It is common to map culture onto socially bounded entities such as ethnic groups and nation-states. This conception spills over to migrants and diasporas – the Gurungs have Gurung culture, the Greeks have Greek culture, the Kurdish diaspora has Kurdish culture. This paper looks at exactly the opposite. We will analyze art music as a unified transnational practice that, however, is maintained by a group of people that is fragmented both socially and – except for the common allegiance to their musical art – culturally. They speak different languages, have different religions, belong to different nations. The analysis draws upon two different traditions of transnationalism in art music: Western ”classical music” and Southasian shastriya sangit. Both are constituted within multiple fields interconnected by flows of both people and cultural goods, making up translocal opportunity structures. And moreover, these two cases give historical depth to our understanding of transnational practice: they were, so to say, transnational long before the era of the nation-state.