Conference Agenda

Few concepts in music studies are as unsettled as modernism. For J. P. E. Harper-Scott, modernism unfolds as the self-realization of late-Romantic autonomy — the culmination of an immanent Hegelian teleology. Richard Taruskin exposes the ideological underpinnings of the term itself, reading modernism as an instrument of Western exceptionalism and moral self-authorization. These divergent accounts – there are many others - reveal that “modernism,” far from a coherent style or epoch, is already a problem internal to the Western canon: a debate over history, value, and identity.

This paper rethinks that problem through the lens of empire and the global nineteenth century. It turns to Qajar Iran, where musical modernization unfolded amid imperial pressures and cross-cultural encounters. Under Naser al-Din Shah, the introduction of military bands, staff notation, and European instruments signaled not merely imitation but negotiation — a translation of imperial modernity into local idioms. Persian musicians adapted these imported materials within the dastgāh system, generating hybrid practices that blurred the lines between continuity and rupture, autonomy and subjection.

By setting Western modernism’s self-conscious discourse of progress against Iran’s adaptive musical modernity, this paper argues that “modernism” is best understood not as an aesthetic epoch but as a mode of historical consciousness shaped by imperial entanglement. In a global nineteenth century, modernism ceases to be the property of the West and becomes a comparative question: how different cultures imagine being modern while remaining in dialogue with their pasts and with the global orders that sought to define them.