Inspired by C. A. Bayly’s notion of global uniformities, this article investigates the different ways in which elitist non-Western music reformers, often with state support, canonized and institutionalized modern national music traditions during the age of liberalism and empire. As these non-Western music reformers reinterpreted liberal and earlier Enlightenment ideas, they envisaged their own musics hierarchically in comparison with Western music. In the context of comparative musicological thinking, they became particularly preoccupied with the systematization of scales, equal temperament tuning, and the origins of their own music. In the process, they often incorporated claims about authenticity and spirituality in music to give strength to burgeoning national, if not anti-imperial, identities. However, beneath the appearance of formal similarity and mutual translatability of non-Western national musics, significant sonic and cultural differences remained. As a contribution to global history scholarship, the article principally attempts to establish these global parallels and comparisons.

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This article deals with the life and work of the early twentieth-century British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds, in the context of British national music and ‘imperial culture’ at large. Through a discussion of their Theosophical spirituality, Indian musical exoticism, and modernist aesthetics (for all of which they became outsiders to the British music establishment), it tentatively investigates their ideas as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster, which equally influenced British ‘imperial culture’. Furthermore, it discusses the role of Theosophists (such as Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, and Rukmini Devi) in Indian nationalism and the making of modern South Indian music. This situates the cases of Scott and Foulds within Theosophy as a global movement, and illustrates how cosmopolitan radicalism, Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships in metropolis and colony.

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