Abstract
In “Interlude: Intercultural Remixes,” Wood examines an instance of intercultural music-making recorded during the early seventeenth-century voyage of Martin Pring. A youth in Pring’s company plays a gittern while the Abenaki peoples sing and dance. The musical performances are layered, or palimpsested, over one another and create an entirely different-sounding music that is a product of two cultures, not simply the accompaniment of one culture to another. This brief chapter then considers the role music plays in two film productions—Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). It concludes that only one musical piece between these two films echoes the intercultural production of music described in the account of Pring’s journey 400 years earlier.
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Notes
- 1.
Cited in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes , vol. 4 (London, 1614), 347.
- 2.
Suzanne Lord, Music from the Age of Shakespeare : A Cultural History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), 98.
- 3.
Indeed, as many accounts of the native peoples of Virginia attest, it was rather common practice to dance in a circle with nothing at the center. The absence of anything at the center around which to dance actually suggests that the young gittern-player was incorporated into a traditional mode of dancing in a way that allowed all the dancers the same sonic proximity to the music.
- 4.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 272, write “Singing or composing, painting, writing have no other aim: to unleash these becomings. Especially music….”
- 5.
See, for example, Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel, The True Story of Pocahontas (Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010); Cindy Dunne and Jordan Kolinski, “Reservations about Films: Disney’s Pocahontas,” Lakota Children’s Enrichment website, 11 September 2015, https://lakotachildren.org/2015/09/reservations-about-films-disneys-pocahontas/, accessed 14 July 2018; Chief Roy Crazy Horse, “The Pocahontas Myth,” www.powhatan.org/pocc.html, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 6.
“Stephen Schwartz Comments on Disney’s Pocahontas,” https://www.stephenschwartz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Disney-Pocahontas.pdf, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 7.
Harris , The First Firangis: Remarkable stories of Heroes, Healers, Charlatans, Courtesans & other Foreigners who Became Indian (New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2015), 15.
- 8.
Janet Weeks, “Billboard-Climbing ‘Pocahontas’ Album Just One of Film’s Audio Products,” Los Angeles Daily News, 19 June 1995, accessed 14 July 2018.
- 9.
Schwartz , “Comments,” writes about these lyrics, stating “I don’t remember what the Native American words in ‘Steady as the Beating Drum’ mean, but they lyrics were extensively researched…. They would be in Algonkian. They may refer to the content of the song (about continuity), or they may just be a chant I cribbed from another Algonkian song, or a combination of ones I found.”
- 10.
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Wood, J.L. (2019). Interlude: Intercultural Remixes. 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_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12224-9_5
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