Keynote 2. The Language of the Conquerors: Music Theoretical Standards as Colonial Mimicry
How does colonial mimicry manifest itself as a musical structure? Is there evidence of distortion with mimetic intent corresponding to what Homi K. Bhabha calls “mimicry”, a form of distortion of “original” designs? In The Location of Culture (1994), Bhabha suggests that the colonial gaze not only compromises and distorts the culture of the colonized but also ambivalently splits the foundations of... its own culture with disciplinary intent (Bhabha, 122-123), using its normative energy in specific ways to “form” the colonized subjects.
In his chamber opera Mare nostrum (1975), Mauricio Kagel has the colonizer recite music-theoretical concepts in a hybrid, archaic counterpoint during an ironic “exorcism.” Is this just the composer’s intuition, or can we see a link between colonial mimicry and reinforced normativity in musical style, particularly regarding gestures of “othering”?
The keynote takes up scenes of aping, discriminating, and exoticizing in tonal music. The initial hypothesis is the presence of what Bhabha calls a “forked tongue” (1994, 121) – i.e. an alienated musical idiom that is increasingly working with repetitions, exaggerations, and traces of normative sets of rules and thus falsifies itself as a free artistic expression – which is mirrored in a musical structure corresponding to colonial mimicry.
The strong ties between mimicry and normativity lead to the following epistemological question: to what extent do music-theoretical norms and conceptualizations, similar to the notion of “defensive discourse” coined by Fred Maus, carry traces of a “coagulated” colonial mimicry and reproduce them in musical analysis?