Sonic Cosmopolis: Making European Music around the Early Modern World

Abstract

There remains a prevailing assumption in popular thought that Western art music is connected to essentialised ethnic identities. This is true even in some academic circles, although it is self-consciously recognised that such views stem from critiques of fixation on the European canon and the backgrounds of canonic composers.

In this colloquium, I call for a re-examination of the terms of argument. “European music” was not a homogeneous or unified concept before the long eighteenth century; significantly, this dyad first appears in European languages in the 1680s, entering common discourse only in the 1770s.

Subsequently, the concept began to gain traction as a monolithic notion implying a recently amalgamated and relatively standardised practice within global contexts. In the nineteenth century the concept of “European music” (complemented by “Western music” from the 1830s) began to be linked with canon, ethnicity, and social frameworks.

It forged discursive and epistemological attitudes in European musical thought that had devastating repercussions for colonised territories, lionising “European music” apart from and above all others. However, for the whole of the so-called early modern period (c1500-c1800), the first age of global colonialism, “non-Europeans” – or people considered by ethnocentric European observers to be “Other” on the basis of their own reflexive identity formation – contributed themselves in substantial numbers to the practice, theory, consumption, and the very making of European music (including the manual labour that propped up its production).

Here I aim to demonstrate that evidence of cultural diversity in early modern “Western art music”, in a virtual or sonic cosmopolis beyond Europe’s imagined boundaries as well as within them, can contest narratives of cultural exceptionalism or “ownership” in the artform. This makes us rethink early modern musical cosmopolitanism, before the philosophical shifts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that linked “Western art music” to race and ethnicity.