Five Decolonial Narratives in Global Music History

Abstract

Turning Lyotard’s little narratives on its head, this essay references the universal of Euro North American colonialism in constructing a global music history course in which macro narratives provincialize Western music. While current global music history thinking in the global North tends to favor interconnection as a guiding principle, such an approach often fails to emphasize the underlying reason for such interconnectivities—Euro North American colonialism. Contrary to that toothless approach, this essay crafts macro narratives with the specific aim of underlining Euro North American colonialism that has led to Western-leaning music education on a global scale, including in wide swathes of Asia and Africa. In countering conventional Western music history as a real form of Euro North American colonialism with real world effects, the five macro narratives of this essay, following Garba and Sorentino (2020), are decolonial. The five narratives concern multiple antiquities, the global spread of Arabic music during the Islamic Golden Age (whereas Western music was largely confined to Europe), the Euro North American colonial destruction of the music of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, the global spread of Western music under Euro North American colonialism, and the existence of music histories distal from Euro North America and Australasia.