Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, “Comparative Musicology and Colonial Survival: The Anxiety around Musical Meaning in Late Nineteenth-Century Siam” Kim Sauberlich, “Contagious Musics: Racialized Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Song” Wangpaiboonkit Absract: In 1900, the royal court of Siam debated whether to grant Boosra Mahin permission to tour his musical troupe to Europe, fearing that the assorted performers in the employ of this low-ranking noble would inevitably represent Siamese court music to the world. The court’s fears about presenting Siamese music as commercial exotica in the European concert hall were ultimately eclipsed by Boosra Mahin’s administrative mishaps, which led their sacred repertoire to be featured in the undignified setting of the Berlin Zoo. At this performance, the comparative musicologist Carl Stumpf made the first recordings for the Berlin Phonogram Archive, creating material for his study of the Siamese tuning system in “Tonsystem und Musik der Siamesen” (1901). In analyzing the tuning systems of the world, comparativists of the Berlin school sought a new theory of musical expression in which psychology would replace biology as the basis for human difference. My paper presents a global-colonial history of comparative musicology’s inception from the perspective of the Siamese archive. While recent studies have explored the Stumpf circle’s extractive analysis of Siamese music (Koch 2013, Mundy 2018), I show that the Siamese court practiced its own comparativist theory in the struggle for colonial survival. Across the late nineteenth-century, Siamese intellectuals expounded their anxiety about the superiority of European music, particularly its division of the octave into 12 distinct tones, a feat unmatched by Siam’s seven-tone system, or that of any other nation. Before Stumpf could hypothesize the origins of Siamese tuning in Buddhist numerology, the Siamese court already internalized the idea of the division of the octave as an index for progress and civilizational excellence. The Siamese music Stumpf heard, then, was less an untouched native essence, but a calculated display that balanced between elite cosmopolitanism and national authenticity – indeed “spoiled by Europeanisms”, as Stumpf feared. Experienced in confronting European imperial threat, the Siamese court understood the strategic importance of self-fashioning a “national culture” for European evaluation. Contrary to a narrative of scientistic extraction, comparative theory was not simply a tool applied to agentless subaltern subjects, but instrumentalized and assimilated as a strategy for colonial survival. Bio: Parkorn is a PhD candidate in Musicology at UC Berkeley. His dissertation project "Sounding Civilization: Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Opera of Siam, 1870-1910" examines how the localization of Western art practices in nineteenth-century Siam served as a discursive site for negotiating ethnological imperialism across the colonial modern. Sauberlich Abstract: My paper departs from the anonymous lundu song for solo voice and piano “Mulata do caroço no pescoço” (“Mulata with the pit on her neck”), a most peculiar of comic imperial songs: while it appeared to celebrate the mixed-race woman’s vital beauty, the song called forensic attention to a supposedly impure body. The glandular swelling the “pit on the neck” suggests was a well-known symptom of syphilis, transmitted by Europeans in slave quarters, often through the sexual exploitation of Afro-Brazilian women. “Mulata” circulated widely in Brazilian cities around the period of the 1888 abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, disseminated via word of mouth and theatrical performance and inscribed in song collections and newspapers. The song offers one of many ways into the notion of a “contagious music with infectious rhythms,” which Susan McClary, among others, once explicated as a centuries-old discourse marshalled by white elites to refer to African diasporic musics they adored and despised. These musics’ heightened corporeality and the ease with which they circulated informed interpretations that upheld the life-and-death ambivalence the image of contagion suggests—life-giving and reproducible, but also indexing disease and destruction. I place the song within an archive of white salon songs (so-called lundus), which imagined interracial relationships between white men and Black women. The lundu archive then emerges against biologically racist thought newly imported from the United States, the bourgeois medicalization and pornification of the female body, and burgeoning knowledges from bacteriology and microbiology. On one hand, these songs echoed popular arguments that portrayed sickness as punishment for sexual perversion. On the other, lundus present the Afro-Brazilian woman as responsible for the nurture of the nation, as a coterminous discourse on the hygiene of Black wet-nurses suggests. The contagious song takes illness beyond the space of metaphor, becoming a dramatic extension of practices targeting the Black female body. At last—in a reproductive economy that encompassed sexually transmitted disease and breast milk—these songs bore witness to ongoing efforts to racialize and regulate the Black female body at the dawn of abolition. Bio: Kim Sauberlich is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, entitled “Orphic Sounds: Black Atlantic Musical Practice in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” examines the intersection of embodied musical performance and racialized knowledge production from the 1808 transfer of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro to Brazil’s 1888 official abolition of slavery.