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

My proposed project is the first large-scale study of early global musical modernism at the turn of the twentieth century. 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 displays a long neglected transcultural modernist style that integrates the prevailing cosmopolitan and nationalist idioms, a quality which reflects the symphony’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’. The outcomes are expected to make a crucial methodological breakthrough for the study of musical modernism in a global context, where transcultural hybridisation of musical idioms is immanent.