This symposium, organized by Christian Storch (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), brought together musicologists working on the impact of European colonialism on musical practice and thought during the Age of Enlightenment. Speakers presented topics that covered many geographical locations, interrogating the imagination of the European Enlightenment as much as the colonialist discourses of chroniclers, and evaluating ways of interpreting the material evidence of lived experience (such as architecture, artwork and musical artefacts, including instruments and scores). With an aim of the symposium being to consider whether and to what extent Enlightenment ideals influenced musical practice in European colonies during the eighteenth century – an era which in some places represented a more ‘innocent’ period between the rapacious conquests and epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the high imperialism of the nineteenth – the papers presented a number of case studies drawn from colonial experiences in Africa, India, the Americas and Southeast Asia, as well as considering the cultural ramifications of colonialism as expressed in the arts of Enlightenment Europe.

Indranil Roy (Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India), in his paper ‘Children of Artifice: Colonialism, Enlightenment, Reason and the Genesis of Urban Bengali Music(s)’, offered several definitions of colonialism in relation to traditional music in colonial Calcutta (Kolkata), discussing the difference between forms of intercultural and intracultural colonialism within Bengal. He argued that certain types of traditional music formerly offered to patrons or to gods were transformed with the onset of colonialism into protest songs directed at colonial rulers (and, after independence, postcolonial rulers). The social contexts of public music-making were thus fundamentally altered, and music of resistance – which had not existed in precolonial times – now emerged.

The paper presented by Jittapim Yamprai (Mahidol University, Thailand), ‘Musical Interactions of the Franco-Siamese Relation’, explored the musical dimensions and consequences of cultural and diplomatic exchanges and religious dialogue between France and the kingdom of Siam (the name for Thailand before 1939). She focused on the 1680s, but also considered the artistic ramifications of these exchanges in Siamese/Thai Catholic liturgical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argued that Michel-Richard de Lalande's two airs de Siam, composed in the 1680s, exhibit certain rhythmic and melodic elements that are unusual for French baroque music of the time, and proposed that the composer was attempting to incorporate Siamese music into these works.

My paper (David R. M. Irving, University of Nottingham) explored the printing and proliferation of the Genevan psalter in multiple translations in the Malay–Indonesian Archipelago and Sri Lanka. The spread of Calvinist Christianity in these regions (albeit with relatively few converts compared to the size of the population as a whole) propelled the psalter's translation into Portuguese (a lingua franca of trade, spoken by a number of indigenous communities in South and Southeast Asia), Malay (the primary lingua franca in the Malay–Indonesian Archipelago), Tamil and Sinhala. Significantly, this endeavour involved what appears to be the first known local printing of Western staff notation in colonial Batavia (Jakarta) and Colombo in the eighteenth century, and I discussed extant copies. The paper investigated some of the processes involved in the translation, production and distribution of these music books, and considered aspects of local use.

Vanessa Agnew (University of Michigan) opened her paper ‘Indigenous Music and Eighteenth-Century Colonial Practice in Southern Africa’ with a discussion of issues of rupture and continuity in the European encounter and engagement with non-Western musics, from the Enlightenment to the early twentieth century. Describing the Enlightenment as ‘music's anthropological moment’, she critiqued some of the taxonomic impulses of Enlightenment musical thought (dubbing Herder ‘a musical Linnaeus’) and offered a case study of the Khoikhoi instrument called the gora (also gom gom), a kind of musical bow that is also blown, which evaded European categorization as either a strict chordophone or an aerophone. She gave a fascinating analysis of late eighteenth-century travel writing that described this instrument and its practice – by Peter Kolb, Anders Sparman and John Barrow – and highlighted how the Enlightenment desire to define and categorize with reference to European ‘norms’ was often frustrated.

Laura Fahrenkrog Cianelli (Universidad de Salamanca), in her paper ‘In the Shade of the Discourse: Music in Colonial Asunción’, discussed how the irresistible topic of the famous Jesuit Reductions in Paraguay has overshadowed any study of the country's capital city during the colonial era. With reference to the methodological approaches set out by the field of urban musicology, she showed how Asunción presents an interesting and anomalous example of a city that was not constructed according to strict regulations of physical layout (as followed elsewhere in the Spanish empire). Further, its musical culture relied strongly on the activities of the rural periphery, especially the contributions of indigenous musicians. In the musicological study of other Spanish colonies, cities have often been seen as centrifugal points of hegemonic cultural dissemination, but Asunción does not quite fit this model. Fahrenkrog Cianelli showed how the dominant discourses of previous historiographies of music in Paraguay have led to the neglect of Asunción's urban musical culture. Her work is demonstrating how vibrant an urban centre Asunción was, and is revealing new details about this city's musical culture during the colonial period.

Hanna Walsdorf (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) presented a paper entitled ‘Italian Music for the Mexican Mary: Ignacio de Jerusalem's Maitines para Nuestra Señora de Guadelupe (1764)’. Opening by recounting the famous legend of the Virgin Mary's appearance to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an indigenous Mexican, in 1531, she discussed the establishment of the Mexican devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, a tradition that was in some ways syncretic and which supplanted and replaced the precolonial veneration of an Aztec goddess. This devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe found full fruit in the 1764 Matins setting by Ignacio de Jerusalem y Stella (1707–1769), an Italian-born composer who emigrated to Mexico and is now is regarded as one of the most significant composers who worked in the colony during the eighteenth century. Walsdorf showed how the syncretic tradition of devotion to Guadalupe was incorporated into the most modern Italianate musical style of the time in Mexico City, integrating indigenous and European cultural elements into a form of urban musical expression that was locally appreciated and patronized by Europeans.

In ‘Music and Civilization: Robinson, Gulliver, and the Jesuits’, Jutta Toelle (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) used Daniel Defoe's character of Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift's character of Gulliver to explore many eighteenth-century conceptions of civilization and barbarism, revealing the ways in which these ideas are related to Europe's encounter with other musical traditions. She found similarities between the discourses in Defoe's and Swift's novels and the letters of Jesuit missionaries (compilations of which were being published in Europe at around the same time). The idea of European music as a refuge for the lone European traveller or missionary, and the dichotomy of the European traveller versus the non-European ‘barbarian’, provided some foundations for Enlightenment debates on topics such as the power of music to inspire spontaneous action and the role of music in constructing civilization. As Toelle proposed, Defoe's ‘positivistic experiment of Robinson Crusoe’ – of ‘one man recreating civilization by himself’ – can tell us much about eighteenth-century ideas and expressions of European cultural reflexivity. The position of music within this context, as highlighted by Toelle, is a fascinating topic that invites further exploration.

The papers offered in this symposium demonstrated some of the new perspectives that are currently being revealed by the exploration of colonial music practice in the age of Enlightenment. Thanks must go to Christian Storch for organizing the programme and making practical arrangements, and to the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen for their support.