Diasporas and Global Musical Networks: Jewish Perspectives

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, still present in our lives as I carve these lines, dictates not only daily routines but also scholarly concerns. Thus, global musical networks, the subject of this essay, should be a pertinent concern for musicologists today more than ever before. If we needed a tangible proof of human interdependence at a global level, then this boundless health crisis showed the full extent to which human civilization is hyper-connected. However, one should not turn the idea of connectivity into an exclusively modern phenomenon. Humans interacted with each other from the dawn of evolution. What changed in our times is simply the intensity of such interdependence generated by new transportation and information flow technologies. Music is not immune to such transformative processes. Therefore, human connectivity is also an essential ingredient of a global vision of history and of music history in particular. Music studies are relatively latecomers to the idea of global history as a conceptual framework of research but not in practice, as I shall comment on a moment. The establishment of a Study Group at ICTM dedicated to a global history of music is a response to a new paradigm in the ‘economy of historical knowledge’, namely, how we speak and write about music history.1 Yet, many members of ICTM have been addressing music history from global perspectives ever since its establishment in 1947 without profiling what they did by this name. Therefore, before addressing the concept at the center of this paper, diaspora and its pertinence to global music history, some brief remarks on global history in general are called for.