The Empire of the Ear: Music, Race, and the Sonic Architecture of Colonial Morocco (New Cultural History of Music)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. 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: Mus