The Globalization of Music: Expanding Spheres of Influence
Author(s)
Joyce, John
Abstract
If global history is an incipient field in search of a viable subject matter, surely there can be no more exploitable topic than the unique state of music in the modern world. Joyce refers here, in particular, to a phenomenon of the past hundred years that the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl has called “the intensive imposition of Western music and musical thought upon the rest of the world.” The introduction of Western music to other parts of the globe is, in itself, hardly recent: In most post-Columbian colonized regions, it goes back several hundred years – as early as the first half of the sixteenth century with the incursion of the Spanish conquistadors and their attendant missionaries into Mesoamerica and the Andes. What is unique to the past hundred years is the vastly more intensive imposition of Western music abroad. This is a genuinely contemporary phenomenon, beginning about a century ago but accelerating and expanding dramatically after World War II. How has this phenomenon taken shape?
