Sinthujan Varatharajah
Music and colonial modernity

Technically-speaking, the term 'classical' says little about a geographic place. It instead refers to a relationship to time and class. Yet, when used in imperial languages and in the context of music, "classical" is mostly understood as something place and culture-specific; as something sternly European. While non-European music was systematically pushed into physical and rhetorical museums by Europeans, considered something backwards and inwards-facing, Europe's cultures were deemed "timeless", "classical" and yet also future-oriented by them. With time and violence they became symbols of mobility, progress and "civilisation" even for many colonised and would-be-colonised. Today, conservatories can be found in all corners of this planet, sitting on main streets in European-style buildings from Nairobi, Kabul to Seoul, training tens of thousands of students in rhythms and relationships that are inherently foreign and colonial.

In this talk, Sinthujan Varatharajah explores why questions of representation of non-European in the bourgeois European music industry distracts from the more important questions of how we ended up in a world in which European "classical music" has become a global cultural enterprises in the first place.

Sinthujan Varatharajah is a political geographer and essayist based in Berlin. Varatharajah's work addresses statelessness and displacement from a spatial, logistical, and materialist perspective. Varatharajah's first book, 'an alle orte, die hinter uns liegen', was published by Hanser Verlag in fall 2022. The book project 'Englisch in Berlin', a collaboration with Moshtari Hilal, was published in the same year by Wirklichkeits Books.