Collection Abstract:
This collection offers a wide-ranging examination of new music through the lens of cultural hybridity and global sonic exchange, bringing together scholars working across musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, performance studies, and cultural theory. By examining the points where musical traditions dissolve, merge, and reinvent one another, the volume will illuminate how composers, performers, and listeners are reshaping the very languages of music in an interconnected world.
Purpose:
Over the past several decades, the boundaries separating Western art music, non-Western traditions, electronic music, and popular forms have grown increasingly porous. Composers and performers today move fluidly across notation systems, vocal techniques, rhythmic languages, and sonic technologies drawn from radically different cultural contexts. Yet the theoretical and analytical frameworks available to scholars have struggled to keep pace with the creative realities of this global musical hybridity.
This edited volume seeks to explore how new music participates in processes of cultural translation, sonic border-crossing, and the emergence of hybrid musical languages. From the archaic vocal textures resurfacing in contemporary composition to the electroacoustic reimagining of ritual and sacred sound; from percussion traditions migrating across continents to the music born in the spaces of urban diaspora, these practices challenge received categories of genre, origin, and authenticity.
The goal of this collection is to bring together musicologists, theorists, performers, composers from related disciplines (cultural studies, sound studies, urban studies, postcolonial theory) to examine how new music mediates relationships between cultures, bodies, technologies, and places.
We welcome historically grounded studies as well as theoretically informed analyses and practice-based perspectives.
Possible Topics may include, but are not limited to:
The Dissolving Score
Graphic scores and visual music across cultures
Oral transmission and memory in art music
AI-generated and open-form notation as hybrid language
Voices in Between
Post-bel canto and world vocal fusion
Archaic vocal techniques in contemporary performance
Code-switching and multilingualism as musical expression
The Electric Sacred
Electroacoustic music in ritual and spiritual traditions
Field recording as ethnographic and artistic act
The drone as universal meditative language
Rhythm as Language
African, Asian, and Latin American polyrhythm in Western contemporary music
Percussion traditions crossing cultural and aesthetic borders
Body percussion and physical music theatre
The Composed City
Urban soundscapes and the music of migration
Sound art in multicultural metropolitan spaces
Street music and diaspora as avant-garde practice
Submission Guidelines
Please submit:
A 350-500 word abstract
A brief bio (150-200 words)
Institutional affiliation (if applicable)
Send submissions to: paolo.tortiglione@sanpietroamajella.cloud (as well for additional details or general info)
Deadline for general interest in participating: July 1st
Abstract Deadline: July 31st
Notification of Acceptance: August 15th
Chapter Draft for Editorial Feedback: October 30th
Full Chapter Length 5,000–7,000 words (including notes and bibliography), following MLA Style (notes and bibliography - https://www.balamand.edu.lb/Library/Research/Documents/Manuals/MLAStyle.pdf)