Conference Agenda

In 1952, Eliseo Pajaro premiered his doctoral dissertation piece, Philippine Symphony, with the conductor Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra. This piece was the culmination of his graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music and combined Filipino folk music with Western orchestration practices and formal structures. After he graduated with a PhD in composition in 1953, he returned to the Philippines and spent the rest of his career as the cofounder of the League of Philippine Composers, Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, and Dean of the University of the Philippines Conservatory (Kasilag 2001). Pajaro advocated for “serious music” in the newly-independent nation, as hybridization of Western and Filipino music contributed to “New Society” by portraying the Philippines as an advanced, forward-thinking nation (Pajaro 1973, Castro 2011).

Despite Pajaro’s impact on Filipino arts and culture, his musical legacy is largely forgotten in the United States. Using archival documents from the Eastman Special Collections and newspapers from the United States and the Philippines, I construct a narrative of Pajaro’s early career to circumvent institutional amnesia. Concert programs, manuscripts, and historicized newspapers point towards a two-way exchange between Pajaro and Eastman; although he was there to study composition and orchestration from American professors, he was also there to introduce Americans to Filipino music and culture. I argue that Pajaro actually fulfilled his proclaimed role as a composer in the “New Society” through his doctoral dissertation, written before the height of his career.

I then analyze Pajaro’s conception of Western/Filipino cultural hybridity through a close reading of the first movement of Philippine Symphony, demonstrating how he negotiated the constraints of sonata form with orchestration choices that highlight the symphony’s folk songs. Following ideas from music theorist Roger Grant (2022) who exemplified colonial power structures through analysis of missionary music, analysis in this paper serves to empathize with Pajaro and other 20th-century Filipino composers who valued prowess in Western music traditions to attain higher social and/or economic status. This paper sheds light on a forgotten part of U.S.-Filipino music relations and shows how analysis can provide insight into post-colonial identities.

In 1881, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), leading poet-composer of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal, wrote his first musical drama entitled Valmiki Pratibha (“The Genius of Valmiki”). The work dramatizes the origin story of its titular protagonist as he transforms from a dacoit leader to the revered poet-sage who would later author the Hindu epic Ramayana. Composed shortly after Rabindranath’s first trip to England, the musical idiom of Valmiki Pratibha integrates aesthetics of European opera alongside Hindustani classical and Bengali folk traditions. Through the analysis of its libretto, swaralipi musical notation, and archival recordings, I demonstrate that his integration of these diverse influences is not a mere grafting of styles but rather an active forging of new cultural articulations shaped by British-Indian colonial encounter. Drawing on postcolonial frameworks of modernity (Chatterjee 1993; Chakrabarty 2000) and hybridity (Bhabha 1994), I theorize Valmiki Pratibha’s role in negotiating a distinctive Bengali subjectivity within colonial structures and contemplate how the intimate cultural relationship between British imperial power and its Indian subjects was mediated through musical drama. In doing so, this paper illuminates the “transmutation” of opera (Nicholson 2022) as it shifts in positionalities and performances of coloniality, ultimately centering “shadow opera cultures” (André 2018) – marginalized works such as Valmiki Pratibha – in the narrativization of a global operatic history.

Few concepts in music studies are as unsettled as modernism. For J. P. E. Harper-Scott, modernism unfolds as the self-realization of late-Romantic autonomy — the culmination of an immanent Hegelian teleology. Richard Taruskin exposes the ideological underpinnings of the term itself, reading modernism as an instrument of Western exceptionalism and moral self-authorization. These divergent accounts – there are many others - reveal that “modernism,” far from a coherent style or epoch, is already a problem internal to the Western canon: a debate over history, value, and identity.

This paper rethinks that problem through the lens of empire and the global nineteenth century. It turns to Qajar Iran, where musical modernization unfolded amid imperial pressures and cross-cultural encounters. Under Naser al-Din Shah, the introduction of military bands, staff notation, and European instruments signaled not merely imitation but negotiation — a translation of imperial modernity into local idioms. Persian musicians adapted these imported materials within the dastgāh system, generating hybrid practices that blurred the lines between continuity and rupture, autonomy and subjection.

By setting Western modernism’s self-conscious discourse of progress against Iran’s adaptive musical modernity, this paper argues that “modernism” is best understood not as an aesthetic epoch but as a mode of historical consciousness shaped by imperial entanglement. In a global nineteenth century, modernism ceases to be the property of the West and becomes a comparative question: how different cultures imagine being modern while remaining in dialogue with their pasts and with the global orders that sought to define them.