Reiterating Hierarchy and the Failed Promise of the Global

Abstract

Abstract The idea of global modernisms rests upon freighted power relationships. Far from decolonizing, this concept reinscribes values of Euro- and US-centric discourses. This article addresses the inherent friction of global musical modernisms through Carlos Chávez's 1940 composition La paloma azul , written for concerts at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Tasked with appealing to a US audience, Chávez created work that participates in modernism's hierarchical frame, where Mexico provides exotic fantasy for bourgeois New Yorkers. Chávez was not alone in having been positioned as ‘modernism's shadow’ – the negative counterexample that confirms modernism's progressive image. Global musical modernism suggests that modernism can shed its exclusionary identity and encompass more. But it hides how modernism has always been international, and how composers such as Chávez have been central to its construction. By ignoring modernism's historical realities, global musical modernism shores up existing understandings and maintains the marginal status of whatever is categorized as ‘global’.