Abstract: This colloquium considers the opportunities and challenges for developing an interpretive framework to contextualise sources of Black Atlantic listening in the long eighteenth century. It will focus on Jamaica, Britain’s wealthiest Caribbean colony by 1720 and by the 1770s, the most lucrative in the British Americas. Kingston, the capital today, was already the island’s chief port and commercial hub when it began to yield an intensive flourishing of European arts around the start of the Anglo-American War (1775–1783). While the population was comprised of different social, ethnic and religious backgrounds, most Kingstonians were Black and enslaved, with few being officially identifiable as Christian. What might such people—individuals who had been trafficked to Jamaica from sub-Saharan Africa and their free and enslaved descendants—have perceived of the musical sounds they witnessed in their daily lives? How might scholars today deconstruct the syncretical “sonic baggage” they transported and reshaped in the social crucible of British-colonial Kingston? Scrutinising the polyvalent world-making evident in a range of musical sources, including literary accounts and sheet music, I will explore how Black Jamaicans used sound to represent and imagine their social, cultural, and political surroundings.
Biography: Wayne Weaver is a historian of eighteenth-century Jamaican music and sound. His doctoral thesis (in music) explored the contributions of Euro-colonial composers active in and around the island’s modern-day capital, Kingston. Focusing principally on the life, outputs and surrounding networks of the Anglo-Jamaican organist, Samuel Felsted (1743-1802), Wayne has traced how music was used alongside theatre and other public expressions to underpin a highly localised and racialised construction of white-Creole identity. More broadly, Wayne’s research reshapes and reorients histories of colonial musicking to include details of people of African origin whose lives played out in and around homes, theatres, churches and other (outdoor) spaces where musical performances (black and white) were heard and overheard. Hosted at Royal Holloway, University of London, Wayne’s Leverhulme-funded research project The Acoustic Worlds of Eighteenth- Century Jamaica traces African Jamaican sonic and social cultures, centring on the roles played by Black women in the earliest accounts of Jamaican street pageantry. It also surfaces and interrogates new and forgotten sheet music likely known or heard by Black people living in Jamaica and elsewhere in the early modern Americas with a view to its syncretic 'Afro-Christian' spiritual interpretations. Wayne has varied musical interests. As an organist, harpsichordist, choral director and teacher, he has served churches, chapels, cathedrals, schools, and musical establishments across Britain. His specialism in early modern Black Atlantic sound and its meanings is complemented by his participation within a team of scholars and performers on the Abolition Song and its Legacies project led by Dr Berta Joncus (Guildhall School of Music). Previously, Wayne was part of the Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre and Opera Network, led by Professor Julia Prest (University of St Andrews) and funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Wayne is an alumnus of Edinburgh University and Cambridge (Wolfson College), where his doctoral thesis was completed under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Walton. He is also a visiting lecturer in music at King’s College London, where his teaching ranges from species counterpoint to jazz history.
