On 17 June 2025, the International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS) at Newcastle University hosted a one-day study day exploring the entangled relationships between music, colonial governance, and the construction of colonial memory, with a particular focus on musical stage works. The event welcomed a range of scholars from the UK and beyond, including early-career researchers, doctoral students, and established academics working across musicology, performance studies, history, and postcolonial studies.

Papers throughout the day considered how musical stage traditions—including opera, ballet, melodrama, and musical theatre—have historically served to reinforce, contest, or reframe colonial ideologies. The opening paper, delivered by Elise Maynard (University of Bristol), examined La Bayadère and the legacy of Yolanda Sonnabend’s controversial 1980 costume designs for the Royal Ballet. Maynard explored how enduring Orientalist stereotypes in ballet design have contributed to the work’s retirement from the repertory, while also raising broader questions about the role of choreography, music, and design in perpetuating colonial imagery.

Carlota González Sánchez-Moliní (University of Seville) then offered a rich decolonial reading of musical Orientalism, focusing on the gendered dynamics of East–West binaries. Drawing on examples from 19th-century repertory, Sánchez-Moliní unpacked the feminised sonic tropes that have characterised Western representations of the East, from the exotic and sensual to the primitive and submissive.

In a similarly critical vein, Christoph Weyer (Humboldt University of Berlin) interrogated the mythology surrounding Franz Liszt’s 1847 visit to Constantinople. Challenging long-standing exoticist narratives, Weyer repositioned the journey as a carefully staged act of artistic self-fashioning, arguing that Liszt’s adaptation of Sultan’s March was more deeply rooted in European virtuoso tradition than any real engagement with Ottoman musical practice.

Questions of racialised performance were central to the paper by Thomas Overdijk and Floris Schuiling (Utrecht University), which explored how jazz came to function as a racialised signifier in early 20th-century Netherlands. Their contribution theorised jazz as part of a broader “global Blacksound,” a framework that exposes how stereotypical constructions of Blackness circulated through colonial exhibitions, blackface variety shows, and early jazz clubs, ultimately contributing to a colonial racial imaginary in Dutch cultural life.

Michael Mohammed (San Francisco Conservatory of Music) presented on recent stage works—including Omar and Paradise Square—that engage directly with histories of racial subjugation. His paper highlighted how Black vocality, dance, and theatrical conventions resist and reinterpret colonial legacies, while also navigating the complexities of audience expectation, form, and commercial production.

The afternoon concluded with three papers focused on performance and colonial ideology. Siri Eder (University of Freiburg) examined the little-studied 18th-century melodrama Inkle and Yariko, investigating how Enlightenment audiences were encouraged to engage emotionally with colonial morality tales that ultimately reinforced racial hierarchies. Eder’s focus on performativity and audience identification opened up important questions about the continued staging of such works today.

Olivia Childe (Newcastle University) presented a case study of the 1863 revival of La Muette de Portici at the Paris Opéra. The paper argued that this and other revivals were deeply entangled with France’s imperial ambitions, particularly during the campaign in Mexico. Childe examined how the mythologised revolutionary power of the opera was mobilised by the French state to frame colonial aggression as an extension of revolutionary ideals.

Finally, Cath Warren’s paper, Musical Theatre as Colonial Propaganda, shifted focus to the American context, tracing how Broadway musicals of the mid-twentieth century—particularly The King and I, South Pacific, and Flower Drum Song—functioned as cultural tools of colonial ideology. Warren then provocatively extended her analysis into the 21st century, examining American Idiot and the global success of Wicked: Part One (2024) to question whether contemporary musical theatre continues to reproduce colonial narratives, or whether it offers space for resistance and reinterpretation.

The day concluded with an open discussion in which participants reflected on shared themes across the papers—particularly the ways in which musical works not only reflect but actively shape structures of memory, identity, and colonial power. The study day affirmed the need for sustained, interdisciplinary engagement with the afterlives of colonialism in musical performance, and provided a valuable space for researchers at various stages of their careers to share ideas and forge new connections.

Liv Childe