Conference Agenda

This paper examines the role of colonial-era music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage from the 1930s until the present. I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of eighteenth-century Catholic sacred music sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto Havana’s restored eighteenth-century spaces. Furthermore, I illuminate how, seemingly paradoxically, intellectuals and cultural officials have championed elements from Cuba’s imperial past in pursuit of an anti-imperial Cuban history and culture since the 1930s. Focusing on the preservation and restoration of the colonial Church of San Francisco de Paula as a concert hall and on the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s early music revival, I demonstrate how performances of—and writings about—colonial-era music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the post-colonial present.

First, I explore the effort in the 1930s and 40s by intellectuals galvanized around notions of Cuban heritage, preservation aligned with modernization, and anti-US imperialism to save the eighteenth-century Paula Church-turned-concert hall. I then examine the recovery of Cuban-born chapel master Esteban Salas y Castro (1725–1803) during the 1940s–1960 as part of efforts to reevaluate Cuba’s “true” history and heritage free from colonial misconceptions and cultural imperialism, especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Finally, I show how, since the 1990s, the revival of colonial-era music has been tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities following the Soviet Union’s collapse. This paper thus builds on work by music scholars such as Marysol Quevedo and Susan Thomas, who illuminate the richly textured relationships among art music, cultural institutions, and race in twentieth-century Cuba, and Miriam Escudero’s pioneering studies on Cuba’s eighteenth-century sacred music repertory. I contend that Cuba’s revival of colonial music and its restoration of colonial architecture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries enrolls the fraught colonial past in the needs of the present in order to foster local identity in place, and to project a sense of belonging during times of profound change and uncertainty.

In this paper, I argue that the appropriation and misrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples, both musically and dramatically, was a defining feature in attempts to create explicitly Australian-themed musico-dramatic works from the 1930s onwards. This appropriation was partly intended to separate Australian music from pervasive British pastoralism, paralleling a broader shift away from British dependence, particularly from 1945 onwards. Despite significant changes in political discourse, from assimilation to increased recognition from the 1960s, the musical representation of Aboriginal peoples remains largely unchanged, revealing a continued cultural colonization. The resultant musical stereotype is typified by drones, pounding non-isochronous rhythms and modality. Drawing on settler-colonial theory, particularly the work of Patrick Wolfe and Nicholas Thomas, I examine how these representations persist across changing ideological contexts.

Jindyworobakism, an artistic movement that sought to create a distinctive national style in the 1930s, was the first to incorporate significant Aboriginal influences. This included Clive Douglas’s “reconstruct[ed]… Aboriginal melodies” in his operatic “bush legend,” Kaditcha (1938) (Wood 1979). David Symons has shown that this movement had an underlying assimilationism, mirroring government policy. A closely related work is John Antill’s influential ballet Corroboree (1946). Rachel Campbell (2022) analyzes the ballet through what she terms “settler primitivism,” emphasizing perceived “primitivist” tropes from the settler’s perspective, and drawing a connection with Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913).

Margaret Sutherland’s chamber opera The Young Kabbarli (1964) provides a revealing case study within this historiography. While the work can be read as progressive in some respects, it nevertheless employs a similar idiom to Corroboree in its representation of Aboriginal peoples. Musical pastoralism is reserved for the Irish Protestant protagonist, alongside a liturgical idiom for the antagonistic Catholic missionaries, creating three distinct soundworlds and an overall musical eclecticism. This configuration reflects Sutherland’s genuine, albeit paternalistic, concern for the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples (Graham 2023), and parallels the gradual shift toward Aboriginal recognition and multiculturalism by the 1970s in Australian society. Despite the changing political intentions, these works contain a remarkably stable musical depiction of Aboriginal peoples, revealing the extent to which settler-colonial frameworks continued to shape and even define twentieth-century Australian opera.

In this paper, I assemble materials for a decolonial critique of the concept of polyphony in academic and public discourse. I take as jumping-off point a passage from the post-9/11 bestseller What Went Wrong? (2002) by Bernard Lewis, a historian of the Middle East who helped shape the George W. Bush administration’s approach toward the Islamic world and the need to “bring democracy” to Iraq. In Lewis’s text, polyphony serves as a skeleton key to understanding the West’s drive to modernization and the fundamentally cooperative and democratic essence of Western culture—all of which the Islamic world, in Lewis’s telling, rejects. Whatever the manifold faults of Lewis’s account of music history, it represents a certain common wisdom about polyphony that leaves traces in the work of scholars from the anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) to Lewis’s frequent sparring partner, Edward Said (1993a; 1993b). In much of this writing, polyphony shows the remarkable ability to serve both as an exclusive marker of European civilizational distinction and as an inclusive metaphor for liberal multiculturalism. We see this double move, as well, in global cultural politics, as with the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where some version of “polyphonic” or “multipart” is the most common musical term. The colonizing power of polyphony lies in the way it draws value from a global array of musical traditions—by granting an elevated status as “polyphonic”—without relinquishing its central place in the stories we tell about Western music.

Extending the work of musicologists who have identified the historical practice of polyphony as part of a suite of colonial techniques for conversion and control in Peru (Baker 2008), Manila (Irving 2010), and French Canada (Bloechl 2005), I argue for the continuing valence of polyphony as a means of ordering, dividing, and extracting the world’s voices. My ultimate aim is to redefine polyphony as an ideological account of human difference in music—among the most consequential in global music history and one that has been shaped by changing material practices of production and mediation.