Henry Stoll

With the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, a group of writers and politicians took hostage the music of their French oppressors and, retaining the melodies and meters of revolutionary Paris, replaced the lyrics to celebrate their newly liberated land. Assembling these works of parody for the first time, “Unsung” tells the story of how the leaders of Haiti used music—in particular, song—to broadcast radical new conceptions of freedom and personhood in the wake of the revolution. Of course, this phenomenon—European music for a proudly Afro-diasporic nation—may appear unexpected. But herein lies the book’s central claim: far from rejecting French music, early Haitians considered it their inalienable patrimony—their musical spoil of war—and, adapting it to local aesthetic and political demands, wreaked havoc on Atlantic narratives of Black incapacity for self-rule and artistic achievement. Drawing on an unsung legacy of three operas and over one hundred songs, the book ultimately offers not only a music history of early Haiti, but a cultural history of a period in which the revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité were negotiated on both sides of the Atlantic—always with musical ramifications.