Conference Agenda

Beginning with the immigrant-owned restaurant as a site of everyday musical encounter, this paper reimagines the soundscape of interwar New York City through the activities of early-twentieth-century musicians from colonial India. Biographies of American composers, including Johanna Beyer (1888-1944) and Henry Cowell (1897-1965), and so-called Oriental dancers, including Ruth St. Denis (1879-1968) and Ragini Devi (1893-1982), contain scattered evidence of professional relationships with the first generation of Indian working musicians to settle in the United States. Yet these individuals and their engagements with the American public have been relegated to the footnotes and margins of conventional historiography. Drawing from my dissertation research and building upon critical interventions in postcolonial studies (Guha 1983, 2002; Spivak 1988; Trouillot 1995) and microhistory (Ginzburg 1976; Muir and Ruggiero 1991), this paper argues for a transcultural historical musicology “from below.” By centering the stories of marginalized historical actors, I illuminate a complex interplay of cosmopolitan artistic practices, restrictive U.S. immigration and naturalization policies, and the fetishism of the early-twentieth-century Orientalist economy. Amplifying this history frames early modernism in American music as a transcultural project forged, in part, through global migrations and migrant labor. In reconstructing this microhistory, I discuss methodological advances—particularly in digital archiving and text-scanning technologies—that enable this type of (micro)historical (ethno)musicological research. Where the fragmentary archive falls silent and traces of marginal lives retreat into the shadows, I consider how attending to everyday encounters and experiences allows us to study, and hear, the past with renewed rigor and sensitivity.

In 2019, the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra celebrated its sixty-year anniversary with three major performances in March, June, and September at the National Theater in Accra. The pieces programmed in the March 31, 2019 performance included an array of hymn arrangements, European classical music, art music by composers of Ghana, as well as an excerpt from the Magnificat, BWV 243, by J.S. Bach. These programming choices are typical of concerts in the country and reflect Ghana’s rich and stylistically heterogeneous musical traditions stemming from its colonialist past coupled with its unique musical traditions.

While scholars have already documented the emergence of stylistically hybrid art music influenced by Bach in Ghana beginning with the compositions of Ephraim Amu in the twentieth century, and have examined evolving music education systems and practices, no one has yet examined the role and significance of the music of Bach in relation to issues of concert programming and performance practices.

This paper adds to contemporary research about the global spread of Bach's music by documenting its initial introduction in Ghana and eventual transmission through colonizing religious and educational activities. In addition, based on interviews with contemporary musicians, published and unpublished essays, video footage, and other documents, it examines the role Bach’s music continues to play in Ghana in the twenty-first century in relation to interpretive practices and concert programming. Focused case studies on the Gramophone Ghana Chorus, three organ virtuosi, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Afro Classical Nights Concert Series demonstrate a breadth of ways the music of Bach has been assimilated into the current hybrid musical culture of Ghana. In the process, my paper provides new knowledge about performance practices and concert programming of Bach’s music in countries beyond Europe and North America as well as ways that multiculturalism has impacted how Bach’s music is performed, heard, and experienced today.

On 10 July 1958, Hungary’s Végh Quartet performed Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4 for an exclusively Black audience in Johannesburg, South Africa. In a press announcement the Quartet explained that they chose the Bartók because they “wished to see the reactions of non-Europeans to serious modern music”. Encoded in both the concert program and the press announcement was an assumption that so-called “serious modern music” would evoke an unusual reaction in Black listeners—one whose strangeness would be legible to the white South Africans observing the listening practice of their Black counterparts. But what white listeners heard in Black audiences’ audition of twentieth-century Western art music was arguably more revealing of their own cultural identifications than those of the Black audience members they fetishized.

This paper takes the Végh Quartet’s Bartók performance as a starting point to examine the role of listening in racialized discourses of musical cosmopolitanism (Magaldi 2024; Shain 2018). Taking into account apartheid-era constructions of white South Africans’ bio-cultural connection with Europe, it argues that white auditory cosmopolitanism emerged negatively from projections of Black listeners’ presumed incomprehension of twentieth-century European art music. Journalists did not record Black listeners’ reactions to Mozart, Bach, or Beethoven. They did, however, fixate on Black audiences’ responses to musical modernism. Thus, listening emerged as a site of racial othering, serving as a codification of the perceived cultural backwardness of Black audiences, and as a receptacle for white audiences’ own anxieties regarding the (in)comprehensibility of modernist music. Listening to others listening to contemporary art music became an exercise in both racial projection and racial self-fashioning.

Participating in growing discourse on listening as contact zone (Bloechl 2021), this paper intervenes in current debates regarding music’s role in the codification of race (Thurman 2021; Muller and Froneman 2020). It draws on previously unstudied archival records of segregated concerts for Black audiences, to show how Black listeners emerged as the negative double of white musical cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan ear, the paper concludes, does not simply listen to musical circulation. Rather, it fulfils a far more sinister role in auditory practices of racial and cultural demarcation.

Spanish estudiantina ensembles achieved immense popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and were integral to the international projection of Spanish popular musical styles and associated dances. These groups, formed around a core of plucked string instruments, had an impact on the creation and international reception of the plucked string soundscape, as well as the modes of presentation and repertories of a variety of nationalist-orientated ensembles. The Spanish estudiantinas were the catalyst for important musical transformations during the Belle Epoque, which ranged from issues of instrumentation and evocations of the novel sonorities of these ensembles, through to the creation of a new template for the performance of nationalist and cosmopolitan repertories by nationally-framed (and at times costumed) fretted instrument groups. Within the first decade of their cosmopolitan touring estudiantina ensembles had inspired the creation of mandolin, balalaika and tamburica orchestras in Continental Europe, as well as the BMG (banjo, mandolin and guitar) movement in the Anglo-American sphere. The transculturation of estudiantinas in many parts of Latin America (often through the impetus of the extended tours of the Estudiantina Figaro through the Americas in the 1880s) also resulted in numerous local folk-inspired and urban popular variants.

This paper will explore the global reach of this musical phenomenon by examining the impact of the Spanish estudiantinas on aspects of music-making in the Ottoman and British Empires in the 1890s, drawing on specific examples from Istanbul and Smyrne (Izmir), London and Melbourne. This efflorescence of plectral sonorities and their associated musical cultures, stimulated by the estudiantinas, created the foundation for the string bands and plucked string popular music ensembles of the early twentieth century.