Bibliographic record
Abstract
Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, has been an important historical figure for musicologists. When he entered music-historical conversations in the 1990s, his charismatic persona and, especially, his Blackness opened the door to discussions about how Black and mixed-race musicians had contributed to European music cultures before 1800, and drew important attention to the ways they were passed over in scholarship. Many of those conversations and many since, however, have focused on Bologne and his Blackness as exceptional, as a historical curiosity. Although effective as a critical tool, this exceptionality has monumentalized him in ways that have become counterproductive to the changing historical picture his story might otherwise help develop. As part of this special issue on Bologne, this essay examines how exceptionality has framed Bologne and his Blackness in music-historical writing, and offers an alternative, approaching them as what Bruno Latour has termed “matters of concern.” I situate Bologne and his Blackness in an Atlantic view, looking beyond Paris to broaden and complicate the singular narratives monumentality has offered. Comparing his persona in Paris with that in 1770s and 1780s Cap-Français, the cultural hub of French-colonial Saint-Domingue, reveals how his persona was constituted through plural, shifting relationships between his musical virtuosity, amateurism, his body, and above all, his coloniality as a mixed-race Caribbean-born man. These relationships generate asymmetries and contingencies that resist the monolithic concepts of exceptionality relied on. Complicating the music-historical picture of Bologne, rather than resolving it to a clear, singular narrative, offers a path for Bologne’s story and his Blackness to productively rethink the historical picture scholars have aimed to write him into.
Stored with the screening record, where it is evidence for the labels above.
How this classification was reachedexpand
The three-model screen
all 5,600 screened works →1 of 3 models called this metaresearch. This work is contested: it sits on the field's empirical boundary, and whether it counts depends on which model you asked. It is one of the 51 works in the disagreement dossier.
Musicological essay that critiques how music-historical writing has framed Joseph Bologne while offering a new historical reading; the historiographic critique frames an object that remains the historical figure, so it sits near the T2 boundary.
This essay reinterprets a historical musician in musicological writing and does not study research itself.
Meta-historiographic essay on how musicology has framed Bologne and Blackness; object is scholarly writing practices, generously adjacent STS/historiography of a field.
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".