Paradoxa, Sackgassen und die „geschichtliche Wirklichkeit“ interkultureller Rezeption: Hugo Riemanns Auseinandersetzung mit der ostasiatischen Musik im Kontext der Diskussionen über eine „japanische Harmonik“ im Zeitraum 1900-1945

Elements in Hugo Riemann’s late universalist music theory-disclosed in condensed form in his Folkloristische Tonalitätsstudien (1916)-took a surprising, even nationalistically biased turn in Japan during the 1930s and 40s. Riemann’s approach to Chinese and Japanese music is reviewed here in the broader context of musicology around 1900 (Rudolf Dittrich, Georg Capellen, Abraham J. Polak, Abraham/Hornbostel etc.) as well as the narrower one of Japanese musical modernity between 1900 and 1945 (Kōsaku Yamada, Shūkichi Mitsukuri, Klaus Pringsheim, Shōhei Tanaka, Fumio Hayasaka). The multiple re-interpretations of the fundamentals of East Asian music that resulted from these discourses provide ample evidence for the high relevance of “invented traditions” (Eric Hobsbawm) in global music history-attempts to demonstrate the constructivist character of musical identities as they are insufficiently covered by concept of “transculturality.”