ABSTRACT This contribution follows the journal's ‘Critical Exchanges' format to offer a dialogue between a ‘historical musicologist' and an ‘ethnomusicologist' focused on comparative musicology and its legacy in relation to recent debates about global music history. In contrast to Western-centric examinations of the history of comparative musicology, we discuss the practice of comparative musicology in Japan and the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic during the first half of the twentieth century. The geographical foci of our case studies reflect not only our research interests but also the historical connectedness of Japan, Ottoman Turkey, and Germany, as empires and as post-imperial spectres of those empires. Turning to current discourses on global music history, then, we end by critically engaging with the concepts of entanglement and ‘Asia as method’. Ultimately, we ask how an understanding of the interactions between global manifestations of authoritarianism and anti-imperialism might inform current debates about decolonization.
Hsieh et al. (2025) studied this question.