terminology – but also the failure to understand a genuine intercultural challenge. The issue here is not whether for example to establish a universal idiom or a meta-methodology in composition, but how to formulate wider artistic discourses and musical forms where the integration of all traditions, and perhaps the invention of more integrating perspectives, can provide the catalyst for more universal propositions. It is in this framework that attention to all traditions, recognition of diversities and critical stance are the essential prerequisites of a ‘global’ music, that is an undiscriminating platform upon which music discourses can be articulated. But this is not all: such a musical horizon is too wide to be confined to the isolated work of individual composers. Professional, educational and industrial infrastructures cannot continue to work separately; they must be explored as channels of renewal for new logistics of cooperation. It is both circumstances that need to be discussed. So let us start from composition.

2.  Channels of renewal

2.1.  Composition

2.1.1 Background

An attraction to exoticism as an inspiring source was already evident in Western arts from the second half of the 19th century (take for example the paintings of Gauguin). But throughout the 20th century it is possible to trace a growing awareness of broader cultural spans initially ranging from the employment of specific tools such as pentatonic scales in the music of Debussy to a more integrating approach to pitch systems and performance techniques in the music of Stravinsky and Messiaen. These examples however are still far from providing truly intercultural pursuits in that the concern of these composers was limited to the inclusion of foreign elements, much as ornamental devices, into an essentially European conceptual and structural framework. It is therefore with a more experimental generation of composers such as Harry Partch and John Cage in North America and Karlheinz Stockhausen and Giacinto Scelsi in Europe that a wider intercultural awareness begins to delineate more integrative approaches towards musical conception, form, instrumentation and performance. Partch’s radical approach to musical instruments and tuning systems and Scelsi’s intimate preoccupation with Eastern themes are tangible examples of such an open-mindedness towards the world’s cultures.

The works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage provide two vigorous examples of such wide cultural perspectives. In the case of Cage there is a constant psychological openness towards disparate aesthetic and cultural traditions of the world within a cultural span embracing European serialism and Indian music, Dada and the Gamelan, Meister Eckhart and Ananda Coomaraswasmy, Satie and Duchamp, as well as Joyce, Suzuki, Thoreau, and the I Ching. Such a varied background provided a formidable platform for experimentation and the formu-