Abstract
“Part I: New World Symphony” provides a brief introduction to the chapters “Rattling Soundscapes of Witch Drama and the New World” and “Hell’s Bells: Delight in Transatlantic Jinglings.” The title references Antonín Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, which I employ in order to expand the meaning of “symphony” to include sonic collaborations between different cultures rather than to colonize the sounds of the early modern “New World” within a Western musicological framework. “New World” is also a fraught phrase because it temporally and physically negates the millions of peoples who had been living in the region for centuries before Europeans arrived and called this world “New.” I retain this terminology deliberately to remind readers that travelers to the “New World” possessed—at best—a perfunctory understanding of the Occidental hemisphere.
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Notes
- 1.
Peter Charles Hoffer, in Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 9, makes the point that “Some otherwise splendid re-creations, like Plimouth Plantation and Jamestown Settlement, lie just far enough away from the original site to make picky scholars a little uneasy,” which is well-taken; however, precise location is less important to this study than a consideration of the various sounds heard by early modern peoples in nearby locations.
- 2.
It is important to note that the museum does not state that the spoken recordings of the Lenape Native American language, nor the Kimbundu African language are meant to be accurate reproductions, but rather approximations in sister languages to give the listener a sense of how these languages may have sounded.
- 3.
Consult Jonathan Gil Harris, ed. Indography: Writing the ‘Indian’ in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 4.
James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 192.
- 5.
In the epilogue to Colonial Transformations, Bach analyzes the representations of different cultural groups in Jamestown Settlement museum and Colonial National Historical Park, concluding that the imagined museumgoer is a white person who identifies with the colonialists (despite curatorial efforts to the contrary), and that the story told in these spaces is one of white colonial triumph through the inception of the “American” (i.e., “white”) dream story. Rebecca Ann Bach Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World 1580–1640 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
- 6.
Scott Manning Stevens, “New World Contacts and the Trope of the ‘Naked Savage,’” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003): 125–140, 126.
- 7.
Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, ed. Paul Hulton (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1972), 29. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65.
- 8.
Quotation is from John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia , New England , and the Summer Isles, vol. 1 (Massachusetts: Applewood Books, 2006), reprint, 593. Please refer also to Gavin Hollis, The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 121; Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton, Shakespeare : Staging the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 244–245; Alden T. Vaughan, “Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England” in “The Tempest ” and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 49–59, 50; and Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 9.
OED defines “symphony”: 1. “Used vaguely, after late Latin symphōnia, as a name for different musical instruments.” 2: “Harmony of sound, esp. of musical sounds; concord, consonance”.
- 10.
I am using this term quite expansively, I realize, even as I disagree with the implication that this half of the world was “New” only to those from the “Old World.” As Peter Hulme, in Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1992), 159, acknowledges, even the term “Virginia” “denoted that enormous stretch of coastline from Newfoundland to Florida, and connoted what was assumed to be its pure state.” Similar problems arise with regard to the native peoples that the Anglo-Europeans encounter; whenever possible, I have tried to use the names of specific tribes. “Native American” also performs a colonizing process, by applying a European name to a land already named by peoples who had lived there for centuries, and to the peoples themselves.
- 11.
Quotation cited in Beverley Diamond, M. Sam Cronk, and Franziska von Rosen, Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of the First Nations Communities in Northeastern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 76.
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Wood, J.L. (2019). Part I: New World Symphony. In: Sounding Otherness in Early Modern Drama and Travel. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12224-9_2
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