Conference Agenda

The turn of the twentieth century was rife with imperial interventions across the planet. While some European powers rekindled their colonial ventures in newly flanged geopolitical formations under the umbrella of modern capitalism as it was the case, for instance, with the infamous scramble of Africa, new empires, like that of the United States, thrived amidst deliberate entanglements of commercial, military, and political agendas. The early twentieth century was also an unprecedented scenario of increasing mechanicity, massive industrialization, and enhanced globalization, often propelled by (neo)colonial and imperial enterprises in the Global South. It was along the coordinates of such “machine-age imperialism,” to use Jeremy Lane’s phrase, that recorded sound gained cultural currency and inspired a vast array of scholarly and business initiatives. This panel examines the role of sound recording technologies and their cultural and social valence in modern imperialism. By analyzing commercial and ethnographic endeavors alike, the presenters interrogate both the colonial underpinnings of metropolitan sound-capturing expeditions and the extent to which recording companies and ethnographic archives capitalized on and helped reproduce the same imperial matrix. Presenter 1 focuses on the ideological contradictions and the imperial context that informed the development of the Konrad T. Preuss collections of indigenous sound recordings from Mexico sponsored by the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and housed by the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. Presenter 2 studies the various strategies used by Victor, Columbia, and Odeon to capture—or extract—music and other sound events throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and how these commercial interventions made apparent not only the imperial character of the early sound recording business, but also the potential of these technologies to stir local performances of cultural autonomy. Finally, presenter 3 details the friction between European researchers, transnational record companies, and Arab musicians in the production and political instrumentalization of sound recordings with Arabic music in the late period of the Arab Awakening.

Archives and the information they contain are designed, structured, and organized according to narratives that shape the type of knowledge that their users are expected to obtain from them. Thus, the objects and documents in an archive usually tell and re-tell stories that performatively reproduce the larger ideological frameworks informing the dynamics between objects, documents, representation, and users. The central concern in this paper is whether it is possible (and how) for archives to tell stories different to the ones they are designed to tell us. In order to find an answer, I study the collections of Naayeri and Wixárika chants recorded for the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin by Theodor Konrad Preuss (1869-1938) between 1905 and 1907 and propose that the way the sound objects in those collections were created responds more to Preuss’ expectations regarding these indigenous communities than to how these communities conceptualize their music and ritual practices. Listening to the archive in detail renders audible the archival project’s imperial entitlement, to use Frederick Cooper’s characterization. Considering how it was created, structured, and meant to have information retrieved from, the archive tells us the story that Preuss wanted it to tell us and nothing else. Thus, I close the presentation with an exploration of how Mexican anthropologist Margarita Valdovinos has engaged this archive since the 2000s, and propose that her interrogation of its constituent materials, with the end of repatriating its recordings to Náayeri and Wixárika communities in Mexico, is a model of how to ask questions from archives that force them to tell us stories different to those embedded in their design, structure, and materiality.

In the early twentieth century, transnational corporations in the sound recording business used various strategies to capture music and other sound events from all over the world. These included the deployment of recording expeditions, the recruitment of local and touring performers to make recordings at the companies’ studios in the United States and Europe, and the importation of sheet music—or the appropriation of vernacular compositions more broadly—to be arranged and reinterpreted far from their places of origin. While the globalizing ventures of Victor, Columbia, Gramophone, Lindstrom, Pathé and other leading recording companies during the acoustic era took place with the backdrop of unambiguous imperial interventions, these businesses thrived as commercial empires themselves: imperial formations entangled with and shaped by the imperial agendas of the United States, Britain, Germany, and France in the wake of World War I. In this paper, I examine the colonial interventions of these business in Latin America and the Caribbean through the analytical lenses of extractive economies. By studying Victor’s deployment of recording scouts to multiple cities across the hemisphere, Columbia’s recording sessions of Peruvian music in New York City, and Odeon’s engagement with local entrepreneurs in Brazil and Argentina, I discuss the extent to which neocolonial commercial modalities mirrored or reframed older imperial patterns of extraction or settler colonialism. Nevertheless, it is not just about the advancement of metropolitan businesses. Sound recording technologies in the early twentieth century fostered other kinds of imperial formations, less material or discernable but not necessarily less overpowering: audible or otherwise sensorial empires nourished by varying structures of feeling and convoluted networks of sociability and music consumption. Indeed, as the business thrived so did phonograph culture and, with it, the cracks of modern imperialism became more apparent. Thus, I also pay attention to local performances of cultural autonomy in matters of music, technology, entrepreneurship, and records’ circulations as a way to appreciate the simultaneity of unmistakable neocolonial interventions and a kind of “colonization in reverse”—to use the words of Louise Bennett Coverley’s poem.

In a 1930 report for the meeting of the Society for the Study of Oriental Music, Robert Lachmann (1892-1939) praised the importance of the phonograph and recording industry by stating that melodies “that have been handed down orally [can] be saved from oblivion.” Years later, at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music, he joined other European researchers and traveled to the Middle East to archive and preserve what they considered “authentic” traditional music. They packaged and sold these recordings for the purpose of “educating” the (Western) public about Arabic music in its “ancient, uncontaminated, and distinctive form.” At the same time, however, the Arab musicians at the Congress were part of the second generation of the nahda (“Arab Awakening”) movement, in which scholars, intellectuals, and cultural leaders developed a new modernity that separated themselves from European colonizers. These musicians played an important role in shaping the sounds of the Arab Awakening, utilizing the new recording technology of the phonograph to disperse political, cultural, and nationalist information. At the 1932 Cairo Congress, recording sessions became a space of friction between the European musicians who captured the music they heard and the Arab musicians who wished to use the phonograph as a tool for freedom. Drawing on scholarship on early comparative musicology and field recordings (Nettl and Bohlman 1990; Feld 2002; Racy 2003; 2015) as well as on Arabic music during the nahda (Shannon 2006; Silver 2022), I analyze two recordings from the 1932 Cairo Congress disc collection, and I read against the archival bias grain to question how European scholars heard and studied musical works from the “Orient.” Packaged and sold for the public, these recordings then became entangled in the transnational European record industry already present in the Middle East/North African region. Although cataloged, described, and framed toward Western audiences, the Arabic lyrics and subjects reveal the Arab musicians’ desires to undermine their European counterparts. I argue that, despite exploitation from these sessions, the Arab musicians utilized the recordings for the cylinders for their goals of modernizing Arabic music, lyrics, and genres that counteracted European coloniality.