The Sound of Empire

To better understand cultural relations in today’s multi-ethnic, multicultural societies, the volumes in The Sound of Empire series delve into the long-neglected musical dimension of the 20th-century European empires.
Relations through music eluded conventional authority and empowered alternatives. They allowed exploration of multi-faceted interactions and in places far from centres of power
and surveillance. Musical life in cities and on media contributed to new constructions of what it meant to be “European” and “indigenous” in modern colonial cultures, encouraging
traditional, hybrid, and modern identities. The series seeks to develop an entirely new methodological paradigm - relational, comparative, and integrative - with four objectives:
• To musicalize history, probing what musical fields of production contribute to current debates on the nature of empire and colonial identities.
• To historicize aural media, examining live and recorded music on radio as windows onto the dynamic nature of colonial coexistence.
• globalizing music history, bringing new coherence with its focus on one empire, while encouraging comparative, transnational analysis within it and with other empires.
• creolizing research, inviting scholars from throughout the modern empires to investigate the tastes, practices, and interactions of their predecessors from all populations, usually studied in isolation.