Conference Agenda

How and where has music helped extend the measured delimitation of immaterial wealth and property? Indigenous critiques of settler-colonial institutions—I am thinking here of copyright, private property, museums, archives, and land-grant universities—are increasingly prevalent in critical discourse (Simpson 2014, Coulthard 2014, Moreton-Robinson 2015, la paperson 2017, Reed 2019, Robinson 2020, Gray 2022, la paperson 2017). Running in parallel, allied white-settler scholars have generated extensive writing that centres these Indigenous critiques, often within histories of the Black Atlantic, migration, piracy, and traditions tied to commoning in Europe (Linebaugh 2019, Federici 2004, Ross 2018, Nichols 2020) towards rethinking the contested origins of “private property” as a conceptual fantasy in Euro-American philosophy, history, and jurisprudence.

In this paper, I will argue that the relationship between musical property and landed property should not be registered as an instance of metaphor, but as one entangled in literal, material, and grounded modes of thought. Whether the founder of “political arithmetick” and the division of labour, William Petty, seconded from his position as professor of music at Gresham College to lead the first national land survey by marshalling Cromwell’s troops in Ireland (McCormick 2009), or the recent, graphic scores of Navajo composer Raven Chacon, I insist that musical and landed property have always imagined each other as means of extending proprietary abstractions. Music is caught up in enclosure movements that render “pieces” from out of the common sensorium of musical practice. These stretch from Petty’s geometries through to Goehr’s “imaginary” museum (2007), from Lomax’s (1945) comparison of song collecting to oil, gold, and diamond extraction, to Gray’s (2019, 2022) work on musical rematriation, and into the poetic means by which Robinson’s (2020) event scores and Chacon’s (2022) graphic scores call upon grounded relationships to land, maps, and relationality. As a white settler scholar, I refuse that these are metaphorical relationships and instead follow settler scholars (Tomlinson 2007 and Nichols 2020) in insisting upon how music has been imbricated in metonymic efforts at piece- and work-oriented expansions of the conceptual reach of property relations.

On the island of Janitzio, Mexico, Indigenous P’urhépecha residents deploy a range of practices to keep in-motion the local tradition of pirekua, song in P’urhépecha-language. Though pirekuas are common throughout the P’urhépecha region of Mexico, songs composed and performed on Janitzio register the history of the island and its residents. In this paper, I attend to practices of performing and transmitting pirekuas and suggest that the corpus of Janitzio pirekuas forms its own historical and ethnographic sound archive, one that opens onto questions over what constitutes an “archive” and what is legible as “historical record.” How does one write a history that has left no traces in the paper/sound archives of the nation, but has been inscribed on material instruments, landscapes, and in memories and practices? Drawing from musicological (Bisset Perea 2021; Madrid 2016; Goodman 2019) and anthropological (de la Cadena 2015; Povinelli 2011) work on (post)colonial archives, I argue that this sonorous island archive demands a thinking of the musical archive away from the institutional and juridical and towards its intimate, quotidian, and ephemeral dimensions.

This paper, on one level, is an ethnographic-historical account of Indigenous musical practices that challenge the colonial logics of the sound archive and, on another level, a theoretical exercise in what could be called a “musicology of traces.” Following anthropologists Valentina Napolitano (2015) and Yael Navarro (2020), the paper proposes “tracing” as an analytical tool and “traces” as sites for inquiry in music studies that allow scholars to attend to how materialities, affects, and histories that fall outside the realms of representation resonate and resound in the present. As the knotty leftovers and felt excesses that dwell in gaps and silences, traces allow us to begin to grasp music’s disjointed and disavowed histories and fractured affects without forcing them to make sense.

A hallmark of the burgeoning field of global music history is an emphasis on mobility, legibility, and confluence. Even in studies that disregard European contact, the Islamic or Sanskrit cosmopolis and the Silk Road remain persuasive frameworks. But what of histories that remain resolutely unconnected, of places where an emphasis on a global network disempowers music's local meanings? This paper considers the discourse of indigeneity within the music history of the North Sumatran highlands--and disrupts the assumption that its archives and musical practices should be made universally legible and audible.

For the last few decades, cultural historians of Indonesia have championed the legacy of Islam in Southeast Asia (Ricci 2010, Harnish and Rasmussen 2011), an effort to correct wilful colonial prejudice that had downplayed the newer religion in favour of a safer and more remote “Greater India” (Coedes 1964, Bosch 1952). Yet both historiographical traditions make the same move: Java, Sumatra, and Bali are important insofar as they exist within a regional network, or a religious cosmopolis (and smaller islands less open to networks are often ignored altogether). Scholarship based in performance ethnography can highlight subtle local nuance, but historical work indebted to merchant accounts tends to focus outwards. Recently, transformative scholarship on Sumatran indigeneity by historian Faizah Zakaria pushes back against finding value only in contact: in theorizing “sacral ecologies” in the nineteeth century, she indicts a “geographical flattening” that accompanied “converting out of indigeneity” (Zakaria 2017). In light of Zakaria’s work, I re-evaluate my own analysis of North Sumatran ritual music (redacted xxxx)—which leaned strongly on the prestige of the global—by considering its soundings, upstream of the coastal trading zones. I recruit Margaret Kartomi's case study of the Malay nobat ensemble (Kartomi 2012)--a global inheritance of locally-made meaning (Raja Iskandar 2022)--and emphasize fugitive elements of Toba Batak music that only make sense within a particular multi-species, ecological framework. By doing so, I aim to imagine a global music history that makes room for peoples that resist contact, archives that resist reading, and sound that can best be interpreted within the landscapes that formed it.