From Modernism, to Intercultural Exchange, and Transculturalism. New Challenges in Contemporary Music Making and Education

Abstract

Modernism allowed art decades of important psychological self regard that affirmed the individual but unfortunately created a hermeticism that disconnects art from our societies.Contemporary art is evolving not only beyond traditional tools and techniques but also beyond all classes which art is generated by specific people in a specific place.In the meantime, the rest of the world has caught up, and it is telling its stories unapologetically".It is this paragraph of the call for papers for the ICAPAS 2013 meeting that caught my attention, and I would like to develop some thoughts on the concepts that are outlined in it, from the perspective of a European scholar in music, namely in ethnomusicology, trying to consider new challenges that our academic system must face in coping with such new and meaningful scenario in music education, creation and performance.It is true that modernism allowed decades of important self-regard, as it is indicated in the quotation above.However, XX Century was also a period of closer cultural contact among various cultures of the world.In the domain of the arts we can detect some movements that arise in the framework of a colonial asset, in which Western culture "discovered" cultures and arts other than its own, and recurred to it in various forms, in order to reach beyond the limits of the XIX century romantic culture, and to develop a new language that could overcome those prevailing in XVII and XVIII century.In music, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, among others, turned their attention to sounds and compositions from different parts of the world, encompassing various "exotic" and structural elements in their work, and beginning to create new aesthetics that incorporated elements deriving from non-European cultures in their music, in order to go beyond the language of tonal harmony.It is a well-known process that was analyzed repeatedly in the past century.Among several other studies, I would like to mention here the writings of my Italian professor, Diego Carpitella, on the myth of primitivism in modern music (Carpitella 1961;1985).Among other things, Carpitella distinguishes exoticism practiced by composers in XIX Century from modernist

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