My dissertation accounts for the sonic history of an absolute monarchy—the kingdom of Siam under Chulalongkorn—in the decades around 1900. In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Siamese War of 1893, Siam was in crisis over the racial and civilizational standing of its regional empire against encroaching European colonization across Southeast Asia. This study examines the way the monarchy employed listening, criticism, and emulation of European musical practices to assert sovereignty and to negotiate colonial strategies of racialization. The musical reforms cultivated at court portrayed the Siamese elite as cosmopolitan equals to courtiers of the great monarchies of the world. At the same time, the changes in musical thought and practice at court magnified the ethnic difference between Bangkok as a royal center (the locus of the cosmic glory of the king) and Siam’s own rural peripheries (the realm of “lesser” ethnicities vulnerable to French and British takeover). I also examine the strategies by which the monarchy fashioned itself as interimperial listeners – listening from the situated space between empires as judges of both Siamese and European music practices – and as colonial intellectuals eager to adopt and harness, rather than resist, European music theoretical discourses of racial hierarchy.

Each of the four chapters focuses on a different mode of musical reform enacted as efforts of racialized self-invention that balanced between satisfying traditional Siamese cosmology and European colonial approval. These reforms in musical practice and thought, routed through the underlying rhetoric of race and civilization, illustrate from the Siamese perspective the commensurability of sonic spectacle as an index of civilizational and racial excellence in situations of colonial contest. While the music history addressed here centers Siam’s actions in response to European colonialism, I stress that these practices were not enacted as subaltern efforts of anticolonial resistance, but as a waning monarchy’s bid to wrest the markers of sovereign power in a newfound global-colonial order.