Music, Global History, and Postcoloniality

In the last decades the economic realities of globalization have stimulated within the social sciences a turn towards a new conception of global history that tries to explore the pre-histories of current globalization. Together with the advent of postcolonial theory this implies also a challenge for the concepts of music history still in use by the pertinent disciplines. Starting with a reconsideration of recent discussions within ethnomusicology on world music and globalization, this essay tries to sketch the possibilities of a 'historical turn' for a new kind of cosmopolitan musicology by contextualizing ethnomusicology with respect to its historic source, the "objectivation of music" initiated by Herrmann von Helmholtz.