160062 UE Music in the Early Colonial World (2021S)

How might more ‘globalised’ historical narratives alter conventional music historical narratives and perspectives on the so-called ‘Early Modern’ period? How might we move away from the macro-narrative of Europe-driven modernisation to take account not only of other modernising trajectories, but also coloniality, the constitutive other side without which modernity would not exist? This course brings in perspectives from critical global historiography to consider how musical contacts between European, African, Asian, and American societies in the seventeenth century challenge the Eurocentrism of historical musicology by emphasizing the connectedness of transoceanic music and sound cultures. As a period in which colonial encounter shaped music-making both on the European continent and elsewhere, whether through overseas exploration, conquest, diplomacy, migration, trade and plantation, enslavement, missionisation, or settlement, the seventeenth century marks a critical yet neglected starting point for such an enquiry.

This course will consider how musicians, musical materials, practices, and ideas traveled along oceanic routes of transcultural encounter in the ‘Early Modern’ world through a series of case studies. A variety of primary sources, including travel accounts, music writing, accounts of oral culture and soundscapes, organology and other forms of material culture will be studied, in conjunction with the growing body of secondary musicological literature on the topic, to consider how transcultural paradigms and flows open up aspects of seventeenth-century musical life that have long been ignored or neglected. In addition to gaining knowledge of the theoretical concepts relevant to this topic, students will learn how to work around the limitations of the archive in reconstructing the musics of colonialised people and the indigenous, mestizo, and diasporic lives about which primary sources are so often silent or distorting. Case studies will include music-making in colonial America, Manila, Goa, China, and within the African diaspora, as well as the ways transcultural encounters informed music-making on the European continent.