Dr. Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, Assistant Professor of Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, will giving a talk entitled “Songs for the New Nation” on Friday, February 23, 2024 at the Mead Witter School of Music. Please see details below:
Songs for the New Nation
Mead Witter School of Music Colloquium Series
Friday, February 23, 2024
2:10 pm – 3:30 pm
Humanities 5520
Across the 1930s, the government of Siam received numerous requests from European and American institutions asking to be provided with copies of Siamese national song. These inquiries for specimens –for inclusion in ambitiously comprehensive collections of the world’s songs and anthems – sparked a barrage of worried discussion among Siam’s elite bureaucrats. What is a national song, and did Siam have one? What are the stakes of selecting representative songs that would stand in for the nation against global scrutiny?
My paper examines an archive of Siam’s coming to terms with the Eurocentric idea that a sovereign nation ought to be identified through emblematic song. I follow the administrative trail of these song-selection debates to illuminate Siam’s new sonic conceptions of sovereignty and nationhood after the fall of absolute monarchy in 1932. In their task to define songs worthy of sounding the nation, the bureaucrats articulated an ontology of Siamese song that balanced between local forms of musical value and the perceived demands of Western knowledge production.
Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on music, race, and imperialism in nineteenth-century Siam. Parkorn is interested in issues of aesthetic commensurability in colonial encounter, comparativism and the production of knowledge about non-European musics, and opera as a racializing global-colonial form. His book project, Race and Sovereignty in the Imperial Music of Siam, examines the localization of European music and sound practices at the Siamese court as a means of negotiating new conceptions of sovereignty in colonial survival. Parkorn’s work has been supported by awards from the American Musicological Society, including this year’s Alfred Einstein Award. His writing appears in Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, and Journal of Musicology.