Oriental Miscellany: Airs of Hindustan(Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789), performed by Jane Chapman:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXjXV147pDI.
2. Edward Smith Biggs, arr., “O Do Not Ask Whence Springs My Sadness,”A Second Set of Hindoo Airs with English Words(London: Rt. Birchall, ca. 1800), “performed” by Makoto Harris Takao71:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDkt5JUBfYY.
3. William Hamilton Bird, “Sonata” [as inspired by Indian tunes],The Oriental Miscellany: Airs of Hindustan(Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789), performed by Jane Chapman and Yu-Wei Hu:https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=77DIfMRMCRU.
4. Muthuswami Dikshitar, “Paradevate” [O supreme goddess], (ca. 1800), published in Subbarama Dikshitar,Prathamabyasa Pustakamu(Ettayapuram, 1905), performed by Debipriya Sircar and Ensemble Tempus Fugit:https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=97x1uC5gZKw.

Module 6: Hispanizing Filipino Musics, Philippinizing the Baroque

Lecture

Sounding Filipino Identities in Catholic Soundscapes

Seminar Readings

1. David R. M. Irving, “The Hispanization of Filipino Music,” inColonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 99–133.
2. David Kendall, “This is not Filipino Music”: Syncretism, Homogeneity, and the Search for Philippine-ness in Spanish Colonial Liturgical Music,”Pintacasi: A Journal of Church Cultural Heritage8 (2012): 13–40.

Audiovisual Sources

1. “Tocotín” by Antonio de Villegas /Sebastián de Aguirre, performed by Los Otros:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb0dFcZFMGo.
2. Anonymous, “Misa de Sales” fromKirial de Baclayon(ca. 1826), performed by Manuel Maramba and UST Singers (dir. Fidel Calalang Jr.):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rda6uqVxwI.
3. Pabása ng Pasyón (chanting of the Passion) by community members of Bustos, Bulacan, Philippines:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLQibliF0x8.

Module 7: Composing Indigeneity in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Lecture

Adopting, Adapting, Contesting the Baroque in Colonial Mexico

Seminar Readings

1. Gerard Béhague, “Music in the ‘New World’: The Baroque in Mexico and Brazil,” inThe World of Baroque Music: New Perspectives, ed. George B. Stauffer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 253–80.
2. Jonathan Truitt, “Adopted Pedagogies: Nahua Incorporation of European Music and Theater in Colonial Mexico City,”The Americas66, no. 3 (2010): 311–30.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Manuel de Sumaya,Hieremiae Prophetae Lamentationes(1717), performed by Chanticleer (dir. Joseph Jennings):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc2-I7_aBW4.
2. Manuel de Sumaya,Si ya a aquella nave(Cantata for St. Peter), performed by Ángeles Maciel with Cantiga Armónica:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy-3oP6ELCE.
3. Juana Inés de la Cruz,Madre, la de los primores(1686), performed by London Oriana Choir (dir. Dominic Ellis-Peckham):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW-sw4j2sus.
4. Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla,A siolo flasiquiyo(1653), performed by Ensemble Elyma:https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desk top&v=IZBV5DLzP6k.

Module 8: Afro-Indigenous Musicking in Colonial Peru

Lecture

Many Hands Make a Manuscript: Navigating Indigenous Authorship and Postcolonial Ownership of the Codex Trujillo del Perú

Workshop

Workshop on the Quechua and Mochica Language⁷⁰

Audiovisual Sources

1. “Tonada del Chimo,”Codex Trujillo del Perú(ca.1782–1785), performed by La Cappella Novohispana and Concentus Harmonicus (dir. Patricio Amezcua Zilli):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0th1UPJcT4.
2. “Cachuyta de la montaña, El vuen querer,”Codex Trujillo del Perú, performed by Hespèrion XXI (dir. Jordi Savall):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8NORDzt90s.
3. “Hanacpachap cussicuinin” (Hanaq pachap kusikuynin), Marian hymnal in the Quechua language [Juan Pérez Bocanegra,Ritual formulario, e institucion de curas(Lima, 1631)], performed by La Cappella Novohispana & Concentus Harmonicus (dir. Patricio Amezcua Zilli):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebaAS2UVPY.

Module 9: Baroque and the Black Atlantic

Visit to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library: The Life and Works of the “African” Composer Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) in the Age of the British Slave Trade.

We will gain “hands on” experience with a number of rare 18th-century texts detailing the British Empire and its relationship with the African slave trade to better understand the letters of Ignatius Sancho and his status as an English composer, including:

• Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African(London: J. Nichols, 1782).
• The letters of the late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne, to his most intimate friends : with a fragment in the manner of Rabelais: to which are prefix’d, memoirs of his life and family(London: T. Becket, 1776).
• Elegant epistles being a copious collection of familiar and amusing letters, selected for the improvement of young persons(London: T. Longman et al., 1794).73

Seminar Readings

1. Albert Mosley, “Music in The Black Atlantic,”Philosophia Africana6, no. 1 (2003): 23–30.
2. Rogério Budasz, “Black Guitar-Players and Early African-Iberian Music in Portugal and Brazil,”Early Music35, no. 1 (2007): 3–21.
3. Mary Canton Lingold, “In Search of Mr. Baptiste: On Early Caribbean Music, Race, and a Colonial Composer,”Early Music49, no. 1 (2021): 49–66.
4. Josephine Wright, “Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), African Composer in England,”The Black Perspective in Music7, no. 2 (1979): 132–67.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard,”A Collection of New Songs Composed by an African(London, ca. 1769), performed by Reginald L. Mobley and Henry Lebedinsky:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnd5YOlro44.
2. Ignatius Sancho,Twelve Country Dances(London: S. and A. Thompson, 1779), performed by Zenas Hsu and Eunghee Cho (Phoenix Orchestra):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llxvkSiZJCw.

Module 10: Hymnology and the Repression and Revival of Native American Languages

Lecture

Native Americans, Missionaries, and the Indigenization of Christianity in Early North America

Seminar Readings

1. Richard Crawford,America’s Musical Life: A History(New York: Norton, 2001), 3–20.
2. Olivia Bloechl,Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22–31.
3. Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit: Hymnody in the Moravian Mohican Missions,”Journal of Moravian History17, no. 1 (2017): 1–26.

Audiovisual Sources

1. “Jesu paschgon kia” (in the Mohican language), as performed in three different recordings by Cantores Musicae Antiquae (dir. Sarah Eyerly); the Church of the Wilderness congregation (Stockbridge Mohican Reservation, Wisconsin); Stockbridge Mohican musician, Bill Miller:https://oieahc.wm.edu/digital-projects/oi-reader/singing-box-331-rachel-wheeler-sarah-eyerly/exhibits/.
2. Recording of a Nain (Nunainguk) Moravian Church Choir, 1971, Memorial University of Newfoundland Digital Archives:https://collections.mun.ca/digital/collection/extension/id/757/.

Module 11: “World Building” on the Baroque Stages of Europe

Lecture

The Geopolitics of “Globalism” in Early Modern Musical Theater and Its Performance Today

Seminar Readings

1. Edward Said,Orientalism(New York: Pantheon, 1978), 1–28.
2. Ralph P. Locke, “Alien Adventures: Exoticism in Italian-Language Baroque Opera,”Musical Times150, no. 1909 (2009): 53–69.
3. Ayana O. Smith, “Race and Representation in Baroque Opera: Some Thoughts on Pedagogy, Scholarship, and Performance,”Historical Performance3 (2022): 1–24.
4. Contemporary adaptations and interpretations of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Les Sauvages” (fromLes Indes Galantes, 1735):Les Arts Florrisants, dir. William Christie (Paris, 2003):https://youtu.be/3zegtH-acXE.Les Talens Lyriques, dir. Christophe Rousset (Bourdeux, 2014):https://youtu.be/bD9fLIBP13k.Danse du Grand Calumet/Il Giardino d’Amore, dir. Stefan Plewniak/ Natalia Kozłowska (Poznan, Poland, 2016):https://youtu.be/acd2CyafXlQ.Ars Lyrica Houseton, dir. Matthew Dirst (Houston, 2019):https://youtu.be/GDPgXSv-t9s.Opéra national de Paris, dir. Clément Cogitore/Bintou Dembélé (Paris, 2019):https://youtu.be/Q4jy2wrjESQ.
   • Les Arts Florrisants, dir. William Christie (Paris, 2003):https://youtu.be/3zegtH-acXE.
   • Les Talens Lyriques, dir. Christophe Rousset (Bourdeux, 2014):https://youtu.be/bD9fLIBP13k.
   • Danse du Grand Calumet/Il Giardino d’Amore, dir. Stefan Plewniak/ Natalia Kozłowska (Poznan, Poland, 2016):https://youtu.be/acd2CyafXlQ.
   • Ars Lyrica Houseton, dir. Matthew Dirst (Houston, 2019):https://youtu.be/GDPgXSv-t9s.
   • Opéra national de Paris, dir. Clément Cogitore/Bintou Dembélé (Paris, 2019):https://youtu.be/Q4jy2wrjESQ.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Rameau’s “Forêts paisibles” (Les Indes Galantes) from Les Arts Florristants’ celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Philharmonie de Paris (2019):https://youtu.be/wNmyYgkG2z8.
2. Lully’s “Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs” (Le Bourgeois gentilhomme) from the filmLe roi danse(2000):https://youtu.be/OO2HBhwk05g.
3. “Chinese Chaconne” from Les Arts Florissants’ (dir. William Christie) production of Purcell’sFairy Queen(1989):https://youtu.be/bI-NugPMg2M.
4. Excerpts from Le Concert Spirituel’s production of Boismortier’sDon Quichotte Chez de la Duchesse(2016).74
5. Interview with Bintou Dembélé (facilitated by Noémie Ndiaye as part of “Black Baroque” through the University of Chicago):https://youtu.be/QnNfySQ6lck.

Module 12: Acoustic Contact Zones in South America

Lecture

“Counter-Hegemonic” Uses of Sound and Music in Colonial Paraguay and Bolivia

Seminar Readings

1. Piotr Nawrot, “Teaching of Music and the Celebration of Liturgical Events in the Jesuit Reductions,”Anthropos99, no. 1 (2004): 73–84.
2. Guillermo Wilde, “Toward a Political Anthropology of Mission Sound: Paraguay in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” trans. Eric Ederer,Music & Politics1, no. 2 (2007):http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0001.204.
3. Leonardo J. Waisman, “Why Did Indians Sing? The Musical Practices by South-American Natives in the JesuitReducciones,” inStudies on a Global History of Music, ed. Reinhard Strohm (New York: Routledge, 2018), 311–29.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Anonymous (in Guaraní language), “Ara vale hava pehendu ava,” performed by Ensamble Louis Berger:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5GoIc9m4AA.
2. Anonymous, arr. P. Nawrot (in Spanish and Chiquitano language), “Opéra San Francisco Xavier” (ca. 1740), performed by Ensemble Elyma (dir. Gabriel Garrido):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHFlgFcsAUA.
3. “Guarani Kaiova Brazil” from Deise Lucy Oliveira Montardo’sAtravés do Mbaraka: Música e xamanismo Guarani(2002):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn_rvxgfwvY.

Module 13: Navigating Postcolonial Baroque(s)

Lecture

“The Baroque is Our Tradition Here”: Ensamble Moxos and the Performance of Heritage Preservation

Seminar Readings

1. Javier Alejandro Barrientos Salinas, “‘Macheteros y violines’: La experiencia musical como pedagogía de la espiritualidad en la Amazonía beniana” [“Macheteros and Violins”: Musical Experience as a Pedagogy of Spirituality in the Benian Amazon], inEncuentros con la Amazonía Boliviana: Reflexionando desde la diversidad de nuestros pueblos[Encounters with the Bolivian Amazon: Reflections from the Diversity of Our Peoples], ed. Ángel Eduardo Román-López Dollinger, María Beatriz Castro Mojica, and María Clara Zeballos Puccherelli (La Paz: Instituto Técnico Ecuménico Andino de Teología, 2016), 89–106.
2. Suzel Ana Reily, “Remembering the Baroque Era: Historical Consciousness, Local Identity, and the Holy Week Celebrations in a Former Mining Town in Brazil,”Ethnomusicology Forum15, no.1 (2006): 39–62.

Audiovisual Sources

1. Ensamble Moxos’s campaign “Our Future Is in Your Hands” for their albumLa Cosecha: Recogiendo nuestros Frutos(The Harvest: Reaping our Fruits, 2016):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2rXl4QSQ2o.
2. Ensamble Moxos, “Aquel Monte” (orally-preserved song to the Virgin of Carmel with text in the Moxeño language) from the albumPueblo Viejo(2016):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iwDrZ-gWaI.
3. Holy Week procession in Diamantina, Minas Gerais (Brazil), video taken by Maria Edna Dias (2012):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF7QFEzfPL8.
4. Holy Week in Campanha, Minas Gerais (Brazil), video taken by Suzel Ana Reily in 2008 (2010):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=920oEG6DyW0.
1. Helen Hills’s introduction to Claire Farago et al., “Conceptions and Reworkings of Baroque and Neobaroque in Recent Years,” Perspective 1 (2015): 43–62, at 45. Emphasis original.[↩]
2. George J. Buelow, A History of Baroque Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–8.[↩]
3. Rudolf Wustmann, Musikgeschichte Leipzigs [Music History of Leipzig], vol. 1 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1909), 69; Curt Sachs, “Barockmusik” [Baroque Music], Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters [Yearbook of the Peters Music Library] 26 (1919): 7–15; Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era from Monteverdi to Bach (New York: Norton, 1947).[↩]
4. See, for instance, Daniel Martín Sáez, “La idea musical del ‘barroco’: Genealogía y crítica” [The Musical Idea of the ‘Baroque’: Genealogy and Criticism], Revista de Estudios Culturales [Journal of Cultural Studies] 23 (2018): 1–21; James Webster, “The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical Period?,” Eighteenth Century Music 1, no. 1 (2004): 47–60; Martin Elste, “Curt Sachs und die Barockmusick: Das folgenreiche Missverständnis eines ideengeschichtlichen Begriffes” [Curt Sachs and Baroque Music: The Consequential Misunderstanding of a Concept from the History of Ideas], in Vom Sammeln, Klassifizieren und Interpretieren: Die zerstörte Vielfalt des Curt Sachs [On Collecting, Classifying, and Interpreting: The Destroyed Diversity of Curt Sachs], eds. Wolfgang Behrens, Martin Este, and Frauke Fitzner (Mainz: Schott, 2017), 277–88.[↩]
5. At the risk of constructing straw people, I do acknowledge the significant work many institutions have done and continue to do in rethinking their music history curricula, as well as recent efforts to resolve the “textbook” problem. See, for instance, Timothy Rice and Dave Wilson, Gateways to Understanding Music (New York: Routledge, 2019). This text has been subsequently updated as Timothy Rice and Dave Wilson, Gateways to Understanding Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2022).[↩]
6. Leonard B. Meyer, “Innovation, Choice, and the History of Music,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 3 (1983): 517–44, at 522. Emphasis added.[↩]
7. See Josephine Gabi et al., “Decolonial Praxis: Teacher Educators’ Perspectives on Tensions, Barriers, and Possibilities of Anti-Racist Practice-Based Initial Teacher Education in England,” The Curriculum Journal (2022): https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10./curj.?af=R.[↩]
8. Patricia Suzanne Sullivan, Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 78.[↩]
9. See Olivia Bloechl, “Editorial,” Eighteenth-Century Music 17, no. 2 (2020): 173–76.[↩]
10. As testaments to the pace of progress in global music history, several publications on the field’s pedagogical dimensions have appeared since the completion of this article. See, especially, Hedy Law, Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, and Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang, eds., “Teaching Global Music History: Practices and Challenges,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 13, no. 1 (2023): 45–173. See also Hedy Law et al., “Forum: Centering Discomfort in Global Music History,” Journal of Musicology 40, no. 3 (2023): 249–307; Qingfan Jiang, “From Beijing to Paris: Teaching Music of the Global Eighteenth Century,” in Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom: Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation, ed. Esther M. Morgan-Ellis (New York: Routledge, 2024), 40-61.[↩]
11. Gary Tomlinson, “Monumental Musicology,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 132, no. 2 (2007): 349–74, at 374. For a framing of Tomlinson’s critique as an early intervention in the modern field of global music history, see Makoto Harris Takao, “Global Music History,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Music, ed. Kate van Orden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), doi: 10./obo/9780199757824-0317.[↩]
12. Catherine Haworth, “Book Review: [. . .] Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship,” Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 12 (2017): 71–73, at 73. Many thanks to Melanie Lowe for directing me to Haworth’s important parsing of this distinction.[↩]
13. For more on this see Melanie Lowe, “Rethinking the Undergraduate Music History Sequence in the Information Age,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 5, no. 2 (2015): 65–71.[↩]
14. Stefan Tanaka, History without Chronology (Amherst, Mass: Lever Press, 2019), 6.[↩]
15. Farago et al., 44.[↩]
16. Timothy Brook, “Time and Global History,” Globalizations 6, no. 3 (2009): 379–87.[↩]
17. Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys and a Warlord,” Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91. See also Jan de Vries, “Playing with Scales: The Global and Micro, the Macro and the Nano,” Past & Present 242, no. 14 (2019): 23–36.[↩]
18. This title is a reference to the Jamaican political activist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, Marcus Garvey, who is famously known for claiming that a “people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”[↩]
19. See Raphaela Platow and Lowery Stokes Sims, eds., Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2019).[↩]
20. Kai Kresse employs this expression to capture “the actions and experiences that have started in the past and are ongoing in the present (and possibly beyond),” with reference to the postcolonial experience of coastal Muslims in Kenya. Kai Kresse, Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 3.[↩]
21. Translated in César Augusto Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory,” The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 316–31, at 316.[↩]
22. Salgado, “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory,” 316.[↩]
23. Monique Roelofs and Norman S. Holland, “Anachronism and Baroque Abandon: Carpentier’s, Cortázar’s, and Botero’s Decolonial Columns,” Confluencia Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 30, no. 3 (2015): 149–66, at 150. See Alejo Carpentier, “La ciudad de las columnas” [The City of Columns], in Tientos y diferencias [Themes and Variations] (Havana: Ediciones Union, 1966), 55–56.[↩]
24. Carpentier was appointed as professor of musicology at Cuba’s National Conservatory of Music in 1941 and is noted for his significant contributions to knowledge on Afro-Cuban musical traditions. See, for instance, Caroline Rae, “In Havana and Paris: The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier,” Music & Letters 89, no. 3 (2008): 373–95; Katia Chornik, Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (Oxford: Legenda, 2015).[↩]
25. See José López-Calo, “El Tiento: Orígenes y características generals” [The Tiento: Origins and General Characteristics], in El órgano español: Actas del Primer Congreso, 27–29 octubre 1981 [The Spanish Organ: Proceedings of the First Congress, October 27–29, 1981], ed. Antonio Bonet Correa (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1983), 77–98.[↩]
26. Monika Kaup, “Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier,” The New Centennial Review 5, no. 2 (2005): 107–49, at 111.[↩]
27. Lois Perkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, “Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts,” in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–43.[↩]
28. “Tonada” is an ambiguous term that refers to a range of short songs to be sung (for one and sometimes more voices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), first popularized in Spain and later throughout South America.[↩]
29. Sarah Cascone, “The Storied Codex Trujillo, a Rare Masterpiece Showing Life Under Colonialism, Returns to Peru Following Outcry,” Artnet (June 20, 2017), https://news.artnet.com/market/codex-trujillo-peru-vs-spain-997250. A compromise has, however, been agreed to, wherein these images are on indefinite loan to the museum while remaining as Spanish-owned objects.[↩]
30. Interviewed in Andres Schipani, “Why Bolivian Baroque Rocks,” BBC News, August 30, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8206836.stm.[↩]
31. Schipani, “Why Bolivian Baroque Rocks.”[↩]
32. Interviewed in Nicholas Casey, “Concepción Journal: Jesuit Legacy in the Bolivian Jungle: A Love of Baroque Music,” New York Times, May 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/world/americas/bolivia-baroque-music.html.[↩]
33. Suzel Ana Reily, “Remembering the Baroque Era: Historical Consciousness, Local Identity and the Holy Week Celebrations in a Former Mining Town in Brazil,” Ethnomusicology Forum 15, no. 1 (2006): 39–62, at 48.[↩]
34. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).[↩]
35. Zamora and Kaup, 2.[↩]
36. Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Global Historical Thought, eds. Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy, and Andrew Sartori (Oxford: Wiley, 2014), 1–18, at 1.[↩]
37. Julia McClure, “Connected Global Intellectual History and the Decolonisation of the Curriculum,” History Compass 19, no. 1 (2021): https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10./hic3..[↩]
38. See, for instance, David R. M. Irving, “Rethinking Early Modern ‘Western Art Music’: A Global History Manifesto,” IMS Musicological Brainfood 3, no. 1 (2019): 6–10; David R. M. Irving, The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024); Jürgen Osterhammel, “Globale Horizonte europäischer Kunstmusik, 1860–1930” [Global Horizons of European Art Music, 1860–1930], Geschichte und Gesellschaft [History and Society] 38, no. 1 (2012): 86–132.[↩]
39. Soenka Biermann, “Knowledge, Power and Decolonization: Implication for Non-Indigenous Scholars, Researchers and Educators,” in Indigenous Philosophies and Critical Education: A Reader, ed. George J. Sefa Dei (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 386–98, at 388.[↩]
40. For a useful exploration of acoustemologies in a global “early modern” context, see Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, eds., Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021).[↩]
41. Makoto Harris Takao, “‘In Their Own Way’: Contrafactal Practices in Japanese Christian Communities During the 16th Century,” Early Music 47, no. 2 (2019): 183–98.[↩]
42. See Yurina Koizumi, “Nagasaki-ken Ikitsukishima ni okeru kakure kirishitan no ‘uta orasho’: Ikitsukishima Yamada-chiku no jirei kenkyū” [The “Uta-Orasho” of the Hidden Christians on Ikitsuki Island, Nagasaki Prefecture: A Case Study of the Yamada District on Ikitsuki Island], Nenpō himoji shiryō kenkyū [Annual Report for the Study of Nonwritten Cultural Materials] 11 (2015): 245–66.[↩]
43. I also find images of nineteenth-century Japanese clocks a useful teaching point for thinking about cultural differences in the reckoning of time and their simultaneous functioning in our world. See, for instance, the myriad-year clock, made by Hisashige Tanaka in 1851, with Western and Japanese dials; weekly, monthly, and zodiac settings; as well as the sun term and phases of the moon. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Myriad-Year_Clock,_made_by_Hisashige_Tanaka,_1851,_with_western_and_Japanese_dials,_weekly,_monthly,_and_zodiac_setting,_plus_sun_and_moon_-_National_Museum_of_Nature_and_Science,_Tokyo_-_DSC07407.JPG .[↩]
44. Another teaching point I find useful for exploring the transculturation of the baroque in the Chinese imperial court is with reference to the European-inspired palaces, pavilions, and gardens in a dedicated section of the Yuanmingyuan. Access to the eighteenth-century engravings of this hybridized architecture by Giuseppe Castiglione is freely available through the New York Public Library: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/a-suite-of-twenty-engravings-of-the-yuan-ming-yuan-summer-palaces-and-gardens#/?tab=about.[↩]
45. Scholars have continually conjectured the likelihood of these sonatas being composed in China (and not Italy). See Peter C. Allsop and Joyce Lindorff, “Teodrico Pedrini: The Music and Letters of an 18th-Century Missionary in China,” Vincentian Heritage Journal 27, no. 2 (2008): 43–59, at 56.[↩]
46. Tomlinson, “Monumental Musicology,” 374.[↩]
47. Thinking about a “global Corelli” is inspired by the work of musicologist and violinist David R. M. Irving. For Irving’s important unpacking of Corelli’s adaptation in eighteenth-century Malaysia, see David R. M. Irving, “Trading Tunes: Thomas Forrest, Malay Songs, and Musical Exchange in the Malay Archipelago, 1774–84,” in Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia: History and Society in the Early Modern World, ed. Tara Alberts and D. R. M. Irving (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 203–35.[↩]
48. Nottuswara combines the idea of Western “notes” (nottu) with swara, an analogous concept of “note” and “tone” in Indian classical musics.[↩]
49. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). On the role of seas and oceans in the navigation of more-than-national histories of music, see Kate van Orden, ed., Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550–1800 (Florence: Officina Libraria/Harvard University Press, 2021).[↩]
50. Takao, “Global Music History.” See also Olivia Bloechl and Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang, eds., “Colloquy: Theorizing Global Music History,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 76, no. 3 (2023): 831–72.[↩]
51. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), x.[↩]
52. Susan A. Crane, “Historical Subjectivity: A Review Essay,” Journal of Modern History 78, no. 2 (2006): 434–56, at 434.[↩]
53. Philip V. Bohlman, “Musicology as a Political Act,” Journal of Musicology 11, no. 4 (1993): 411–36, at 418.[↩]
54. I am grateful to Sarah Eyerly, Christina Horton, David R. M. Irving, and Carlos Molina-Vital for their invaluable contributions in this regard.[↩]
55. On the necessity of collaborative research, see Olivia Bloechl, Katherine Butler Schofield, and Gabriel Solis, “The Value of Collaboration,” AMS Musicology Now, March 20, 2017, https://musicologynow.org/the-value-of-collaboration/.[↩]
56. For students whose first language is one other than English, I try my best to provide additional readings written by scholars in that language. Indeed, I think it is a critical intervention to encourage students (especially at the graduate level) to draw on their multilingualism as a source of scholarly strength and to find ways to assist them in designing a research project that takes advantage of this invaluable skillset.[↩]
57. On this concept, see George J. Sefa Dei, “Indigenous Knowledge Studies and the Next Generation: Pedagogical Possibilities for Anti-Colonial Education,” Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 37, no. 1 (2008): 5–13, at 8, 11.[↩]
58. Writing from the perspective of a “white middle-class male working in a university,” Biermann offers a sober assessment of how educators of this demographic might confront their “own implicatedness in colonial structures” and make meaningful contributions to systemic change. Soenke Biermann, “Knowledge, Power, and Decolonization: Implication for Non-Indigenous Scholars, Researchers, and Educators,” in Indigenous Philosophies and Critical Education: A Reader, ed. George J. Sefa Dei (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 386–98.[↩]
59. Reinhard Strohm, ed., Transcultural Music History: Global Participation and Regional Diversity in the Modern Age (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenchaft und Bildung, 2021). See also Sanela Nikolić, “Five Claims for Global Musicology,” Acta Musicologica 93, no. 2 (2021): 219–35.[↩]
60. For a personal reflection on these challenges as an educator (and in response to student-led movements for curricular reform in the United Kingdom), see Michael A. Peters, “Why is My Curriculum White?,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 47, no. 7 (2015): 641–46. See also Shzr Ee Tan, ed., “Decolonising Music and Music Studies,” Ethnomusicology Forum 30 (2021): 4–162.[↩]
61. Walter D. Mignolo, “Coloniality is Far From Over, and So Must Be Decoloniality,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 43 (2017): 39–45.[↩]
62. Mignolo, 42.[↩]
63. Mignolo, 45.[↩][↩]
64. Mignolo, 40.[↩]
65. J. Laurence Hare and Jack Wells, “Promising the World: Surveys, Curricula, and the Challenge of Global History,” The History Teacher 48, no. 2 (2015): 371–88, at 377.[↩]
66. On approaches to “connected history” see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62.[↩]
67. Alan J. Singer, Teaching Global History: A Social Studies Approach (New York: Routledge, 2011), 39–47.[↩]
68. Helen Hills’s introduction to Claire Farago et al., 45.[↩]
69. For a recent critique, see Timothy Rice, “Schools of Music as Social Institutions in Service to Society,” MUSICultures 50 (2023): 111–31.[↩]
70. I have been most fortunate to call on the expertise of colleagues both on campus and further afield, including that of Carlos Molina-Vital in the Center of Latin and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prof. Molina-Vital and I were able to collaborate in using seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music scores in Quechua and Mochica as starting points to explore the rudiments of these languages’ grammar and history. Online resources that may be useful in this regard include the vocabulary for Barry Brian Werger’s Internet Quechua Lessons (http://ullanta.com/quechua/Vocabulary.html) and Culturas de los Andes (http://www.andes.org).[↩]