Editorial: Musicology at the Global Front Lines

Abstract

We’ve been here before, musicologists facing historical moments of global proportions. Such moments, the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, for instance, alter the lives of individual scholars, and they lead to responses across an entire field, such as those rerouting the history of the International Musicological Society (IMS). These are the moments of conflict and violence, of the political and cultural realignments that divided the world into East and West in the twentieth century, and opened an even greater gap of inequality between North and South in the twenty-first century. The competition for scarce resources, the tragic journeys of refugees, the plight of those in want, all these define the global front lines, and each dramatically transforms global musical landscapes, past, present, and future.