4. Modernist Reception of Japanese and Indian Traditional Music between 1910 and 1945: Delage, Cowell, Mitsukuri, and Hayasaka

Abstract

lies the basic problem of musical localism as a whole: on the one hand, composing as an act of cultural or intercultural positioning seems more plausible the more specific it becomes, and the more precisely art takes certain local traditions seriously, with all their implications, and draws comprehensive compositional conclusions from them. On the other hand, such a rigorous restriction of the musical-idiomatic “listening field” – as becomes very clear in Tan Dun’s Nine Songs – risks approaching imitation, a culture-specific onesidedness and – in an international context – a f lirtation with one’s own exoticism: self-exoticization.186 In this context, however, it should be noted that since 1986, Tan Dun’s works have been produced in the United States and are primarily aimed at Western audiences – even though they have been no less successful in China – and that Guo Wenjing’s and Qu Xiaosong’s larger works in the 1990s have likewise been predominantly performed in Europe and the USA. This paradox makes it clear once again that musical traditions – art music and local music genres – are in a constant process of transformation and do not produce immutable “authentic objects,” so that any compositional action inevitably decontextualizes such traditions. Every musical or compositional act will therefore operate, consciously or unconsciously, within this tension field – whether concrete local traditions are explicitly addressed or not. Both extremes that can be deduced from this are problematic: the notion of an “absolute authenticity” of local music, which must not be touched by art music, as well as the image of a “hypercultural” supermarket that music creators can freely navigate. Only compositional designs that completely transform these extremes through variety and precision of compositional ideas and solutions can attempt to outstrip the ideological accents of the local – especially in view of the resurgent nationalism in Asia today, especially in China (and in parts of Europe and the Americas), and its demagogically leveling construction of national characteristics. Effectively rejecting nationalist or provincial discourses involves an artistically substantive reference to local identities as refracted, pluralistic, and critical. The final statement in Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music is rather topical in this regard: “Perhaps that art alone would be authentic that would be liberated from the idea of authenticity, of being thus and not otherwise.”187