This edited book aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on the intersections between the coining of the 'Western Music' concept and the institutionalised and entrepreneurial management of culture. It studies the emergence of the trademark 'Western Music' in relation to the commodification of leisure, the institutionalisation of academic discourses, and the transnational imperial politics of culture. This collective work devotes particular attention to the ways events, such as the virtuosi concert tours, song contests, diplomatic acts, or mass broadcastings have created possibilities for homogenisation and globalisation of a corpus of musical practices, repertoires, and ways of thinking, ambiguously labelled, as 'Western' along the long 20th Century.

María Cáceres-Piñuel, Ph.D., teaches and researches in the areas of historical musicology and ethnomusicology at the University Autónoma of Barcelona (as a Maria Zambrano fellow) and the universities of Bern and Basel (as an associated researcher). Her interest includes historiography, gender studies, and cultural dissemination. Alberto Napoli holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Bern and studied musicology at the University of Pavia (Cremona, Italy) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. His broad spectrum of research topics ranges from the philology of 16th-century vocal music to the history of cultural politics in liberal Italy, to the analysis of Italian pop music in the 1960s. Melanie Strumbl holds a Ph.D. in Musicology and a masters degree in Gender Studies. She wrote her dissertation on the exhibiting practices at the International Exhibition of Music and Drama, Vienna 1892 as part of the SNF-project 'The Emergence of 20th-century Experience' based out of the University of Bern.