This paper discusses how mechanisms of myth-making and the commodification of anticolonial struggle and resistance are used in the promotion of Cabo Verdean popular music and its relationship to musical production on the islands. In recent years, small Western labels have specialized in reissuing African popular music records with extensive bonus material, including interviews and photographs of the musicians. The liner notes provide historical and socio-political background information on the compiled songs. These materials are used to enhance the aura of the records as "lost treasures" and create "premium products" by highlighting their historical and cultural significance, especially in the context of African anti-colonial resistance. In this way, labels actively engage in mythmaking and highlight connections to anti-colonial struggles as a form of commoditization. I focus on Analog Africa's 2016 compilation Space Echo which features modernized Batuku and Funaná songs from the 1970s and 1980s. The liner notes tell the fictional story of a ship that ran aground near São Nicolau in 1968. Allegedly, revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral ordered the ship's synthesizers and instruments to be distributed among the people, fueling their rebellious spirit. This story took on a life of its own beyond the liner notes, being printed and distributed as a true story in international magazines and newspapers, and even prompting the production of a short independent film and several radio features. In this paper, I trace the various iterations of the myth and the debates about its credibility and its relationship to real historical events.

This presentation investigates the expansion of Western staff notation transcription during Korea’s Japanese colonial period (1910-1945). Before the arrival of staff notation, there was no notation that was used for all genres of Korean music, which had been transmitted orally or through a combination of mensural notation (chŏngganbo), with other notation written in sino-Korean. In the process of integrating Western music into Korean culture, Korean traditional music was transcribed into staff notation. Korean composers Paek Uyong (1883-1930), Kim Insik (1885-1962) and Yi Sangchun (1884-1948) were among the first Koreans who systematically converted traditional music into staff notation. Their work was long overlooked by Korean music scholars who considered them to be experts on Western music alone, until 2018, when Youn Young-Hae published an article highlighting Yi’s musical achievements related to traditional music.

The presenter discusses factors omitted from Youn’s study, namely how the achievements of Korean Western music experts related to their understanding of the field of traditional music. A close analysis of the transcriptions will show how the notators influenced Korean music society during the colonial period. The transcription would bring changes to the concept of Korean musical notation, with metronome markings, the arrangement of instruments according to instrumental family, and the signifying of the different elements of music. Furthermore, the process of recording traditional music using Western notation has enabled all Korean traditional musics, to be transmitted through notation, not just orally. The presentation will highlight the lasting effects of cultural convergence on a colonized society.

In this paper, using selected Gaelic songs created in Nova Scotia, I argue that song makers used songs to simultaneously raise awareness of and resist epistemological and cultural colonization by using the very expressive forms that coloniality sought to repress. Sociologist Aníbal Quijano argues that although much formal, political colonialism has been defeated, colonial domination persists in the form of coloniality, the colonization of the imagination and the repression of images, symbols, and modes of signification of dominated groups (2007: 169), such as language and song. Many Gaels fled British colonization – or were displaced and forced to leave as part of colonizing acts – in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a significant number of whom settled in Nova Scotia. Colonization and coloniality resulted in a dramatic decline in Gaelic language and culture globally. Epistemological decolonization (Quijano 2007: 178) demands a reckoning whereby the processes of cultural colonization and coloniality are recognized and confronted. In Gaelic culture, songs must necessarily be at the heart of this reckoning. Songs are central to both the production and sustainability of knowledge in Gaelic society, encoding Gaelic history and genealogies in language while celebrating people, places, and events of significance. I examine selected Nova Scotia Gaelic songs that explicitly address linguistic and cultural loss to trace in their texts a process of epistemological colonization. These song texts simultaneously resist epistemological colonization by framing language attitudes with cultural values and by rooting them in traditional poetics.