Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit from Washington University in St. Louis, who will discuss Siamese responses to European colonial music theory. Dr. Wangpaiboonkit obtained PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently, Dr. Wangpaiboonkit serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Washington University in St. Louis.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

My talk examines how Siamese thinkers worried over the European study of Siamese music as a measure of racial-civilizational worth, and how they sought to harness the perceived prestige of European comparativism rather than counter its inconsistencies with local forms of knowledge production.
I begin with a focus on the British theorist Alexander J. Ellis in a quintessential moment of colonial encounter: his 1885 examination of Siamese court musicians, where Ellis declared that Siamese music utilized seven-tone equidistant tuning, regulating its non-harmonic character to the racial-developmental equivalent of Europe’s past. I am not ultimately interested, however, in understanding Ellis’s project on his own terms, nor in exposing the inconsistencies in his methods to uncover what Siamese tuning really was. The fantasy of the European intellectual’s control of knowledge over the colonial world, whether it involved careful ethnography or mere guesswork, has been extensively scrutinized in music studies. I am interested in following, rather, what the aftereffects of European colonial knowledge production meant for its subjects of research: the anxious reception and lineage of theorizing about Siamese music as it took hold within Siam itself. Tracing the anxiety-ridden history of musical knowledge production about “seven-tone tuning” through the court of Chulalongkorn and the regime of Phibunsongkram, I show how musical tuning shifted from an embodied practice of pedagogy and performance into an extraneous object of knowledge entangled in the construction of race and nationhood. The racial science of music comparison – the idea that quantifiable knowledge about a people’s musical organization reveals essential value about their race – was not a one-sided concern of European intellectuals. It was also localized in Thai musical thought as a matter of reflexive self-fashioning.

About the Speaker

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. He is interested in issues of aesthetic commensurability, comparativism and the production of knowledge about non-European musics, and opera as a racializing global-colonial form. Parkorn’s 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 sovereign personhood in colonial contest. His Opera Quarterly article “Voice, Race, and Imperial Ethnology in Colonial Siam” received the 2023 Alfred Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society. His other writings have appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal and Journal of Musicology. As a recipient of an ACLS Fellowship, Parkorn is spending this academic year at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University. He is thrilled to be joining the Department of Music at Cornell University in Fall 2025.