One of the reasons I wrote my latest piece is I've been thinking abt how Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Peoples overlaps the earlier slave orchestras stage, but I feel they represent 2 modes of the cultural imperialism that happens in colonialism.
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/col…
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Since I'm still barely scratching the surface of slave orchestras, as I learned more about it in trying to wrap my head around the phenomenon, the closest frame of reference for me was the forced assimilation. There were many similarities in, but the differences matter more.
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The biggest difference is that the slaves in slave orchestras were usually trained as adults (at first), and more experienced slaves (and former slaves) often became the trainers for the next gen of musicians.
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Forced assimilation models usually started with children and the re-education wasn't music solely on music: music was just a side effect of many of the programs.
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Slave orchestra musicians weren't necessarily trained to read music while forced assimilation made that a mandatory part of the music education. This included private lessons in some cases as well as full school productions with all performing arts branches together.
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Example of the latter, here's a photo from the Carly Indian Boarding school of a 1909 production of "The Captain of Plymouth" an opera by 2 white men where children had to perform whiteness and stereotypical Indians accompanied by the school orchestra.
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/div…
6/
While many of the musicians in the slave orchestras were Indigenous peoples in the colonized regions and countries they were enslaved, they weren't attending schools. However, there is some evidence that a kind of music school model for slave musicians emerged in some places.
7/
But the purpose of slave orchestras, for the most part, was a show of colonial or individual colonists' power. It wasn't to create "good 'white' citizens" while taming the "less civilized." This leads directly to the 5th part of my piece: Barenboim and white supremacists.
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The legacy of slave orchestras and forced assimilation is intimately tied to the civilizing mission of Western colonial powers and that carries over into how classical music is viewed and used.
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When Barenboim says “Now I want to explore all those places where music hasn’t been brought to” or "It’s better to send the Berlin Philharmonic to play Beethoven’s Sym. No. 1 because [that] they can’t imitate. Neither the Beethoven nor the orchestra”
van-us.atavist.com/orientalism20
10/
We're hard pressed not to hear the words of a colonialist, and when white supremacists say "listening to the classics FORCES you to be white" or “Celebrate the power of your race and listen to more classical music” and it surprises us...
van-us.atavist.com/white-noise
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...maybe it's time for us to stop thinking these are isolated events and an integral and systemic part of classical music history and practice.
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While that classical music history has been whitewashed in the Western world, there are enough traces of it for us to start piecing together it's colonialist and white supremacist past, and that follows the two stages of colonialism.
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Namely direct colonialism which invariable involves direct military control, followed by (or overlapping) cultural colonialism (e.g. cultural imperialism) which is the "soft power" side/stage.
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It remains to be seen if we're actually just in the neocolonialism stage of that in classical music. I suspect yes, if only because, as I've been saying we need to change the assumptions about what we mean by DEI.
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Since DEI initiatives focus on colorizing white performing arts orgs (poa), these things decenter the actually existing BIPOC poa. What this will translate into is reinforcing those white orgs. We're already seeing this happening.
americantheatre.org/2017/07/21/who…
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And just to be clear, this is also happening in the world of Pop Music. Western Pop Music Imperialism was the subject of academic debate in the 80s, but we seem to have have lost sense of that and how that makes it easy to exclude...
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...musics which don't follow the "eurological/afrological" divide which is echoing the perpetual foreigner stereotype, but now in how we view what is even considered American (USian) music.
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This is all a part of the logic of exclusion of colored bodies in music which I mentioned in 3) in my piece. An American Music Essentialism necessarily demands the idea of Perpetually Foreign Musics.
silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2020/09/15/col…
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And all those structures are necessarily for maintaining the status quo of colonialistic white supremacy in the US and Western Music Ecosystems.
20/end
P.S. I should qualify this: "all those structures are necessarily for maintaining the status quo of colonialistic white supremacy in the US and Western Music Ecosystems"
We tend to think of a sharp divide between so-called "Art music" and "Pop music."
P.S. 1/
But they exist on a continuum, and they do so in any culture. I may be hard for folks in the 'Western world' to believe, but there are Art musics and Pop musics that aren't from the Western world.
P.S. 2/
Colonialism has just made it easier to not think about either existing outside of the West. Which makes it easy to underestimate how colonialist Western Popular music genres are (usually in contradistinction to the colonialism of Western Art Music/WAM).
P.S. 3/
Until we realize this, so-called curricular approaches that simply include Western Pop genres will invariably jsut replicate the logic of exclusion in colonialism and white supremacy in a slightly different but related way.
P.S. 4/end
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