Elements of decolonial compositional praxis

An abridged version of this post was first presented at the ‘Black British Music: Sacred and Secular’ Study Day on 25 March 2023 at the University of Bristol. The session was chaired by Dr Natalie Hyacinth.

From left to right: Dr Natalie Hyacinth, Dr Samson Onafuye, Alexander Douglas, Dr Matthew Williams, Parise Carmichael-Murphy, and Adriel Miles. Photograph by Dr Monique Ingalls.

Back in 2020, US American composer and trombonist George Lewis gave a talk at a symposium on decolonizing contemporary music. It focused mostly on decolonizing the new music scene in Europe, asking us to consider ‘what […] a decolonized curatorial regime [sounds] like’. In my own scholarship, you could say I’m asking what a decolonial compositional practice might sound like.

When we consider decolonization, there are some problematic habits. One habit is to exist purely within the realm of research or theory. This is troubling, not least because some Indigenous groups take exception to the institutionalized concept of research, but also because it fails to consider how decolonial trajectories are enacted (particularly without adequate models of practice as research).

Another habit, I think, is the desire to focus on decolonization as some kind of endpoint. ‘If we do things in this way, if we teach these topics or composers, then we’ll have a “decolonized” curriculum,’ goes the line of thinking in university spaces. Rather than being a teleological philosophy, I understand decolonization as a fundamentally causal one. It’s not an attempt to undo but instead an attempt to contend with things that cannot be undone. This is why I choose to speak of ‘decolonial’ practices, rather than ‘decolonized’ ones.

One last habit is the conflation of decolonization with diversity, or to think of decolonization purely in racial terms. Decolonization’s solid grounding in postcolonial scholarship should be an obvious indication that gender, nationality, ethnicity, ability, and other identity characteristics are relevant concerns. Also, as one interview participant said of their teaching experience, ‘Having a diverse student body doesn't necessarily mean that people are on it.’ Instead, these philosophies need to be cultivated explicitly and outside the related but distinct goal of diversifying one's institution.

I want to borrow Lewis’s ‘eight difficult steps’ format from this talk, and invoke a Freirean understanding of praxis, to share my eight elements of decolonial compositional praxis (or DCP). The elements are derived from studying primarily the practices of living Black British composers like Hannah Catherine Jones and Elaine Mitchener, but I will also include some statements from interviews I’ve conducted with composers employed at UK universities.

In my research, I consider these elements in the context of undergraduate composition pedagogy, so a Freirean model of praxis is especially useful, where an iterative process of action (composition) and reflection (commentary and critique) aims to transform not just the practitioner but also the teacher–pupil dynamic, as well as the musical venues composers inhabit.

This list is not exhaustive, and the elements are not sufficient indicators of decoloniality in and of themselves. Instead, like Olly Wilson’s research, my elements are notable tendencies within the practices of these composers. Also, this list is neither hierarchical nor particularly arranged. With that out of the way, here are my eight elements of decolonial compositional praxis.

A photo of me presenting my research in Victoria’s Room, University of Bristol. Photograph by Dr Monique Ingalls.

1) Performative composition and improvisation

Because decolonial compositional praxis is often concerned with telling personal stories of identity and marginality, composers have often taken a central role in communicating these stories, first through composition and then again through performance. While the composer–performer archetype is not exclusive to DCP, an important nuance is the integral nature of the composer-performer to the performance. Elaine Mitchener’s performance in her piece Sweet Tooth, for example, feels inextricable from the fundamental identity of the piece, and likewise for Hannah Catherine Jones’s Owed to Bussa, with the subject of the piece tied directly to her diasporic Bajan heritage. Contrast these examples with someone like Chopin, whose enviable technique made him fully capable of performing his own piano compositions but is not viewed today as integral to their performance.

2) Disruption and transgression

Decolonial compositional praxis is deeply aware of borders, and there is much to be said about the kind of ‘border thinking’ that takes place at art music’s various precipices. DCP intends to bring its audiences out of their zones of comfort and expectation, specifically in ways that ask them to consider the unsettling ways in which our lives intersect with the legacies of colonialism. In Part III of Jones’s Owed to Humana 2.0, she expresses a clear philosophy that sonic acts that ‘lead us to transgression’ are also able to lead us to ‘transcendence’ and ‘liberation’. She explains that ‘[conversations] create ripples, sound waves transmit, transgress, transcend the institution.’ When we composers acknowledge that transgression is not inherently bad or harmful―that, in fact, transgression can be distinctly valuable―this can lead us to exciting and unexpected musical places.

3) Multimedia and electronic technology

Novel adaptations of technology have a long history within Afrodiasporic creative practices. Some of the philosophical drivers behind hip hop music, for example, run parallel with decoloniality, and computer technology has offered meaningful avenues of expression and distribution to the marginalized composer. Jones makes heavy use of technology in Owed to Bussa to create a diasporic, Afrofuturist Gesamtkunstwerk. The use of technology is certainly not exclusive to DCP, however; one interview participant spoke broadly of computer technology's near-total integration into music creation: ‘[If] you think about it, the idea of a completely acoustic performance or acoustic music now, that is more of a niche than something that's made with the use of a computer.’

That said, technology can also have strong colonializing implications embedded within its products and tools, before even considering the global inequity of reliable access. Consider digital audio workstations that launch in 4/4 time, rely on piano rolls and equal temperament by default, and err toward rigidly quantized rhythms. Technology like this, while objectively useful, does impose Westernized standards on music creation that can erect barriers to creativity in other traditions; some practitioners have even made it their goal to address these forms of coloniality in music software.

Another interview participant was wary of how ‘received aesthetics’ complicate a decolonial approach to electronic music pedagogy, explaining that these aesthetics are ‘derived from classical music [and are] often maintained by professors who very much have a grounding in classical thinking, in terms of form and in terms of how technology should be used and not abused, and so on.’ Herein lies a recurring problem of decolonization: the success of any decolonial tool depends heavily on the one wielding it. We must be dispassionately aware of the risks when attempting to foster decolonial trajectories.

4) Nontraditional and nonstandard performance venues

Decolonial compositional praxis recognizes that spaces are not simply neutral sites of performance; every space―including digital spaces―has its own history and its own set of cultivated practices. One study participant explains that ‘venues have a huge impact on how we listen and what sorts of sounds are available to use and what sorts of expressive shortcuts are available.’ Thus, a composer engaging in DCP will consider the site(s) of (intended) performance of a work and will consider the need to expand compositional performance outside of its presently privileged spaces, the concert hall and similar venues. This move outside the concert hall―transcending physical spaces of musical privilege―can be seen as an ultimate form of transgression. Jones explains, ‘It’s so important for me to perform at a club, […] and then in a concert hall the next week, and then maybe a squat the next week. […] It’s important to my very being to keep moving around and not get locked down into any one kind of place or style or genre.’ To deny the university, the conservatoire, and the concert hall their near-exclusive claim to composition is to directly call into question their roles in society as the exclusive conduits of ‘serious’ music.

5) Composition as ‘putting together’

The idea of composition as ‘putting together’ comes directly from Jones and her description of her own practice. She explains that ‘[it] doesn’t matter what I’m putting together. It might be people for an orchestra, it might be the audience, it might be a DJ set or a radio show or a video, or something traditionally scored, or me putting something together in this improvisatory way that ends up over time becoming a composition.’ This perspective is clearly exemplified in, for example, Jones’s piece The Sound of Rittmann for chamber orchestra. In the piece, she explores a point of sonic connection she experiences between two works by other composers: Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser and the show tune ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music. One of Jones’s contributions as composer is to reveal this sonic connection to audiences―some of whom will recognize each constituent piece―and, in her own words, to claim that composer Trude Rittmann ‘knew exactly what she was doing, that she in fact sampled Wagner in full knowledge of how that would antagonize everything that he stood for.’ This, I believe, is treated as mythology rather than fact, but it is a clear acknowledgement of the real continuities between colonialism and imperialism, both of which have affected the lives of numerous composers.

6) Composition as collaboration

US American anthropologist Dennison Nash has written about a number of ‘idols’ (like the ‘composer as specialist’) that impede a cross-cultural understanding of composition, rejecting these idols in his own definition. Alongside Nash’s useful idols, I propose another: the ‘composer as solitary genius’. Western art music composition favours the idea of an individual musician as the creator of compositions. Also, the interpretation of a score (by a performer or conductor) is not viewed as a co-equal meeting of minds; rather, the interpreter is working in a subordinate relationship with the composer and their score.

These sorts of hierarchies are common in the structures of Western art music practice and its pedagogy, tied in part to longstanding myths of solitary genius. DCP rejects hierarchies and narratives that reinforce myths of solitary genius. At some level, of course, hierarchies are unavoidable and practical, but in the context of music they also present a risk of obscuring the truly dynamic relationships of the compositional process. Mitchener’s Sweet Tooth, a work she put together, is an example of the openly collaborative nature of DCP, with both a movement director and a historical consultant working in collaboration.

7) Resisting style and genre

Categorization is a useful thing to do where it produces benefits for all parties involved in the process. However, this is not always the case. In Lewis’s talk, he invokes Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included, wherein she writes of ‘kinship’, ‘a way of “being related” and “staying related”’, arguing that institutions operate under kinship logics that reproduce sameness. Within new music, Lewis advocates for a ‘move beyond kinship’, arguing that genre categorizations create kinship networks that have served to maintain coloniality in new music curation. Genre can be used as a basis to include or exclude without having to consider the individual merit or value of a composition. This has a distinct impact on the transgressive practices that are prominent in DCP.

One of my study participants feels strongly about the constraints of genre, speaking of the more fundamental distinctions between composition and sound art. ‘If you go back far enough,’ they explain, ‘and you go to different cultures, those distinctions never existed. I feel that it’s a very European [distinction], […] and it’s this weird, modernist glitch that has a composer who only composes and doesn’t also perform or doesn’t include other forms of art.’ This participant seems to express a need to resist not just genres and styles within compositional practice, but the bordering of compositional practice from other sound-based practices in the first place. This is similar to a sentiment expressed by Jones, that she is unsure what her compositional style is and she's happy not to know what it is.

8) Centring diaspora

There is a great deal of importance around the telling and preservation of stories from the margins, and decolonial compositional praxis is one means for composers to do so. Examples of this are numerous in Black British composers: Jones’s Owed to Bussa and her Owed to Diaspora(s) installation, Mitchener’s Sweet Tooth and On Being Human as Praxis, or Hannah Kendall’s chamber opera The Knife of Dawn. Each of these instances of centring diasporic narratives compels its audiences to think specifically about this legacy.

To resist Eurocentricity, I do not advocate for a move toward Afrocentric modes of thinking. Instead, much like Lewis, I conceive of an ecology of musical logics―reminiscent of Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s ‘ecology of knowledges’―where epistemologies can be in a constantly reflective discourse.

With DCP, I hope to lay out practical means by which composers, who are often tasked with reflecting on their compositional approaches, can engage practically with the perspectives of decolonial scholarship. I encourage composers to incorporate these elements into their practice―and for teachers to mention these possibilities in their lessons―not simply for the sake of doing so, but with the specific goal to effect positive, decolonial change.

Decolonizing beyond racial diversity in higher music education

There is a specific, pernicious sticking point for people when thinking about decolonization or decolonial work. Many people naturally equate decolonization with issues of racialized exclusion and diversity work more broadly. It is a trap into which many decolonial scholars are susceptible to fall as well, though I think it comes from an honest place.

I should say that I am absolutely a proponent of diversity work both within and outside institutions of higher education. In UK higher education, there is still much work to do in enrolling students from households with lower incomes, students of underrepresented ethnicities, and students with disabilities, particularly in conservatoires. If these institutions had higher enrolment of these students, it is likely that some relevant issues pertaining to decoloniality would also improve, although if this were the only approach to solving issues of coloniality, the opposite is also certainly true.

Thus, I think it is vital to make clear the difference between doing decolonial work and doing diversity work, at least in the context of higher music education (HME), so that is the issue I am presenting for consideration in this post.

Before proceeding with the issue presented, however, I want to consider how this problem would arise in the first place. A considerable factor is that the decolonial workspace is rather disorganized in a conceptual way. There are some relatively cohesive schools of decolonial thought (for example, those which coalesce around the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire), but it may be more useful to think of a spectrum of thought in this area.

Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970)

The literalist perspective presented in Tuck and Yang’s 2012 piece ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’ can be seen at one edge of this spectrum. For them, any use of ‘decolonization’ that does not ‘[bring] about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ is a metaphorical use, and these uses are potentially ‘incommensurable with decolonization.’ While I absolutely do agree about the repatriation of stolen life, a statement as strong as this comes with caveats. I think the colonial situation is more complicated than simply considering indigeneity and physical land, simply because of the varying ways that the looming presence of the settler (or perhaps the ‘post-settler’) society makes itself felt. That said, I still prefer the term ‘decoloniality’ over ‘decolonization’ to allow the latter to refer to issues of land repatriation*.

Of course, an intellectually sound appraisal of decolonization must first recognize that this body of scholarship is fundamentally generated by postcolonial, largely global South societies. The philosophies of these postcolonial scholars draw attention to the most harmful or most intensely felt causes and effects of colonization, to which settler societies should earnestly respond. At the same time, though, conversations about how decolonial work is done must consider exactly how settler nations exercise(d) coloniality on foreign nations, and how these colonial tools still persist within the settler nation and are thus still a threat.

For historically settler countries like Britain that now want to enter into this discourse, the parameters of engagement are different to a country like the US, where Tuck and Yang are based. In particular, with Britain in its melancholy ‘lost empire’ period, colonializing powers have turned inward and are being exercised on the nation’s own inhabitants, and even its own citizens. Interestingly, these powers now manifest more as a power of exclusion and expulsion, rather than of annexation. Political manipulation through propaganda, denial of vital opportunities, siphoning of material and human-life resources to serve elite interests, the forceful movement and sequestering of people by social categories, and wilful indoctrination are all key elements of colonializing a foreign society. In the UK today, the same groups aforementioned (people with disabilities, underrepresented ethnicities, people from low-income backgrounds) are often the targets of these quintessentially colonializing tactics. For my purposes, this point extends to Britain’s education system, with the fee structures of tertiary education being of specific concern. This, for me, is what makes the decolonial conversation relevant even within a historically imperial country like Britain, but this is also the nexus which causes confusion between decolonization and diversity.

This nexus relates to another edge of the decolonial spectrum, which is a more casual understanding of ‘decolonization’, what someone might encounter in general public discourse. These are two opposing poles to this casual use. The conservative position (i.e. those in favour of essentially maintaining HME institutions as they are) adopts a stance of protecting the great Western masters of the canon (i.e. the corpus of music which represents musical scholarship) from being thrown out in favour of music they see as inferior. The liberal counterpoint to this stance is usually that no one is trying to throw anyone out; we simply want the curriculum to include more voices relevant to more experiences. For Tuck and Yang, both poles are equally inaccurate, and I am not sure I agree with these stances as ‘decolonization’ either.

Decolonization is not about ‘no more old, White men’ as some people casually describe it; such a move would not benefit students nor accurately reflect the impact of these individuals in this country. Instead, decolonization is about how it behoves us to interrogate the mythos surrounding these figures and how these stories and associations have been used to control or manipulate people’s behaviours and thought processes, in this case in an academic context. This has been the historical use of the canon and its curricula in former British colonies, with Macaulayism being a particularly salient example. The model of Western education implicitly equates the academic canon with greatness. It is a meritocratic conception where it is assumed that the greatest works and thinkers will naturally endure and enter the canon, and the rest will eventually fall away as inferior or even potentially dangerous. Even if one is convinced the process is meritocratic in some way, I do not believe it possible to deny the subjectivity of defining and constraining a canon, processes which fly in the face of any claims to objective greatness.

Furthermore, while the trajectory from canonization to greatness is laid bare, at least somewhat obscured is that this claim to greatness is not limited to a specific context; it is universal. Such a claim erects a defence against the need to look beyond the canon. It attempts to reason that the absence of particular musics from our canon of is not a product of a natural, understandable ignorance which should be rectified, but rather the expected outcome of the universally meritocratic canon at work.

On top of this, greatness is not an individual feat; it is a product and a triumph of the nation, further complicating the colonializing impact of canonization. In the conservative position, any attempt to broaden the canon beyond its largely Anglocentric and Eurocentric focus is an inherent attack on both the masters and the greatness of the nation. I see it rather differently. There must come a point where one recognizes the negative impact the British Empire has had on its former colonies, its people, and their cultures. Colonization was often violent, physically and emotionally, and Britain’s empire was incredibly expansive. Both the education systems used in this country and the systems used for the colonial project (like Macaulayism) draw upon the same canon, and this is not a meaningless coincidence. It is because of what the canon meant to Britain and for its colonial project. It is important now to recognize the cultures that have been impacted; to (re)familiarize ourselves with these cultures; and to be influenced by this relevant history, remodelling our pedagogy to this end.

Remember, though, that decolonization is also not just about ‘more voices, more experiences’, as this is what is meant by ‘diversity’. In other words, decolonization is not a synonym for diversity, nor for difference. Trying to address issues of colonialization through diversity work alone feels like a by-product of neoliberal economic thinking rather than a concerted effort to address structural issues about the Academy (universities, conservatoires, etc.) and how it functions as a cultural agent. In his book chapter ‘The Possessive Investment in Classical Music’ (2019), Loren Kajikawa (also writing from the US) explains that ‘universities have attempted to become more diverse and inclusive through initiatives designed to broaden their curricula and attract underrepresented students to campus,’ but that simultaneously ‘they have left largely untouched the institutional structures that privilege the music of white European and American males.’ Diversity ends up weaponized to attract students to a programme concerned primarily with celebrating the greatness of its canon, not with whatever music originally resonated with the student, and charging them thousands of pounds for the privilege. This is reminiscent of some of Tuck and Yang’s concerns about how diversity work can actually undermine meaningful decolonial progress. Students are not paying for a general survey of music, as the degree or programme name might imply. Their exploration is not without boundaries and restrictions, typically because of faculty research expertise within an eminence model. In this model, if there is no ‘eminent’ person to teach a topic, the avenues for a student to intuitively explore a topic on an extended, two- to four-year basis are rare to nonexistent, at least at the undergraduate level**.

The main thrust in considering the issue of diversity versus decolonization is to highlight the colonializing framework of how knowledge is transferred and made legitimate within our academic spaces. The implicit, non-accidental associations between canonization and personal–nationalistic greatness, between UK curricula and colonial-era curricula, have implications for how students value music and involve themselves within the practice. This is compounded by the top-down, eminence model of HME, where teachers may unwittingly play a role in indoctrinating their students or manipulating them to abandon valuable, intuitive forms of knowledge. Some of this intuition could have been valuable in starting a career as a twenty-first-century musician, a radically different landscape to even just forty years ago.

Once more, racial diversity in institutional spaces is important, especially in education. That said, even though the colonial project was often predicated on a racial superiority of the settler over the colonized population, this does not mean decolonial work always takes place along racial lines, nor does it need to be primarily framed as such. Decolonization in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) cannot simply be about having a number of diverse (usually meaning BAME) students completing the programme, nor even about achieving higher enrolment numbers of underrepresented students. Careful consideration must be paid to how HEIs subtly use indoctrination, propaganda, denial of opportunities, the coercive siphoning of resources, etc. as the covert framework of the institution, like a deference to canonization, which directly translates to curriculum and programme design. Decolonial programmes must be designed to encourage free and critical thinking, to facilitate intuitive opportunities, and to reject coercive or neoliberal economic practices which harm underrepresented students by weaponizing diversity. This is about a fundamental, baseline shift in how the Academy as an institution approaches knowledge production and dissemination, the value we place on bodies of knowledge, and how knowledges interact with one another. Decolonization is not a racial question as such, and it is time to move beyond this way of misunderstanding it.

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*I do still use ‘decolonization’ occasionally throughout this because this term is in common use to describe the topic of this post in the UK. I do recognize the technical imprecision, but I think the context makes the meaning clear.

**A concentration like composition may allow for longer study on intuitive projects, but as a highly subjective discipline, the eminence model can produce an even more volatile colonializing context.