The Sound of Empire in 20th-c. Colonial Cultures: Rethinking History through Music

Project Information

MUSICOL

Grant agreement ID: 834195

DOI

10.3030/834195

EC signature date 11 October 2019

Start date 1 November 2019

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 500 000,00

Coordinated by

FONDATION UNIVERSITE COTE D'AZUR
France

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MUSICOL (The Sound of Empire in 20th-c. Colonial Cultures: Rethinking History through Music)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Delving into the musical dimensions of the French empire, long neglected by historians, MusiCol aims to produce a robust new conceptual and historical model for studying colonial cultures. Focusing on musical life and new media, it studies how music was practiced, heard, and understood in capital cities of North Africa, the A.O.F. Madagascar, and French Indochina, 1900-1962. Crucially important is the need to investigate the tastes, practices, and interactions of all urban populations, usually studied in isolation.

This involves four objectives. (1) To musicalize history, it investigates what music contributed to identities in colonial cultures and the agency natives as well as Europeans achieved through music. (2) To historicize aural media, it examines broadcast strategies and music used to reach diverse listeners and shape complex, evolving identities under colonialism. (3) To globalize music history, it focuses on aural roots of the French empire and music’s contribution to its diversity and coherence. (4) To creolize research, it integrates indigenous perspectives and oral testimonies and promotes dialogue with collaborators from formerly colonized countries.

In its chosen cities, MusiCol pursues these objectives in six domains. First, how and where music was learned, from contexts forming the ear to solfège in colonial schools, music taught in private associations, and instruction for future professionals in conservatories. Second, how music functioned in religious contexts, whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or traditional religions. Third, what musical ensembles emerged, their members, music, and purposes of their choruses, fanfares, various bands (civil, military, or representing the court), amateur orchestras of westerners, indigenous musicians, or mixed groups, and professional ones, specializing in various musical genres. Next, we examine music in the theater, recordings, and radio, the latter extending the agency of all taking part.

This pioneering study of the modern French empire through music will generate new insights into its mechanisms and constituencies, taking colonial, media, and music history in unprecedented directions. Only in understanding the aurality of colonialism--what helped their imperialism take hold and last--can Europeans grasp its full nature, meaning, and legacy.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To stimulate interest, in 2019 the PI presented “The Musical Fields of Practice and Identity under French Colonialism: A New Paradigm” in Weimer, and two keynotes: “Mapping the Globe through a 'Sound Atlas': Listening to Race and Nation” at the International Conference on Music Since 1900, and “The Sound of Empire in 20th-c. Colonial Cultures: Rethinking History through Music” at the Société Suisse de musicologie, Bern.

Simultaneously, the PI assembled and trained a team of Europeans and researchers from Tunisia, Benin, Senegal, Vietnam, and Cambodia and worked in Madagascar and Morocco. Shared methodology and research questions inform their archival research, interviews, analytical working papers, team workshops, and zoom meetings.

To prepare open-access to this research, especially in the Global South, the PI created a massive GSuite/google drive. For each area of study, researchers deposit their documents as pdfs, annotated bibliography, and working paper. Organization by metadata facilitates subsequent comparisons.

The PI has published six peer-reviewed articles in Open access, seven others, and begun her book, Music as Relation. Most important, “Co-producing Knowledge and Morocco’s Musical Heritage: A Relational Paradigm for Colonial Scholarship,” Journal of North African Studies (September 2022), 1-47, analyzes how French and Moroccans collaborated in music education, festivals, and radio, promoting Arabo-Andalusian and Berber musical traditions. Despite power asymmetries, they came together as policy maker, scholar and practitioners to co-produce musical knowledge. What linked them was concern for and interest in the future of Moroccan music. Related is her article, “Teaching Andalousian music at Rabat’s Conservatoire de musique marocaine: Franco-Moroccan Collaborations under Colonialism” (Routledge, 2021).

The PI also completed comparative articles in two areas. In “Live and Local: Making Sense of Musical Categories and Polyphonic Identities on Colonial Radio in North Africa” (under review), she analyzed the categories used to program indigenous music and shape identities on Radio-Maroc, Radio-Alger, and Radio-Tunis-P.T.T. 1928-1960. And she has written on women’s contributions to music education, ensembles, concerts, and running theaters in “Women’s Work in the French Colonies: Musical Entrepreneurship as Patronage” (Routledge, 2023) and the keynote address, “Women Pianists in the French Colonies: Entrepreneurship and Self-development,” UC Irvine (2023).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Underlying the depth, breath, and ambition of its research, open-access website, and publications are the foundations of an innovative methodology. Rather than assuming that empire is “necessarily the manufacture of difference” (Radano 2016), its approach is relational, comparative, and integrative.

• First, creolizing research articulates a new notion of colonial history as Relation, inspired by Glissant (1997)’s concept in which natives and settlers, individuals and groups, listeners near and far, are “mutually, if unequally, transformed.” See the PI’s paper “Creolizing Research: Colonial Cultures as two-way ‘Relation’” at the International Musicological Society, Athens, Greece (August 2022) and her book-in-progress, Music as Relation. Recently, she has also shown the wider relevance of this approach in other countries, as in her keynote address, “The Challenge of a Multicultural Past and Present: How to write History as Relation,” at the international conference, Ukraine in Music History, University of Vienna (May 2023).

• Second, to flesh out the local, regional, and imperial scales, MusiCol involves five successively layered axes of comparison in its six domains--intra-urban, inter-urban, intra-regional, colonial-metropolitan, and intra-imperial.

• Third, while scholars have begun to examine individual music genres in colonial contexts, MusiCol studies musical practices among all local populations and across an empire.

Besides its annual team workshops, MusiCol anticipates producing a journal special issue, an international conference and edited volume, additional articles and papers by the PI, and a draft of her book, Music as Relation.

Through dialogue among western and non-western team members (Asians and Africans), MusiCol aspires to create a new generation of scholars on the colonial phenomenon who will take inspiration from these approaches and team members’ diverse perspectives. Clarity on the aural legacy of colonialism will thus make possible new colonial, media, and music histories, local and global. Encouraging better understanding of cultural exchange within today’s contemporary multi-ethnic, multicultural societies, this research will also contribute to urban, African, Southeast Asian, post-colonial, and women’s studies, music anthropology and sociology. In the years ahead, its global networks will hopefully grow, generating similar work on other empires and eventually inter-imperial research. It is especially hoped that African team members will return to create what may be the first musicology departments in their countries.

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