Army Stew
Continuity, Rupture, and Militant Musicking
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About the Project
About the Project
Below you will find curated performances of “militant folk music.” Each performance is a meditation on how diasporic identities are built and understood through the 'sonic indigenization' of instruments that were introduced to colonial subjects via occupying armies. Epitomized by the words of ethnomusicologist Andrew Alter, these performances demonstrate the “syncretic process[es] by which a foreign instrument has become indigenized” in local communities (Alter 11). My curation thus shows the multifactorial effects of militarism in musicking—in short, how colonized populations selectively mine the dominant culture for their own anti-imperialist cultural forms. In this way, insurgent epistemologies enter into established protocols of marginalization. Instruments become complex signifiers—Western objects curated and reconfigured to become a part of a tradition, carrying a repertoire with distinct meanings in place. My thinking here is grounded in Hobsbawm and Ranger's concept of the “invention of tradition”: Hobsbawm argues that an "invented tradition" evokes a “set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past,” but at the same time, the “peculiarity of ‘invented’ traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1, 2). The musicians in this project are part of larger strategic efforts by their respective communities to bring in elements that are putatively "new," but at the same time bear a meaningful relationship to a legible— and audible—past.
This is why you see this sentence repeated in my writing about each performance:
The interesting paradox of occupation is that it simultaneously energizes rupture and continuity. This is the hinge on which instruments are indigenized and traditions are invented.
The new instrument (or other object/thing/idea) that a colonized person may incorporate into their life can serve as a metonym for the extreme socio-economic rift that comes with occupation, but at the same time, the objects are carefully chosen to make sense within the existing culture.
"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life... Communism responds by politicizing art" (Benjamin 20).
This Tik Tok landed on my feed thanks to the rather ineffable algorithm right when I first began gathering these wonderful performances. To put it bluntly, my jaw dropped: in less than a minute, this Tik Tok creator captures the essence of my project. The creator make fun of drummers who claim argue that the technique "traditional grip" is superior to a technique called "match grip," while the original use of traditional grip was to help drummers in military bands to escape gunfire quickly. With this he shows us how musical techniques and instruments rooted in military traditions can take on completely different meaning in a new context— in his case, in contemporary debates about virtuosity.
Indeed, military bands have had an active role in the creation of music cultures. Boonzajer-Flaes works to figure out the complex ways the brass band in particular has operated in the colonial context in his book Brass Unbound: Secret Children of the Colonial Brass Band. He maps out particularly compelling formations around the world, arguing that the “idiom of the Western brass band” has come to represent “one of the first forms of worldwide standard music,” and that an analysis of the use of brass instruments globally can present listeners with an abundance of musical creoles (Boonzajer-Flaes 10–11). Suzel Ana Reily and Katherine Brucher similarly argue that brass bands found their way to virtually every continent, and that as “each band world emerged and developed, it came to articulate a unique set of musical elements, performance practices and symbolic associations, a configuration that derived from the continuous and complex processes of collective negotiation and renegotiation taking place at both local and transnational levels” (Reily and Brucher 12). Helena Simonett deals with similar negotiations that result in musical fusion in her essay “From Village to World Stage: The Malleability of Sinaloan Popular Brass Bands,” showing how the brass bands in Sinaloa, Mexico draw from indigenous styles of music (Simonett in Reily and Brucher 199). It is thus clear that the brass bands do not have static functions or settled meanings: they are “deployed” along with the military and enter into complex dialogue with the host population.
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