The STORIES WE HOPE TO SHARE

INTRODUCTION TO A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

EDITED BY WILLIAM CHENG AND DANIELLE FOSLER-LUSSIER

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC 2023

EXCERPT

Culture, the great thinker Raymond Williams once wrote, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” I may be about to do Williams and the community of serious scholars a grave disservice. But here goes. Culture is the realm of images, ideas, sounds, and stories. It is our shared space. It is the narrative we are immersed in every day. It is where people find community, and express their deepest-held values …

- Jeff Chang, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America (2016: 5)

“Eight travelers. Eight adventures. Eight roles to play,” teased the ads for the much-hyped 2018 video game Octopath Traveler. “Choose the path you wish to walk and discover what lies beyond the horizon.” No matter which avatar a player chooses at the outset—whether the insatiable academic Cyrus, the highborn dancer Primrose, or the mercenary thief Therion—all eight travelers converge in due course. Their fates, it turns out, are braided. Through its experimental storytelling, Octopath Traveler runs the topical gamut, unflinching in its pixelated representations of euphoria and courage, illness and depression, dictatorship and regicide, rape and victim blaming. The game is about all of these things. Ultimately, it is about relationships forged from chaos, and stories emergent.

We, the editors and authors of A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age, invite you to traverse our chapters in any sequence you desire. Together, we carve eight paths through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In parallel with the five preceding volumes in the Cultural History of Western Music series (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, Industrial Age), our book ventures across eight broad themes: 1. Society, 2. Philosophies, 3. Politics, 4. Exchange, 5. Education, 6. Popular Culture, 7. Performance, and 8. Technologies.

Histories of Western music have never been cohesive or even coherent. What we imagine and refer to loosely (for rhetorical convenience) as the geopolitical West has encompassed dueling courts, multi-ethnic republics, competing religions, and hungry empires. The vague figure of the West has come to wear thicker and grander layers of meaning and power primarily in relation—and in witness—to its designated Others, namely the (usually darker-skinned) peoples whom (usually lighter-skinned) Europeans encountered through voyeurism, trade, tourism, alliance, settler-colonial aggression, pillage, rape, and total warfare. As a word, West is a mess. It can simultaneously mean too much and mean nothing. As with many words, we might start by asking who is saying it, and why.

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Resisting the editorial habit to overprescribe, we asked our authors to dispel any aspirational illusion of comprehensive coverage. We trusted them to follow their curiosities, take intellectual risks, and write outside the box. In their cultural histories, our authors foreground creative giants and earthshaking events as well as the subtler everyday social networks where music-making happens. They uncover music-centered and music-adjacent relationships, energies, synergies, and frictions, the swirl of forces at play in artistic striving.

In this introductory chapter, I unfurl four popular themes in extant histories of Western music in the modern age: progress, crisis, connection, and power. Each is conceptually thorny. Each is an amplified echo of an originary cry from at least as far back as the early 1800s. Progress, the lodestar ethos of relentless forward motion and fervent material production inherent in (and inherited from) the Industrial Revolution. Crisis, the Romantic and oft-nostalgic struggles and disenchantments with the bare realities (versus liminalities, spiritualities, mysticisms) of modern life. Connection, the unchecked acceleration of symbiotic as well as extractivist relationships between and among human beings, nations, schools of thought, and real and imagined communities, with open-ended agendas of globalization in full swing by the tail of the long nineteenth century. Power, everywhere yet elusive.