ABSTRACT
As a composer, comparative musicologist, and performer, Béla Bartók was a virtuosic listener across cultural borders. He offered a model for those interested in cross-cultural exploration, and his viewpoints are echoed by composers ranging from American minimalists (Steve Reich) to “New Wave” Chinese composers (Chen Yi and Tan Dun). Bartók’s career also proved a stimulus for a more global outlook in music history pedagogy, including for a course on twentieth-century musical globalization that has been offered at Williams College over the past quarter century by the author: “Music in History III: Musics of the Twentieth Century.” Bartók’s career prompts us to ask how might our approach to “world music,” and to music history more generally, become transnationally historical? Both the inspirational example of Bartók’s work and the problems inherent in his somewhat ahistorical approach to world music resonate with this course. In addition to discussing the goals of globalized music history pedagogy, this chapter considers a case study: Bartók’s comparative musicological study of North African Arab folk music in the region of Biskra, Algeria, in 1913, and his subsequent writings on this music, which illustrate some of the perils inherent in any globalized historical study.
