Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the kind of specific regional practice that has not commonly been covered in general surveys of modernist music: the interest in Balinese gamelan of a range of late twentieth-century composers in Quebec, including Gilles Tremblay, Claude Vivier, Jose Evangelista and John Rea. It also focuses on history, distinguishing between ‘“music History (capital H)” and “music history (small h)” – taking the former to mean an approach rooted in some notion of universal historical laws, and the latter an approach driven by relations to contingent, particular historical events’, and associating the former primarily with Adorno and the latter with Taruskin. The book explains the reflection on the places and displacements of musical modernism, arguing that the alienation often associated with modernism can be seen to be intimately connected with the experience of exile shared by many of its protagonists.