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.