Global Musical Modernisms – the formulation heralds expansion into new arenas of music research.1 For while certain pairings of the component terms are familiar enough, the concatenation of all three is novel. In music studies, the most notable trend is the flurry of activity around global music history, with study groups in two societies historically focused on Western musics, and one focused on ethnomusicology.2 Global music history derives strength and in turn strengthens movement towards disciplinary convergence, or at least greater interaction – an important precondition for the study of global musical modernisms.3 There has also been renewed interest in musical modernism, though not so much, at least at first glance, in the direction of the global, and with less interdisciplinary synergy. By contrast, the global figures very prominently in what has been termed the ‘new modernist studies’, a field that coalesced in the late 1990s.4 As one indication, its global turn had gathered enough momentum for Oxford University Press to publish a handbook on ‘Global Modernisms’ in 2013, just three years after its handbook on ‘Modernisms’.5 Despite aspirations to coverage of modernism in all its forms, the field is populated predominantly by literary scholars, with minimal attention to music.

When is it modernism? This article poses this question to traditionally based Indonesian musik kontemporer, as an occasion to examine a distinctive instance of musical modernism, but most importantly to illuminate issues with the question itself. Taking it literally, I identify when musik kontemporer was most clearly modernist, recognizing that modernism, and its conception of history, itself has a history. Scrutinizing the question's more usual goal of drawing a distinction between that which is and is not modernist, I show how the case of Rahayu Supanggah – a musician with a deep and primary commitment to the traditional performing arts, whose work has been shaped by his adoption of modernist ways of thinking without being fully defined by them – defies a simple answer. Ultimately, the article is concerned with what is at stake when invoking modernism, and what this means for the larger project of understanding musical modernism as a global phenomenon.

While the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.

After 1917 the word ‘jazz’ disseminated rapidly throughout the world attaining, along the way, a multiplicity of meanings, sometimes related to musical practices from the United States, but often associated with a diverse array of things, objects, ideas, and situations in the worlds of music entertainment, dance, leisure, and fashion. In the Caribbean, this process entailed not only the constitution of jazz as a symbol of social modernity but also revealed a long history of exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean – not to mention the Afrodiasporic origins of jazz. By examining jazz as a by-product and an expression of Caribbean modernity, this article disentangles some of the cultural meanings of the word ‘jazz’ in the Caribbean between 1917 and 1920, considering, ultimately, how imagining jazz as Caribbean was inevitably intertwined with imagining it as modern.

The idea of global modernisms rests upon freighted power relationships. Far from decolonizing, this concept reinscribes values of Euro- and US-centric discourses. This article addresses the inherent friction of global musical modernisms through Carlos Chávez's 1940 composition La paloma azul, written for concerts at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Tasked with appealing to a US audience, Chávez created work that participates in modernism's hierarchical frame, where Mexico provides exotic fantasy for bourgeois New Yorkers.

Chávez was not alone in having been positioned as ‘modernism's shadow’ – the negative counterexample that confirms modernism's progressive image. Global musical modernism suggests that modernism can shed its exclusionary identity and encompass more. But it hides how modernism has always been international, and how composers such as Chávez have been central to its construction. By ignoring modernism's historical realities, global musical modernism shores up existing understandings and maintains the marginal status of whatever is categorized as ‘global’.

The Paris-trained, Japanese composer Michiko Toyama (1913–2006) was appointed as the earliest foreign-born visiting composer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC), the first institutionally supported studio of its kind in the United States. Yet she remains virtually unknown to scholarship, despite a growing literature on women pioneers in electronic music. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and the interpretive study of music, this article studies the conditions under which Toyama has found little remembrance to date; and it conceptualizes Toyama's own ideas of modernity formulated over the massive cultural and geographical dislocations of her lifetime. Within an intensely lyrical compositional practice, Toyama thematized hallmarks of traditional modernism studies: self-reflexivity, estrangement, exile, and exoticism. Racist criticism during her lifetime dismissed her music as a belated mimicry of Western models. Yet the modernist qualities and themes of her work emerge as a consequence of her life lived in intercultural contact zones of uprooting – the very conditions that make ideas of the ‘modern’ possible.

This article argues that through historiography, global musical modernisms decolonize Western musical modernism, expanding and bursting the latter's spatial (geographic), vertical (high–low genres), and temporal boundaries. The unsettling of these various boundaries shows how coloniality is the context of, and thoroughly imbricated with, global musical modernisms – and yet the latter has channelled the self-conscious resistance of global music-makers against the colonial condition that characterizes modernity. Examining global musical modernisms both in the real world and in the inter-disciplines, this article addresses material complexities that are elided in purist dichotomous conceptions of resistance and oppression as inhering in different musics and cultures.