Music as Sound, Music as Archive: Performing Creolization in Trinidad

Abstract

This article positions performance as a key concept in understanding creolization. In doing so, it situates music as both sound and archive in analyses of Trinidadian tassa drumming, soca, and chutney-soca. Musical analysis provides useful insights into the processes of creolization, while revealing colonial and postcolonial relationships between groups of people that give shape and meaning to the music, past and present. I draw on notions of music as sound to further analyze the forces that work to control the Trinidadian soundscape by promoting or marginalizing musical styles in an effort to shape musical production according to the ideal of creole culture. I conclude by suggesting that the conventional notion of the archive has from its very beginnings been connected with elite desires to enumerate and historicize positions of power. In this context, musical performances analyzed in this study emerge as subaltern archival practices that run alongside mainstream archives and popular interpretations of history. In listening to Trinidadian music as sound and archive, I trace present and potential social structures while providing new ways of thinking about creolization as performance.