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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01rb68xg24x
Title: Forging a Global Avant-Garde: African Experimental Music, Transnational Circulation, and Postcolonial Radio
Authors: Brady, Sophie Angeline
Advisors: Steingo, Gavin
Contributors: Music Department
Keywords: African music
avant-garde
experimental music
Pierre Schaeffer
radio
SORAFOM
Subjects: Music history
African studies
Issue Date: 2024
Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University
Abstract: How does recognizing the robust tradition of African experimentalism change the histories of avant-garde music and African music? I answer this question by analyzing the musical work of musicians and technicians from more than a dozen African countries who were associated with the SORAFOM, France’s colonial radio network. The SORAFOM was founded by Pierre Schaeffer, a composer, engineer, and philosopher who is a foundational figure in the discipline of Sound Studies. Schaeffer maintained that his projects for the colonial radio were unrelated to his musical experiments, but I demonstrate that they had a significant influence on his philosophy and compositions. One of the SORAFOM’s most important initiatives was the Studio-École, a training school for African radio employees that was active from 1955-1969. Although the school was not officially dedicated to musical experimentation, Studio-École alumni learned many of the same skills that fueled composition at prominent electronic music studios across Europe, and they enjoyed extensive careers as professional musicians. I explore the creative work of a constellation of four musicians from Cameroon, Guinea, Congo, and Togo who studied at the Studio-École, examining how they used many of the same techniques and instruments as other avant-garde composers, albeit with very different outcomes. In addition to their original compositions, Studio-École graduates made ethnographic recordings and wrote scholarly works about African music, contributing to knowledge production initiatives on modern African art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such as Alioune Diop’s Présence Africaine journal and Senegal’s First World Festival of Black Arts. Their recordings also circulated globally via the French world music label Ocora Records, which influenced art and popular music worldwide throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I redefine twentieth-century musical experimentalism as the product of postcolonial mobility of people and musical ideas between continents, which was facilitated by new sound communication technologies. This history not only shifts the hemispheric focus in the history of experimental music from Europe and North America to include Africa, but it also illuminates the critical role that radio played in West and Central African musical development after Independence, a legacy which is still evident today.
URI: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01rb68xg24x
Type of Material: Academic dissertations (Ph.D.)
Language: en
Appears in Collections:Music

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