Decolonising the Music Curriculum: Handel, Sancho, and the Slave Trade
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- Decolonising the Music Curriculum, Episode 1
If you haven't watched my introduction to 'Decolonising the Music Curriculum' before watching this video, please do so here: • Decolonising the music...
What's one way to try to decolonise the European-derived music curriculum at the same time as incorporating composers from more diverse backgrounds? In this video, I give one suggestion: talking about Handel's links to the Slave Trade. The fact that Handel invested in the Slave Trade on at least four different occasions was described by scholar David Hunter as 'an appalling conjunction of the finest art and the worst of humanity'. The Slave Trade underpinned large amounts of the economy in 18th-Century Britain, and that naturally spilled over into art and music production as well.
In this video, I summarise some of Hunter's recent research, understood in the context of work by historian David Olusoga about Black Britain and the abolitionist movement in the 18th-century. At the same time, I give a brief survey of the life of Ignatius Sancho, a pioneer in many respects, not least in being one of the first ever African composers to be published in Europe, but also a figure who suffered tremendously under the Slave Trade. The links between Handel and Sancho tell us something deeper about the relationship between music and economics in 18th-century Britain, and gives us one angle in which to explore how much of the music in the European tradition was funded by the exploitation of others.
Further reading:
David Hunter, 'The Lives of George Frideric Handel' (Boydell & Brewer, 2015)
David Hunter, 'Handel Manuscripts and the Profits of Slavery', in 'Notes', 76/1, 2019, 27-37.
David Olusoga, 'Black and British: A Forgotten History' (Pan Macmillian, 2016)
Ignatius Sancho, 'Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African' (available online: docsouth.unc.edu/neh/sancho1/...)
Hannah Templeton, 'Mozart and the Slave Trade': hannahmtempleton.wordpress.co...
Bonus: an episode of Will Robin's excellent podcast 'Sound Expertise', interviewing David Hunter about his Handel research: soundexpertise.org/handel-and...
You can listen to Sancho's '12 Country Dances' here: • Ignatius Sancho (ca. 1...
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These videos are just brilliant! Can we have some more, please?
A somewhat related question: what would you say to notions of morally virtuous and reprehensible music? I've debated this with some people and insist that while a piece of texted music can convey ideas or sentiments that are morally sound or dubious, I fail to see (or hear perhaps) how the music itself is affected by them. Some have countered with the idea that pieces are morally formed. While I agree that notions of morality have been important to various composers and those who've written about music (e.g. the culture of 'sensibility' in the late eighteenth century), I feel that we're on pretty shaky ground if we accept that compositional decisions are moral ones.
Thanks for this video - Is decolonising the music curriculum only about learning history and acknowledging harmful legacies? Once we know these things, what then?
Nice vid, thanks for making and sharing
A few interesting elements of the story is the 2nd Duke of Montagu tried to set up a slave free colony but it failed badly, also that Sancho was a grocer and his primary sales were of sugar and tobacco grown on plantations.
Thank you for this important video. I have grappled with whether I should continue to listen to Handel. I will but am aware of his history and the state of affairs during that time.
Hunter's research is shallow.
Handel was not an investor in the Royal African, he received shares as part of his package as director of the Royal Academy. He held shares on two occassions, once for a few days and once for a few weeks. Not only so, but at the time Handel held the shares, the Royal African had suspended activity in the trans-Atlantic slavery. The company returned to involvment in slaving a decade or so later.