Learning Outcomes:
- To rethink Western music as a global phenomenon beyond its traditional borders through its manifold encounters with cultures from South America to Asia and Central Africa from the XV century until more recent forms of imperialism.
- To analyse the role that Western music played in Europe’s long imperial history as a conveyor and sounding board for ideologies of cultural superiority, racial discrimination and Eurocentric progress.
- To compare different Western imperial experiences around the world and discuss the complex and often unpredictable relationship between music and power outside Europe up to more recent times.
- To engage critically with the main theoretical debates and methodological challenges posed by such perspective on Western music, from postcolonial studies to the more recent debates on the differences between global and world history.
Indicative Module Content:
Week 1: A global history of Western music? Debates, challenges and problems
Week 2: Audible powers: building empires through music
Week 3: The musical colonisation of Spanish América: evangelisation and social order
Week 4: “Educating” indígenos: Jesuit missions between Bolivia and the Philippines.
Week 5: ‘We want to be modern!’: Italian opera in postcolonial Mexico
Week 6: Other polyphonies: threats from the Far East during the Western Enlightenment
Week 7: Orientalism: staging the other in eighteenth-century Europe
Week 8: reading week
Week 9: Music in a cage: ‘exotic’ sounds in the Paris World Expo of 1889
Week 10: Project presentation
Week 11: Harmonic power: colonising central Africa through music (1850-1940)
Week 12: Staging Egypt: the case of Verdi's Aida