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.
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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, 02:57:03am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Transculturation, Heritage, and Misrepresentation Session Chair: Andrew Chung | |
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Notes toward a Decolonial Critique of Polyphony University of Pittsburgh 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. | |