Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines by Mary Talusan (review)

Reviewed by: Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines by Mary Talusan James Carl Lagman Osorio (bio) Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines, by Mary Talusan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Xiii + 280 pp. $99.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper. ISBN 9781496835666; 9781496835673. What does it mean to listen with an "imperial ear?" What are the implications of being pigeonholed as "natural musicians" in a society that foregrounds musical notation? What does having a Black conductor leading a band of "little brown men" musicians engender in an imperialist arena filled with racial, class, and gender cacophony? Using archives, oral histories, and secondary sources, Mary Talusan's Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines answers these questions by recounting the forgotten tale of the Philippine Constabulary (PC) Band led by African American US military officer and conductor Lt. Walter H. Loving during the early decades of the twentieth century, a time of heightened racial and cultural anxieties. In this first monograph-length study of the PC Band, Talusan examines the fragility of racial ideologies in imperialist America through an examination of spectatorship along the currents of cultural hegemony and colonization. In doing so, Talusan expands our knowledge of the nurtured alliance between Black people and Filipino diasporic communities, forged out of the shared trauma from imperialist Americans, that affected the intersection of music, culture, race, and politics. The book's author, Mary Talusan, goes above and beyond the expectations of a music historian. Rooted in her positionality as an immigrant, ethnomusicologist, and a descendant of Captain Pedro Navarro, one of the original members of the Philippine Constabulary Band, Talusan frames the PC Band within the context of the Philippine's forced annexation which led to the development of an "imperial ear": a discourse that afforded white Americans to listen to colonized subjects reductively, thus upholding racial supremacy and domination. In the PC Band's case, the "imperial ear" dismissed Filipino musicality as a "natural state of being," obscuring their creative agency and authenticity (6, 20). Talusan argues that white spectators, listening with an "imperial ear," heard the PC Band as a testament to America's paternalistic duty of "benevolent assimilation" (4). Talusan builds her argument upon Jon Cruz's notion of "disengaged engagement," defined in his book, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), as a cultural pretext that granted white audiences to enjoy the artistic "authenticity" of Black music while also overlooking the realities of racial segregation and violence (3–4). Talusan organizes the book's five chapters chronologically. The first outlines the long history of European music and training in the Philippines before [End Page 433] US colonial rule. It traces native band traditions, Lt. Loving's beginnings, the implications of Black presence during the Philippine-American War, and the formation of the PC Band. The remaining chapters focus on the PC Band and the way it negotiates the complex silhouettes of the American public and social life centered around William Taft's presidential inauguration, the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, and the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. Chapter 2 focuses on Lt. Loving, who, as Talusan states, "to Filipinos, he was an ally; to African Americans, a symbol of achievement; and he was seen by all as an educated and accomplished musician" (70). This tripartite association challenged white supremacy, and reporters and fairgoers at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair omitted Loving's race from their accounts. On the other hand, while Filipino band members "traversed colored lines by attending prestigious events [at the fair]," American audiences concurrently heard their performances of Euro-American music as a submission to American values (116–17). Lt. Loving and his Filipino musicians' amenability to perform for white audiences invokes W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "double consciousness," referring to the oppressed people's compliance with a dominant society while also...

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