ABSTRACT
It has been widely believed that, at least until the twentieth century, the rate of musical change in Asia has been extremely slow. Western music histories have tended to place nonWestern music at the beginning of a chronological history in the “Ancient and Oriental” category, assuming that even living “Oriental” music had changed little since “Ancient” times. But even from current knowledge of Asian musical histories (knowledge that remains limited in important ways), we can surmise that change was always a factor, and when calamity struck, as when a population was carried off to a conqueror’s kingdom, radical change could and did occur. From a closer perspective, however, we can see that indisputably from 1900 to the present has been an age of nearly cataclysmic change, much of it stimulated by contact with the West. ese factors may be considered under the heading of modernization.
