Western Art Music Beyond the West

Contemporary Western art music appears as space where the ‘art’ tradition strives to encounter other musics or other music traditions that are distant, certainly in the geographic sense, but also in the historical, cultural, aesthetic and social realms. But what happens when the ‘Other’ is the contemporary western art music itself? This paper focuses on processes of negotiation between contemporary classic canon and elements originated by non-western musical traditions that occur in works composed by non-western composers. For the purpose of this paper case studies are taken from the production of Chinese and Iranian composers of the late 20th Century such as Guo Wenjing, Hossein Alizâdeh, Reza Vali and Alireza Mashayekhi. The different categories of negotiation between contemporary classic canon and the encounter with ‘Others’ that have been developed by scholars as John Corbett, Bruno Nettl, Philip V. Bohlman and James Clifford are here applied to the works of non-western composers in order to stress the aesthetic-poetic complexity that stands out in contemporary masterpieces, in a world where the boundaries are more and more permeable in both directions, from West toward the ‘Others’ and vice-versa, in a process of complex cross-hybridization.