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12 - The Business of Music on the Peripheries of Empire: A Turn-of-the-Century Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2021

Christina Bashford
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Musicology, School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hilary J. Grainger
Affiliation:
Dean of Quality Assurance and Academic Development, London College of Fashion
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Affiliation:
Director of the Opera Studies Forum in the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa and faculty member
Michela Ronzani
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Italian, Division of Liberal Arts
David C. H. Wright
Affiliation:
Formerly Reader in the Social History of Music at the Royal College of Music; retired in 2010
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Summary

IN recent decades, the musical life of cities has received increasing attention within musicology. As Tim Carter has pointed out, it is not surprising, given the field's history, that many studies of cities have focused on Italian centres in the Renaissance, or that one of the prominent early exceptions to the predominance of Italy, Reinhard Strohm's study of Bruges, examined a city associated with another foundational interest of the discipline, Franco-Flemish polyphony. Urban musicology, however, has broadened to include a variety of other cities, prominent among them the great metropolitan centres of Vienna, Paris, London and New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonial cities, too, particularly in Spanish and Portuguese America, have been the subject of pathbreaking studies.

There is one type of city, however, whose musical practices have so far received little attention: settler colonial cities, that is to say, the myriad cities that quickly grew from nothing, or from small and sleepy origins, to metropolitan areas of sometimes remarkable size, across central and western North America, Australia and New Zealand during the long nineteenth century. This is not, of course, to suggest that the music history of all these cities remains unknown: those that grew into major cities in their own right – Chicago and Los Angeles for instance – have attracted considerable musicological attention, and local historians have provided records of many other locations. But in part because historians and urban geographers have themselves only relatively recently begun to recognize the settler colonial city as distinctive and in part, perhaps, because of a reluctance to acknowledge that the American West, in particular, was populated through a process of colonization, studies of the musical life of those cities have been informed primarily by local and national perspectives. We have not yet considered what the peculiar dynamics of urban development in settler colonialism might have to do with musical practices that involved millions of city dwellers worldwide by the time of World War I.

There are good reasons to explore those issues, however. For one, the ‘instant’ nature of these cities – their extraordinarily rapid growth to sizes that in many cases rivalled those of European cultural centres that had existed for centuries, if not millennia – means that their cultural institutions too were newly created rather than evolving from pre-existing local practices.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2016

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