Tuesday 15 October 2024 4:30pm
About
“Music and Sound in the Colonial Struggle for Northeastern America, 1754-1783”
[1] Tuesday 15 Oct @ 4:30pm: Song as Contested Worlding in Bougainville’s Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique (1756-58)
(Recital Room)
[2] Wednesday 16 Oct @ 5pm: Chanter la guerre during the Seven Years War
(Recital Room)
[3] Thursday 17 Oct @ 4pm: Entangled Histories of Fur Trade Instruments in the Pittsburgh Waste Book (1759-60)
(Recital Room)
[4] Friday 18 Oct @ 5pm: “William Calls It a Fiddle”: The More-than-Colonial Lives of Peter Johnson and His Violin
(Concert Hall)
Abstract
Method is emerging as a core issue for global music history/global musicology. One of the most challenging questions arises with researchers’ emphasis on relatedness, as a dimension of the cases we address and a condition of our address itself. While various forms of relatedness have been at issue in other modalities of music research for some time, questioning entanglement or interconnection is fundamental to globally oriented musicologies in novel and often discomforting ways. For the Wort Residency, I take up these questions in the context of my recent work on music and sound in colonial struggles over northeastern Indigenous peoples’ homelands between the Seven Years’ War and the aftermath of the American Revolution. Some of the research I present is drawn from a book-in-progress, Music and Sound in the Struggle for the Ohio Country, 1740-1795; but the lectures also venture beyond the book to related research that lets us think through the heuristic value of taking complex connective phenomena as starting points for musicological inquiry.
Across the four lectures, I work with a conception of sonic world-making as a framework for asking how peoples engaged in colonial or inter-imperial conflicts have deployed song, movement, music, and sound to situate themselves meaningfully in relation to expansive geographies and temporalities. The first lecture develops this conceptual framework through a close reading of a French officer’s anecdote about his Anishinaabe ally’s dream recitation on the eve of battle. With the second lecture, I turn to the first of three connective phenomena I have found to be especially productive starting points: sounding and dancing bodies “in contact,” which I discuss via the practice of French leaders performing Haudenosaunee-style personal war songs in coalitional negotiations. In the third lecture, I focus on sonic materialities, especially the overlapping, dynamic materialities of small sound instruments exchanged in the multi-Indigenous/British fur trade at Fort Pitt. Finally, in the last lecture I offer thoughts on working with the often mobile or fleeting lives of colonial musicians and their instruments, and I share my ongoing efforts to reconstruct the life stories of a teenaged Mohawk/Irish musician, Peter Warren Johnson, and his treasured violin.