AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 171
of music that depicts specific locales or events, thereby providing a musical tour of a certain
region. The musical travelogue allowed European audiences to travel to foreign locales without
leaving the recital hall and offered composers a means by which to market their music.
Through the incorporation of songs from popular tourist locations and strategic military bases,
Salvador created a musical map of North Africa.
At the same time, Salvador’s travelogue is no mere Orientalist fantasy; the mix of French,
Arab, and Kabyle attributes within the composition creates a hybrid collection of songs. I
connect this hybridity with the civilizing mission and policy of assimilation of the French
government in Algeria. Unlike the imaginative expressions of the Orient by other nineteenthcentury
composers, Salvador composed a musical depiction of Algeria that appealed to both
the French public’s interest in tourism and the government’s colonialist agenda. Through his
Album de Chansons, Salvador presented a unique collection that allowed the European public
to musically cross the Mediterranean and experience the cultural and political climate of
French Algeria.
REVISITING NINETEENTH-CENTURY COLONIALISM: WESTERN
MUSICAL INTERVENTIONS IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE
Rachel Beckles Willson
Royal Holloway, University of London
In line with pioneering work by the late Edward W. Said, research into music and colonialism
has tended to concentrate on the mechanisms of representation, and its contextualization
within the ideologies of reigning powers. Said’s influence on musicology can also be traced
in the predominant focus on artistic products of singular, fully-fledged colonial powers such
as those of the British and French empires. These two Saidian trends, however, leave a great
many questions about music unaddressed. We know very little, for instance, about the reverse
flow of musical imperialism from colonizer to colonized. Furthermore, we are uninformed
about times of competition between potential, but as yet unestablished empires, and we lack
information about non-state forms of cultural domination such as those practiced by religious
groups. Only very recently, as seen in work such as that by Guillermo Wilde (2007) for instance,
have scholars started to probe these matters.
My paper contributes to filling the gap by presenting research into the Protestant rediscovery
of Palestine during the nineteenth century. In the wake of the late eighteenth century’s
religious revival, and in consequence of nineteenth-century millennarian desires to repatriate
Jews to “the Holy Land,” travelers from Europe and America flocked to Palestine in numbers
unmatched since the Crusades. They set out to reclaim the territory from the prevailing Islamic
administration both in terms of its discursively constructed significance and its actual
religious practices, and to this end they engaged in research, education, and preaching. They
have left us a vast archive of textual material illuminating both their encounters with music
they found on the land, and the consequences of their bringing music to it.
In the paper I examine the publications of three contrasted visitors. First, Swiss physician
Titus Tobler (1806–1877), one of the leading European authorities on Palestine in the
nineteenth century; second, film-maker American Dwight Elmendorf (1859–1929), who published
a book of photographs of Palestine; and third, German theologian Gustav Dalman
(1855–1941), who alongside undertaking missionary work also collected peasant music and
researched local customs. Although I will argue that these visitors all projected interpretations