On Doing Global Music History

The following post is co-authored by the editors of the forthcoming “Oxford Handbook of Global Music History.” Its text is drawn from the editors’ in-progress introduction to the “Handbook,” and it reflects their own perspectives. They do not claim to speak for individual contributors (especially since the volume is not yet published), although their exchanges with them and their chapters in progress have shaped what they write here. The post is designed to accommodate various modes of reading. Those who would like an overview of key points (or who are new to this topic) are encouraged to focus on the introduction and the last two sections, while those who read the full post will find a more in-depth discussion of the practice of Global Music History (GMH) as instantiated in this project.

The forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History joins a growing chorus of voices discussing music’s past and present from globally oriented perspectives.¹ With the present level of interest in GMH and related formations such as global musicology and historical ethnomusicology, it is tempting to try to circumscribe this emergent field of research and teaching from the outset. As the Handbook’s co-editors, we have had to assess and reassess GMH’s current state, potential, and pitfalls in the course of developing the volume and working with its 40+ contributors, as well as in related publications.² Their chapters-in-progress sketch a composite portrait of this field and its recurrent concerns, as these appear from the authors’ wide-ranging specialties and professional locations. The results so far reveal a pluralistic and evolving musicological domain whose contours we nevertheless aim to outline here.

If we begin here by highlighting the pressure to define this domain of musicology—by which we mean music and sound studies, in a broad sense—that is because we perceive an unusual degree of tension between its fugitive (elusive or ungraspable) nature and the monumentalizing function of an academic area handbook. Addressing such a vast object of musicological study as “the global” and its histories is of course impossible. Yet we all find ourselves in dynamic relation to the territorial orders, affective regimes, and forms of dis/connection that the metaphor of “the globe” conjures, or what Roland Robertson otherwise calls “globality”—the situated imagination of the world as a whole.³ The dynamism and unevenness of our diverse globalities lend this musicological domain its fugitive character: not because musical pasts grounded in globalities are somehow unknowable, but because our own scholarly “worlding” is multi-polar. (Worlding can mean different things, but here it points to the situated, varied, sometimes incommensurate knowledge practices by which music scholars shape our lived worlds—that is, how we imagine our relations to other collectives, large networks, geographies, or timeframes.)⁴

Trying to define an emerging field of discourse also risks determining its parameters prematurely, reifying the field before its profile takes firm shape. (A similar caution is audible in the title of Martin Stokes’ essay “Notes and Queries on ‘Global Music History’” introducing Reinhard Strohm’s important 2018 edited volume, Studies on a Global History of Music.) As we discuss below, we decided to envision the Handbook inductively, by theorizing collectively as editors and by organizing voluntary workshops for the contributors.

It should no longer be necessary to point out that GMH, as we understand it, does not aim to map a history of music worldwide and in every human timeframe. Practitioners of GMH are likewise skeptical of equating the “global” with a totality like the physical “globe” or more generally the “universal,” and there is broad agreement that the field should not replicate Eurocentric and Westcentric epistemologies. (There is, however, much less agreement on whether it does, or both skepticism and resistance as to whether it even can succeed in sidestepping Eurocentric or Westcentric epistemologies.) Neither does GMH necessarily address music in twentieth-century decolonization and globalization, although those processes arguably conditioned historical musicology’s “global turn” at a macro level. Finally, it must be said that a globally oriented epistemology is not necessarily the most relevant or obvious approach in many cases, and it is important to question what a “global” (or transnational, oceanic, translocal, etc.) framework distinctively contributes or which scholarly problems such a framework may solve.⁵

We propose that GMH is both a practice of knowledge and a critical perspective that places its constitutive terms—the global, music, and history—into tension.⁶ GMH seeks to uncover: (1) what it means to think about local (or even hyper-local) sonic practices in relation to larger and longer historical processes that played out in different places; and conversely, (2) what it might reveal to think about historical processes of various scales, including larger or longue-durée processes, as ones that became locally rooted through sonic practices. 

We are interested in the divergences that appear when music-historical practices from different disciplinary and epistemological traditions—even beyond global musicology—are set into dialogue. This is not about embracing and celebrating difference per se but rather acknowledging its irreducibility and committing to letting that reality unravel the seams of our questions, concepts, methods, and conclusions. In that spirit, the next section addresses the emerging relationship between global music history and global musicology approaches and voices our skepticism at efforts to distinguish them firmly, given the subtlety of their differences, their overlapping participants, and the greater salience of other issues facing our fields. This seeks to nuance a debate that has thus far been conducted in quite simplistic terms.

The dialogical process of developing the Handbook has directed and, in many cases, challenged our sense of which issues matter most to our communities of practice now. In the third section, we briefly summarize that process before reporting, in the fourth section, on thematic anchors among the Handbook’s chapters and what they tells us about GMH’s key issues and concerns. These include fundamental matters of how best to engage in this work; who gets to frame, decide on, and access the knowledge it yields; in whose language(s); and from which professional locations. Disappointment over the music subdisciplines’ ability to achieve meaningful and lasting change on these crucial issues—at least in their current formations—arguably drives much of the momentum to develop globally oriented “homes” for musicological scholarship, alongside many other critical developments in our decentralized fields. Perhaps the most salient work GMH can do is to provoke our perennial return to the ethical and political demands our lived globalities make, as we discuss in the concluding section of this post.

This Handbook project consciously adopts the approach of GMH rather than historical ethnomusicology, the history of world music, global history of music theory, or global musicology. Amanda Hsieh and Vera Wolkowicz, building on Daniel Chua’s work, stipulate global musicology as an inclusive, post-national approach to the doing of musicology around the world. Their definition of the two fields, GMH and global musicology, is worth quoting in full:

GMH is a mode of exploration that foregrounds interconnections, power relations, and entanglements (of all scales) among the music, objects, and peoples involved in processes of musicking. Global musicology, on the other hand, is centered on communities of researchers today. It aims to establish linkages in recognition of each other’s works, contributions, strengths, and concerns as scholars around the globe, which also means being open to myriad ways of doing “musicology.”⁷

We celebrate this inclusive project of global musicology—which we interpret as building the musicological ecumene and working to redress its inequities—and are excited about the methodological, epistemological, and ethico-political possibilities it opens. With the Handbook’s GMH orientation, focused as it is on historical processes and relationalities, we hope to project this ecumenical care and justice ethos backwards and forwards in time:

• to engage peoples’ often radically different modes of hearing music and sound histories;
• to think with and through some of the myriad ways in which music has contributed to the construction of selves and collectives in the present, often in relation to larger historical and geographical structures or processes;
• to analyze how music indexes historical events and how historical events (both momentary and processual) became embedded in musical practices;
• to understand how collectives have envisioned interconnected or disconnected futures through musicking and its knowledges; and
• to account for the historically, geographically, and politically grounded conditions of human and more-than-human listening and sounding.

In spatial terms, GMH reflects on how events and outcomes elsewhere may have generated musical practices “here” (wherever “here” may be), “in proximity,” “in-between,” and other points of orientation; or, conversely, how musical practices here conditioned constructions of identities, events, and outcomes elsewhere. The territorial formations in which global music histories unfold thus reveal sonic geographies that rarely coincide with or intersect the social spaces produced around nation-states. In historicizing the formation of these sonic geographies, GMH scrutinizes the hierarchies of space that musicking generates in between the “here” and the “elsewhere” as well as how reified spatial categories and scales such as the “local, “regional,” “national,” or “global” condition musical practices and listening habits.

Politically, GMH seeks to understand the social structures and power asymmetries at play when a particular way of thinking, feeling, or—crucially—sounding the world is taken for granted just as it comes into tension with other world-making projects. In this sense, GMH is interested in tracing and explaining how musical and sonic practices, as well as listening habits, took part dialectically in the processes (i.e., “worldings”) by which “worlds” were formed (worlds of sense, worlds of empire, Native worlds, colonial worlds, etc.). Conversely, by prioritizing contingency and process over static research objects (as in “works” of Western art music, or monolithic area music “cultures”), globally-oriented music historians are confronted with the political implications of the methodologies with which we choose to think the world—e.g. when scaling our music histories—as well as the political economies of knowledge we participate in by doing or demarcating something called “global music history.”

We do not see GMH as an alternative to global musicology, if such a distinction ought to be made, but rather as an overlapping undertaking with different emphases. (Indeed, Chua, Hsieh, and Wolcowicz are each contributing chapters to the Handbook.) The two approaches may be complementary, as they both seek to instigate new or resurgent ways of thinking critically about music and sound worlds—about their pasts and relation to the lived present, about timescales generated by temporal experiences unregulated by clock time, or about practices of history that understand the past otherwise than as a set of events that unfold linearly in a causative sequence—and about our place within them. They are also arguably both post-disciplinary in practice.

If there are multiple emphases, GMH’s focus on historicity and temporalities is probably the most significant distinction, although scholars doing “global musicology” might of course work historically. (Likewise, some Handbook contributors prioritize contemporary musics and/or present-day communities, while drawing connections with their pasts.) Hsieh and Wolkowicz’s point that global musicology emphasizes relations among international musicological communities makes sense. However, relationality is an important component of work being carried out under both headings. A hard-and-fast demarcation between them risks unnecessarily calcifying their subtle differences in emphasis. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that we arrived at these methods and perspectives through GMH and its professional study groups, and our account of the Handbook’s development in the next section speaks to that history. Moreover, as several Handbook contributors note, much scholarship carried out under any of the relevant headings—whether historical ethnomusicology, the history of world music, global history of music theory, global musicology, or GMH—is currently conducted in the English language. This raises issues of what gets lost in translation and of where the limits of the English language lie.⁸ Excitingly, the global orientation of these fields also offers the chance to examine the expressive possibilities afforded by non-English or non-standard English vocabularies. It may be that this “languaging” of globally oriented music scholarship matters more, in its pragmatic effects, than the heading under which we carry it out.

Proceeding from this both/and approach to GMH and global musicology, we wish to introduce GMH as a relational and dialogic critical knowledge practice that is ideally in good relation with (though not identical to) ethnic, area, and regional music studies.⁹ GMH, pluralistically conceived, attends to the specificities (material, affective, discursive, and otherwise) of localities and globalities, of the scales of sonic experience in-between, and of historical consciousness (including different forms of “knowing the past”). Crucially, it does not seek to condense these specificities into a single, harmonized account of linear historical processes but works to understand their layered, multidirectional, multivalent, or multipolar dimensions.

With this characterization of GMH in mind, it becomes evident that this mode of musicological scholarship cannot be done well in isolation. Its multivalence requires multiple perspectives, developed by scholars with dissimilar specialties, languages, backgrounds, and experiences. The structure of the Handbook reflects this pluralist orientation and extends it into a collaborative ethos that could well be filed under the banner of global musicology.

Our collective enthusiasm for the Handbook project reflects our individual interests in GMH as a research and teaching practice, as well as the salience of longer conversations that have been taking place across various ethno/musicological fora over the past decade or so.¹⁰ Indeed, the research domain of GMH has seen increasing institutional recognition and formalization in the 2010s and 2020s, with GMH study groups founded by the International Council for Traditional Music (2019), the International Musicological Society (2019), and the American Musicological Society (2020). The networks and study groups engaged with GMH have grown into valuable intellectual communities, and many of the Handbook’s contributors are members of them.

The editors approach the Handbook and the broader field from various geographic, linguistic, political, and professional contexts, and we thus bring a range of concerns and priorities to this work. When we tried to distill a shared working conception of GMH as an emergent field, or even its constitutive terms (global, music, and history), we quickly learned that they held different meanings for us, based on our backgrounds, standpoints and specialties. Rather than trying to reconcile these, the editors agreed that we preferred to develop the contents inductively, in partial collaboration with the contributing authors. Collaborative conceptualization therefore served as a core operational principle from the very start.

Starting in 2023, we organized a series of online workshops (sometimes duplicated across days and meridians to account for time zone differences) with potential and confirmed contributors. The first workshops invited contributors to articulate their own understanding of GMH as a field or scholarly approach and to bring this into dialogue with others’. The aim was to create room for uncertainty, experimental exchange, and generous and thoughtful listening. What we ended up with was a lively exchange on the stakes of academic thinking about music history in a world that is at once globally integrated (if unevenly) and divided.

We also realized again just how nebulous the categories of “global,” “music,” and “history” are and how these terms, in various permutations, can generate conceptual possibilities for methodological explorations. Thinking collaboratively about these terms confirmed our intuition that GMH as a field, practice, or perspective emerges processually: acts of thinking-with, thinking-through, and thinking-together did not merely give rise to new interpretations; rather, the “doing” (or “doing together”) of this work itself constituted the practice of GMH.

The author workshops and presentations at professional forums have yielded some key insights. The diversity of perspectives and approaches that animated our workshops underscored that GMH is not defined by a particular method or thematic focus (e.g., music globalization, world music, diasporic musics). Put differently, GMH is not an “it” but a materially conditioned, inchoate non-object that emerges in the process of doing research, teaching, creating, archiving, curating, or public musicology.

Second, building on this processual nature, we can only think of the globality in “GMH” as multi-polar and protean. The moment one tries to pin it down, it shifts. Hence, the global emerges as “elsewhere,” and “otherwise,” and “here.” These geographic markers could overlap with another spatial matrix like the local, regional, or national. As an abstract totality, “the global” may also reveal its own particularity within themes such as large-scale integration, interconnection, circulation, and movement. However, the Handbook contributors did not take the global formations they wrote about at face value. Instead, difficult methodological questions about how to historicize globality meaningfully and responsibly emerged, revealing tensions between world-making projects (past and present, including inter-imperial conflicts and the undoing and rise of world orders) that affect how we write, listen, and think-feel about music and sound in relation to the past(s).

Third, GMH encourages a mode of critical inquiry that draws relationships between sound practices and what some may perceive as their para- or extra-local historical and spatial contexts (though, e.g., Indigelogical epistemologies know-feel practices and time-space contexts as always already inseparable). In this sense, GMH is intercontextual. The question for music historians is not so much whether this or that more-than-local music is global, although there are contextual bases for claiming so (e.g., the multinational release of a recording). More critically challenging is analyzing what happens when historical actors and collectivities confront competing or incompatible claims about certain music/sound practices as being global, or as having a relation to the global. This foregrounds the political, discursively conditioned nature of whose music histories “count” as global.¹¹ Similarly, distinct sound, song, or music ontologies also often leave historical traces in contact-zone encounters, challenging any unified conception of what the “music” in GMH is. 

Further, GMH may incorporate and articulate ruptures, refusals of connection, and failures of integration. GMH is often described as preoccupied with interconnections, relationalities, and entanglements. However, we learned that the opposite is true as well. Disconnects, fractures, silences, erasures, and stasis may be just as reflective of historical processes shaped by and embedded in “the global,” and in the teleology of large-scale integration that this term assumes. Moreover, moments of encounter and exchange are themselves rarely frictionless. Rather, tension is frequently the defining feature of relationality. At times, it can also appear quite antagonistic, violent, and destructive. We therefore want to underscore that the global is also—and especially—a site of non-connection and aporias, filled with misunderstandings and misrecognitions.¹² Such is the nature of encounter, often with unpredictable connections and chance interactions. Addressing discomfort that may arise from confusion, inconsistency, lack of knowledge, and a lack of foundation for understanding supposedly familiar areas is ingrained in the doing of GMH.¹³

For the editors, recognizing the limits of our knowledge base marks an important point of departure. We often read and commented on scholarship dealing with musical genres, historical events, or geographical locations with which we were not deeply familiar. The anxiety that may accompany such reading is perhaps more widespread than usually acknowledged. Several of us have noticed a form of such self-proclaimed ignorance among students taking GMH courses, which may prompt self-examination of our limitations. But not knowing may underscore the foundational attitude at the core of the practice of GMH: if encounter, exchange, and entanglement are about coming to an understanding of the self, the other, or the world as constituted by relationalities, then the starting point is always one of yet-to-know or yet-to-fail-to-know. The insights that may yield from such inceptive encounters could provide a basis for new inquiries or fronts of knowledge.

Finally, in editing the Handbook’s chapters, a number of key practices, processes, critical concepts, and methods have emerged as thematic anchors. These theoretical anchors, drawn from the contributors’ work, are distinguished by subtle but important variations:

• Language and languaging
• Voice, song, and singing
• Listening, silencing, aurality, and acoustemology
• Preservation and archiving praxis
• Im/mobility, migration, diaspora
• Cross-cultural encounter, entanglement, and integration
• Homing and worldmaking
• Scope and scale
• Non-national geographies
• Historicity and temporalities
• Race, indigeneity and coloniality
• Relational densities
• Embodied experience and phenomenology
• Historical fabulation
• Neo-comparativism

What ethical and political demands do our lived globalities make on music scholarship and teaching? How do these demands register in our professional relations with other researchers, classroom teachers or students, creative artists, and community-based experts? As mentioned in the Introduction, we sense a deep “political disappointment” haunting the music disciplines’ relationships with past globally oriented knowledges, such as comparative musicology, “salvage” ethnomusicology, or colonial and racist teleologies of music’s historical or cultural progress.¹⁴ It may be that a related disappointment with our music disciplines’ ability to meaningfully accommodate this emerging research has also driven the momentum to develop multiple alternative “homes” for it.

GMH does not present any neat solutions to these disciplinary anxieties and disappointments, much less to the larger ones defining our present historical-political moment. Rather, we see these anxieties and disappointments as a source of the ethico-political imperative behind doing and re-doing GMH. For us, this work demands (1) generating knowledge dialogically and dialectically, and (2) sharing it in new and resurgent forms, including those forms that are only available in non-standardized Englishes or in performance-based knowledge sharing.¹⁵

At basis, doing GMH involves reconsidering historical knowledge and knowledge of music/sound histories as contingent, situated, and provisional. It tends carefully to the futurities that these histories imply for stakeholder communities. And it attends to the silences and limits of musicological discourses, alongside other critical ethno/musicological formations. Ideally, its research and teaching products, including the Handbook, respect the actual multivalence of concepts and practices of “globality,” “music,” and “history,” abandoning authoritativeness from any singular epistemological center. That would light the way towards realizing—hopefully—a form of relationality that does not seek facile homogeneity in the name of harmony.

1. For an overview of this literature to 2022, see Makoto Harris Takao, “Global History of Music,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Music, ed. Kate van Orden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
2. Olivia Bloechl et al., “Colloquy: Theorizing Global Music History,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 3 (2023): 832–72; Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang, Daniel Castro Pantoja, and Hedy Law, “Introduction by the Guest Editors: Global Music History in the Classroom: Reflections on Concepts and Practice,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 13, no. 1 (2023): 45–51; Hedy Law et al., “Forum—Centering Discomfort in Global Music History,” Journal of Musicology 40, no. 3 (2023): 249–55.
3. Roland Robertson, “Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness,” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 10 (2011): 1336–45.
4. Recent work reflecting on (ethno)musicological worlding includes Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Columbia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Jessica Bissett Perea, Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Jessica Bissett Perea, “Introducing [Our] Peoples, Places, and Projects: Indigelogical Ways of Doing Global Music History Homework,” in Law et al., “Centering Discomfort,” 255–65; Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022); Jim Sykes, “Music Studies, ‘Worlding,’ and the Anthropocene,” in Encounters in Ethnomusicology: Essays in Honor of Philip V. Bohlman, ed. Michael Figueroa, Jaime Jones, and Timothy Rommen (Zürich: Lit, 2022), 41–66.
5. Richard Williams warns, “given that we are still in the early stages of mapping certain historical periods in some regions, thinking globally might divert attention away from important musical ideas and practices simply because they were not ‘global’ enough.” Richard David Williams, “Querying ‘Global’ Music History: Significant Geographies Between Goswami Pannalal and Queen Victoria,” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 54 (2023): 14.
6. This develops historian Sebastian Conrad’s summary conception of global history, in What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). For more on Conrad’s model from a musicological perspective, see Maria Semi, “A (Global) History of What? Three Challenges in Contemporary Music History Writing,” Acta Musicologica 94, no. 2 (2022): 227–44; Daniel Castro Pantoja, “Grasping the Global, Historicizing the Non-Global,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 3 (2023): 863–67; Williams, “Querying ‘Global’ Music History,” 10.
7. Amanda Hsieh and Vera Wolkowicz, eds., Global Musicology: Music Histories from Elsewhere (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), 7. See also Daniel K. L. Chua, “Global Musicology: A Keynote Without a Key,” Acta Musicologica 94, no. 1 (2022): 109–26; Daniel K. L. Chua, “We Are All Global Musicologists Now!,” Musicological Brainfood 10, no. 1 (2026), https://brainfood.musicology.org/vol-10-no-1-2026/we-are-all-global-musicologists-now.
8. See Juliana M. Pistorius, “Ways with Words,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 3 (2023): 837–42.
9. On the latter point, see Nancy Yunhwa Rao, “Inter-Asia Studies and Global Music History / 亞際研究與全球音樂史,” 臺灣音樂研究 / Formosan Journal of Music Research 12 (2023): 123–32; Williams, “Querying ‘Global’ Music History,” 11.
10. The establishment of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s “Historical Ethnomusicology Special Interest Group” in 2014 formalized recognition of ethnomusicology’s historical practice. See Jonathan McCollum and David G. Hebert, eds., Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 1–4.
11. Castro Pantoja, “Grasping the Global,” 864–65.
12. Ibid., 865–66.
13. Law et al., “Centering Discomfort,” 249–307.
14. On political disappointment, see Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York: Verso, 2007), 8.
15. In discussing forms of knowledge sharing, we are inspired by Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), and Bissett Perea, Sound Relations.