Conference Agenda

This paper focuses on the social and political role of sacred Protestant music in the context of colonial spread and Anglo-Haudenosaunee diplomacy. I take as a case study the work of Samuel Kirkland (1741-1808). Like his missionary peers, Samuel Kirkland understood that hymn singing could be an alluring part of Christian worship and it played a role in his decades-long teaching and ministerial work among Oneida communities, as well as his disastrous early missionary work with the Seneca village of Kanadasaga in 1765-1766. At Kanadasaga, Kirkland lived in a militarily and politically powerful community that found no purpose in listening to his lessons or his hymns. By focusing on Kirkland’s experiences, including his mistakes and failures, I raise questions about the extent to which hymnody was mobilized to advance colonialist goals while also being adopted and adapted as an Indigenized social and sacred form of musicking.

This paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship explicating how Western music was (and is) entangled with colonialism. Musicologists have been sharpening the points of critique on this topic in recent years, often by noting adjacent and overlapping historical trends (such as wealth begotten by colonialism and slavery) and examining themes of colonialism as expressed in musical works. I intervene in this growing body of work by asking how Western music was heard and made by those most directly impacted upon by colonialism. I do so by taking a historicist approach that is grounded in the critical guidance of Native American and Indigenous Studies: focusing on the agendas, actions, and experiences of individual people contextualized by their communities. Granularity brings to the fore the unpredictability of music’s effect in situations of intercultural encounter. The hymnic scenarios examined in this paper show how Native peoples’ refusal to listen was a key strategy for forestalling colonists’ goals. Ultimately, this paper offers new avenues for the critical study of music and colonialism by using a historicist approach that illuminates the unstable power dynamic between colonizers and non-colonizers.

Choralism is often used as a metaphor for community engagement (Ahlquist 2008, Hillier 2012, Bithell 2014, de Quadros 2019). Voices joined in harmony, working together toward an aggregate sound under the direction (or command) of a conductor, has been co-opted by nation states, missionaries, and other hegemonic colonial forces to define and enrich power in community contexts (Applegate 2005, Olwage 2005, Eichner 2012). However, the shared acoustic spaces and embodied experiences of choral practice are often hidden below the surface of cultural gloss, connected to the above metaphorical forces but not entirely encompassed by them. This paper seeks to show, and then complicate, the boundary between the physical and the memorialized/emotional aspects of affective experience within choralism, and suggest why this distinction deserves further contemplation as scholars consider the nuanced, insidious, and wide-ranging cultural effects of colonialism and imperialism.

In this work, I will offer the term “diagnostic embodiment” as a set of physical, mental, and emotional listening practices key to British- and European-derived choralism. Drawing on my rehearsal observations of several professional groups in the UK, including The King’s Singers, the Tallis Scholars, VOCES8, and the King’s College Chapel Choir, I offer some ways that this lineage of choral praxis has developed specific engagements between body, voice, and acoustic space; and show how physical-affective interconnections have been taken advantage of by hegemonic powers within the realms of religion and politics. Proposing a physical-affective nexus, I introduce further guides and complications to affective regimes (Mankekar and Gupta 2016, Jack and Conte 2021) beyond the immediacy of vocalization in shared space, integrating colonial histories and individual memorialized experiences interstitially bound in moments of performance. I make the case that “choralism,” as a term, should be considered inherently colonial, derived from hegemonic use of choral praxis to consolidate power in a variety of contexts, in part by harnessing the relational engagement and affective sensitivity integral to the processes of diagnostic embodiment. In this case, attempting to decolonize choral praxis may require recognizing and dismantling entrenched metaphors fed by the affects and immediacies that underpin choralism.

In the late 1950s the French composer Henri Tomasi (1901–1971) wrote a one-act opera for radio broadcast entitled Le Silence de la mer. The opera’s text came from Jean Bruller’s novel of the same name, which he had published clandestinely and pseudonymously in 1942 during the German occupation, and which became a central text of the French resistance. After Tomasi’s opera had been recorded by one of the orchestras of Radiodiffusion-télévision française in 1960, however, the French government banned the piece from broadcast as part of an effort to subdue growing intellectual opposition to the ongoing colonial war in Algeria. The French government thus adopted the curious position of suppressing one of the foremost literary testimonies of the same resistance that it officially celebrated.

In this paper I interpret Le Silence de la mer as an anticolonialist opera, and argue that Tomasi invoked memories of resistance precisely in order to oppose colonial oppression. In a set of analyses of the piece’s music and text I employ two analytics in turn, drawing on theories of both coloniality and of memory. First, I demonstrate how the opera may be understood as staging some of the ideas of contemporaneous critics of coloniality, and especially those of Aimé Césaire, whom Tomasi is known to have read. The opera supports Césaire’s comparison of Nazism and coloniality, and suggests what Césaire describes as the corrosive effects of colonialism on the colonizing cultures. Second, I invoke Aleida Assmann’s theorization of memory to discuss how the piece drew on audiences’ memories of French resistance in order to justify Algerian resistance. Historical studies indicate that many French anticolonial activists were motivated by precisely such appeals to the memory of resistance. The paper thus suggests how music history can illuminate the effects of colonial collapse in the colonizing countries, and in turn how the process of that collapse constitutes an essential mid-century context for the study of music.