The Captain of Plymouth: Cicero and the Politics of Music and Assimilation

Please note the date of the event has now changed to Thursday, Oct. 22nd! In their 2023 chapter, Dylan Robinson and Patrick Nickleson ask a series of questions which are interrelated to each other: "What is the feeling of knowing music?" and "How are we supposed to know music?".

In this talk, I sketch out some of the contours of these questions by asking: how we are supposed to know music if we can't even hear it? This question is explored through a close study of an early comic opera, "The Captain of Plymouth" (1904).

The titular character is Miles Standish, introduced emphatically to us as New England's version of Caesar. It was performed at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, located in Carlisle, PA in 1909 and then again in 1910 as part of the commencement exercises for the school.

While these exercises were ostensibly meant to celebrate the students, they functioned as a means to showcase the assimilation and citizen making power of the federal government's boarding school regime. Thinking with Robinson and Nickleson, this talk explores the politics of assimilation, and the role of music, by turning to Cicero's De Legibus which repurposes Platonic conceptions of mousikē to mold his ideal Roman citizens.

I argue that tracing the relationship between music, (ancient) philosophy, and citizenship unveils new understandings about our titular Captain's role in producing gender and racial hierarchies in the play and the effect on students at Carlisle. This talk will be held in person at Horace Mann 103 and online on Zoom on Thursday, October 22nd from 5-6:30 pm.

To join on Zoom please register online. Ashley Lance is a Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies in the Department of Classics.

She is of Yurok and Wiyot descent and an enrolled tribal member of the Blue Lake Rancheria.This event is online: https://brown.zoom.us/meeting/register/4tZo5iL4S22jCy1zJbA8IA