Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly

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СКАЧАТЬ of playing an instrument or singing.⁷⁰ So I wondered if there could be a similarly embodied form of knowledge to be gained from “sounding” historical acoustic environments. Sound certainly has a direct relationship to emotion, memory, and instinct. Sensitivity to vibration is found in even the most primitive of life forms, and our brains have evolved over millennia to respond to acoustic signals and patterns.⁷¹ If acoustic knowledge is fundamental to our experiences of the world, then research processes and methods of historical inquiry that take advantage of the acoustical properties of sound might impart embodied forms of knowledge that deepen our understanding of historical times and places.⁷² In writing this book and composing the sound maps, I wanted to use my training as an academic and as a musician to imagine past soundscapes. I wanted to be a storyteller—a composer of both words and sounds. I have especially been inspired and drawn courage from Craig Womack’s assertion that history should be dreamed and imagined, and that we are called as historians (and musicians) to create stories that are compelling and rich:

      History means very little until we develop a relationship with it that in this cyberage we might call “interactive” . . . I am talking about more than developing a capacity to empathize with people from our pasts. This has to do with placing ourselves inside their stories, becoming participants in history, more specifically, turning ourselves into characters in a story. History must be dreamed. It has to be authored. It must be turned into a fiction before it can ever be true. . . . This is the responsibility of any human being who desires an ethical relationship to her past. History is a vision quest, the quintessential religious experience. How else, if not through vision, can we access these experiences from the past so we may also experience them? This is how we approach the paradox we are up against. How can we ever know what experience is in its original forms, apart from mediation, interpretations, our perceptions? We cannot. Reality may exist with or without us, but whatever we can know is affected by our thoughts, no matter how spiritual the message. But we can imagine the places where experiences originate.⁷³

      The book and the website are intended to be imaginative frameworks for Moravian places and experiences. They represent the journey that I have undertaken as author to understand how sound intersected with Moravian ideas of space, community, and spirituality. They also represent the journey that my collaborators and I undertook to understand Moravian places. And they represent the journey that you, as reader, might take. In digital and physical space, whether in person or by imagination, you might journey beyond the page, participating in these narratives out on the land in the places where these histories were shaped.⁷⁴ When you stand in these places, listen to the sounds around you. Imagine the layers of history underneath your feet, the traces and clues that previous generations have bequeathed us: names, stories, musical instruments, iron tools and wooden looms, buildings of stone and wood, and dug-out places in the earth. These are the sites of collective memory, of histories and soundscapes embedded in place. When we experience them in that way, we add our own stories, we add our own sounds.

      Notes

      1. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, “Lied bey den Liebesmahlen,” Herrnhuter Gesangbuch (HG) Hymn 1340, verse 14. Hymn composed for the return voyage of a mission ship from St. Thomas in 1739.

      2. Throughout this book, I have chosen to use “Mohican” rather than “Mahican.” While most ethnohistorians and anthropologists prefer “Mahican” because it is close to the Dutch “Mahikander” (a term also used by the Moravians), the sole descendant community on the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation in Bowler, Wisconsin, uses “Mohican” or “Muhheakunnuk” (https://www.mohican.com). Similarly, I also use “Delaware,” rather than “Munsee” or “Unami,” since it is the term currently used by many descendant communities. For more information, see the website of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, a descendant community in Oklahoma and Kansas (http://delawaretribe.org/services-and-programs/historic-preservation/removal-history-of-the-delaware-tribe/), and the website of the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, a descendant community in Ontario, Canada (http://delawarenation.on.ca).

      3. Obadiah Holmes’s account of the Gnadenhütten massacre is recorded in T. Holmes, The American Family of Rev. Obadiah Holmes (Columbus, OH: 1915).

      4. Earl P. Olmstead, David Zeisberger: A Life among the Indians (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), 333.

      5. Letter written at Bethlehem, April 5, 1782. MissInd 151.6.8a, MAB.

      6. Olmstead, David Zeisberger, 333.

      7. “Johann Heckewelder’s Travel Diary of 1792,” MissInd 213.7, MAB. Translated in Paul A. W. Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, Or, Travels among the Indians of Pennsylvania, New York & Ohio in the 18th Century. The Great Pennsylvania Frontier Series (Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), 261.

      8. For detailed histories of violence during the American Revolution, including religiously motivated violence, see Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (Broadway Books, 2018); and John Corrigan, Lynn S. Neal, eds., Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

      9. Olmstead, David Zeisberger, 333.

      10. Quoted in Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffmann, Jon Gjerde, and Thomas G. Paterson, eds., Major Problems in American History: Documents and Essays I (Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012), 205.

      11. Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.

      12. For more information on the daily integration of hymns into Moravian life, see Sarah Justina Eyerly, “‘Singing from the Heart’: Memorization and Improvisation in an Eighteenth-Century Utopian Community” (PhD diss., University of California Davis, 2007).

      13. Although hymnody has often been overlooked as a cultural and musical form, there has been a recent resurgence in scholarly interest in hymnody from disciplines as diverse as religious studies, anthropology, performance studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and African American studies. Interdisciplinary methods of studying hymnody featured prominently in a recent roundtable at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Early Americanists, “The Hymn in Early America: A Roundtable,” chaired by Chris Phillips (Lafayette College). The roundtable featured presentations on the revival hymn and the epic function in early America, poetry and hymnody in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Samson Occom’s hymns and the articulation of Native space, and two different discussions of Moravian hymns.

      14. This study is indebted to the work of Barry Truax and R. Murray Schafer in defining the key concepts of “acoustic ecology,” “acoustic environment,” and “soundscape.” Truax’s Handbook for Acoustic Ecology and Acoustic Communication, have been especially helpful in building a framework for study of the acoustic environments of eighteenth-century Moravian missions. Based on Truax’s call to account for all environmental sounds within a given landscape, I aim to highlight the importance of studying the complex and interrelated patterns of sound that surrounded Moravian Christians and how these soundscapes helped to construct personal, social, environmental, and religious identity. See Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (Burnaby, BC: Cambridge Street Records, 1999); Barry Truax, “Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition,” in A Poetry of Reality: Composing with Recorded Sound, ed. Katherine Norman (Reading, UK: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997); Barry Truax, “Paradigm Shifts and Electroacoustic Music: Some Personal Reflections,” Organised Sound СКАЧАТЬ