Musica che affronta il silenzio - Scritti su Toru Takemitsu - Pavia ...

Convergence between West and East in 20 th Century Music:
Reflections on Some Crucial Aspects
Gianmario Borio
In recent decades the relationships between Eastern and Western cultures have once again
become the subject of enquiry for anthropologists, philosophers and historians. This interest
goes hand in hand with certain social and political phenomena: the all-pervasive expansion
of communication systems, the spread of the capitalist economy worldwide, the growing
mobility of individuals, and ideas and life styles becoming common to the most disparate
ethnic groups. These developments have raised a series of questions: is the unification or
partial synthesis of cultural forms and social practices bound to lead to the blurring of identities
and in certain cases to a crisis in fundamental values? Or does it rather tend to
reinforce identities, if for no other reason as an instinct of self-defence or preservation? Or
again, is this paving the way for a worldwide culture that will draw on fluid, readily transferable
attitudes to knowledge? Investigation of developments in the domain of music in the
20 th century may offer some insights into such questions, although rather than coming up
with unequivocal responses, we must be prepared for this ultimately to reveal all the topic’s
ambiguity and complexity.
In the wake of the influential study by Edward Said, one may be tempted to denounce the
convergence of perspectives between East and West as nothing more than a trompe l’oeil. 1
This suspicion becomes all the stronger when the field of research – that of notated composition
destined for concert performance and subject to individual, contemplative consumption –
forms part of the cultural system that has prevailed in the West in modern times and has become
the bête noire of post-colonial studies. Nonetheless there are at least two elements
which go to justify such a reflection:
1. there has been a self-conscious evolution of the conception of music in the
20 th century, coinciding at various points with an interrogation of the social
system (language, customs, institutions and roles);
1 Cf. Said (1978).