This article examines the “Lives in Musicology” column in Acta Musicologica (introduced in 2017 by Federico Celestini and Philip V. Bohlman) as a lens for reflecting on the discipline of musicology. Eight renowned scholars – including pioneers in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory – from the United States, Europe, East Asia, Africa, and Australia – revisited their careers, revealing the construction and trajectory of the field. Their autobiographical accounts, analyzed through the theory of autobiography by Jaume Aurell, trace the discipline’s expansion from the Western canon to diverse research areas, the establishment of new concepts, and the radical shift in Acta Musicologica editorial policy from conservative positivism focused on the Germanic canon toward a pluricultural and multilingual global musicology.

After the pandemic break (2020–2021) the journal TheMA continues with the presentation of research results relating to the cultures, literature, theater, music, and arts of and on southeast Europe. Furthermore, the next three volumes will be dedicated to herstory in the mesoregion, with the focus on women’s studies. Starting with this volume, female cultural enterpreneurs, Maecenases, authors, artists, composers, and performing artists, as well as the characters in literary, dramatic, and musical works, will be presented in papers by international scholars.

In order to shed light on cultural exchange in a meta-national context, Michel Espagne coined the term ‘cultural transfer’ with respect to exchange between ‘cultural zones’. The migration of cultural objects and individuals, signified by their appropriation and transformation in new contexts, is a process of continuous reinterpretation of travelling ideas and concepts. Such transnational approach provided by cultural transfers assumes transdifference, cultural hybridization, and interpenetration of cultural zones beyond the traditional dichotomy of centre-periphery: the nodes of the formed networks are proliferated (in some cases, temporary) centres, including also certain mediatory points. Two case studies of Serbian, i.e., Yugoslav musicians – the violin player Dragomir Krančević (1847 – 1929) and especially the soprano Karola Jovanović (1879 – 1958) – will be explicated in this theoretical framework in relation to their positions at music theatres. Both were well-known artists and had successful careers in Vienna and other cities in the Habsburg Monarchy (Budapest, Olomouc, Graz) and its successor states, Krančević mainly as a soloist and Jovanović as an opera and concert singer. These two musicians are understood here as agents of cultural transfer and this paper will show how they were transformed by adjustment to their new environments, i.e., to the dominant cultural policy expressed through repertoire, gender policy, guest performances, and other aspects. By doing so, they contributed to network building networks all over Europe, beyond territorial or national borders.