ABSTRACT
Musical studies occasionally transform musical life into systematic classifications based upon genre, style, scale, repertoire, or functionality, for example. Reductive categorization of musical systems is in some instances employed as an attempt to fix historically a "tradition" of practice, something that can be grasped, historicized, and hence interpreted. This chapter analyses the performative expressions of tradition among Marie-Galantais—expressions that evoke, form connections to, communicate about Marie-Galantais pasts. It seeks to illuminate the interplay of variant versions of history on Marie-Galante, all "official"—in other words, all real constructions, drawing on varied imaginaries that contribute to expressions among Marie-Galantais of, among other things, sentiments of non-nationhood, hence of absence. A dance form related to kadril and commonly incorporated into and performed at a kadril dance event is the biguine, a European-influenced dance that purportedly originated on Guadeloupe. The biguine, quadrille, and mazurka dominated the first half of the twentieth century in Martinican and Guadeloupean cities among the mulatto and white native elites.
