The Online Program of events for the 2023 AMS & SMT Joint Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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European Music and Caribbean Slavery in the Eighteenth Century
Time:
Saturday, 11/Nov/2023:
10:45am - 12:45pm
Session Chair: Naomi Andre, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Location:Governor's Sq. 16
Session Topics:
1650–1800, African American / Black Studies, Race / Ethnicity / Social Justice, AMS, Roundtables
Presentations
European Music and Caribbean Slavery in the Eighteenth Century
Chair(s): Naomi André (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Presenter(s): Julia Doe (Columbia University), Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden (University of North Texas), Aimee González (University of Chicago), Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University), Henry Stoll (University of Michigan)
Recent years have witnessed a growth in new research addressing the connections between European music, broadly defined, and the centuries-long enslavement of Africans and their descendants in America. Whether examining the colonial financing of metropolitan concert institutions, the theatrical interchanges between France and Saint Domingue, the working lives of Black musicians in Europe, or the experiences of enslaved performers in the Caribbean and Latin America, such scholarship draws attention to the deep—and previously under-explored— entanglements between race, artistic categorization, and the economies of music and slavery in the early-modern Atlantic world. In this roundtable, panelists will discuss examples from their own research that challenge simplistic understandings of racialization and music-making in the eighteenth century.
This roundtable will prioritize conversation between participants and audience. In the first half of the session, each panelist will give a lightning talk of five minutes; the rest of the session will be devoted to dialogue. Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden will present archival work on the Galbaud du Fort family, arguing that plantation slavery supported musical consumption in mid-eighteenth-century Nantes, and that musical consumers were acutely aware of the violent circumstances that underwrote their leisure. Julia Doe will trace the musical life of violinist Louis Julien Clarchies, from the concert stages of Saint-Domingue to the salon of Josephine Bonaparte. Mary Caton Lingold’s contribution troubles the very categories of “European” and “African” music in this period, locating such distinctions in the logics of plantation slavery. Maria Ryan will discuss how enslaved African soldiers in Britain’s West India Regiments interacted with military music. Henry Stoll will consider how, and why, the future people of Haiti used French music to signal their revolutionary ambitions. Wayne Weaver will explore the context of "non-white" subscription to the publication of European sacred music in 1770s Kingston, Jamaica. Finally, Aimee Gonzalez will examine the ways in which colonial Latin American sacred music is understood and performed in contemporary Cuba, focusing on how this repertory has been both racialized and unracialized since the 1990s. Taken together, these case studies underscore the complex negotiations of race, freedom and unfreedom, and music-making in the eighteenth century.
