ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates the global diffusion of musical modernism, studying its adoption and development in four different countries – Argentina, Mexico, Finland and Japan – from a comparative perspective. In this way, I uncover specificities but also underlying commonalities in the ways different national and regional cultures responded to the challenges posed by musical modernity. Adopting the perspective of critical cosmopolitanism, I argue that cultural influence was at least partly reciprocal: not only were distant musical cultures affected by modernist music, but modernism at the centre would not have become what it did without its encounters with others in far-flung corners of the globe.