The Unsung Revolution: The Music of Haitian Independence, 1804–1820

Abstract

When Haiti, a former French colony in the Caribbean, won its independence in 1804, it became the first nation to permanently abolish slavery. In an age of revolutions, this was revolutionary. Yet no sooner had Haiti done so than it witnessed the revival of the musical traditions of its former oppressors, commemorating its independence by publishing songs and anthems in the French language. Assembling these materials for the first time, this dissertation examines how a nation of African-descended people, having fundamentally altered their Atlantic world, used French music to express their desires, plaints, ambitions, and pleasures. In three chapters and an appendix, this dissertation provides the first music history of Haiti’s early independence period (1804-1820), a refutation of static histories of genre and Eurocentric understandings of the Enlightenment, and a compendium of Haitian musical source material including three operas, two cantatas, two songbooks, and dozens of songs—what this dissertation terms Franco-Haitian music.

Cultural histories of early Haiti have traditionally attended to the more legible subjects of journalism and literature, treating song texts and libretti as poetry or orphaned lyrics—music never to be sung again. Meanwhile, musicological scholarship has either concentrated on Haiti’s colonial era or hastened past its early-independence period altogether. By focusing on an unnotated tradition of song parody—Haitian lyrics sung to French melodies—this dissertation brings early Haitian songs back to sonorous life, reuniting their words and music. As it shows, early Haitians used and reused French music to glorify their leaders, confound their enemies, celebrate their genius, and revise their musical inheritance—their musical spoil of war. It considers the question: what happens when one privileges parodic genres, adaptations, and other specimens of compositional thrift in the writing of music history? It also examines the function of Afro-diasporic genres, concluding that while music in the French tradition served a primarily commemorative function, the music of Haiti’s common classes conveyed a populist message and exposed dissatisfaction with the nation’s leadership. By examining traditions both French and African, elite and common, this dissertation reveals music’s influence on Haitian diplomacy, statecraft, literature, and the ongoing process of decolonization.