Conference Agenda

Spectacle and ceremony are well-understood tools of the British Empire, overwhelming the senses of spectator-participants and enculturating them into a particular worldview. Such scholars as Wendy Webster (2005), Nalini Ghuman (2014), and Sarah Kirby (2022) have analyzed how British colonial forces used music, spectacle, and ceremony to shape understandings of imperial order across the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in both the metropole and the colonies. Furthermore, historians have noted ceremonies as key tools in crafting a post-colonial identity across the former British empire (Cannadine 2008, Kaul 2008, Kahn 2008). But what role did these ceremonies play in shaping the people of Britain’s national consciousness during the anticolonial moment of the 1960s?

I answer this question by analyzing music used to mark the independence of British colonies at ceremonial events in London across the 1960s. Using Katie Day Good’s framework for understanding spectacle as a pedagogical tool (2020), I focus on a series of ceremonies hosted by Westminster Abbey, intended to welcome former colonies as independent members of the British Commonwealth. Planned by the Abbey and the British Government’s Colonial Office, these spectacular events took the form of Anglican worship services and featured musical well-wishes to these independent nations. These pieces included hymns and instrumental works that would not feel out of place in the Abbey’s hallowed halls, leading to the ceremonies having a uniform sound, one distinctly British in nature, rather than idiosyncratic approaches highlighting the unique musical qualities of the varying nations. Drawing on materials from the British National Archives and the Westminster Abbey Archives, I reconstruct the questions and debates leading up to the ceremonies for Jamaica (1962), Kenya (1963), and Guyana (1966). I argue that, through music, one hears how the British Government’s desire to control and shape the Commonwealth in their national image led programmers to structure these events to please British attendees, rather than the newly independent nations they were supposedly honoring. By reframing spectacle from this vantage point, this project highlights how music can both support and undermine the crafting of national identity via ceremony.

After being the most renowned composer in the UK for a short time at the turn of the twentieth century, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor faded gradually to obscurity in predominantly white musical institutions after his early death in 1912. Beginning around a century later, as those institutions in Europe and the United States have looked to rectify centuries of racism and other bias in programming and teaching, Coleridge-Taylor's music has been returning to concert and educational canons in force. But what are these canons? Historically, scholars have approached the idea of canonicity either by focusing on conserving, expanding, or critiquing a single “Western” canon, or by postulating an almost unordered multiplicity of canons. I take it as axiomatic that neither of these approaches can exist without the other. Canons are exercises in community building and narrative-making, serving specific purposes for different communities at different times. In any place and time, multiple canons interact and nest within each other, but none operate independently of either local or global power structures.

Some recent studies have considered how Coleridge-Taylor—who was born and raised in London and never knew his Krio father from Sierra Leone—came into his “Black” and “Pan-African” musical identities. Others have looked at his powerful influence among Black American musicians at the time. Inspired by Naomi André’s concept of “engaged musicology,” this paper traces a broader reception through to the present. Drawing on sources ranging from historical reviews and concert programming patterns in different countries to new interviews with musicians in Sierra Leone, I chart intersecting histories of Coleridge-Taylor reception in Britain, America, and West Africa—observing how the ways people engage with his music remain as multivalent as they were during his own lifetime. For example, the trilogy of cantatas on which the composer’s fame hung in his heyday, Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha, no longer serves as a particularly appropriate vehicle to anchor new interest in his music.

By recognizing Coleridge-Taylor's diasporic Blackness as vital yet context-dependent, we can see interactions between “the canon” and multiple decentralized canons in action, and weigh some implications of these juxtaposed cultural narratives.

The 1990 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest aired at a pivotal moment in European history, between the end of the Cold War and the establishment of the European Union. While many competing songs gestured toward bright Europeanist futures, the show’s runner up–the Guadeloupean singer Joëlle Ursull, who was France’s first Black representative in the Contest–sang of another kind of unity: racial integration. Her song “White and Black Blues” addresses her desire to overcome racial prejudice and celebrate her Blackness in a majority white society. Drawing from Muñoz’s (1999) theory of disidentification, I argue that Ursull and her song “White and Black Blues” positioned the importance of racial unity within the emerging prospect of European integration while resisting assimilationist rhetoric developed to erase her Blackness in the name of national and regional colorblindness. Through lyrics gesturing to racial integration and her global Black identity, Ursull figured herself as both Black and European at a time when definitions of “European” were heavily in flux.

The song was composed in the style of the French Antillean genre zouk, which became popular in France in the 1980s and 90s when French Antillean bands began touring and moving to France (Guilbault 1993), as well as in Guadeloupe during its concurrent independence movement (Camal 2019). And yet, the song is characterized by commodified markings of sonic Blackness (Eidsheim 2019; Stoever 2016), such as an eight-bar bridge featuring percussion and shouting alone. Scholars in music and sound studies have argued that references to “African” drumming in music evoke vague, essentialist sonic depictions of a fixed ethnic somewhere else to the white ear, rather than a specific location such as Ursull’s native Guadeloupe (Hill 2013; Agawu 2003). I contend that these vague “African” gestures were powerful tools with which Ursull represented globally racialized and Afro-diasporic communities on the European stage. Through realizing this goal, which she clarified in interviews prior to the Contest, Ursull positioned racial integration as a necessary component to the project of European integration. Ultimately, I show how Ursull’s participation in Eurovision reveals the complexities of racial and (post)colonial belonging in a unifying Europe.