Event

“Instruments of Empire: A History of Global Nineteenth-Century Music”
Room 266, Everson Hall

This presentation links the island of Java with metropolitan London and rural South Africa. It invokes visions of a so-called “global nineteenth century” in order to present an archeology of the “wired worlds” that so characterize global built environments today. Colored by its grounding in music studies, the paper theorizes the ways in which land might be actively emplaced through the active use of musical instruments.

The focus, in other words, is on geographies of empire, and nineteenth-century musical instruments conceived to achieve that space, or to “annihilate distance,” particularly in the work of Charles Wheatstone, music-instrument inventor and Chair of “Experimental Philosophy” at King’s College London. In Wheatstone’s work, sound itself was reconfigured as an enigmatic force for propagation: a way of collapsing space – extolled as an annihilator, or (more benignly) as a political force for cross-cultural communication and understanding. In the sixth of his popular 1835 “Lectures on Sound,” for example, Wheatstone laid before his audience a free-reed talking machine or vowel synthesizer, a Chinese sheng, Chladni figures, and an oversized Javanese gendèr, which Sir Thomas Raffles, “Father of Singapore” and former Lieutenant-General of Java, had recently brought back from the East. Another reed instrument on the table was the prototype “multi-tongued” “Wheatstone concertina,” later versions of which would be advertised as the sound of “British Dominions and Colonies.” They were taken to the Antarctic by Shackleton, Central Africa by Livingstone, and were instruments of choice for colonial missionaries. The paper draws connections between Wheatstone’s experiments on sound conductance, his telegraphic/telephonic fantasies, popular science, the birth of comparative philology, and the liberal-humanitarian search for a truly global instrument – one tuned to the so-called “scale of nature” and capable of “speaking” a universal musical language.

James Davies’s book, Romantic Anatomies of Performance, was published by the University of California Press in 2014. This monograph addresses immersive modes of music making in the European nineteenth century, exploring music’s role in the political cultivation of bodies. It describes a historical phase wherein, in the words of one reviewer, “new norms about music’s relation to the body emerged and began to organize new relations of social power.” His current research extends from the book’s focus on “personal voice” (which works to denaturalize liberal certainties about “creativity” and “expression”) to larger questions of materiality writ large. Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London is a book co-edited with Ellen Lockhart for the University of Chicago Press. Davies’s chapter in this volume moves in the direction of a second book project, which addresses musical knowing and being in the “global nineteenth century.” The aim is to interpret the emergence of transcendental, globalist, or idealist aesthetics in Europe as a byproduct of the material contingencies of imperial expansion. This means documenting the social placement, not just of political anatomies, but of political geographies. The study explores how people engage in the active placement of land through the active use of musical instruments.

Free, a Valente Lecture

Everson Hall, Davis, CA

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