1. Global History, Musical Modernity, and the Globalization of Western Music

The world-wide facility of communication has allowed the wind of Western civilization to blow into the East [...] still, to anyone who has seen with his eyes the present state of world affairs and knows its [i.e. resistance’s] actual impossibility there can be no other policy than to move on with the rest of the world and join them in dipping into the sea of civilization, joining them in creating the waves of civilization, and joining them in the pains and joys of civilization.¹

The people of India, Africa, and China all love Mozart – is this not remarkable? How has Classical music spread so widely throughout the world? How was classical music able to become the global standard? [...] The music we listen to, whether rock, pop, or kayōkyoku, are in fact hybrid genres, born from the principles of harmony (chord progression) brought forth by Western classical music, as well as from rhythms that developed from their African origins. If Japanese emotions (jōcho) are added to this harmony and rhythm, they become enka and J-pop; if Korean emotions are added, they become K-pop. And on the American continent, travelling up North, they became jazz, while travelling down South they became tango.2

Fukuzawa’s words illustrate that, whatever criticisms scholars today level at concepts of modernity and progress, for an intellectual writing in Japan in the late nineteenth century the case was clear: Western civilization was the way to go; resistance was not an option. Western music was part of what we might call the ‘civilization package’, and the spread of music can thus be linked to Western imperialism and dominance. On the other hand, no one forced the Japanese (or other non-Western peoples) to adopt Western music, much less European art music, to the extent they did. So it is legitimate to ask whether something in the music itself encouraged its worldwide adoption.

Saegusa (b. 1942), a composer whose works include operas with Japanese themes, introduced his book (it has the English subtitle Astonishing Classical Music) by noting the omnipresence and prestige of music that originated in Europe and outlined what he called the ‘three great achievements’ of (European) classical music: staff notation, harmony, and ‘an attitude of “progress” that continuously demands renewal’.3 Harmony relates to the music itself, while notation is a practice that is fundamental to European art music. To what extent the ‘attitude of progress’ can be heard in the music itself must remain open to question. However one chooses to answer, classical music came to be closely associated with modern times and was perceived as desirable for that reason.

Geopolitics, musical practices, and musical characteristics contributed to the global reach of Western music, and if we treat global history as the history of increasing global integration, we might describe music as a major integrating force. 4 The concept of integration implies that the different parts of the world are interconnected and that events in one part of the world are likely to have an effect on other parts of the world. Whether or not connections and transnational movements of people, objects, ideas, and institutions, even on a global scale, have significant effects on the societies involved, depends on the overall geopolitical environment in which they happen.5 The case of music in Japan illustrates this point very well. Western music was first brought to Japan in the sixteenth century, when it was taught to Japanese by Jesuit missionaries. But the early encounter ultimately left no lasting traces. The well-known story of the hidden Christians and their sung liturgy, also mentioned by Saegusa, does not fundamentally alter this fact.6 The main reason for this is that, by around 1600, political and military leaders who were aiming to unify the country had good reasons to keep the Western intruders at bay, which was largely achieved with the suppression of Christianity and the shogunate’s seclusion policy. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the geopolitical situation in East Asia had changed completely. The power of China was in decline: although it escaped colonization, it was unable to resist heavy foreign encroachment. Foreign ships increasingly appeared on Japan’s shores, and in 1853 Commodore Perry forced Japan to conclude the first of the ‘unequal treaties’, precipitating the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Meiji government then embarked on a course of reform, and their first priority was to resist Western imperialism and, crucially, to be accepted as an equal to the great powers. Thus, three hundred years after the first encounter with Western culture, the government had good reasons not only to tolerate but to embrace much of it, including music.

Global Modernity

Japan’s course of pursuing Western-style modernization, including the adoption of Western music, took place in the context of global developments from the mid-nineteenth century: Western expansion, global integration, and state-building.7 The reforms enacted by the Meiji government and the resulting political, economic, social, and cultural transformations have often been described as ‘modernization’, a concept originally developed with reference to Europe. Although problematic when applied to other parts of the world and much criticized, it has proved hard to avoid (resorting to ‘modern’ or ‘modernity’ hardly solves the problem of Eurocentric bias) and has found its defenders, albeit with more modest claims.8 Modernity can be usefully defined as ‘a condition, historically produced over three centuries around the globe in processes of change that have not ended yet’. The modern ‘possesses commonalities across time and space’.⁹ Commonalities include the nation state, the call for national political participation, major social shifts, major changes in values, and ‘global forces of capitalism and industrialization’, as well as ‘incorporation into the reigning geopolitical world order’ and experience of tensions between global and the local.10 The different types of interplay between these global commonalities and local specifics, including differences in timing, mean that modernity is experienced in significantly diverse ways across the globe. In order to recognize the modern in its many different forms, we need to examine individual cultures closely, so that we do not end up regarding cultural differences as ‘evidence of stunted modernity’.¹¹ In other words, although many elements that are regarded as characteristic of modernity historically originated in the West, we must not fall into the trap of assuming modernity is intrinsically Western or that modernization is the same as Westernization.¹² Instead, we must train ourselves to recognize innovation that is not immediately derived from Western influences.¹³ In Japan, for example, culture and society had begun to transform and develop characteristics associated with modern times before its enforced opening to the West. In Tokyo (then still named Edo) and other cities a consumer culture emerged. As a result, when, for example, the Meiji government abolished the monopolies protecting certain groups of musicians and their genres, the more enterprising found a receptive audience for their art among the townspeople. Increased mobility, both social and geographical, provided the possibility of disseminating regional genres, such as the Satsuma-style of biwa14 performance, nationwide. The adoption by the government of Western music did ultimately affect the traditional musics of Japan, but innovation in these genres and their successful adaptation to the changing conditions was not a direct result of Westernization.¹⁵

The different forms modernity takes in different times and places result from the ‘plurality of pasts’ and the ‘plurality of futures’16 or, in other words, the variations in ‘preexisting conditions’ and ‘available modernities’.¹⁷ For Japan, at the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Western expansion in East Asia, as well as the political, economic, and social conditions of the Tokugawa system of rule represented these ‘preexisting conditions’.18 While some of these can, with hindsight, be regarded as having been conducive to modernization, it is important to note that the leaders of Meiji Japan did not deliberately seek to build on Japan’s legacy, at least not its most recent legacy.¹⁹ The ‘preexisting conditions’ determine what choices are available at the conjunction of a society’s history when ‘modernization’ is on the agenda. The same applies to ‘available modernities’. The version of modernity aspired to by Meiji Japanese was known to them as ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika) modelled by Western countries (Ō-Bei shokoku or ‘the countries of Europe and America’), which they understood to be to a greater or lesser degree ahead of them on a universal ladder towards progress.20

In other words, leading intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi did in fact perceive a single, universal modernity. For him, as for other intellectual and political leaders, ‘an aspiration to be “up with the times”’21 was certainly an essential ingredient of being modern, and modernization was thus also the ‘adaptation to the contemporary situation.’²² Likewise, the global dimension of modernity was obvious to Fukuzawa and others. It was the outside world encroaching on Japan that forced the Tokugawa shogunate to abandon its isolation policy, precipitating the collapse of the regime and the establishment of the Meiji government. The new leaders, at both national and local levels, saw from the start the need to act within a global context. The pledge in the Imperial Oath of 1868 that ‘knowledge shall be sought from all the countries of the world’ found its remarkable expression in 1871, when half of the new government, which had only just managed to secure control over the entire country, embarked on the Iwakura Embassy which took the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, four vice-ambassadors and an entourage of nearly one hundred men, over a period of twenty-one months, to twelve countries as well as to every major sea port between Marseilles and Nagasaki.23

Meanwhile, in the remote prefecture of Kashiwazaki (soon to be absorbed into Niigata Prefecture), in the spring of 1873, the Deputy Councillor, in a public notification to all village headmen concerning the ‘Control of Customs during the Spring and Autumn Festivities’, condemned young people’s dancing together, pointed out the government’s efforts ‘for our country to hold its own among the countries of the world (bankoku to gotaiji)’²⁴ and that Japan must not be put to shame by those countries (bankoku no chijoku o ukuru).²⁵ And when Shikama Totsuji (1859-1928) founded the first journal dedicated to music, Ongaku zasshi, in 1890, the additional English title, ‘The Musical Magazine’, on the cover signalled clearly that he too had his eyes on the world beyond Japan. These examples show that local actors in Japan (as elsewhere) were conscious of being caught up in global trends.26 The speed of global interaction increased dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century with the development of the railway, steamships, and the telegraph. Likewise, ‘ideas of modernity–progress, science, and rationality–meant a great deal to the Japanese themselves from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the recent past.’27

‘Modernity’ is nevertheless likely to remain a contested term, and never more so than when it is applied to music. Efforts to ‘provincialize’ Europe have been combined with attempts at ‘decentring musical modernity’.28 While it is certainly important to recognize and study developments that challenge Eurocentrism in music history and the sharp distinctions between ‘the West and the rest’, no amount of decentring can deny the global impact of music that originated in Europe, including European art music, in modern times. Increasing and accelerating global integration is one of the defining characteristics of modernity and can also be observed in relation to music.

Musical Modernity

Musical modernity is, however, about more than the global spread of Western music. The term can be applied to describe both the music itself and the changing characteristics and conditions of music-making. The first is more difficult to define than the second, and to do so requires considerable expertise in musicology as well as history. Max Weber (1864–1920) was the first to attempt a definition of the entity we call (European) art music from a comparative perspective. He developed a theory of musical rationalization, based on his understanding of rationalization as a defining characteristic of modernity.29 According to Weber, music as a cultural complex comprises four major elements: the material logic of tone production and its systematization in the form of a tonal musical language; the application of this language in the creative process of composing individual musical works; the meanings ascribed to these works by musicians and their audiences; finally, the institutional organization of musical life. He then attempted to identify what made the West and its music unique, while avoiding the kind of Eurocentrism that would elevate art music of Europe above all other music. His work was based on the latest research in acoustics, musicology, and ethnomusicology.30 Although he attempted to identify cross-cultural commonalities, he concluded that European art music represented an outstanding case of rationalization, evinced in the development of the tonal system and its standardization through equal temperament embodied in the mechanics of the piano, the notation system, and the rules of composing polyphonic works. The tonal language, as Weber knew from the works of acousticians and musicologists of his time, is based on scientific observation, even if the reverence for masterpieces by genius composers is, as Weber knew equally well, a result of social construction. Its basis in scientific facts (facts that cannot be explained away with postmodern or postcolonial theory) was one of the characteristics that contributed to its image of being modern, and was certainly a major reason for Japanese reformers such as Isawa Shūji to privilege Western music.

A different approach to the question of musical modernity in European art music is presented by the musicologist Julian Johnson in Out of Time. Johnson argues that it extends over the 400-year period that is marked by Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the beginning of the seventeenth century and Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus towards the end of the twentieth. The recurrence of motifs from the Orpheus myth throughout this period is just one example of the continuities Johnson identifies in the music of the last 400 years: continuities that conventional periodization into epochs and styles tends to obscure. Johnson argues that rather than a linear development, comparable to a train line, the history of music might be likened to a map of the London underground; in this way one might account for the several seemingly contradicting currents in the nineteenth century.31 Johnson’s overall argument is that music does not merely reflect the fundamental differentiations and tensions of the modern experience, but that in exploring them it has also reshaped them and by doing so helped shape modernity itself: ‘music is entwined with the making of modernity’.32 He demonstrates his point by examining a wealth of European art music from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries and discussing music’s exploration of time and space and music’s relationship with language: music is both like a language and quite different, characterized by sound that is both produced and listened to by the physical actions and through the bodies of performers and their instruments and listeners.

A long-term perspective on modernity emphasizing continuities across the conventional style periods does not mean that they are irrelevant. It merely means that musical modernity ‘led to a constant transformation and destabilization of the foundations of music’ well before the mid-nineteenth century,33 even while significant commonalities across time remained. Indeed, in Out of Time, transformation in musical styles is not ignored, but related to developments in literature, scientific advances, social changes, and cultural trends. For example, the completion of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in 1804, described by Richard Wagner as the beginning of musical modernity, coincided with the first steam locomotive train, built by Richard Trevithick in Wales; the coincidence has been noted by several observers. While the two events are not directly connected, Johnson argues that the dynamism of train travel experienced by the public a few decades into the nineteenth century ‘had already been prefigured in music by about half a century. Music thus articulated a new sensibility of time which the railway later realized’.34 The railway was a major symbol of modernity worldwide. In Japan, from 1900, it was celebrated by so-called railway songs. Beethoven, meanwhile, was revered as ‘the sage of music’ even before his symphonic music could be heard. The first railway line was already in operation by the end of 1871, while the first performance of the Eroica by a Japanese full symphony orchestra did not take place until 1924.35

Johnson does not discuss European art music in relation to other musics, but he outlined his view of what makes it unique in an earlier work intended for a wider audience, Who Needs Classical Music? As he himself noted, several other authors published books in defence of ‘Classical music’ at the beginning of the new millennium.36 They seemed to be driven by a sense of crisis that, while not new, appeared to have become even more acute, and argued, albeit in different ways, that classical music can offer an experience not gained from popular music to those who make the required effort to listen.37

In Japan too, the place of (Western) classical music was a subject of debate, although from a different angle: its dominant position in Japan’s cultural life and in particular in the education system at the expense of Japan’s traditional music had begun to be challenged. In 2002, the Ministry of Education (MEXT) published new guidelines, which for the first time stipulated that playing a Japanese musical instrument would become a compulsory component of music education in public schools.38 Likewise in 2002, two books by musicologists presented a critical evaluation of the history of Western music in modern Japan. Aikawa Yumi, a singer and musicologist, in her book ‘Enka’ no susume (An encouragement of ‘enka’―a type of popular song that originated in the late 1920s and is regarded as quintessentially Japanese), diagnosed a ‘Western music complex’ as a result of Japan’s music education.39 Watanabe Hiroshi challenged contemporary misconceptions about both Western and traditional Japanese music. He drew attention to the interaction between them and highlighted the different forms musical modernity took in the Kansai region, in contrast to Tokyo.40 And in Doremi o eranda Nihonjin (When the Japanese chose ‘do re mi’), published in 2007, Chiba Yūko, a musicologist specializing in Japanese music, presented a history of what she called the ‘dual structure’ of music in Japan. Highlighting the impact of Western music on indigenous music and on the musical perceptions of the Japanese, Chiba too identified a Japanese ‘complex’ in the face of Western music.41 Although different on the face of it, the two trends―the perceived crisis of classical music noted by writers in Europe and North America, and the unease expressed by Japanese about the overwhelming dominance of that same music and the resulting neglect of Japanese traditional music―may well be regarded as reactions to global trends in music, including the blurring of boundaries between Western and non-Western, or classical and popular music.

While it seems reasonable to assume that European art music has characteristics that marked it as ‘modern’ and therefore made it attractive to non-Western societies aspiring to modernity, there remain two problems with this assumption. First, few of these characteristics are likely to register with an audience to whom it is completely unfamiliar. Second, European art music was not the only Western music that was globalized; its impact, at least initially, was comparatively limited. In fact, the very category of ‘classical music’ is a modern invention.42 The creation of this category involved establishing and cultivating a canon, or repertoire of works, often by dead composers, that were considered timeless, although this involved a value judgment that was very much of its time. The expressive aesthetic and the importance of individuality and originality were treated as axiomatic and were accepted as such by musicians working in the tradition of ‘great’ classical composers.⁴³

We are on much firmer ground when we attempt to define the modern in relation to the context of music-related activities, including performance. Western music was modern, because it was performed in modern settings and for modern purposes. ‘Places and spaces’, as well as ‘purpose’, are two of five areas where, according to Tim Blanning, a historian of early modern and modern Europe, music benefited more than any other art from major transformations between 1700 and the present day. The other three are status, technology, and liberation.44 Blanning’s account centres on Europe and the Western world, but the areas that he highlights can usefully serve as a basis for examining non-Western cases.

Modernity brought new purposes for music, while old functions, including religious worship, affirmation and representation of power, and recreation and entertainment, remained significant. The power that was represented could and did change: new institutions and modern ceremonies required appropriate music, such as military bands playing at political and diplomatic ceremonies.45 Military bands also played for public entertainment. Indeed, military music was often the first Western music that people in other cultures encountered, and anyway, the boundaries between European art music and military music are at best fluid: military bands played arrangements from operas, and musical elements of marches are common in symphonic music.46

A new development in (early) modern Europe that spread to other parts of the world was the institution of the public concert, open to anyone who could afford a ticket. Music performed at concerts was enjoyed for its own sake and involved a new kind of listening, in which performers and audience were clearly distinguished from each other.47 The public concert, particularly the symphonic concert, required a new kind of space in the form of the purpose-built concert hall. Like other modern ‘places and spaces’, the concert hall was an urban space, catering to the demands of the increasing populations of cities. The symphony, a central genre of musical modernity, is an urban phenomenon by definition and depends on an orchestra, a substantial paying audience, and a large hall, all of which are only available in cities.48 In smaller towns, concerts had to be held in venues intended for other purposes, and performers were most often amateurs.49

Even in the major cities, however, not all performance spaces were temples of high art. The majority of the urban middle classes craved lighter fare, and represented a growing market for commercial entrepreneurs, who staged big concerts in large halls offering programmes that mixed demanding works with more accessible pieces of various orchestral genres. Dance venues, another musical space, also reflected social hierarchies with the more exclusive venues only open to the upper classes. Dances were increasingly standardized, and in the early twentieth century large dance halls attracted huge and diverse audiences. For the working classes unable to afford opera and concert tickets, the music hall became a major space for enjoying music. An extension of traditional performance spaces in pubs, inns, and coffee houses, music hall performances featured opera extracts, burlesque, and songs of various types ranging from patriotic to sentimental to comic, with catchy tunes.50

The public concert provided new opportunities for composers and performers.51 While this did not necessarily result in a higher status for musicians―dependence on an aristocratic patron came to be replaced by other kinds of dependency―it did allow more freedom and independence, especially for musicians with entrepreneurial flair. A significant transformation of the musician’s status was the development of musical professions in line with other middle-class professions, with the establishment of conservatoires providing training and accreditation in composition and performance, as well as in teaching.52 In Germany, the first conservatoire was established in Leipzig in 1843 and offered a broad curriculum of theoretical and practical subjects, with members of the Gewandhaus Orchestra teaching orchestral instruments.53 The number of conservatoires increased over the next decades.

The new professions were open to men only. Women, although admitted to conservatoires, were systematically excluded from the professions, apart from teaching. Those who did perform for a living tended to come from the ‘artist-musician class’ and from families where women’s employment was taken for granted.54 Women from the aristocracy or the educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum) might be trained to professional level, but their music-making was limited to the home or, possibly, charity concerts. A woman’s supposedly natural role was that of a housewife, mother, and, on occasion, the inspiring muse to her artist husband. The new romantic ethos, moreover, not only defined the artist creator and genius as male, but even the music itself was defined as masculine.55 In Japan, the situation was different, at least initially, because the male elite regarded music-making as an inappropriate occupation for men.

Technology revolutionized the performance and reception of music in direct and indirect ways. Railways and, later, steamships enabled musicians, traditionally an itinerant group in many societies, to travel further and with more ease and enabled the phenomenon of the travelling virtuoso. Means of mass-production (whether a result of technology, organization, or economy of scale) brought the prices of musical instruments down, making them affordable for more people. Technical improvements to instruments, such as adding valves to brass instruments, increased the scope of what could be played on them, and also made them easier to learn. The technical changes to brass instruments, together with lower prices, made possible the proliferation of amateur brass bands.56 Two instrumental technologies in particular were ‘central to the development of musical modernity’: the orchestra and the piano. The orchestra, in the form of the ‘specifically symphonic orchestra’, displayed the latest instrument technology (woodwind with keys, an expanded section of brass instruments with valves), as well as the working together of individual parts as in an industrial machine, or the division of labour in a modern factory. The resulting sound fit the Romantic category of the sublime.57

The development of the piano into a robust and loud instrument that could fill the new, large venues and hold its own against a full symphony orchestra, promoted its entry into the new concert halls, while its versatility, its pleasing sound even when played by the unskilled, and its affordable price made it the instrument of choice for middle-class homes. Meanwhile, another keyboard instrument, the reed organ or harmonium, besides rivalling the piano in the home, was widely played in small churches, village halls, and schools.58 More affordable and easier to tune and maintain than a piano, it was, moreover, widely disseminated overseas, chiefly by missionaries. In Japan, reed organs were produced domestically and sold nationwide from the 1880s.

Technical improvements to the piano and lower prices transformed music-making in many ways.59 But Liszt certainly put his finger on one vital capability of the piano when he remarked that, ‘[t]hrough its mediation, works can be broadcast that otherwise would remain unknown, due to the difficulties of assembling a full orchestra.’⁶⁰ Before the advent of recording technology, piano arrangements (together with arrangements for small ensembles) were the only way of hearing operas and symphonic works in remoter parts of the country, or overseas. When the first performance of a European opera in Japan―Gluck’s Orpheus61―was staged in 1903, the piano replaced the orchestra.

Audio technology, although first invented in the nineteenth century, did not have a major impact until the twentieth century, when gramophone recordings could be made and sold in large quantities. Then, however, it fundamentally changed the practice of music. Recorded performances made it possible to separate the music from the performer and bring it to places where it would otherwise not be heard, thus making a wider range of music accessible to more people. Radio broadcasting, whether live or with pre-recorded music, increased accessibility even further. Recordings widened the audience for classical music in both Western and non-Western countries and thus contributed significantly to its globalization, but also to the ‘ossification’ of the classical canon.62 Recordings also introduced new music. Jazz, for example, which came into being at around the same time as large-scale commercial recording, owed much of its worldwide dissemination and popularity to the new medium. Recording companies moreover played a role in popularizing music that was produced to suit the medium, namely the popular song.63

Recording technology also made it possible to collect and archive performance-based musics that did not rely on a written score, including music of the ‘folk’ at home, and that of other cultures, and thus revolutionized both folk music research and ethnomusicology.64 In Japan, Tanabe Hisao (1883–1984), one of the founders of Japanese ethnomusicology, collected recordings both within Japan and in the territories of the expanding Japanese colonial empire, and played a major part in defining hōgaku (Japanese indigenous music) but also tōa ongaku and tōyō ongaku (East Asian music and Oriental music).65 Meanwhile, collecting the music of the ‘folk’ with the aid of sound recordings lent impetus to musical nationalism; perhaps most famously demonstrated by Béla Bartòk (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) whose collections of folk music provided material for their nationalist and modernist compositions and made them ‘national cultural heroes’ in their home country.66

Nationalism, including musical nationalism, predated the modern nation state. In Europe, nationalism emerged as a liberating, revolutionary, and democratic force during the wars following the French Revolution and fuelled the movements for unification in Italy and Germany. Blanning treats it in the context of ‘liberation’. He argues that music played a decisive part in forming the imagined communities that, according to Benedict Anderson, represented the indispensable foundation of nation states.67 One example is national and transnational travel to amateur music festivals, including large choral meetings. Enabled by modern transport, travelling helped participants to develop both a sense of nation and an awareness of being part of a world of nations.68

Once authoritarian rulers aligned themselves with the idea of the nation, however, nationalism’s liberating potential gave way to more repressive forms―for example, in the unified German Empire after 1871, or in Japan at around the same time. But whether state-led or not, music represented an important vehicle to promote a sense of community and national destiny, and the belief that a nation had to have its own national music persisted. National anthems and songs, and military music, featured prominently in the ceremonies and in mass traditions of nation states.

The Globalization of Western Music

Nations exist in a world of nations, that is, in relation to each other. The concept of the nation state originated in Europe, and began to gain worldwide currency as an ideal in the late nineteenth century, although the nation state did not become the dominant state form until well into the twentieth century. The growth of nationalism was accompanied by the dissemination of European art music. While not the only form of Western music with a global reach, it played a major role in the construction of national music traditions worldwide. This is particularly true of the theoretical concepts and practices associated with it. The trend towards standardization identified by Max Weber helped pave the way for the globalization of equal temperament tuning and modern functional harmony along with Western music.69

Elite music reformers in Japan and around the globe established modern institutions for music education, rationalized music theory, collected local music and transcribed it in staff notation or indigenous notation systems modified with reference to Western ones, defined canonical repertoire, published music manuals and books for self-instruction, and organized concerts and conferences.70 The fact that European art music was globalized in the context of European expansion does not, however, mean that it was necessarily linked to colonial rule.71 Comparing the influence of Western music on the development of music to represent the nation in non-Western countries, Bob van der Linden speaks of a continuum ‘between the two extremist poles of the adoption of Western music and simultaneous neglect of indigenous music (Japan), and the rejection of Western music but modernization of high-cultural traditional music (India)’.72 Given that India was a British colony and Japan was never colonized but, on the contrary, became a colonial power itself, it should be clear that colonial expansion cannot be more than part of any explanation for the globalization of European art music and Western musical idiom.

On the other hand, even in India, musical reformers referred to Western ideas about music to ‘systematize their own music traditions scientifically’ and adopted a Western-style distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘non-classical’ music’.73 They studied Western Orientalist and musicological writings on Indian music, as well as works on European music and musicology. The creation of modern institutions was likewise inspired by Western models. Some Indian musical traditions even adopted Western instruments: the violin into Carnatic music, and the harmonium.74 This is in marked contrast to Japan, where, ultimately, no Western musical instrument found a place in any of the traditional genres before the explorations of new, blended, musical forms from the late twentieth century.

In Muslim countries from Central Asia to Morocco, there existed a shared elite music culture, which, during the period of the Ottoman Empire, was influenced by the performance of musicians who travelled between the different courts.75 Initiatives to reform and modernize music with reference to Western models took off in the early twentieth century, with the first Congress on Arab Music in Cairo in 1932 representing a major landmark for Arab music. Ultimately, however, Western art music did not come to play a dominant role in the musical life of the participating countries. In the Ottoman Empire, musical reform following Western models began as early as the end of the eighteenth century, under Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and continued under his successor Mahmut II (r. 1808–39). Borrowing from Europe continued into the twentieth century, by which time Japan as well as Europe served as a model.76 After the end of the Ottoman Empire, the radical reforms under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk included music, and efforts were made to establish European art music. But ultimately it did not gain ground among the masses. As of the early 1970s it was ‘governmentally sanctioned and supported as the price for being accepted in the international community of nations’. A few European-trained musicians and composers had gained international recognition. But the masses ‘detested’ it, and even the educated, urban elite merely ‘tolerated’ it.77

In the Americas, the situation of Western music was different in that the musics of the indigenous peoples were marginalized in the face of massive immigration from Europe. In North America (which will be treated in more detail in the following chapter), music from Europe dominated, reflecting the dominance of European immigrants. These immigrants, however, brought with them a variety of musics, and it is wrong to take the high prestige of European art music and its dominance as given.

In Mexico and South America, European art music remained the focus of the European elites, who ‘invented European military music, Italian-opera-inspired anthems, and classical music with vernacular references as national music’.78 Meanwhile, the musics that came to represent Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, and Mexico were popular genres that developed in the context of slavery and the intermingling of races, and were strongly influenced by African rhythms.⁷⁹

In the countries of Northeast Asia, China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, Western music represented a significant element of the modernization that advocates of reform envisaged when they propagated modernization and national strengthening from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. While the threat from the Western powers motivated the reforms, none of these countries was colonized by a Western power. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the foundations were laid for the much-noted presence of Western art music in these countries and of their musicians on the global stage during the second half of the twentieth century and subsequently. Japan, as the first Asian country to be transformed into a modern nation, went furthest in the adoption of Western music, including European art music. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, moreover, following the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895, Japan began to act as a disseminator of ‘colonial modernity’.80

China, like Japan, first encountered Western music through Christian missionaries in the early modern period, without the encounter having much significance for the dissemination of Western music in modern times.81 Until the encroachment into the region by the Western powers, the Chinese empire and its culture held a dominant place in the region. But by the late nineteenth century, Japan was well on its way to becoming a modern nation and, after defeating China in war in 1895, a model for successful modernization. The defeat, together with the collapsing domestic order during the last years of the Qing dynasty, increased the pressure for China to modernize. Reformers looked to Meiji Japan as well as to the West as their model. Educational reformers strove to create modern institutions following Western examples. Music was seen as a means to inspire the heart, cultivate character, and awaken and strengthen national sentiment. Thousands of Chinese students travelled to Japan. Among the reformers who studied music in Japan was Xiao Youmei, born in 1884 and known as ‘the father of music education in modern China’.82 In 1901, at the age of just sixteen, he went to Tokyo, where he studied at the Tokyo Academy of Music (Tōkyō Ongaku Gakkō) and later at Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to China in 1909. Three years later, he travelled to Germany where he studied music in Leipzig and Berlin, just as many Japanese students did, but foundations of his musical training were laid in Japan.

While Xiao Youmei studied at the state-sponsored Tokyo Academy of Music, many more studied at private colleges, particularly the Music College of the East (Tōyō Ongaku Gakkō), founded in 1907 by Suzuki Yonejirō (1868–1940). Just before founding the college, Suzuki had travelled to China to study the state of education there. Even before opening his college, Suzuki taught music to Chinese students at the hall of residence for Chinese students opened in Kanda in 1902. The students had their own music society, established in 1904. Suzuki opened his new college in the same neighbourhood.83 While the number of Chinese students who specialized in music may have been small, many more studied music as part of a teacher training course. Waseda University, for example, opened a teacher training department for Chinese students in 1905, and shōka (singing of Western-style songs for use in schools) was one of the subjects taught; the same was true of the (accelerated) teacher training department of the private girls’ school Jissen Jogakkō.84

In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the foundations for a new musical culture were established, and the period from 1919 to 1949 marked the creative breakthrough in the field of European art music in China.⁸⁵ Chinese intellectuals, starting with Cai Yuanpei, who in 1917 published an essay entitled ‘About replacing religion with aesthetic education’, saw music as a replacement for religion.86 European art music, particularly that of Beethoven, came to represent the highest ideals. The early promoters of European art music were scholars educated first in the Confucian tradition and then abroad, where they personally experienced Western-style musical culture. They perceived music as a means for education and social reform. From the late 1920s they were joined by musicians, either Western foreigners in China, or Chinese who had learnt musical instruments from them or had studied at mission schools.87 In 1927 the first public music college was established in Shanghai. The majority of its teachers in the first decades were foreigners. The choice to adopt Western music, however, owed much to the ideas and actions of strong Chinese individuals who believed that they could save the essence of Chinese culture by strengthening it with the help of Western techniques. Those who were trained musicians actively created a place for Western music in the midst of Chinese society.88

In Taiwan, too, missionaries were the first to introduce Western music. British Presbyterian missionaries came first to northern, then to southern Taiwan in the 1860s to spread their faith among the aborigines and they distributed hymn books. They were joined by Canadian Presbyterians from the 1870s. The missionaries also trained girls for Christian service and set up a school in 1884.89 When Taiwan became Japan’s first colony in 1895, the Japanese established a public education system with Western music as a school subject. Isawa Shūji (1851–1917), who had acted as the driving force behind the establishment of music education in Japanese schools, was appointed acting chief of the education bureau (gakumu bu), established in the civil department (minsei kyoku) of the government-general in May 1895. His tenure only lasted until July 1897, and his ambitious plans for education in Taiwan were only partly realized. Nevertheless, Isawa ‘had mapped out the direction for education in Taiwan’,90 including music education.

In Korea, efforts to modernize the country were made in the years following the enforced opening of the country in 1876 by Japan.91 They continued under Japanese dominance. The colonial government introduced a programme of reforms similar to that conducted in Japan, including a school curriculum with singing lessons, often taught by Japanese school teachers. Like the Japanese, Koreans embraced Western music, although initially they did not much like it, because they regarded it as part of the general reform package. The state school system was introduced in 1906, but, as in Japan, schools founded by missionaries played a major role in providing education. In Korea too, hymns and songs taught in school represented the first introduction to Western music for many people.

The capital, Seoul, offered more opportunities to hear Western music. In 1901, the German Franz Eckert was appointed to teach military music at the Korean court. Eckert, who had previously taught in Japan for twenty years (from 1879 to 1899), worked in Korea for fifteen years until his death in 1916.92 Under his baton, the military band gave weekly concerts in Pagoda Park, performing a repertoire that included arrangements of Classical and Romantic works as well as military music. A concert culture evolved in Seoul and the other larger cities. In the early twentieth century, gramophone recordings and radio broadcasting also did much to disseminate European art music. The Japanese composer Miyagi Michio (1894–1956) lived in Seoul during some of his formative years, where he enjoyed and benefited from new opportunities to attend concerts and listen to imported records. Although his works are in the traditional Japanese genre, it was while being exposed to Western music in Korea that he began to compose.93

As he had done in Japan, Eckert composed musical arrangements of local songs, including a folk song that became the basis for the pre-war Korean national anthem.94 Korean composers likewise re-arranged melodies as well as composing their own. Missionaries adapted the melodies of their hymns to the local tonal system and published new versions with Korean lyrics that took on the character of folk songs. In this way new hybrid genres of song emerged.

Traditional Korean music was discouraged and marginalized in the colonial period. This did not immediately change after liberation. Even Korean nationalists did not reject Western music. On the other hand, a nation state’s ideological legitimation lies in invoking tradition. Thus, as in Japan, European art music was promoted as part of modern culture, while selected genres of traditional music were promoted and protected as national heritage.95

Transnational Circulation in Northeast Asia

Although Japan became a dominant power in Northeast Asia and a model of successful modernization, the dissemination of Western music in the region happened in the midst of cultural flows in several directions. In the early twentieth century, Japan owed much of its success in assimilating Western music to impulses from the Asian continent. The growth of the symphony orchestra and the general rise in standards of music-making after the First World War can hardly be imagined without the cities of Harbin and Shanghai and their significant foreign populations as sites of encounter and cultural interaction, both between East Asia and Europe and within East Asia.

Harbin, sometimes known as the ‘St. Petersburg of the East’, had a distinctly Russian flavour as a result of the Russian treaty with China in 1896, which secured Russia a concession to build and operate a railway in northeast China. Russians in search of work and a living had settled there. After 1917 they were joined by Russian Jews and White Russians fleeing from the revolution, and by 1922 about a quarter of the population were Russians. Harbin had its own music academy and symphony orchestra, the China Eastern Railway Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1909.96

Even more significant as a city of musical encounters was Shanghai. After the Opium War, the International Settlement and the French Concession were established. Shanghai had a public band as early as 1879, which in the early twentieth century evolved into a full professional symphony orchestra under the Italian conductor Mario Paci. Like Harbin, Shanghai experienced an increase in its Russian population, even more so after Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931, when many Russians fled Harbin. The Russian refugees gave a considerable boost to the city’s musical life, both as musicians and as audience members. Japanese immigrants moved into the International Settlement from the 1920s. The Chinese population of Shanghai likewise increased as many fled from other parts of the country into the foreign concessions during the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), the Boxer Rebellion (1901), the fall of the Qing, the rule of the warlords, and during the Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945.97

Russian musicians, particularly from Harbin, played a major role in the formation of professional symphony orchestras in Japan, including the present-day NHK Orchestra.98 The Kansai region in particular benefited from Russian musicians who settled around Kobe and Osaka. Orchestral performance received a major boost when Emmanuel Metter (1878–1941), the conductor of the symphony orchestra in Harbin, was invited as a conductor of the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra and then the Kyoto University Orchestra in 1926.99 Under his baton, the latter became a major orchestra of the region. Among his students were the future conductor of the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra, Asahina Takashi (1908–2001) and the highly successful composer and arranger of popular music, Hattori Ryōichi (1907–1993). Both worked for a time on the Asian continent.

Osaka by the 1920s was an industrial metropolis with a growing, multi-ethnic population that included immigrants from Okinawa and Korea, and Shanghai significantly contributed to the distinctive musical developments in the Kansai region.100 Jazz in Japan received significant influences from Shanghai, which had become a veritable Asian jazz mecca. Many Japanese performed in the Shanghai International Settlement’s dance halls, restaurants, and jazz clubs: they were known as ‘Shanghai returnees’ (Shanhai-gaeri).101 A similar pattern can be discerned for tango.102

The dissemination and circulation of Western music in East Asia was facilitated by the technological innovations already mentioned: modern forms of transport, which enabled the increase in migration over long distances, and recording technology, which made music transportable independently of the travelling performer. The gramophone business was highly international from its beginnings, with major manufacturers dividing up the world market between them.103 South and East Asia, particularly the large populations of India and China, were then perceived as having huge potential. Once they recognized the local populations’ preference for their own music, the manufacturers sent recording engineers, who with the help of local intermediaries, recorded local performers. In September 1902 the Anglo-American Gramophone Co. sent the recording engineer Frederick Gaisberg (1873–1951) to Asia, accompanied by an assistant and a businessman. Over the next months they travelled to Colombo, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Rangoon and made hundreds of recordings (the finished records were manufactured in Germany). In 1904, Gramophone, together with Victor, published its first Chinese record catalogue. These early recordings (like those made in India) included popular artists who were regarded as disreputable. Their music, separated from its performers, moved into the houses of respectable society.104

Soon Western record companies were competing with each other, which resulted in lower prices. Japan also joined the competition, with a gramophone type named ‘Nipponophone’ that sold at prices well under those for similar European devices.105 During the First World War, Japanese manufacturers managed to take over market shares from European producers, just as they did for other products. Record companies, besides producing recordings in a wide range of musical genres, created musical styles specifically for mass consumption. After the First World War, Japanese record companies began to produce hits: popular songs in various, blended styles, which came to be known as ryūkōka.106 Recordings of popular music were exported to Japan’s colonies, including Taiwan from the late 1920s. In 1933 the Columbia Record Company of Japan set up an operation in Taiwan in order to record popular songs composed and performed by local artists to suit local tastes. As a result, local people had the chance ‘to link themselves to the global music/dance scene (albeit through the mediation of the Japanese colonial culture)’.107 Columbia also had operations in Korea, where Japanese popular songs were often covered in Korean.

In a rare reverse case, a Japanese-language cover of the Korean folk song Arirang became a hit throughout the region. In 1932 a musical arrangement by the famous singer Koga Masao was recorded by Columbia Japan in Seoul and sung as a duet by the Korean singer Hasegawa Ichirō (Ch’ae Kyuhwa) and the well-known Japanese singer Awaya Noriko. Victor Japan had already released its own Japanese-language cover version the previous year, and in 1933 Dynaphone Recording released a version of Arirang under its Kirin label.108 Arirang in fact enjoyed what Atkins has called a ‘dual career’: as a ‘Korean resistance anthem’ and a ‘Japanese pop hit’; as a national song, and as a ‘transnational pop song’ and an expression of colonial modernity.109 One might even add a third: during the Korean War, Arirang became a marching tune for the U.S. Army Seventh Infantry Division and is still performed at commemorative ceremonies.110 Today Arirang is regarded as a Korean national song, both in North and South Korea.

‘Western’ versus ‘Modern’

The transformations of the allegedly traditional folk song Arirang illustrate salient characteristics of musical modernity: the impact of Western music and the importance of music for fostering national sentiment, as well as a sense of living in a modern world of nations and different cultures. The lyrics of Japanese pop versions of the 1930s expressed emotions such as longing for lost love and home, just as many other Japanese pop songs did. But they also represented ‘a means for critique of modernity itself’ and its alienation of the Japanese from their own cultural heritage, as well as an ‘ethnographic lens’ through which to observe the perceived essence of the Korean psyche.111 The postcolonial history of Arirang in both Koreas illustrates the kind of streamlining and standardization that transform a folk song, the transmission of which is characterized by inconsistences and variants, into a national song. The most familiar lyrics of Arirang sung in Korea today refer to lost love and to Baekdu (or Paektu) mountain, a location of national cultural significance. Musically, most versions of the song heard today have more in common with modern sentimental popular songs in many other countries than with specifically Korean folk music: the use of Western instruments and harmonization demonstrate the influence of a Western musical aesthetic. Both the music and the discursive characteristics represent what might be described as a common ‘grammar’ of musical modernity, as does the prevalence of a de facto standard version (even if it exists side by side with other versions).112

The example of Arirang also reminds us that the term ‘Western music’ broadly covers two types of music that can no longer be regarded as ‘Western’ at all.113 One is the ‘global hybrid’ (Cook), including popular songs such as Arirang and the genres named by Saegusa (quoted earlier): rock, pop, kayōkyoku (a genre of Japanese popular song), K-pop, jazz, and tango. The other is the art music that originated in Europe, popularly known as ‘classical’, that served as a kind of gold standard for musical modernization worldwide.

Paradoxically, at the time when European dominance was at its height, opportunities to hear its most iconic products, operas and large symphonic works, performed as the composer wrote them (as opposed to various arrangements) were limited even within Europe, because until the wide availability of recorded music, these genres depended on the physical presence of a large group of competent performers. European art music’s enormous prestige was in part based on influential literary works, such as the writings of Romain Rolland.114 This prestige endures. Even in the twenty-first century―so far―the historian David Schoenbaum only slightly overstates his case when he observes, ‘When people join the modern world, their kids get piano and violin lessons’.¹¹⁵

Whatever the ‘modern’ elements of the music itself, Western music’s modern image was chiefly based on non-musical features. Arguably, it was the first music to benefit from modern innovations that originated in the West. The musical features themselves were less significant than the fact that they were presented to the world as a rational system, including staff notation, equal temperament, and other elements of standardization. Its tonal system, moreover, was claimed to be based on science. Above all, it was modern, because it was played in modern spaces and for modern purposes, as the case of Japan illustrates. The military served to defend the nation and to expand its borders, while at the same time uniting men from all social classes in one institution and imbuing them with a sense of national purpose. Universal schooling, too, served as a powerful unifying force and to transform the nation’s young into citizens. School auditoriums could also serve as concert venues. The concert, another modern institution imported from Europe, was potentially a shared space, where performers and composers of Western music, and performers and (performer-) composers of traditional musics could meet and their musical worlds could connect.116

The encounter with Western music, while certainly not the only impulse, transformed indigenous musical cultures in several ways.¹¹⁷ Modernizing indigenous music could take the form of standardizing intonation on the basis of equal temperament; publishing scores in staff notations or in indigenous notation modified with reference to it; rationalizing music theory, or subjecting it to Western performance practices. Modernizing could involve ‘classicizing’ indigenous music by defining a canonized repertoire, formalizing teaching, creating a sharp distinction between recognized specialists and amateurs, and treating it as absolute by separating it from its social context. Finally, where different musical traditions existed, indigenous music could be invented as a new category, bringing together previously separate musical worlds, as was the case with ‘Japanese music’ (hōgaku) in Japan. Thus, standards that originated in the West are no longer exclusively Western. Nor is European art music: it is particularly firmly established in East Asia.118

In one of the most powerful Western countries, on the other hand, the assimilation of European art music and the high prestige it was accorded were not a given: the United States of America’s musical history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is in several respects remarkably similar to that of Japan.