Tom Peterson

Tom Peterson is a CHASE doctoral researcher at SOAS. With interests in global histories of music and colonialism, his doctoral research examines the musical archive and scholarship of Hugh Nevill (1847–97), a British civil servant and collector in colonial Sri Lanka (then Ceylon). 

In his thesis, Peterson brings Nevill’s broad and diverse collection of Sri Lankan lyrics into conversation with postcolonial readings of global music history. In doing so, his work follows a recent scholarly turn towards colonial musical archives as key resources for decentering European music and epistemologies in our understanding of what music is and how it developed across human history. He completed a BA (Hons) in ‘Professional Musicianship’ at the University of Sussex, after which he undertook an MMus in ‘Ethnomusicology’ at SOAS. 

Drawing on fieldwork conducted during his MMus, he has previously written on the metaphysic ontologies of Theravada Buddhist chant, a subject often avoided by musicologists and Buddhologists. From this, he developed a growing interest in sounds and practices that complicate European epistemologies of music, considering how European frameworks have affected readings of music outside Europe and how such entanglements have informed musical modernity. He is also a semi-professional musician. 

His most notable work came with Kudu Blue, an electronic-pop collective of which he was a founding member. Kudu Blue performed at Glastonbury, Boomtown, and Love Supreme, undertook a number of national and European tours and had considerable support from BBC Radio 1, Radio 1Xtra, and Radio 6. More recently, he has been working with the nascent Dr. Chonk & The Nature Injection, an instrumental jazz-funk group formed of members from Cousin Kula, Tamasene, and Snazzback. 

Following successful support shows with Azymuth and Yīn Yīn, Dr. Chonk & The Nature Injection are an emerging influence on the Bristol music scene and will be performing at Shambala and Wilderness in the summer of 2024.

• Peterson, Tom (2022). 'Sonic Benefit: Ontologies of Buddhist Chant and the Supramundane in Bengaluru', Asian Music, 53:1, pp. 56–79. Peterson
• Tom (2023). 'Review: 'Renegade Rhymes: Rap Music, Knowledge, and Narrative in Taiwan. By Meredith Schweig', Fontes Artis Musicae, 70:2, pp. 187–88. Peterson
• Tom (2024). 'Listening to Songs about Bees in Nineteenth-century Ceylon: Hugh Nevill and the Hugh Nevill Collection', The Island.

The ‘global turn’ in music studies has increasingly shown the need to view regional histories as interrelated, overlapping, and integral to the summation of world history, engendering global music history into a growing field. Within this field, histories of music in South Asia present particularly rich source material, supported by the subcontinent’s regional and transregional connections through religion, language, trade, and colonialism. Although Sri Lanka has shared many of these connections, its musical histories are often overlooked. 

My thesis considers Sri Lanka’s relevance to global music history by revealing some global implications of a nineteenth-century archive of Sri Lankan songs. In 1897, Hugh Nevill (1847–1897) left the colonial administration in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and returned to Europe with thousands of lyrics transcribed on paper and palm-leaf manuscripts. This singular collection is now held by the British Library and is the largest archive of Sri Lankan manuscripts outside of the country. 

By examining Nevill’s appreciation of lyrics in Ceylon, his collecting practices, and the songs themselves, my thesis presents alternatives to commonplace readings of music history in Sri Lanka as well as general colonial listening practices. It also shows that examining a single collection can complicate understandings of global music history, colonial engagements with non-Western performance practices and knowledge systems, and how something considered regional and local like debates about Sinhala musicality can have a global intellectual hinterland behind it.