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.
