

Project
Working on Amy Beach's Gaelic Symphony was a “commissioned job” from my freelance days. Had I known what I would be faced with, I don't know today whether I would have accepted the commission. It almost seems to me as if the topic was “made for” bringing burning issues in our discipline to the table. Rarely have I been thrown back so thoroughly on the fundamentals of what I do as a profession (in all areas that the study of music has held for me so far) as in this project.
Armed with a superlative (the first symphony composed by a woman in the USA), I set out to use my experience in gender studies and music to inspire a wider audience for this music. But that fell far short of the mark. Sensitized by my musicological training in the USA in the 1990s, this was no longer easy from a certain point onwards. Enthusiasm for this symphony (for whichever of its numerous musical parameters) meant plunging right into the middle of a colonial web of hierarchizations that I actually wanted to combat. It meant dealing with the prioritization or discrimination of minority groups, playing them off against each other, it meant a reference to elitist local patriotism in nationalism, it meant an unconditional affirmation of progressive thinking, of gender hierarchies, of academic elitism and racisms. Ultimately, it also meant confronting issues of the global “export” of European music of all kinds across the oceans.
I am very glad that I had time during the years of the project to theoretically grasp and feed these contradictions. It didn't really “help” in terms of the essential nature of the questions raised. Even though I had little direct exchange on these topics during the project work for various reasons, I could be sure that I was not the only one who had to face these problems. Ultimately, it is a question of the history of academic disciplines and their inherent reproduction of the colonial matrix through - any - work with and on music, indeed through - any - unreflected social interaction.
“Colonialism returns at the very moment of its disappearance” is a phrase that is now often quoted, but rarely taken seriously, and is often dismissed with the reference that it is all a ‘process that will never reach its destination’. I sometimes find it difficult to perceive this process or to believe in it. Like Sisiphos, we push a globe uphills, knowing full well that it will soon roll downhill again, probably because there is no alternative to it that we can justify to ourselves; and also because there is a core to this whole repulsive colonial mess that we are deeply fond of: the combination of art and academic research; this fascination may take different forms for each and every one of us, but I can imagine that behind it, as a “common terrain” so to speak, there is something like an inkling which our occupation with music gives rise to in ever different ways, that there is something concretely experienceable in what we do with music that is greater and more sustainable than our existences. And thus we find ourselves - once again - in the middle of age-old questions of musical theory, which were already shaped by colonialisms at the time. We simply cannot escape...