Music and Colonialism

Colonizers took ears with marches and hymns; the colonized turned the same instruments back.

Related

RomanticAnthemTrumpet

Question

Colonization did not only draw maps; it rearranged ears. Military bands, hymns, and school singing lessons brought imperial rhythm into occupied places. At the same time, the colonized wrote their own songs with those instruments. Who gets called local color, and who may collect another people's music?

Historical background

European military bands spread with armies and trading posts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and brass and drums formed a new public sound in colonial cities. Missionaries translated hymns into local languages, and schools taught European notation. In the twentieth century, records and radio turned colonial music into a commodity while also recording anti-colonial songs.

Key cases

Rule, Britannia! was written in London in the 1740s and became an unofficial anthem of the British navy. The British Grenadiers marched with regiments and left a band tradition in India, Africa, and North America. Aloha Oe was written by Queen Liliuokalani around 1878; after the kingdom was overthrown in 1893, it became a memory of lost sovereignty, then was softened into a tourist postcard. The three show proclamation, administration, and appropriation.

What to listen for

Hear whether brass is standing in for an administrative order, and how a local melody emerges from under the chords. Exotic orchestration often turns living people into scenery.

Related

Imperial ritual depends on Anthem and Trumpet; the military band tradition of the colonial era peaked in Romantic.

Sources

• Grove Music Online 的 Colonialism and music 与 Rule, Britannia! 条目，用于核对帝国歌曲的传播
• Adria Imada, Aloha America（Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire，Duke University Press，2012），用于核对夏威夷音乐的殖民与旅游语境

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.