Between May 7th to 10th, 2026, the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto hosted an international conference, Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency, organised by the Global Western Art Music (GWAM) Network, led by the Network’s founders, Michelle Assay and Robin Elliott. The Toronto event was a continuation of the Inaugural Symposium of the Network held in Chicago two years prior. The event, gathering both music scholars and performers, was not limited to the themes of western art music (WAM), but rather embraced the broadly defined idea of global musical modernities. It welcomed parallel discussions flowing between composers such as Zeki Müren and Javier Fajardo Chaves, Jorge Peixinho and Lui Man-Shing, Anthony Braxton and Joseph Haydn. In this manner, not only did the GWAM Network seamlessly succeed at overcoming the ‘West and the Rest’ paradigm, but it also took another step forward by fostering a dialogue between diverse repertoires, placing all musical modernities—past and present—at the same level of importance.

One of the most well-articulated endeavours taken on by the conference participants was to consider the ways in which WAM has been ‘reinvented’ in local environments. Felipe Luzuriaga and Diego Palacios Dávila showed how the Andean tradition balanced the entrance of WAM, while Lee Canon-Brown compared the contrasting and conflicting processes of ‘indigenisation’ in Mexico. Some of the presenters, including Kevin Y.C. Tam, shed light on how elements of WAM became subject to local musical modernities without standing a chance to demonstrate the notion of Eurocentric musical universality. These papers allowed for the reimagining and reevaluation of the past from a twenty-first century perspective. At the same time, Morteza Abedinifard, Solmaz Shakerifard, and Assay, as well as Daniel Jordan, introduced us to key Iranian and Latvian thinkers, who not only witnessed the changes in respective local musical environments, but also initiated a scholarly enquiry about them, which continues to inform the local music today.

Although during the conference we learnt about music and media surviving under the constraints of imperialism and isolation in the past, the overarching theme that seemed to tirelessly and persistently return and define the event was the colossal consequence of our complicated histories—migration. Many speakers provided answers on how music, knowledge, and identity are produced and encountered through experiences with migration. This included presentations about artists stuck between two worlds: one by Alexandra Magazin on Marcel Mihalovici (a Romanian composer based in France), and another one by Tangmuyang (Krystal) Zhang, on Chinese-American pop-star Coco Lee. And while in this way we were able to discuss the outcomes of migration historically, most examples proposed during the conference emphasised how the global aspect of contemporary musical modernities is still heavily shaped by migration.

What made the conference especially engaging was that a number of presenters offered their arguments from a performing musicians’ perspective. This stance was often adopted by the members of the Chinese diaspora in Canada, whose ethnographic and autoethnographic insights highlighted the role of an immigrant identity in music composition and performance especially well. The two most memorable events of this kind were: the Panel Discussion on Mandarin poetry and art song at the Canadian Music Centre; and the lecture-recital by the Sirius Piano Duo. The former included a conversation between poet Edith Yang Qing, composer Roydon Tse, pianist Jialian Zhu, and soprano Zi Xin Emily Lapin, illuminating the process and challenges of writing, composing, and performing a collection of poems in Mandarin, in the context of intercultural collaboration; while during the latter, pianists Pei-Chen Chen and Mengjie Xiong demonstrated a way of working with musical materials with the aim of creating and sharing an understanding of Chinese-European fusion as an immigrant duo.

And while we ought to celebrate the way migration managed to make our conference truly global, in their recitals, Eve Egoyan and Wissam Boustany reflected on the unconscionable causes of migration in the first place. On the one hand, Egoyan’s programme, built upon piano pieces composed by Armenian composers, including herself, opened the door, offering a glimpse into an intimate journey of coming to terms with one’s heritage. Boustany, on the other hand, performing Schulhoff, Gieseking, and Younis, alongside his own two solo flute pieces, underlined the temporary and always changing nature of heritage, belonging, and identity. Both musicians’ versatile performances left us wondering about the way war, genocide, displacement, and healing shape the manner in which music is played and listened to.

What preceded Boustany’s concert was the keynote presentation by the world-leading scholar, Prof. Daniel K.L. Chua, titled ‘Interrogating Global Musical Modernities and Local Agency: Is There a Chinese Way?’. Understanding globality as musicology’s inherent quality, Chua called for more generosity and the removal of corners from our musicological squares. Interestingly (and perhaps, consciously on the organisers’ part), both Boustany and Chua—the lead figures of the two Friday afternoon events—have been outspoken promoters of love and suspended judgement. While it takes courage to speak about music and its academic study in the context of love, which I am afraid most of us find intimidating, I can remark with confidence that the most striking and inspiring thing about this conference was the extent of openness demonstrated by all present. At the roundtable session, everyone was given a chance to share their reading recommendations and thoughts on the general themes of the event. As Chua pointed out during this conversation, what made the conference special was the willingness to listen to presentations and engage in conversations with scholars of various career stages, no matter the level of personal interest we have in the examined repertoire or musical environment in question. And that, if you ask me, comes close to what it means to practise love and suspended judgement.

If I may report, speaking on behalf of other participants as well as myself, in the end, we left the four-day conference with bellies full of Lebanese food, Canadian coffee, a long list of new music and concepts to explore, and a couple of new friends we hope to encounter again soon.

Anna Nikolozišvili is a recent Research Master’s graduate from Utrecht University, specialising in the global history of music theory and analysis.