Conference Agenda

Music and media scholars have discussed the many ways that musical performances during U.S. sporting events have supported nationalist agendas, especially those globally-broadcasted during the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship (Kellner 2003; McLeod 2011; Kooijman 2013). But when considering some of the event’s most popular performances within their larger cultural and historical contexts—by Whitney Houston (1991), Garth Brooks and Michael Jackson (1993), and U2 (2002)—closer analysis reveals that they communicated more complex messaging than the patriotic and nationalist framing imposed by the event’s surrounding pageantry. As I argue in this talk, the iconicity of these performances stemmed from their direct musical responses to domestic and foreign crises, complicating the themes of U.S.-centric militaristic power and control that scholars have deemed historically essential to football culture (Gems 2000; Garrett 2004; McClusky 2016).

This talk combines interdisciplinary scholarship on nationalism in U.S. football with close musical analysis and reception history to offer nuanced perspectives about music’s impacts during these broadcasts. Although Houston’s overtly-confident version of the “Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl suggested unwavering resolve, her no-frills vocality and metrical expansions reflected the gravity felt by the families of deployed troops to the Persian Gulf. In 1993, Brooks and Jackson’s pathbreaking headliner performances were simultaneously spectacular yet insubordinate to the broadcast’s nationalist rhetoric, as they responded to the recent Los Angeles riots incited by Rodney King’s brutal arrest with powerful video-texts and on-field songs that magnified the nation's racial unrest. A decade later, U2’s 2002 halftime set focused on hope and empathy for a hurting nation following the 9-11 attacks as demonstrated by Bono’s flash of a U.S. flag sewn into his jacket. But the Irish band’s juxtaposition of the names of the deceased with “Where the Streets Have No Name” and recitation of “love, love, love,” encouraged compassion and the forsaking of ideological divisions while the world anxiously awaited the superpower’s full retaliatory response. I thus argue that the positive reception of these performances’ lay in their frank acknowledgement of the personal, local, and global realities of militarized U.S. imperialism and racism at the turn of the twenty-first century.

This paper explores the role of Andalusi music scholarship and performance in negotiating shifting conceptions of the West during the decolonisation of North Africa in the mid-twentieth century. I explore the ways in which scholars and musicians from the Maghreb, Spain and France gave shape to overlapping, yet distinct and competing narratives of Andalusi music to support their countries' agendas in the western Mediterranean. I argue that Moroccan and Maghrebi musicians mobilised constructions of Andalusi music as "western music" (Shannon 2015) to debunk widespread views that it was a decayed spin-off of the Arab music of the *Mashriq* (Eastern Arab World). In this way, they fuelled nationalist and anti-colonial movements in the lead-up to independence of the Maghrebi states in the 1950s and 60s. Spanish scholars emphasised and "invented" similarities between the Andalusi *nawbat* (suites) and the western diatonic system in order to consolidate their country's colonial stronghold in northern Morocco (1912-1956). Spanish colonial propaganda was predicated on the idea that the "Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood", an identity formation with roots allegedly going back to medieval Iberia, gave Spain an edge in the colonial rivalry with France over Morocco (Calderwood 2018). The French Service des Arts Indigènes sponsored performance and scholarship to promote *hispano-mauresque* style (Glasser 2016), a unique blend of Iberian and Moroccan elements that placed Andalusi music within the sphere of the West, and at the top of the Arab music complex. In casting its leading contribution to the "revival" of Andalusi music through the lens of the *hispano-mauresque* discursive framework, France aimed to define itself as the essence of Mediterranean identity and the pinnacle of western civilisation. By studying Moroccan, Spanish and French sources on Andalusi music, my paper will show that scholarship and performance practice helped to negotiate the position of Morocco, Spain and France relative to shifting and malleable notions of the West and the Orient. In this way, music culture played a key role in shaping the balance of powers during the decolonisation of the Maghreb.

The music and dance show at the Dutch East Indies 'Javanese village' during the 1889 Exposition Universelle has acquired over time the aura of a founding myth of the encounter with a distant and mysterious 'other,' capable of impacting the future of Western music. This production captivated visitors during the fair—of which it represented one of the most commented attractions—and its influence has persisted, becoming entrenched in the historiographic canon to this day.

Nevertheless, many relevant aspects of the show, including the dances performed and the specifics of the music played, have not been thoroughly studied. Only part of the rich press documentation has been examined, and only some of the transcriptions made by visitors have been mentioned in the literature. The main obstacle has been the loss of the gamelan's trace at the end of the fair, unlike what had happened at the previous exhibition in Amsterdam (1883) and what would happen precisely in Chicago at the World Columbian Exhibition of 1893, in which, in addition, pioneering phonographic recordings were made.

In January 2024, through extensive cross-research across France, Germany, and the Netherlands, the authors located the gamelan from the 1889 exhibition. The exhaustive scrutiny of Dutch and French press from the time, interpreted through Sundanese and Javanese artistic traditions, was crucial to this discovery. Despite being unplayed for 135 years, the gamelan's excellent preservation has enabled a detailed study of its morphology and tuning, revealing significant insights for future research on the 1889 events.

The relevant information presented here for the first time significantly enriches our understanding of the show and dispels previous assumptions about various aspects of what was heard during those six months in 1889. The composition of the ensemble clarifies some inconsistencies in both iconographic sources and written reports. And its challenging tuning and features—similar to those of other ensembles of the time and subtly contrasting with later practices—shed new light on the transcriptions from that same year by Julien Tiersot, Jean Kernoa, Louis Benedictus, and Ludovic Ratz. This reveals the extent to which the prejudice of associating 'the oriental' with the pentatonic scale filtered the listening of even attentive and trained listeners, preventing them from perceiving, beyond the intervals, the real nature of the musical processes that took place in Paris.

The research also enhances our knowledge about the dance aspects of that spectacle, its logistics, and its protagonists. That show was so conditioned by the commercial interests and colonial arrogance of its promoters that the artistic proposal itself ended up being profoundly different from what could have been witnessed on the island of Java in those same years. What European audiences saw as an expression of exotic authenticity was, in many ways, an extravagant patchwork born of circumstance. Nevertheless, the characteristics of this gamelan ensemble and its comparison with the extensive written documentation allow us to affirm that significant samples of Sundanese performative practices of the time were indeed heard in Paris—practices that even very refined ears were incapable of contextualizing and understanding, clouded by the difficulty of associating a supposedly ancestral and primitive world with the rhythmic and intervallic complexity of those traditions.