The compass revisited: Rewriting histories of music in the south

Abstract

The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either from the West or from the East. This has had to do with traditional and univestigated assumptions of divisions on religious and linguistic grounds, amongst others, and a lack of familiarity with the relevant literatures which it self derives in large part from a lack of familarity with the relevant languages. Thus, there has been very little comparison of aesthetics in the context of emerging or newly-established nations, and the vital and simultaneous investigation of modernism in those countries, that takes into account both the countries of the Mediterranean and of the Balkans, rather than viewing them as peripheries and discussing them almost exclusively in relation to a theoretical centre. In a number of recent publications and papers, I have aimed to break down some of the seborders precisely by confronting the question of tradition and modernism and bycomparing and contrasting the music of the Latin/ Roman Catholic South-West with that of the Slavic and Greek/Orthodox East, at the same time endeavouring todiscuss this problem in a very broad sense, which I believe to be necessary in establishing the groundwork for future investigation in this area. In this article I discuss this approach and examine the problems inherent in its implementation, given both the need for breadth of historical and geographical vision (i.e., denationalizing music histories) and for the avoidance of a musicology of cliché, born of ideology rather than unbiased curiosity.