New Materialist Approach to East-West Distinction: South-Eastern Europe Musics

This article critiques traditional Southeastern European1 music history for its reliance on Eurocentric, binary, and human-centered paradigms. Proposing a framework rooted in posthumanism and New Materialism, the study reconceptualizes music as a dynamic assemblage of distributed agency between human and non-human actors. Central to this approach are Karen Barad's concept of intra-action-where musical entities are co-created through their entanglement-and the notion of entangled memories, which privileges embodied and oral traditions over static archives. By applying these concepts, the article challenges rigid national narratives and highlights the region's music history as a continuous process of hybridity and cross-border exchange. Methodologically, the author advocates for multi-sited ethnography and collaborative performance to capture these complex musical ecologies. This approach offers a more inclusive, noncentric lens for understanding the interconnected cultural landscape of Southeastern Europe.