Maria Ryan

This project explores how enslaved and free African people and their descendants in the British colonial Caribbean engaged with music that had its origins in Europe through listening, performance, theorizing, and composition, during the period between the banning of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the granting of unrestricted freedom in 1838. By shifting perspective to how Black people heard European music, rather than how white people heard colonized and enslaved Black people, this project complicates traditional narratives about race and music in the colonial Caribbean, arguing that Black musicians used music and listening as a tool to assert their intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, while simultaneously learning, theorizing, and sometimes subverting the music of their colonizers.

“Ambivalent Listening” explores how African-descended people in the British colonial Caribbean engaged with European music, arguing that black musicians used such music as a tool to assert their intellectual and aesthetic capabilities, while simultaneously learning, adapting, and subverting the music of those who subjugated them. The ambivalence of the title refers to how some white listeners mobilized their ideas about black musicality to advocate for African humanity, while others used music to demonstrate “primitiveness” thus justifying slavery. Ambivalence also foregrounds that listening was always multi-directional in the colonial Caribbean, with black listeners assessing European music at the same time as the more documented practice of white evaluations of black music was taking place. Through examples drawn from archival work undertaken in five countries, “Ambivalent Listening” demonstrates how European music became perceived as white in the face of growing black competency in European music forms. This project covers a period when Britain was facing ever-increasing pressure to end slavery, and justifications given for slavery were rapidly adapting to new ideas about race, in ways that also had a musical impact.