‘Maritime Musicology’ – Tentatively Sowing the Seeds of a Discipline

Earlier this week, I was deeply honoured to be invited to present a paper on the nineteenth-century shanty tradition at the Royal College of Music Museum, as part of their ongoing exhibition on Shared Airs: Our Thriving Folk Musics. It was, as always, a pleasure to talk about the shanty and to introduce elements of its history that many people are not aware of, such as the difference in how the shanty is presented today compared to its historical form, and the deeply intercultural, multinational origins of its repertoire. After the event, however, one of the attendees made an observation that has been relayed to me several times after presenting similar papers, which is that they were ‘unaware that maritime musicology was a career path open to them’. This sentiment is almost always conveyed in a humorous capacity, making light of the incredibly niche descriptor that I use when introducing myself and my work as a ‘maritime musicologist’. The comment did set me thinking, however, and reiterated a thought that I have had several times over the last few years, which is that some effort ought to be made to formalise the concept of maritime musicology as a methodological and historiographical approach. As this is so central to my work – from maritime understandings of abolition song to narratives of identity formation and belonging in contemporary shanty singing – I thought that I would begin to jot down a few of my initial thoughts about the discipline, which I hope to expand on at a later date as a longer article.

What is maritime musicology? First and foremost, I would define maritime musicology as a methodological approach that attempts to understand music and music-making from the perspective of the sea, moving away from historiographies that view music connected to the sea through a land-centric gaze. In other words, rather than viewing the sea from the land, we instead consider the sea (and, by extension, the ship) as the primary space for music-making, transmission and circulation. One might ask why such a methodological shift is required. In my many years studying the history of the shanty, I have seen time and time again how repertoires of maritime song have been separated from their original nautical contexts, reframed and categorised as national traditions, bound within frameworks that offer a highly selective and biased presentation of the songs’ forms, relations and histories. A musicological approach that is maritime in nature steps back from the systems and categories imposed on its music by terrestrial authors, and instead begins to ask broader questions related to the movement, transmission and global reach of music and musical genres that a framework bounded by nation or land boundary would not enable us to answer. In maritime musicology, we are concerned not with what distinguishes one cultural maritime tradition from another, but rather what connects music and music-making that comes from the sea, what is it about this music that is intrinsically connected to the maritime world, and how can further study of this distinctive body of songs provide us with a new global framework for understanding music history.

What would this look like from a practical perspective? Well, one of the initial consequences of this change in perspective would also be a change in the way we frame the sea and its music. When one hears shanties, for example, sung at folk clubs and at sea music festivals, the song is often introduced as an ‘American shanty’ that was sung in the cotton trades, or an ‘English shanty’ sung aboard ships sailing to and from Liverpool. Even a cursory analysis of shanty repertoire across multilingual collections tells us, however, that the same repertoire was heard aboard ships from differing ports of origin, sung by men of varied nationality. Take a shanty such as Banks of the Sacramento: the popularity of the song in the merchant service meant that versions of the then ubiquitous tune can be found in dozens of collections printed in Germany, France, England, America and Scandinavia. There is a tendency by song collectors and scholars alike to fixate on the place of origin of the tune or lyrics, as opposed to the means and circumstances of circulation that allowed the song to move across the globe in the first place.

The ship itself is famously referred to in Foucauldian thought as l’hétérotopie – a heterotopia, a place within a place, a miniature society formed within the confined space of the ship and adhering to the rules of the maritime world, which differed from that on land. Maritime musicology takes this concept of the ship and sea as heterotopia as the starting point of our mode of enquiry. To look at a piece of music from a maritime musicological perspective, then, is to remain aware of where the song ended up on shore and how it was subsequently collected, framed and reused, but to treat this as secondary to how, when, where and why a song was sung at sea within this discrete, separate space. Via this simple shift, we start to see patterns and networks of connection that, although tangentially referred to in canonical historiographies, have nevertheless been overlooked in favour of approaches that more readily connect maritime song histories to socio-cultural events on land.

At its heart, to study maritime music as a maritime musicologist is to study, above all, a history of shared culture, global and transnational encounter, and a common language, formed and shaped by the maritime world.

There is a great deal of work still to do to connect these vague, abstract thoughts about the field that I work in with broader conversations happening in music and beyond – most notably that of the ‘Blue Humanities’, which, although making waves (so to speak) within literary and geographic circles, has yet to convincingly translate over to music studies. For now, though, the above musings will have to suffice, until I have the time and space to present my thoughts in a more coherent manner.  

There is the small matter of the arrival of my first child and subsequent delivery of two monographs in the meantime, but more on this later...