Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:56am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Colonial Frameworks in 18th-Century Music Session Chair: D. Linda Pearse Discussant: Sarah Eyerly | |
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Black Military and Court Musicians in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1680–1720: A View from the Colonial Archive Bowling Green State University Based on my archival research in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (GStA PK) in Berlin, this paper investigates the connection between Brandenburg-Prussia’s early modern colonies in West Africa (1680–1720) and the trafficking of enslaved Africans who were intended for service as military and court musicians in early eighteenth-century Prussia. The historiography on these Black musicians currently resembles a patchwork, dispersed across multiple disciplines—a fragmentation that is due in part to the near-total destruction of the Prussian military archive during World War II, and, more generally, the marginalization of early modern German colonialism in both scholarship and public discourse. My paper opens a new avenue of inquiry by examining GStA PK’s extensive holdings on the Brandenburg African Company, Brandenburg-Prussia’s trading company invested in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, through the methodological lens of colonial music and sound studies. These sources reveal King Frederick William I of Prussia’s ambitious plans during the 1710s to transport a large number of enslaved boys and young men from West Africa to Prussia and train them as military Hautboisten. I reconstruct both the development of this project and the reasons for its failure, as well as the King’s subsequent efforts to obtain enslaved musicians through intermediaries in London and elsewhere. Building on Saidiya Hartman’s understanding of the archive of slavery as a record of commodification and the fungibility of the Black body, and Jörg Jochen Berns’s work on technologies of power in early modern court ceremonial, I argue that these musicians were conceived both as extractable musical labor and as instruments of state display. In military parades, court festivals, and other public spectacles, enslaved performers were meant to symbolically evoke the fiction of Prussia as a global colonial power especially after 1720, when it had lost all its colonial possessions. By bringing colonial trade records into dialogue with the study of military and courtly soundscapes in early eighteenth-century Berlin, this paper shows how music and sound functioned as tools of imperial representation, and, more broadly, sheds light on the intertwined and still understudied histories of Black musicians, colonialism, and race-making in the Holy Roman Empire. | |