ABSTRACT
Western music, and modernist music in particular, is assumed to be universal, transcending its cultural and geographic origin. Musical culture, as practised and experienced by different people at specific times and in particular places, tends to be far more diverse and heterogeneous than a canonic history based primarily on stylistic innovation in composition. Traditional music histories tend to employ a mixture of the criteria and categories mentioned, typically in an informal but ideally judicious manner. The rationale was to establish to which musical culture the composer in question made the more substantial and sustained contribution. Turning to the East, the musician who introduced knowledge of serialism to Russia was Philip Herschkowitz, a Romanian-born student of Webern. The point layer of conservatoires, included in both maps, was intended to draw attention to some of the enabling conditions of musical modernism – musical modernity as it were.
