How is it that a country as small as Dominica (home to a mere 70,000 people and geographically smaller than New York City) has consistently produced popular musics that inform and shape the sounds of the entire Caribbean? What sounds are Dominican musicians tapping into in order to generate such a disproportionate impact on Caribbean popular music? We will approach answers to this set of questions by exploring the history of Dominican popular music in relation to the region and to the region’s musical life. We will also work to develop a theoretical frame within which to think about these answers, coming to terms specifically with how “the creole” works in Dominica and throughout the region. By connecting history with theory in this way, we will be able to formulate some tentative answers to our initial questions while simultaneously opening our inquiry to additional questions. So, for instance, why would Dominicans call for and musically enact a borderless Caribbean? Why would such a state of affairs be desirable? What, moreover, is at stake in such a claim? By thinking about these related questions, we will, by the end our time together, come to hear Dominica’s place in (and challenge to) the region—we will be able to hear these ideas and concerns play out in cadence-lypso, and bouyon. And we will be attuned to the musical answers steadily echoing back from the region—answers ranging from calypso to konpa, and from soca to zouk).
Timothy Rommen
Professor of Music and Africana Studies
Timothy Rommen received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago in 2002. He specializes in the music of the Caribbean with research interests that include folk and popular sacred music, popular music, critical theory, ethics, diaspora, tourism, and the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. The majority of his research is focused on musics circulating in and around the Anglophone Caribbean. He is the author of "Mek Some Noise": Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad (University of California Press, 2007) and Funky Nassau: Roots, Routes, and Representation in Bahamian Popular Music (University of California Press). He is also co-editor, along with Daniel Neely, of Sun, Sound, and Sand: Reflections on Music Touristics in the Circum-Caribbean (Oxford University Press, 2014) and editor of the World Music textbook, Excursions in World Music (Routledge 2016). He is a contributor to the Cambridge History of World Music, and his articles and reviews appear in Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, the Black Music Research Journal, the Latin American Music Review, the Journal of Musicology (forthcoming), The World of Music, The New West Indian Guide, the Journal of Religion, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Journal of Anthropological Research, the International Dictionary of Black Composers, and the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. Professor Rommen is currently engaged in a long-term musical ethnography of Dominica and working on a second volume exploring music and tourism in the Caribbean.