Chanter la guerre during the Seven Years War (Dr Olivia Bloechl, University of Pittsburgh)

In this lecture, I focus more closely on singing and dancing embodiment as a site for the world-making I introduced in the first lecture. As a case study, I discuss the practice of performing Haudenosaunee-style personal war songs in negotiations to form multi-Indigenous/European military coalitions during the Seven Years’ War. French and British colonial archives extensively document these intercultural rituals that the French termed “chanter la guerre.” However, missionaries’ and officers’ writings often furnish more performance details than official records, so I turn to French officers’ writings and to war song transcriptions for information on performances by Montcalm’s officers in negotiations convened in 1756-57. In fact, Bougainville performed his personal war song several times, including in his ceremonial adoption by the Kahnawá:ke Kanien’keha’ka (Caughnawaga Mohawk) Turtle clan. His learning to embody Haudenosaunee men’s ways of singing in war councils and adoptions conformed to longstanding Six Nations protocols for forming alliances, and it furthered French military aims. Yet Bougainville’s and Montcalm’s writings suggest their discomfort with the intimacy and indistinction between Indigenous/European combatants entailed in “chanter la guerre.” I read their discomfort as responding to the contradictions of forming intercultural alliances in a colonializing zone.

* This is lecture 2 of Professor Bloechl’s Wort Residency in the faculty.

OLIVIA BLOECHL is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where she joined the Department of Music in 2017. She had previously taught at UCLA and Bucknell University. An alumna of Smith College, Massachusetts, she received a Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Prof. Bloechl is a music historian and cultural theorist with wide-ranging interests clustered in the early modern period and the long eighteenth Chanter la guerre during the Seven Years War Week 2: 5pm, 16th October 2024, Recital Room Professor Olivia Bloechl Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh century (1500-1800). Her research emphasizes music and sound in early Atlantic empires, French Baroque opera (especially tragédie en musique), postcolonialism, and global music history and historiography. Her full-length publications include Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), which was supported by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship and a generous subvention from the James R. Anthony Endowment of the AMS. With Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg she also co-edited the collection Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015). ). Her current book project, which undergirds her lecture series for the Wort Residency here in Cambridge, is “Sound and Song in the Allegheny World, 1740-1776,” a study of Indigenous/settler sonic interaction and exchange in the upper Ohio River valley (especially the Ohio Forks region, near Pittsburgh) before the American Revolution.