Decentering Musical Modernity

This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and East Asia. Through contributions by both European and East Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while being attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in East Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.

Tobias Janz, born in 1974, is full professor and director of the Department of Musicology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany. He is also editor of the journal Musik & Ästhetik. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the dramaturgy of orchestral sound in Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen and published his second monograph Zur Genealogie der musikalischen Moderne in 2014. His research interests include music history from the 17th to the 21th century, music aesthetics, and music theory. ChienChang Yang is associate professor and director of the Graduate Institute of Musicology of the National Taiwan University. He earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2002 with the dissertation 'Music as Knowledge: The Foundation of German Musikwissenschaft and Hugo Riemann's Theory of Listening' which received a research grant support from the DAAD and the Chiang Chingkuo Foundation. His research areas include the intellectual history of music, critical theory, music historiography, and issues related to musical modernity.