Acoustemologies in Contact E-Book

Suzanne G. Cusick

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars.

Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past.

This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.

Leseprobe

ACOUSTEMOLOGIES IN CONTACT

ACOUSTEMOLOGIES IN CONTACT

Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity

Edited by Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick

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© 2021 Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors.

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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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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-035-1

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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 Relations

Olivia Bloechl

13

2.

Native Song and Dance Affect in Seventeenth-Century Christian Festivals in New Spain

Ireri E. Chávez Bárcenas

37

3.

Performance in the Periphery: Colonial Encounters and Entertainments

Patricia Akhimie

65

SECTION II: Contact and Captivity

4.

‘Hideous Acclamations’: Captive Colonists, Forced Singing, and the Incorporation Imperatives of Mohawk Listeners

Glenda Goodman

83

5.

Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive

Danielle Skeehan

107

6.

Little Black Giovanni’s Dream: Black Authorship and the ‘Turks, and Dwarves, the Bad Christians’ of the Medici Court

Emily Wilbourne

135

SECTION III: Textual Contact

7.

A Global Phonographic Revolution: Trans-Eurasian Resonances of Writing in Early Modern France and China

Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu

167

SECTION IV: Mediterranean Contact

8.

‘La stiava dolente in suono di canto’: War, Slavery, and Difference in a Medici Court Entertainment

Suzanne G. Cusick

201

9.

‘Now Despised, a Servant, Abandoned’: Wounded Italy, the Moresca, and the Performance of Alterity

Nina Treadwell

239

10.

‘Non basta il suono, e la voce’: Listening for Tasso’s Clorinda

Jane Tylus

265

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.

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 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.

Emily Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, and (since 2017) Editor-in-Chief of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Her first book, Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte, was published in 2016 by University of Chicago Press, and an edited collection in honor of Suzanne G. Cusick appeared as a special issue of Women & Music in 2015. Wilbourne’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Music, Recercare, Teatro e storia, Italian Studies, Echo, and Workplace. In 2011, Wilbourne was awarded the Philip Brett Award for excellence in queer music scholarship for her article, ‘Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love’; in 2017–2018, she was the Francesco De Dombrowski Fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Introduction

Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick

© Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0226.11

Acoustemologies in Contact attends to embodied, sensory experience in historical and cultural flux, and to the transcultural relations that flourished in the period that we — for expediency’s sake — call ‘early modernity’ (roughly 1500–1800).1 In order to think the history of early modernity differently, the authors in this collection have centered sound: auscultating the archive in search of the means by which sounds signified, and to whom they signified, these authors corral a wide range of sonic traces. Importantly, these essays presume no access to objective, unmediated sonic events, but rather understand sound as heard and actively listened to by auditors in historically and culturally specific formations. They share the conviction that sound — as vibrational force — necessitates bodies in sonic contact; as Olivia Bloechl reminds us in her chapter: the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones.2 Sounds convey vast amounts of information — information that situates bodies in space, in relationship to others, and in relationship to power. The essays share the assumption that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds make sense may be foreign to each other and to our present moment.

In early modernity, an unprecedented number of people, objects, and ideas moved around the globe, often in involuntary and uninvited ways. Yet traditional histories, including those of sound, music, and performance, have largely focused on regional repertoires bounded by linguistic or political borders. Until recently, the study of historical sound amounted to the study of historical music-making. Too many histories have prioritized the notated repertoires that were prized by elite Europeans in courts and churches, as if these venues, their music-makers, and their listeners were not confronted on a daily basis with people, objects, and ideas in migration.3 Whether these repertoires were performed in Europe or in a colonial setting, their written histories have valued the kinds of musical aesthetics that best flourish in notated genres (such as precise repetition, composerly gestures, developmental complexity, and self-referential musicality). These same histories have all but ignored the relationship of those repertoires to other intentional sound-making that some listeners might have deemed meaningful — even musical — and have neglected the importance of sound for the recognition of the familiar and the foreign. To privilege European and European-descended acoustical practices is to contribute to the colonial fantasy that European notions of sound, music, and listening are universal, and thus to also contribute passively to ongoing notions of European — white — cultural supremacy.

Since the turn of this century, the study of historical sound has expanded beyond the study of what Europeans called ‘music’. Classic texts of historical sound studies, such as Bruce R. Smith’s The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti’s Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice (2009) and Niall Atkinson’s The Noisy Renaissance (2016), have added enormously to understanding the ways that material technologies of sound and listening shaped theatrical, religious, and sociopolitical experience in the early modern era.4 Yet neither these nor Veit Erlmann’s provocative genealogy of ‘modern’ listening practice, Reason and Resonance (2014), attend to the ways that sound (including but not limited to music) was understood and directed to sociopolitical ends in cultures beyond Europe.5 Nor did they attend much to the ways that material technologies of sound and listening were implicated in this era of unprecedented transcultural contact. The essays in Acoustemologies in Contact share a desire for the sometimes elusive practice of what Peter Szendy has called ‘listening to listening’, excavating sound from various forms of writing, including musical notation, descriptive texts, poetry, and visual imagery.6 Here scholars listen for the impact that sounds make on individual bodies, and for the extent to which such responses were naturalized by cultural formations that gave the relationship between sounds and their meanings a seemingly monolithic veneer of truth.

The power of sound to move the body extends from the pleasurable labors of dance, through learned responses to commands or to one’s name, to the involuntary (sometimes only momentary) terror of the startle, caused by an unexpected bang or frightening noise. Acousmatic sound, sight unseen, insistently presses its way into the body — vibrating through the ears and through our flesh — fraying our attention and demanding a narrative explanation:7 ‘What was that? Where is that noise coming from? Is there anybody there?’ If Descartes’s famous dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) locates subjectivity within the internal (metaphorical) space of the mind, then the faculty of hearing locates the subject quite literally within space and in relation to an other: ‘I hear something (or someone) therefore I am not alone.’8

Through exposure and experience, reassuring and disturbing noises teach the listener how to parse sound, identifying others who move around, past, and into and out of proximity to the listener. In response, the auditor develops what J. Martin Daughtry has called ‘virtuosic listening’, or the capacity to discern threatening sounds amongst the mundane noises of everyday life.9 In this listening that sorts and storifies we can come to understand our place in the world and our position (of subjection) in relationship to power.

Not coincidently, the import of sound is central to many accounts of subjectivity. In Louis Althusser’s famous account of interpellation, for example, the subject recognizes themselves as caught up in and intelligible according to the law, only in the moment in which they are hailed by another and the hail is heard.10 A related sonicity is at work in Julia Kristeva’s semiotic, in which the infant babbles to and with her (or his) mother, absorbing the prosody and intonation of language as a life-sustaining and explicitly audible element of the maternal bond, which, in the absence of semantic meaning, defers the separation of mother and child into distinct subjectivities.11 Jörg Jochen Berns, too, marks subjectivity as auditory in his formulation of the ‘acoustic cocoon’ of early modern sovereignty.12 Berns argues that to control what one heard was the ultimate display of princely power. In early modernity, to control sound was to fill up even the immaterial spaces between the objects under one’s dominion, demonstrating power over a faculty (that of listening) largely understood as involuntary. Berns traces the presence of controlled sounds of various types, including the fake bird calls and obediently gurgling waters of the princely estate and the ceremonial sonic aura of the trumpet and the drum. If Berns’s sovereign is immune, in his ‘acoustic cocoon,’ to the interpellating hail, then the non-sovereign listener is rendered subject precisely in the moment of overhearing sovereign sounds.

In each of these examples, the subject hears the other and recognizes their own vulnerability in a powerful moment of self-awareness and simultaneous political subjection. Yet the essays in this collection are equally, or, indeed, more concerned with the ways in which subjectivity is ascribed to an other who is heard or overheard: not only the recognition of one’s own subjectivity in response to sound, but the ways in which the sounds of others — principally but not exclusively vocal and musical sounds — are understood to police the borders of subjectivity.

The intelligibility of sound has oversized consequences for the identification of friend and foe, and for the correct interpretation of meaning (aptly demonstrated in more recent times by the use of emojis in text messages and new punctuation norms that attempt to compensate for the absence of sound in short-form written communications). We regularly listen for indices of physicality (such as age, gender, and good health), for the historical residue of lived experience (such as regional accent, linguistic fluency, social class, or education), and for emotional cues (such as sorrow, joy, guilt, or sincerity). The coherence of this system relies on an acoustemology that naturalizes the association of certain sounds and certain types of bodies. Who gets to be understood as eloquent? Who instead is brutish? Who subtle and poised, versus faltering, incoherent, or hysterical? Who correctly processes sonic signals and survives or thrives? Who dies?

The various modes of interpreting and living in sound that are articulated in these essays can be described with the term acoustemologies, coined by the anthropologist Steven Feld in 1992.13 ‘Acoustemology’, Feld writes, fuses ‘acoustics’ and ‘epistemology’: ‘it inquires into what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening’. Taking the physical energy of sound as evidence of its capacity to be ‘instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations’, Feld posits that sound and listening are ‘a knowing-in-action: a knowing-with and knowing-through the audible’. In the end, ‘acoustemology figures in stories of sounding as heterogeneous contingent relating: stories of sounding as cohabiting; stories where sound figures as the ground of difference — radical or otherwise — and what it means to attend and attune; to live with listening to that [emphasis in original]’.14

To live with listening to that is the experience of listening that characterizes what Mary Louise Pratt famously called a ‘contact zone’.15 Pratt defined contact zones as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’.16Acoustemologies in Contact recognizes the world of early modernity as a set of contact zones. Listening through archival evidence from New France, New England and New Spain, the slave ships of the Middle Passage, England, Italy, France, and China, these authors hear cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other by listening to each other through distinctive acoustemologies. These acoustemological meetings, clashings, and grapplings can, in turn, be heard to produce rage, sympathy, pain, wonder, resistance, self-satisfied fantasies, and mutual misunderstandings that threaten deadly consequences, to colonize bodies as well as territories, and to lead to sonic practices of transculturation.17 Concerned with the sonic consequences of contact, these essays explore how the structural configurations of sound within cultures in contact impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorization (of people, animals, gods, and other-than-human kin) in the past and during its long (and still unfolding) aftermaths.

It is acoustemology that assigns culturally, geographically, and historically situated meanings to the bodily sensations of contact and difference produced by acoustical energy. Acoustemologies can produce ways of categorizing audible acoustical energy into such categories as speech, song, music, voice, noise, and prophecy, and ways of categorizing human acoustical behaviors in such terms as sound-makers or listeners. Each of these categorizations maps easily onto categories of both social difference and power, as they did, for instance, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sEssai sur l’origine des langues.18 As Lester Hu’s chapter indirectly reminds us, Rousseau asserted that human song, with its capacity to express emotion, preceded human speech, which developed later as a way to add the precision on which rational discourse depended. For Rousseau, song was the more natural medium of human pleasure and self-expression, and cultures rich in song — such as those, in his view, of ‘the South’, were to be envied for the natural expressivity they retained. Speech, by contrast, was a medium from which pleasure and emotion had been drained for the sake of the clarity and reason that he believed to characterize those from colder, ‘northern’ places. It takes little imagination to understand how this one distinction between song and speech, when mapped onto places warm and cold and affective stances of self-expressive pleasure and clear reasoning, would eventually resonate with the attitudes that justified ‘northern’ (European) domination and the racialization of the vast areas of our planet now called ‘the Global South’ in the era now called ‘modernity’.

The authors in this collection probe the seams of received meanings, they listen for moments of misunderstanding, and they think through the consequences of sonic incoherence. When the sounds of others are heard as testimony to their civility or intelligence and interpreted according to an epistemology that is foreign to their personhood, it is terrifyingly simple for listeners to mishear or misunderstand, while simultaneously mistaking the terrain of their listening practice as neutral or objective.

These essays offer examples of very different situations in which sound produced and articulated relationships of human contact that required everyone present to manage shared corporeal feelings of tension, vulnerability, misunderstanding, exchange, complementarity, self-flattery, instrumentalization, resistance, appropriation, mockery, contempt. Each essay recounts ways in which real and imagined differences among human beings — differences of language, belief system, ritual practice, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, status, skin tone, and ability — intersect and collide with each other in the medium of sound. Each strives to distribute complex subjectivity equally among the real or represented human actors who figure in their narratives. And each treats sound as a contact zone already created by the property of acoustical energy to literally invade, move, and change the bodies within the range of its expansion through the air. For these authors, acoustical energy (sound) becomes a medium in which the social differences of experienced contact play out in the sensing bodies of the social actors involved — sometimes as pollution, sometimes as resistance, sometimes as violation, sometimes as love, sometimes as war. These essays show readers (and other writers) how we might hear beyond either ‘hungry’ or ‘inquisitorial’ listening, eager in the first instance to consume sonic experience, or in the second to identify sound objects (this song, or that rhythm) and assign to them fixed meanings.19 Instead, these essays collectively show how we might begin to listen consultatively, through one another’s acoustemologies, and thus attribute meaning to the necessarily elusive relationships of contact that are produced in moments of sounding. As Bloechl argues, to listen thus is to make listening a contact zone, too — a contact zone in which we can know, through thinking about sound, relationships of difference that are more complicated than we can know from texts to which we have not listened so well.

This project originated at a meeting between Suzanne and Emily over beers at the Cubbyhole, and developed over a long series of text messages; in those first conversations we imagined contributing to the literatures that historicize listening, sound, and the sonic construction of subjectivity (mainly historical sound studies and musicology); we believe we have. Just as crucially, we envisioned our work as an intervention into the patterns of mature academia, seeking to unsettle a model of polished academic products and a process of antagonistic critique. We wanted the contributions in this volume to speak to each other, yes, but just as importantly, we wanted the contributors themselves to speak to each other: to exchange ideas, to learn from and teach each other, to read each other carefully — both for what we might ‘scavenge,’20 to (re)use in our own work, and for what we might give, by spotting each other’s blind spots, and pointing out the various ways in which we have failed. Such reading and such conversations require vulnerability and generosity. They require time, presence, and careful — even virtuosic — listening. They require a mutual recognition of the subjectivity of the other. In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s terms, this would be a reparative listening, eschewing the paranoid.21

To produce a volume that would itself model collaborative, mutually resonant difference — of perspective, positionality, methodology, and subject matter — we conceived a two week long encounter in Florence, Italy, in late May 2018. We invited participants who (we hoped) could articulate a variety of approaches, a variety of geographical and linguistic competencies, from various disciplines and various career stages. The resulting contributions are shaped by who we asked but also by who turned us down (scholars who knew us were much more likely to agree to what was, in the early stages, an experimental and vaguely defined ask). Some authors knew each other personally or by reputation, and some arrived knowing no one else present; some knew Florence a bit, and spoke Italian, some not at all. Each author was invited to circulate in advance a first draft of their proposed essay, to be workshopped by the group, and each was further invited to propose a theoretical reading they would like to discuss with the assembled group of strangers, colleagues and friends. Over ten long workdays of workshopping and discussion, the authors shared perspectives, ideas, relevant bibliography, and candid questions about the premises of each other’s disciplinary approaches to sound. Some authors went on to collaborate privately after the workshop ended, others not; but the experience of grappling together with the germs of our own and others’ draft essays, our own and others’ theoretical concerns, produced an uncommonly rich, collaboratively constructed theoretical foundation — and changed the proposed essays dramatically. We believe that readers who choose to listen to the whole collection will find the authors straining to have listened to each other well, and to write for and to each other in a textual contact zone dominated by no one disciplinary, methodological, or theoretical perspective.

Opportunities for such collaboration and reflection have become rare and precious in our world. All of us who participated in this volume are grateful to New York University’s Villa La Pietra campus, whose director Ellyn Toscano and staff supported the project generously, particularly Elisabetta Clementi and Lucia Ferroni, as did Paul Boghossian and the staff of the New York University Global Institute for Advanced Study and Maja Jex and staff at the NYU Global Research Initiative. We would also like to thank Ana Beatriz Mujica Lafuente, Samuel Teeple, and Evangeline Athanasiou in the graduate program at the CUNY Graduate Center, for their willing and able assistance with various editorial tasks.

The precarity of contemporary academic life leaves few of us with the resources (mental, physical, or financial) to take our time with our own work, let alone to regularly devote time to the work of others in any sustained fashion. The project as we imagined it was deliberately utopian: a collective effort in which the goal was as much the process as the product. We hoped to generate scholarship as praxis. Rather than a theoretical manifesto urging specific types of future scholarship, this volume offers a set of examples of what it might look like to do this kind of work and a range of different answers, provocations, and queries that might (and can) emerge when the listening ear of the scholar strains to catch the echoes of past acoustemologies. As praxis, none of these essays makes a claim to complete knowledge; even taken collectively they make no claim to totality — politically, stylistically, or geographically. We hope the variety herein will reverberate among an ever wider variety of scholars, encouraging them to work alongside, with and against us, multiplying the work we can read and cite, and generating richer histories of early modern sounds, the people who made them, listened for them, were moved by them to attribute meaning, and the various ways in which sound was understood to narrate.

1 The term ‘early modern’ became prominent in Marxist histories of the mid-twentieth century and found wide usage in North-American-based scholarship after it was popularized by scholars such as Peter Burke (see Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) and Natalie Zemon Davis (see Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). Intended by proponents as a substitute for overtly elitist and Eurocentric periodizations of human history, such as ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Baroque’, ‘early modern’ incorporates the long transition from communal, religious, feudal, and agrarian societies, such as those that characterized the European ‘Middle Ages’ and pre-colonial Americas, to an individualist, secularist, capitalist, democratic, and technologically innovative society such as characterized European settlements after the French and Industrial Revolutions; it remains the most widely used alternative to traditional periodizations. The term, however, has been contested by many scholars and remains problematic, not least because it perpetuates a Eurocentric notion of human history. Walter D. Mignolo, in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonialization, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), theorizes the ‘coexistence of clusters’, linking ‘early modern’ to the ‘early colonial’ (see, in particular, pp. vii–xiii); for a particularly cogent and usefully reparative critique of ‘early modern’, see Jack Goldstone, ‘The Problem of the “Early Modern World”‘, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 41.3 (1998), 249–284, https://doi.org/10.1163/1568520981436246

2 The term comes from Marie Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 1 (1991), 33-40. See also, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 405–423, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386452. It was Olivia Bloechl who first introduced the term in the conversations that led to this book.

3 Several important exceptions include Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003); Olivia Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). We would also like to acknowledge a number of recently completed or forthcoming publications and conferences that — like this book — move towards thinking the history of sound differently, including the ‘Race and Empire in Global Music History (1500–1800)’ conference, 30–31 March 2018, University of Pittsburgh, organized by Olivia Bloechl and Molly Warsh; the special issue ‘Music, Indigeneity, and Colonialism in the Americas’, ed. by Jessica Bissett Perea and Gabriel Solis, Journal of the Society for American Music, 13.4 (2019); Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Colonial Worlds, 1550–1880, ed. by Kate van Orden (Florence: I Tatti Studies, forthcoming); and Kate van Orden, Songs in Unexpected Places (forthcoming).

4 Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); and Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture and Florentine Urban Life (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv14gp0cj

5 Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2014). A recent exception is Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015), https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0062

6 Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of Our Ears (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

7 On acousmatic sound, see Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Listening in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199347841.001.0001

8 Deaf studies have mounted a spirited critique of intellectual traditions that stigmatize the Deaf and hard of hearing, a tradition that can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. Though this collection foregrounds sound, we do not mean to imply any loss of subjectivity or agency for Deaf individuals.

9 J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199361496.001.0001

10 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Verso, 1971), pp. 85–126.

11 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

12 Jörg Jochen Berns, ‘Instrumental Sound and Ruling Spaces of Resonance in the Early Modern Period: On the Acoustic Setting of the Princely potestas Claims within a Ceremonial Frame’, trans. by Benjamin Carter, in Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century, ed. by Helman Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), pp. 479–503 (p. 493).

13 Steven Feld, ‘Voices of the Rainforest: Politics of Music’, Arena, 99.100 (1992), 164–177, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/545aad98e4b0f1f9150ad5c3/t/54670be2e4b0a915edff0627/1416039394252/1992+Voices+of+the+Rainforest.pdf. Paul Jasen prefers the word ‘acousteme’; see his ‘Acousteme: How Does Sound Shape Knowledge?’, in Paul Jasen, ed., Surrounding Sound — An Electric Fields Symposium (Ottawa: Art Engine, 2013), http://www.surroundingsound.ca/essay-three.htm. See also Paul C. Jasen, Low-End Theory: Bass, Bodies and the Materiality of Sonic Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501309960

14 Steven Feld, ‘Acoustemology’, in Keywords in Sound, ed. by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 12–21, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375494-002

15 Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, 33. See also Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203932933

16 Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, 34.

17 Pratt, defines transculturation as ‘the process whereby subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (ibid., 36). For an exemplary application of acoustemological thinking to contact zones and nation building, see Ana Maria Ochoa, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, trans. and ed. by John T. Scott (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998). See also Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chravarty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); see also Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World.

19 Dylan Robinson coined the phrase ‘hungry listening;’ see Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Olivia Bloechl uses the term ‘inquisitorial listening’ on p. 17 below.

20 ‘Scavenge’, in the sense used by Greg Dening in Readings/Writings (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), p.20.

21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably think this Essay is About You’, in Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–152, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384786-005

1. Listening as an Innu-French Contact Zone in the Jesuit Relations

Olivia Bloechl

© Olivia Bloechl, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0226.01

In his field report of 1636, the French missionary Paul Le Jeune described an Innu (Montagnais) shaking tent ceremony that went differently than expected. According to Le Jeune, an unnamed female kakushapatak (ritual specialist, or shaman) led the ceremony after a male shaman failed to call the powerful beings who were supposed to enter the tent. Her singing worked, but the being she consulted — a powerful manitou, according to Le Jeune — ended up saying more than the priest wanted to hear.1 After predicting the death of a sick man and revealing an imminent Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) raid, the Manitou warned that the cannibal giant Atshen would devour the band if they went through with a plan to relocate to a mission settlement near the new French fort at ‘Trois-Rivières’.2 Nor would they find shelter from the Haudenosaunee there, as the Manitou boasted he would ‘cut the throats of the French themselves’.3

Le Jeune’s account illustrates the high stakes of the sonic interactions that the Jesuits chronicled in Nitassinan (‘the land’, in Innu-Aimun).4 Shaking tents were ceremonial zones of contact between Innu bands and powerful other-than-human persons5 (animal elders, Mishtapeuat, or mythical beings), with the kakushapatak acting as a go-between whose singing and drumming could draw them into human experience.6 In this shaking tent, the tent itself was also a site of multiple conflicts: pitting Atshen against the band, Innu traditionalists against those favoring settlement, and the shaman against the priests.7 These struggles were political, to be sure, as the band’s members weighed protection from Haudenosaunee raids against French efforts to sedentarize them and control their lands.8 But they registered most immediately as a clash between Innu and French participants’ sensorial experience and understanding of the shaking tent, a clash between two very different modes of ‘world-hearing’.9

In their 2005 edited volume Bodies in Contact, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton claim that ‘the body is in many ways the most intimate colony, as well as the most unruly’. Their argument for approaching ‘bodies as contact zones’ is helpful for understanding missionary interactions with First Nations like this one, as it acknowledges the centrality of somatic life to past colonial projects and to the people they targeted. ‘The body’, they write, ‘has, arguably, been crucial to the experience’ of colonial cultural interactions, and holds a distinctive ‘capacity as an archive for the pleasures of human experience and the violences of history’. Approaching past embodied experience relationally, as a zone of colonial ‘engagement’, also holds promise, they argue, as a way of making women and gender more visible in global history, because of ‘the extent to which women’s bodies (and, to a lesser degree, men’s) have been a subject of concern, scrutiny, anxiety, and surveillance in a variety of times and places across the world’.10 As their own case studies demonstrate, body praxes and their poetics have often furnished a basis for refusing coloniality, including colonial racism and misogyny.11

Focusing on singing, instrument-playing, or listening ‘bodies in contact’ in Nitassinan directs our attention to the larger stakes of the sonic micro-interactions chronicled in the Jesuit Relations (1632–1673) and related archives. Although these sources have been important for Canadian and mission historians, the sonic interactions they detail have infrequently counted as part of the larger processes of colonial integration that reshaped northeastern Indigenous societies and landscapes in the seventeenth century. As importantly, these sources transmit histories of Innu, Algonkin, Abenaki, Wendat, Anishnaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples ‘in contact’ with each other and with local other-than-human kin (like animal elders), including through song, dance, and listening. These trans-Indigenous and even trans-species layers of sonic interaction are less fully treated in the missionaries’ reports, because of the priests’ own limitations; yet they are crucial to understanding events as they unfolded on the ground, in ways that center Indigenous bodies of knowledge and practice.

The specific case I consider is the sonic interaction among sub-Arctic Innu and other Algonkin bands and French Jesuit missionaries in the 1630s and 1640s — decades of real upheaval for Aboriginal people in Nitassinan. In the Relations that were issued during these years, singing and listening emerge as matters of concern for all sides in mission interactions, so much so that ‘listening to listening’ (reporting on others’ listening) is a recurring trope of the scenes that the missionaries described for readers.12 Sometimes their ‘listening to listening’ narratives focus on people using music writing technologies, in Aboriginal, European, and hybrid forms. As the annual Relations chronicled the missions across decades, we also get a sense of how listening practices changed over time, as Algonkian groups and French missionaries and settlers interacted more intensively and became more socially interconnected.

My discussion will center on Innu-Jesuit interactions and the acoustemologies that shaped them. The Jesuits’ documentation of song, sound, and its auralities offers a perspective on the close, improvisatory engagement of Innu and French people in the Nitassinan missions. Focusing on this early moment of missionization is also useful for a global music historiography with decolonial aims, as the mission reports from these years show sovereign Aboriginal communities confronting the aspirations and consequences of French and English colonial projects that were still in their nascence. In hindsight, this was a transitional moment in the relationship between Innu and French communities, when Innu bands were deliberating how to respond to the changes they witnessed, while French missionaries and officials were trying, with mixed success, to exert control over them, their animal relations, and their lands.13

This is why I approach the Innu hearing-based knowledge described in the Relations as a sovereign acoustemology. Labeling Innu bands’ acoustemologies ‘sovereign’ acknowledges the unconquered, place-specific sensoriums and intelligences that Innu people brought to their interactions with foreign missionaries. In addition, ‘sovereignty’ is a way of naming how Innu actors in the Relations legitimized certain ways of listening and relating sonically while refusing others, as well as refusing colonial ways of knowing that were tied to dispossession.

This sense of an Innu ‘refusal’ of colonial body logics is indebted to the theorizing of Indigenous/First Nations/Métis scholars David Garneau (Métis), Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Leanne Simpson (Anishinaabeg) and, in music studies, Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō).14 As a settler musicologist specializing in France and the Francophone Atlantic, I am most familiar with missionary acoustemologies and have relied on ethnohistorical and ethnomusicological research for contextualizing the Innu sonic practices and philosophies that the Relations describe. Beyond this empirical research, contemporary Indigenous critical thought has been essential for the more culturally attuned, non-colonial perspective it offers on Indigenous/European sonic interactions: in particular, the acoustemological sovereignty, grounded in Innu norms and protocols, with which Innu actors seem to have countered French missionaries’ ‘hungry’ listening.15 I will say more about the concept of refusal in the conclusion, but for now will turn to what can be recovered of Innu and French Jesuit sonic knowledges from scenes of listening in the early mission reports.

Fig. 1.1 Pierre-Michel Laure, Carte du domaine du Roy en Canada / dressée par le P. Laure, missionnaire jésuite, 1731, augmentée… et corrigée… en attendant un exemplaire complet l’automne 1732 (1732). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Public Domain, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84467273/f1.item

Innu Acoustemologies

By the 1630s, European projects of missionization, trade, and settlement had begun to transform the traditional Innu lands between Piyêkwâkami (Lac St-Jean) and the great river that the French called the Saint-Laurent, in present-day Québec (see Fig. 1.1).16 With the return of the French to the outpost of ‘Kébec’ in 1633 (after the brief English takeover in 1629), Innu communities began to experience disruptive changes in trade patterns, food resources, relations with the Haudenosaunee, and in the local microbiome, as epidemics of European diseases devastated their communities. The 1630s and 1640s also saw the establishment of mission settlements at Kâ Mihkwâwahkâsic (Sillery, from 1637) and near Trois-Rivières (‘La Conception’, from 1641).17 These réductions, as Le Jeune came to call them, were in many respects modeled on native Christian settlements that the Jesuits had established in Japan and Paraguay.18 Le Jeune, then the superior of the Canadian mission, meant for these settlements to serve the Jesuits’ efforts to convert migratory groups by inducing them to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and abandon their traditional ceremonies and performance. However, Innu people exercised considerable agency in deciding whether and how they would live there, and the winter season saw most able ‘residents’ return to a hunting-based lifestyle in the backcountry.19

We do not have direct, seventeenth-century Innu accounts of their own ways of listening and knowing, although mission documents do transmit conversations, speeches, and songs by historical Innu people. In lieu of that, one possibility is to consult Innu oral historical accounts of analogous practices in the twentieth century (with the understanding that these reflect modern experiences). As an example, take Mary Madeline Nuna’s reflection on listening to shaking tents of the 1930s, outside the Innu reserve of Sheshatshu:

It’s like the way someone speaks to you. That’s the way it sounded from the shaking tent. It was very good fun. It is a great time and, when stories are being told, it’s like listening to a radio. When spirits speak from inside the tent, they might guide us where to hunt for the animals. […] You could talk to the spirits, the ones who you heard from inside there. Like, for example, the one who is called Mishtapeu — the One Who Owns the Animals. This spirit is heard through the shaking tent. And when the Mishtapeut (more than one spirit) sing, it is really good to listen to them, to the songs of the shaman. The Mishtapeut are really loud singers.

20

Nuna compared the shaking tent with another technology for transmitting sound, a ‘radio’, and pointed out what ‘a great time’ it was, hearing the spirits’ stories. The analogy of listening to a radio clearly stems from a modern Innu experience of transmitted sound, but it also recalls much earlier characterizations of the shaking tent as a means of long-distance communication, information transfer, and entertainment. I also appreciate Nuna’s observation that ‘the Mishtapeut are really loud singers’ for its humor and physical immediacy, which centers her enjoyment in listening.

Le Jeune’s description of a shaking tent he attended in November, 1633, recalled that the shaman, ‘having entered […] shook this tabernacle gently at first, then, rousing himself little by little, he started to whistle dully and as if from a distance, then to speak as if in a bottle[…]’.21 He also recorded various band members’ opinions on how the shaking tent transmitted voices. Some thought that the shaman was far away, while others thought his body was on the ground inside the tent while his soul was up above, where it called the animal elders. During this part of the ceremony, the shaman started

to cry like a screech owl of this region, which seems to me to have a louder voice than those of France, then to howl, sing, varying the tone at every stroke, finishing with these syllables,

ho ho, hi hi gui gui nioué

, and other similar ones, counterfeiting his voice, so that it seemed to me like hearing these marionettes that some showmen display in France. He spoke sometimes Montagnais, sometimes Algonkian, but always preserving the Algonkian accent, which is lively like Provençal.

The kin-group led by the hunter Mestigoït, who hosted Le Jeune, was traveling in their hunting grounds south of the St. Lawrence River, and the shaman seems to have called the regional owl master, along with other animal elders. The priest also noted how loud the owl master’s voice was, as Nuna remarked of the Sheshatshu Mishtapeut. Unlike Nuna’s analogy of radio transmission, though, Le Jeune thought the shaman ventriloquized the animal elders’ voices, rejecting his hosts’ explanations and attributing the voices to a willed, human source.

Witnessing each animal elder’s arrival was important for the ceremony’s success, and a ceremonial listening protocol guided participants’ interactions with them. Each time the voice from within the tent changed, participants ritually urged each other, ‘moa, moa’, which Le Jeune translated as ‘écoute, écoute’ [listen, listen]; then they collectively called on the animal master to enter. Once the first one had arrived, the assembly responded excitedly and asked the master to call his companions:

Now to return to our consultation, the Savages, having heard certain voices counterfeited by the charlatan, gave a cry of joy, saying that one of these Genies had entered: then, addressing themselves to him, cried,

Tepouachi, tepouachi

, call, call; which is to say, [call] your companions; at this, the jongleur called them, pretending to be a Genie [and] changing his tone and voice: meanwhile our sorcerer, who was present, took his drum, and the others responded, singing with the jongleur who was in the tabernacle.

Members of Mestigoït’s band knew to listen to the voices in the tent with discernment, to welcome the first animal elder when he arrived, to respond supportively with singing and dancing, and to listen attentively to the news that they brought.

Beyond the specific protocol recorded in this account, careful reading of other reports suggests more general characteristics of Innu acoustemologies. One of these is the cultivation of mediated listening practices, using materials like sticks, bark, or prepared skins that had long been used for record-keeping across the northeast. Some of these mediated listening practices, like the shaking tent protocol, clearly predated the missionaries’ arrival, while others developed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century as adaptations of existing Innu media to Catholic usage.

An example of traditional mediated listening is the use of song record sticks, a form of graphic notation that helped ‘guide singers during the performance of long, complex ceremonies’.22 Le Jeune noticed Mestigoït’s band using a song record stick in a 1633 condolence ceremony that the manitousiou (lead shaman) Carigonan held in the lodge where the missionary was staying:

The 24th of November, the Sorcerer [le Sorcier, or

manitousiou

] assembled the Savages, and entrenched himself with some robes and blankets in part of the Cabin; so that neither he nor his companions could be seen: there was a woman with them who marked on a triangular stick [un baston triangulaire], half a spear’s length, all the songs that they sang.

23

A ‘hungry’ observer, Le Jeune listened closely to the listening of the ceremony’s participants, including that of the unnamed Innu woman who kept the song record.24 Despite his keen appetite for Innu knowledge, he didn’t learn much beyond the name of the ceremony (ouechibouan, according to Carigonan’s youngest brother, Pastedechouan):

I asked a woman to tell me what they were doing in this enclosure, she responded that they were praying, but I believe that she gave me this response because, when I prayed, and they asked me what I was doing, I said to them,

Nataïamihiau missi Khichitât

, I am praying to him who made everything: and thus when they sang, when they howled, beating their drums and their sticks, they said to me that they were making their prayers, without being able to explain to me to whom they addressed them.

25

The Jesuit’s hosts deflected his questioning about ceremonial practices, and their purpose, that were clearly secret, or at least not for him to know. Tellingly, the woman whom he consulted seems to have translated what was going on into terms the priest could understand — prayer — while declining to satisfy his curiosity, whether from language difficulties (due to Le Jeune’s level of comprehension) or as an act of refusal.

The song record stick that Le Jeune described resembles a later Osage stick that Victoria Lindsay Levine included in her anthology, Writing American Indian Music. As with the Osage stick, the Innu one had notches along its length, one for each song sung by Carigonan and his associates. As a mnemonic aid, the stick seems to have allowed the woman who used it to keep track of which songs had been sung and where the singers were in the long ceremony. I think it is fair to think of this woman’s use of the song stick (following Levine) as a form of music writing.26

This does not mean, however, that the Innu woman’s use of the song stick resembled the musical notation that European observers used to transcribe Indigenous singing, or even Le Jeune’s own habitual use of a notebook or erasable tablet in the field. Beverley Diamond contrasts this kind of Indigenous song record with the writing practiced by early modern Europeans, which focused on recording ‘details’ and aimed at ‘fixing’ events in historical time:

The role of print documents created by Euroamericans often fixes things. Consider, by comparison, such records as Osage or Omaha ‘song counting sticks’, Haudenosaunee Condolence canes, Passamaquoddy Wampum Records, Navajo jish, or Anishnabe ‘song scrolls’. They record historical practices in order not to establish a record for posterity but to perpetuate practice by stimulating memory. They do not describe details but include images that, in an abbreviated form, symbolize processes of receiving knowledge (through dreams, for instance), relationships, or ritual forms, the substance of which is kept only in living tradition. […] They serve as mnemonic aids in performance situations, thus not fixing but enabling the renewal and re-performance of historical reference points.

27

Similarly, the stick that Mestigoït’s band used seems to have tracked the sound of voices and drums and helped guide the ritual performers through the cycle of songs across a long performance. In this, it mediated the performers’ listening, and it may also have enabled — in Diamond’s words — ‘the renewal and re-performance of historical reference points’ in the band’s past.

Listening to participants’ listening in ceremonial settings was a fixture of the Jesuits’ early field reports in Nitassinan and Wendake (Wendat territory), and the priests paid careful attention to the media used in ceremonies while trying to determine their purpose and meaning. This was an interested scrutiny, of course, as the Jesuits were known for their readiness to adapt their evangelizing methods to local languages, artistic cultures, and media. (The adaptive process ran in the other direction, as well, as missionized groups often integrated aspects of the Jesuits’ teachings, music among them, into existing sacred knowledge and performance.) Whatever the impetus in this case, by the mid-1640s Innu and other Algonkin Christians were using traditional writing technologies, including song record sticks, as aids in Catholic devotion and worship.

In the 1640s, the Jesuits largely relinquished the work of evangelizing Innu bands to baptized part-time residents of the mission villages along the St. Lawrence.28 Jerome Lalemant’s letter in the Relation of 1645 and 1646 reports that baptized Innus at the mission of Tadoussac had begun adapting French Catholic practices for themselves by the spring of 1646, and some of them used record sticks and bark writing as mnemonic aids for confession. Either Tadoussac Innus or the priest also adapted their record stick technology for use by baptized band leaders during their seasonal hunting journeys. Each of the three bands received five ‘books’, as the Jesuits put it, recording key Catholic teachings and practices: ‘The Father, needing to depart from these good neophytes, left them five books or five chapters of a book made in their way; these books were no other than five sticks variously fashioned, in which they are to read what the Father has persistently taught them’.29

Of special interest for musicologists is the third stick, which apparently worked much like the song stick used in Carigonan’s condolence ceremony of November, 1634:

The third is a red stick, on which is written that which they must do on Sundays and Feasts, how they must all assemble in a big cabin, hold public prayers, sing

cantiques spirituels

, and above all, listen to him who will keep these books or these sticks, and who will interpret them for the whole assembly.

The band leaders kept the sticks and presented them periodically, perhaps to recall the relationship established with the Jesuits at Tadoussac:

It is a truly innocent pleasure to see these new preachers hold these books or these sticks in one hand, pull one out with the other [hand], and present it to their audience with these words: ‘Behold the stick or the

Massinahigan

’, that is to say, ‘the book of superstitions, it is our Father who has written it himself. He tells you that it is only the priests who can say mass and hear confessions, that our drums, our sweats, and our trembling breasts are inventions of the manitou or of the bad demon who wants to deceive us’, and likewise with all those other wooden books, which serve them as well as the most gilded volumes of a Royal Library.

30

It is hard to tell from this account how or why the band leaders used the adapted record sticks, including the third stick for Catholic prayers and songs. Perhaps the Jesuits did indeed appropriate Algonkin record stick technology for their own purposes, as Lalemant’s report suggests. Or perhaps they followed the lead of baptized Tadoussac Innus who had already adapted record sticks for their own use.

Regardless of who initiated this usage and why, two things are clear. First, the Innu leaders’ use of the record sticks likely meant something quite different to their bands than to the priests, who brought a fundamentally French perspective on religious books and authority. If, as I think is likely, the leaders’ record stick recitation drew Catholic practices into an Innu spiritual and diplomatic orbit, band members would also presumably have listened and participated in familiar ways. This includes habits of mediated listening, with song record sticks, inculcated across generations of ceremonial practice.

Other scenes of listening and exchange in Le Jeune’s earlier Relations hint at features of Innu acoustemologies that endured into the twentieth century. For example, the 1634 report paraphrases a conversation in which his hosts were surprised that the Jesuit did not pay attention to or give credence to dreams, in which other-than-human persons could appear to them and share knowledge and practices, including songs. As he put it, ‘Our Savages asked me nearly every morning, did you not dream of Beavers, or of Moose when you were sleeping? and when they saw that I ridiculed dreams, they were astonished, and asked me what do you believe in, then, if you do not believe in your dreams?’.31 As Diamond and other ethnomusicologists have noted, listening to dreams was and is a fundamentally important Innu way of living in nutshimit; and it is also a source of songs (nikamuna), accompanied with the snare-strung frame drum called the teueikan.32 Le Jeune’s failure to do so was astonishing to Mestigoït’s kin, and they rejected his explanation as nonsensical, in another instance of refusal. Responding to the Jesuit’s assertion that he believed in the God ‘who made everything’, they reportedly said, ‘you are out of your mind. How can you believe in him if you have not seen him?’ (probably meaning, ‘seen him in your dreams’).33

As for listening to the French, Le Jeune reports that they compared the priests’ singing to bird song: ‘They say we imitate the chirping of birds in our songs, which they do not disapprove, as nearly all of them take pleasure when they sing or hear others sing; and despite my telling them that I understood nothing about it, they often invited me to chant some air or prayer’.34 This story suggests that Mestigoït’s family members listened with ears accustomed to enjoying and interpreting song created by both human and other-than-human persons, such as birds. It also indicates the value they placed on ‘responsible reciprocity’, here in inviting the priest to join them in singing, by exchanging songs.35 One of Mestigoït’s favorite songs apparently voiced this core social value of reciprocity and mutual accountability, repeating a three-word text (‘Kaie, nir, khigatoutaouim’) that Le Jeune translated as, ‘and you will also do something for me’.36

The scenes documented in the Relations