Peripheral Symphonism: Transcultural Form and Glocal Modernism at the Fin de Siècle

The proposed project offers the first account of the emergence of global musical modernism at fin de siècle. It focuses on the peripheral symphonies by travelling composers that fall outside of the Austro-German orientated European canon. This study suggests that such music display a long neglected transcultural modernist style that combines the prevailing cosmopolitan and nationalist idioms, a quality which reflects the symphonic genre’s international migration at the time. Through interrogating the organisational patterns of musical materials in these works, I posit a novel music-analytical model to account for the interaction between cosmopolitan and nationalist tendencies in musical form. This transcultural phenomenon is then examined via the sociological notion of ‘glocalisation’, through which I theorise a new species of early musical modernism peculiar to global manifestations—namely ‘glocal musical modernism’.

Keywords:musical form, musical peripheries, modernism, transculturalism, glocalisation

Disciplines:Musicology and ethnomusicology, History of music