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Any study of colonial Morocco (1912-56) presents unique and compelling challenges due to the simultaneous presence in its territory of two foreign powers, France and Spain. The colonialist rivalry between these two countries formed dynamic and changing narratives of Morocco's musical cultures. Through their accounts of Morocco's musical activity and sound practices, French and Spanish musicologists gave shape to models of social organization that they wished to implant in Morocco at the expense of the local populations. But music was also an important instrument of resistance even if opposition to colonial rule meant adopting and subverting the discursive tropes and rhetorical strategies first formulated in the work of European scholars.
In The Empire of the Ear: Music, Race, and the Sonic Architecture of Colonial Morocco, author Samuel Llano demonstrates that auditory culture, music, and musicology played a key role in negotiating the cultural struggles of colonialism in Morocco by helping to redraw society's ethnic and racial boundaries. Music was deeply involved in shaping a colonial rivalry between France and Spain, with both powers fighting to lead the discovery and promotion of Morocco's music, particularly the Andalusi and Amazigh repertoires. Llano further illuminates the ways in which France and Spain used music to promote markedly distinct and competing racial agendas in order to categorize and control Moroccan populations and their cultural practices. At the same time, he delves deeply into the significant roles that Moroccan and Maghrebi musicians and scholars played in fostering performance criteria and producing scholarship that challenged deep-seated European views, acting as a form of anti-colonial resistance. As he explores music's dual role as an instrument of power and resistance, Llano demonstrates that the impact of colonial rivalry on music scholarship and performance was more complex than the coloniser/colonised binary suggests. Finally, he analyzes how collaborations between Maghrebi and European scholars and musicians in transcription and performance obscured the lines between oppression and contestation, pushing resistance into a liminal space.
In exploring these cultural tensions, The Empire of the Ear argues that race was the primary principle governing the performance and study of Morocco's music repertoires and the shaping of forms of identification among rural and urban populations.
