This course is not an explication of how, where and why this music came to be, or a guide to listening to it. It's also not an attempt to paint the musicians themselves as globally aligned political protagonists and their Western counterparts as antagonists. Instead, it's an attempt at helping to mobilize critical and open-ended experiences and thoughts by listening and examining the variety of ways that the music of the curriculum has been covered by its creators, local musicologists and listeners, and within a variety of outside discursive contexts. Genres, scenes, traditions, etc. are all at play, but they only go so far.

The status of myself and many students in the class as approaching the material with a Western musicological lens makes a carefully thought-out approach especially important. It's as easy to lump a series of artists into a flattening genre name as it is to deny those names as expressions of difference. For instance, self-described "onkyō"'s association with a "style" of specifically Japanese "new music" was as flattening as the attempts by Western improvisers to assert that it was no different than other quiet improvisers like Francisco Lopez. On one hand, the onkyō scene was full of artists with profound differences who shouldn't be lumped together as a hivemind; on the other, there are important similarities between many of them that point towards new expressive modalities that, without a rough term to accompany them, can be flattened into the false default of Western free-improv.

The Western/non-Western dichotomy is similar. On one hand, none of the types of music I'm covering are uniquely non-Western, and conversely no "Western" contemporary avant-garde music has been purely that. Some questions some might ask me then might be: why haven't I covered this material in a more general, global context to avoid arbitrary cutting edges? Why haven't I discussed the idea "non-Western" in a diasporic context and included developments located in Western Europe and the US like the AACM?

My answer is just that by using the category of "non-Western", I'm not trying to construct an ideological boundary, physically real divide, or global unity. Instead, this is a practical category that aims to approach the task of drawing attention to some experimental artists, genres, and scenes that have been severely neglected. This category, which doubtlessly can only be taken so far, has been used by some of the musicians I'll cover in this class itself (see: Yan Jun), who sometimes are very eager to assert the uniqueness and difference of their music against the assumptions by Western musicians that it is all the same.

The approach of this course offers a way of navigating music and musical discourse which can be applied far outside of the material I'll cover. The mindset of a cautious approach to categories as fragmented and imperfect but without neglecting their potential for being tools in a broader, mobile understanding can be applied to all music. Still, we are not focused on creating historical narratives, but understanding how to listen in a digital world.