Table Of ContentAcoustemologies in Contact
Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity W
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E E W S G. C L
DITED BY MILY ILBOURNE AND UZANNE USICK B
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In this fascina� ng collec� on of essays, an interna� onal group of scholars explores the E Acoustemologies
sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine A
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how cultural confi gura� ons of sound impacted communica� on, comprehension, and D
the categorisa� on of people. Addressing ques� ons of iden� ty, diff erence, sound, and C
in Contact
subjec� vity in global early modernity, these authors share the convic� on that the body U
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itself is the most in� mate of contact zones, and that the culturally con� ngent systems by I
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which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day K
scholars. (ED Sounding Subjects and Modes of
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Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to Listening in Early Modernity
the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court
environment—this collec� on challenges the privileged posi� on of European acous� cal
prac� ces within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black
and non-European experiences demonstrates how the produc� on of ‘the canon’ in EDITED BY EMILY WILBOURNE AND SUZANNE G. CUSICK
the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human
exploita� on and extrac� on of resources. As such, this text is a � mely response to calls
within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works A
of the European past. C
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This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within T
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musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, M
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and slavery. L
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As with all Open Book publica� ons, this en� re book is available to read for free on the IE
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publisher’s website. Printed and digital edi� ons, together with supplementary digital IN
material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com
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Cover Image: ‘The manner in which the Mexicans dance’, in Juan de Tovar, Historia de la venida de T
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los indios (Ms., ca. 1585), f. 58r. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, CC BY-SA 4.0. C
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Cover design by Anna Ga� .
e
book
ebook and OA edi� ons
also available
OPEN
ACCESS
www.openbookpublishers.com
OBP
ACOUSTEMOLOGIES
IN CONTACT
ACOUSTEMOLOGIES
IN CONTACT
Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening
in Early Modernity
Edited by Emily Wilbourne and
Suzanne G. Cusick
https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2021 Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick. Copyright of individual chapters is
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Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick (eds), Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding
Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers,
2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0226
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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0226
Cover Image: ‘The manner in which the Mexicans dance’, in Juan de Tovar, Historia de la
venida de los indios (Ms., ca. 1585), f. 58r. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, CC
BY-SA 4.0. Cover Design by Anna Gatti.
Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
SECTION I: Colonial Contact
1. Listening as an Innu-French Contact Zone in the Jesuit 13
Relations
Olivia Bloechl
2. Native Song and Dance Affect in Seventeenth-Century 37
Christian Festivals in New Spain
Ireri E. Chávez Bárcenas
3. Performance in the Periphery: Colonial Encounters and 65
Entertainments
Patricia Akhimie
SECTION II: Contact and Captivity
4. ‘Hideous Acclamations’: Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, 83
and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners
Glenda Goodman
5. Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive 107
Danielle Skeehan
6. Little Black Giovanni’s Dream: Black Authorship and the 135
‘Turks, and Dwarves, the Bad Christians’ of the Medici Court
Emily Wilbourne
vi Acoustemologies in Contact
SECTION III: Textual Contact
7. A Global Phonographic Revolution: Trans-Eurasian 167
Resonances of Writing in Early Modern France and China
Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu
SECTION IV: Mediterranean Contact
8. ‘La stiava dolente in suono di canto’: War, Slavery, and 201
Difference in a Medici Court Entertainment
Suzanne G. Cusick
9. ‘Now Despised, a Servant, Abandoned’: Wounded Italy, the 239
Moresca, and the Performance of Alterity
Nina Treadwell
10. ‘Non basta il suono, e la voce’: Listening for Tasso’s Clorinda 265
Jane Tylus
Bibliography 289
List of illustrations 323
Index 327
Notes on Contributors
Patricia Akhimie is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers
University — Newark. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation
of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018), and
co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama,
and the Wider World (with Bernadette Andrea, 2019). Her research has
been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the
Folger Shakespeare Library, the Ford Foundation, the National Sporting
Library, and the John Carter Brown Library.
Olivia Bloechl is Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh, with
research interests in the early modern Atlantic world, French Baroque
opera, postcolonialism, feminist ethics, and global music history. She is
the author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music
(2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (2017),
and co-editor of Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (with M. Lowe
and J. Kallberg, 2015). A longtime advocate of postcolonial and global
approaches to music history, she is a founding convener of the Global
Music History Study Group of the AMS.
Ireri E. Chávez Bárcenas is Assistant Professor of Music at
Bowdoin College. She received her doctoral degree in musicology
from Princeton University and a master’s degree in religion and
music from Yale University. Her work analyzes the performance
of villancicos within the institutional and social fabric of Puebla de los
Ángeles and develops a new methodology for the study of function,
meaning, and transmission of the vernacular song tradition in the
Spanish empire. She has published studies on the villancico in early
seventeenth-century New Spain and on Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma and
the adaptation of conflicting historiographical interpretation about the
Conquest of Mexico in Early Modern Italy.
viii Acoustemologies in Contact
Suzanne G. Cusick is Professor of Music on the Faculty of Arts and
Science at New York University and Honorary Member of both the
American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology;
she has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to
the musical cultures of early modern Italy and of contemporary North
America. Her 2009 book Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and
the Circulation of Power received the ‘Best Book’ award for 2010 from the
Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. More recently, she has
studied the use of sound in detention and interrogation of prisoners
held during the twenty-first century’s ‘war on terror’, work for which
she won the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society.
Cusick is currently at work on a monograph on gendered, eroticized,
and politicized modes of hearing in Medicean Florence. Cusick served
as President of the American Musicological Society from 2018 to 2020.
Glenda Goodman is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of
Pennsylvania. She works on the history of early American music. Her
first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American
Republic (2020), considers the material and social practice of amateur
music-making. She also researches music, Indigeneity, and colonial
encounter, and is currently working on a new book about sacred music
and Native American Christian conversion in colonial New England
and New York. She is also working on a collaborative project, American
Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, which will
result in a volume and digital project. Her articles have appeared in
the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society
for American Music, the William and Mary Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century
Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.
Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu is Assistant Professor in Musicology at the
University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. in Music History
and Theory from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation
was recognized with a Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award of the
Humanities Division in 2020. He is a former recipient of the Howard
Mayer Brown Fellowship from the American Musicological Society, the
Mellon Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Council for Library
and Information Resources, and the Chateaubriand Fellowship from the
French Embassy in the US. His research focuses on global histories of
Notes on Contributors ix
music in the early modern era, particularly intersections between music
and empire-building in Eurasia and comparative studies between the
Qing Empire (1636–1912) and the European-Atlantic world. His works
have appeared in Early Music and Opera Quarterly, and he is currently
working on a monograph based on the ‘Phonographic Revolution’
hypothesis he develops in his contribution to this volume.
Danielle Skeehan is Associate Professor in English at Oberlin College,
where she specializes in early and nineteenth-century American
literature. Her work has appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
Interpretation, The Appendix, The Journal of the Early Republic, Commonplace,
and Early American Studies. Her first book, The Fabric of Empire: Material
and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650–1850 (2020), provides a
new model for thinking about the different media, languages, literacies,
and textualities in the early Atlantic world.
Nina Treadwell is Professor of Music at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. She is a music historian and a performer on Renaissance
and Baroque plucked-string instruments. She particularly enjoys
playing basso continuo in baroque operas, especially those ripe for
queer performative interventions. Ironically, her written work often
engages with ‘opera’s others’, musico-theatrical works that typically fall
outside of the musicological canon and are rarely performed. Her first
book — Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for ‘La
pellegrina’ — was published by Indiana University Press in 2008. She is
currently completing a monograph on queerness in sixteenth-century
Italian music-making.
Jane Tylus is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian Studies and
Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. She is the author of several
monographs (Siena, City of Secrets (2015); Reclaiming Catherine of Siena
(2009); Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (1993)) and
has translated the complete poetry of Gaspara Stampa and Lucrezia
Tornabuoni de’ Medici. She is currently working on a book manuscript
entitled ‘Saying Goodbye in the Renaissance’ and a collection of essays
on accompaniment and translation. She is General Editor of I Tatti
Studies in the Italian Renaissance.
