During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Indigenous musicians in rural South America created a distinctive musical style under conditions of Jesuit colonization. These musicians had been forcibly relocated to mission communities in the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, which is now eastern Bolivia. There, they participated in vibrant scenes of choral and orchestral performance; they trained and retrained each other in apprenticeship systems of singing, composition, and instrument building. A substantial corpus of their work survives today in the Archivo Musical de Chiquitos (AMCh) in Concepción, Bolivia, including masses, motets, operas, and instrumental pieces written in the Chiquitano language and attributed to teams of Indigenous composers. Long neglected in North American music studies, this archive constitutes the single surviving written record of the mission period preserved in Indigenous hands. Surprisingly, no previous studies have systematically examined this music to understand the way in which it was written.

This paper argues that the music of the AMCh exemplifies a distinctive style I call the Colonial Galant: a coherent and internally consistent subset of the eighteenth-century galant shaped by Indigenous creativity within Jesuit mission culture. Through close analysis of representative works, I demonstrate how this music is genuinely part of the eighteenth-century European aesthetic movement that shares its name. I also define the Colonial Galant style as a distinct sub-set of the galant and demonstrate its particular features; these include an emphasis on elegant simplicity and simple homophony, exact imitation at the unison, extensive use of parallel thirds and sixths, notably elastic phrase rhythms, and a reliance on ritornello forms. Together, these traits form a style that is modular, pedagogical, and remarkably dynamic.

The Colonial Galant was written in such a way as to be both pedagogically accessible and deeply impressive. In closing, I situate these characteristics within the broader history of musical style, colonialism, and global circulation. Re-hearing the galant through music from South America, we gain a richer understanding of musical style itself as a historical agent in early global modernity.

This paper examines how the writings on scale and institutional songwriting by Xiao Youmei (1884–1940), widely regarded as the founder of modern music education in China, reflect Leipzig‑based intellectual genealogies acquired during his studies in Germany in the 1910s. Xiao’s interpretation of these genealogies, I argue, underpins his construction of a musical Germanness indispensable to his project of modernizing Chinese music. This paper questions the undefined “West” as a stable source of knowledge for this modernization by tracing intellectual lineages tied to specific localities. Investigating complex translingual interpretations at the individual level, this paper promotes a more finely‑grained intercultural historiography of music theory.

I will first show how Xiao’s interpretation of scale embodies Leipzig-rooted theoretical thinking. While Xiao’s contemporaries in China treated scale nominally as a quantitative descriptor of pitch structures, Xiao adopted an expanded, concrete understanding of it: scale constitutes the pitch material from which all music is built, rendering other qualitative concepts—including European “mode” or Chinese diao调—unnecessary. This view underlies several of Xiao’s narratives, including intercultural, scale-producing circles of fifths and pseudo‑historical narratives of global transmission of specific scales.

Xiao’s transtemporal–transcultural conception of scale could not have emerged without two Leipzig‑rooted music‑theoretical traditions—Ernst Richter’s pedagogy and Hugo Riemann’s historiography—on the basis of close investigations of their concepts of scale and of Xiao’s engagement with them. Situating Xiao’s writings on scale within his evolutionary discourse, I argue that his scale helps construct a musical Germanness both preeminent and commensurate with other musical ideals.

I will then demonstrate how this twofold musical Germanness, underlying Xiao’s project of modernizing Chinese music through institutionalization, is reflected in his songwriting for newly established institutions—songs that also embody interpretations of Leipzig‑rooted knowledge. In many cases, the music employs stylistic features familiar from the textbooks used in Leipzig, while the lyrics draw on archaic Confucian quotations. These two traditions are aligned through the ideals of “great sameness/harmony” (大同) and the institutional recovery of musical–moral education (典乐). This paper concludes by reflecting on a nuanced historiography of music theory that links localized intellectual lineages to individual-driven musical modernization.

The rise of ambient audio compositions has expanded composers to apply minimalist techniques to fill an environment with what creator Brian Eno called “as ignorable as it is interesting.” While Victor Szabo (2022) observes that American and European ambient creators employed audio to “simulate—nay, create spaces” for expansive and relaxational mental states, the practice has taken hold in other regions. In Japan, kankyō ongaku (環境音楽) presents a branch of ambient music that synthesizes Eno’s techniques and R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape methodologies with traditional Japanese aesthetics, particularly from Zen Buddhism (Har 2025).

This paper adopts the framework of place, process, and context to identify techniques of ambient composition that occur in kankyō ongaku. My analysis of Yoshimura Hiroshi’s Soundscape 1: Surround (1986) etches out how kankyō ongaku alludes to and collaborates with place, inviting the consideration of possible ways listeners may engage with musicalized spaces based on the circumstances of their listening practices.

Through mapping techniques from Schafer (1977) and Lochhead (2016) to select tracks from Surround, I categorize the compositional techniques of Surround with Rebecca Leydon’s tropes of repetition (2002) to connect the music to potential analogies (Zbikowski 2017) and interpretations that will arise during discussions of place. These techniques demonstrate Yoshimura’s application of gradual processes to form, texture, timbre, rhythm, motive, and dynamics. These processes, depending on the situated listening context, present different experiences of place. Such perspectives open up discussions about Japanese approaches to ambient composition, expanding both the repertoire and approaches to minimalist analysis.