before the empire lives long

for musical sample and annotation

May 6, 2023

content description: verbal descriptions of racializing stereotypes, references to slavery, colonization, and environmental destruction

Statement:

“long live the king”

before the capacity to live long, the capacity to dictate injury

before the capacity to dictate injury, the capacity to normalize injury

before the capacity to normalize injury, the capacity to sanitize injury

before the capacity to normalize injury, the capacity to deny culpability

This project excavates the relational content of musical form in the coronation anthem “Zadok the Priest” by George Friedrich Handel. As this anthem has been performed at every British coronation since 1727, it is a telling document of how one of the most violent empires in human history speaks about itself. The present project takes as a point of departure horizons of meaning thematized by the anthem’s historically novel extended instrumental introductory passage, horizons quickly spiral outside of the purely musical, of the imperial metropole, and of what is even thinkable to official discourses about music in the modern Western imperial core. Following decades of inquiry in contemporary art, music studies, narrative studies, media studies, and sensory studies, from feminist, disability, Marxist, queer, trans*, decolonial, and black standpoints, the project takes as axiomatic that artistic form has political content. 

The project proceeds from a close reading of the anthem’s formal mechanisms, grounded in analytics of black study and related fields. From this standpoint, the anthem’s binary oppositions recall and resonate with empire’s operative binary oppositions. That is, the anthem’s opening material, built from instrumental rudiments (arpeggios, repeated tones, and sustained tones), is contextualized within three binary oppositions which marked it as Other, and in ways that reiterate and naturalize racializing binary oppositions. The opening material is marked with respect to extra-textual norms of early tonal art music as deficient, as lacking overt melody, that is, as lacking rationality and sentience. This binary opposition is not easily separable from that between rational Man and inert-mechanical ticking-clock Animal proposed by Réne Descartes in the century before the anthem, a thesis in which the latter position “recalls and reinforces” historically simultaneous “[theories] that black people were impervious to pain,” as black study scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has argued. This marking of the opening passage is reinforced by the two work-specific markings, markings whose meanings corroborate this reading. First, the opening material’s local-level rudiments (repeated verbatim for a whole bar) are marked in relation to a more slowly changing, more global-level functional harmony (changing once per bar), that is, as inert, docile, and mechanical with respect to the Human rationality, sentience, and dynamism of functional harmony. As critical race music theorist Philip Ewell’s research on Schenkerian analysis has demonstrated, the local/global opposition in a European art music context is often paradigmatically racialized, as nonwhite/white, respectively. Second, the opening material (executed in performance with an extended silence on the part of the whole choir as well as trumpets and timpani) is marked in distinction to the anthem’s core texted choral passages, that is, as meaningless noise (as in prevalent eighteenth-century secular and Christian understandings of instrumental music) in relation to the Logos of the texted, syllabic, homophonic vocal music and, through volume, as mute (figuratively) and docile with respect to the envoiced, agential nature of the choral material. The alignment here of the chorus with the body politic of the imperial British nation is quite obvious in light of the text.

The opening material is not only marked as Other; the latter two markings also position it instrumentally, hardly a politically neutral designation. That is, according to Ewell, in a European art music context, global is often understood as “governing” the local, often in explicitly racializing terms; thus the conjunction of local-level rudiments with more global-level functional harmony will likely be heard instrumentally, as the latter governing the former. Moreover, as the piece unfolds, the opening material becomes marked narratively as introductory and texturally as accompanimental, and thus as instrumental and indeed instrumentalized with respect to the piece’s vocal core. In inscribing particular sounds are pure means, this musical logic reiterates and reinforces a racializing political logic in which particular bodies are inscribed as black(ened), that is, as “pure function” (Calvin Warren) and as a “territory of cultural and political maneuver” (Hortense Spillers). This analysis is not to position the piece or composer as a “bad apple” but rather as a historical threshold to a broader field of practice: this approach to composition, in which dramaturgy is constructed through a thematizing of imperial binary oppositions, intensified in (post-) Beethovenian organicism, which is well known to have been influenced by the music of Handel.

The anthem’s instrumentalization of the inert in relation to the sentient resonates in unsettling ways with specific aspects of modern regimes of imperial governance. For political theorist Achille Mbembe, the “ultimate expression of [state] sovereignty” is in necropower, “the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” An important initial historical instance of necropower is plantation slavery, in which enslaved people are “kept alive but in a state of injury,” or a state of debility/debilitation, as per political theorist Jasbir Puar’s important reformulation of the concept of disability. Thus states’ power to enable biological capacity of their populations is contingent upon their active production of debility, whether through past slavery and colonialism or present extractive industry and climate imperialism. The anthem re-enacts and naturalizes precisely this kind of instrumental relation in its positioning of instrumental rudiments (both words functioning in multiple senses here) as supporting “fully musical” choral statements about state sovereignty (“long live the king”), statements which explicitly reference biological longevity. 

From this standpoint, the “purely musical” logic of this coronation anthem is hardly separable from the British empire’s worldwide regime of violence—a regime that continues today through settler colonies, neocolonialism, climate change, and extractive industries—nor from Handel’s investing in the enslaving activities of the Royal African Company. For post-colonial literature scholar Simon Gikandi, the eighteenth century emergence of the culture of Taste was not unconnected to slavery but rather emerged as a key tool for whiteness to manage slavery’s contradictions. The anthem’s sanitizing view of instrumental power relationships could be understood as doing precisely this: the opening material’s inertia is simply a given, rather than something produced through violence, while this material seemingly offers its support (as both introduction and accompaniment) for the choral material without any resistance.

The present piece loops the anthem’s first bar, hyperbolizing its inertia while confounding the anthem’s enclosure of this inertia in functional harmony. However, a title pointing to imperial relations aims to rupture the piece’s inert/sentient binary and situate this binary opposition within a particular imperial (necro)political logic. The piece is not intended as a Representation of necropolitical violence, but as an excavation and problematization of how empire and associated canonical works of European art music already engage in pernicious, sanitizing Representations of these relations. In other words, I do not speak about the particulars of being subjected to necropolitical violence, as these are not my stories to tell; instead, I position myself as a person read as white, as a settler who has lived on lands colonized by the crown, and as a classically trained musician whose training included this anthem as well as other works composed by this enabler of slavery, in relation to the British empire’s ongoing necropolitical regimes.

The title (incompletely) echoes black study scholar Hortense Spiller’s important formulation on the violent making of the modern European subject: “before [i.e. functionally prior to] the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh.’”

The piece is notated as a text score, which may be realized by live performers or by audiovisual media.

I make this piece as a statement against ongoing imperial violence, and against European art music’s deeply-ingrained alignments with this violence, and as a proposal for mapping strategies capable of holding cultural materials and producers accountable for the (imperial) relations they (re)produce. 

Proceeds from the piece are donated to:

Building Black Youth Foundation (Tkaronto) https://www.bbyfinc.org/

Native Youth Sexual Health Network (Tkaronto) https://www.nativeyouthsexualhealth.com/

ICCA Consortium (global) https://www.iccaconsortium.org/