Towards a Global Baroque

Unbinding Time, Temporality, and the “European” Tradition

Abstract

In this article I explore how the field of global music history can facilitate pedagogical spaces of decolonial praxis in higher education. Structured as a series of conceptual, curricular, and personal “unbindings,” I reflect on my own experiences with and modeling of a syllabus that works against the chronological conventions of the baroque. Sitting with Gary Tomlinson’s earlier call for “revisionist alternatives” to canonical histories of Western art music, I ask what is at stake, and especially for whom, in conceptualizing a global baroque that is transcultural, transregional, and transhistorical. Pushing against stylistic and periodizing universals, I argue that we must make room for a multiplicity of “baroques” that relink Indigenous agencies across and between time and space. This is arguably less about nominal inclusion in our classrooms and more about a restorative historiography that centers the peoples, practices, and places who have largely been un(der)represented as orchestrators (both literally and figuratively) of the baroque in music history curricula to date. Interfacing with an accompanying syllabus, I advocate for the utility of teaching through “keyholes” (be they people, musical “works,” or practices) that reveal global processes of (dis)integration, entanglement, and friction in individual lives both past and present. By approaching such regions as Beijing, Kolkata, Nagasaki, and San Ignacio de Moxos as baroque epicenters, the global baroque that emerges not only foregrounds Indigenous contributions to and ownership of its diverse musical traditions, but also invites students to understand their own relationship to the connected histories of these musics.