Recent developments in today’s art music reflect a general trend of cultural globalisation: It can be characterised as an oscillation between a standardisation of compositional idioms (usually following standards established in the West) and claims for sustainable forms of cultural difference. Even though it is obviously necessary to counterbalance and criticise an academically established »avant garde’s« ethnocentrism and its tendency to dominate a worldwide discourse of new music, references to cultural difference can prove to be naïve or self-deceiving, since they are often linked to essentialist, post-nationalist concepts of (musical) culture. A critical discussion of paradigms and paradoxes in the aesthetics of cultural difference is opened with an analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s universalist Telemusik (1966) as a main example showing how compositional processes can easily eradicate those »cultural« peculiarities in musical styles that the composer claims to preserve. Whereas such processes are often due to a fundamentally mono-cultural discourse and – in Stockhausen’s case – can be traced back to the 19th century Western universalist concept of »art religion«, the three remaining case studies introduce works from Asian contexts that exemplify a dense interpenetration of political, historical and aesthetical strata of both Asian and Western origins. While José Maceda’s Pagsamba (1968), Ge Ganru’s Yi Feng (1983) and Yuji Takahashi’s Sojo Rinzetsu (1997) all use highly idiosyncratic »Asian« material, their works remain informed by key principles of Western modernity, namely incommensurability and the deconstruction of cultural or stylistic stereotypes. This allows for the conclusion that the »space« in which their musical art evolves is a globalised cultural memory that reflects the inner contradictions and the historicity of music as a »cultural« technique.