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978-0-521-86605-7 - Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music

Olivia A. Bloechl
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Native American Song

at the Frontiers of
Early Modern Music

OLIVIA A. BLOECHL

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

  
           
  



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! Olivia A. Bloechl 2008

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 
  
           
  



Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in

the history of culture.
Derrida, The Other Heading

 
  
           
  



CONTENTS

List of illustrations page ix

List of music examples and tables xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxi

1 On colonial difference and musical frontiers:

directions for a postcolonial musicology 1

Part I: Transatlantic savagery 33

2 Protestant imperialism and the metaphysics of

New World song 35
3 The voice of possession 58
4 The voice of prophecy 80

Part II: Staging the Indian 107

5 Musicking Indians in the Stuart court masque 109

6 Savage Lully 142
7 Rameau’s Les Sauvages and the aporia of musical
nature 177
Conclusion: opera, elsewhere 216

Notes 222
Bibliography 251
Index 269

vii

 
  
           
  



P R E FA C E

Like other disciplines whose history is intertwined with European

colonialism, musicology has long held a certain ideology of ‘‘Europe’’
at its core. Before the 1990s musicology was almost exclusively concerned
with European classical music, and this repertory still dominates musi-
cological research and pedagogy despite a broadening of its subject
matter in recent years. More basic even than the object of musicological
study, however, is the still limited range of assumed perspectives, or
subject positions, from which music can be authoritatively historicized,
interpreted, or evaluated. This is in spite of the fact that in recent years
the range of acceptable methodologies and, implicitly, assumed subject
positions has expanded considerably. New approaches have flourished
that investigate the complex relationship between European reperto-
ries and historical relations of dominance. However, most treat inequi-
ties based on gender, sexuality, race, or class as matters internal to
European societies, when in the modern period these developed in
conjunction with stratified power relations elsewhere, particularly in
the colonies. While political approaches to music history that are
nationally or ethnically delimited can indeed be valuable, they often
do not explicitly challenge the coherence of the idea of ‘‘Europe,’’ or,
more broadly, the ‘‘West,’’ that remains central to the discipline.
Yet the sense that European music can be meaningfully understood
in political or cultural isolation is rooted in an ideology of Europe’s
cultural autonomy and superiority that developed during the early
period of Atlantic colonization, in the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries. This ideology served to justify colonization and the Atlantic
slave trade, but it was also an anxious response to the intermingling of
peoples and cultures that these processes involved. Though the most
intensive Atlantic inter-cultural encounters occurred in the colonies,
indigenous American and African diasporic ideas, materials, and prac-
tices of music also migrated eastward to Europe. In some cases this
stemmed from the voluntary or involuntary migration of colonized
individuals themselves, but it was also the product of European
travel, writing, and trade in material goods. The resulting influx of
American, African, and, increasingly, mixed colonial cultural practices
energized artistic production in Europe, as Europeans at many social

xiii

 
  
           
  



Preface

levels developed a fascination with all things ‘‘exotic’’ (and as the flow
of American gold and silver provided for sumptuous elite cultural
production). Yet colonial inter-cultural exchange also issued a sustained
challenge to the European Atlantic nations’ own politico-cultural iden-
tities, as reports and practices of music brought back from the colonies
altered Europeans’ sense of human musical possibilities, including in
their own societies.
Many European travelers tried to neutralize the difference they
heard in indigenous American singing and instrumental performance
by tracing resemblances with music or heightened sound familiar from
European societies, such as the noise of charivaris or the unearthly cries
of demoniacs. Such comparisons proliferated because they were ideo-
logically effective and efficient: in one stroke they strengthened existing
power asymmetries in European societies and reinforced the increas-
ingly important fantasy of European cultural superiority relative to
native American cultures. However, the strategy of aligning colonized
peoples with liminal groups in the colonizers’ own societies admitted
the intimacy of the kinds of cultural difference and political resistance
that early European travelers encountered (or imagined) at the fron-
tiers. This destabilized European social and political hierarchies by
highlighting alternate vectors of identification. When English Protes-
tants, for example, sensed a likeness between eastern Algonquian and
Catholic ceremonial song they indicated something in the music of a
liminal segment of their own society that seemed to them to resemble
‘‘savagery.’’ Inasmuch as Englishness was firmly associated with Pro-
testantism in the seventeenth century, the threat felt in living cheek-
by-jowl with those whose religion and sacred music marked them as
veritable ‘‘savages’’ could be contained. Yet were Catholic Londoners
not English too? If those who were English, but not quite (to borrow a
formulation from Homi Bhabha), dwelled invisibly in the midst, how
could ‘‘Englishness’’ be distinguished from its others? Colonial rela-
tions begged uncomfortable questions regarding relations of likeness
and difference in colonizers’ own societies, including those that
involved music-making and discoursing on music.
None of this is meant to suggest that early colonial representations
of indigenous song were simply occasions for Europeans to redefine
self-conceptions of their own musics (and, by extension, their own
collective identities), nor that native American practitioners were pas-
sive or merely reactionary in the face of European efforts to control
their performance through colonial representation and mimicry.
Rather, my focus on the European aspect of colonial intercultural rela-
tions in the early modern period is meant to show that, while the
violence of American colonization was overwhelmingly borne by
indigenous and enslaved people, the cultural effects of colonization

xiv

 
  
           
  



Preface

were multidirectional. This does not disregard the stark disparity

between, on the one hand, the devastation of colonial representations
that were indirectly but powerfully implicated in acts of cultural
destruction, land seizure, resource exploitation, and even genocide,
and, on the other, anxieties that arose in imperial capitals in response
to colonial relations. Yet it remains an underexamined historical reality
that while European colonization forcibly influenced colonized peoples
and cultures, the colonies also irrevocably altered Europe and its cul-
tural production.
With this study, then, I rethink the conventional wisdom that
European music in the early modern period (in musicological terms,
the late renaissance and baroque periods) was essentially untouched
by the proliferation of sites of ‘‘European’’ musical performance and
discourse in the colonies or by the music (both real and imagined) of
indigenous and enslaved populations. This approach – informed by
the history and politics of colonial and postcolonial societies, as well
as by postcolonial theory – recognizes the ideological nature of poli-
tical, racial, or ethnic cultural boundaries in the early colonial period,
and it questions the value of repeating these boundaries as limits for
scholarship on early Atlantic music cultures. The following chapters
propose instead that a past marked by foreign imperial conquest of
European polities and an early modern present marked by external
colonization fundamentally shaped the conditions in which European
music was performed, conceptualized, heard, and composed.
I develop this argument with an awareness that the relevance of
colonialism for early modern European music is rarely available as
evidence of the positive sort that has historically been valued in
musicology, nor even necessarily within the broader spectrum of
traces considered by a hermeneutic criticism. Cultural theory thus
provides necessary support for remembering music history’s ideologi-
cal and instrumental relation to European imperialism, yet history’s
own methods and materials are at the heart of this study. Thus, I
examine traditional musicological sources like notated scores, music
theory, composers’ writings, music criticism, iconography, and so
forth, while also considering non-traditional sources relevant to
European and American music cultures, including travel writings,
religious controversial prints, demonology, prophetic writings, phi-
losophy, and theater and costume designs. My methodological
approach is similarly eclectic, drawing where appropriate on herme-
neutics, criticism, music analysis, poststructuralism, and postcolonial
theory. In general, I have been guided but not limited by historicism,
where a rigidly historicist approach further obscures the limits of
European music cultures and the human relations that were their
conditions of possibility.

xv

 
  
           
  



Preface

In short, this book is concerned with European and Euro-American

music history, but it approaches its subject in the spirit of the ‘‘subaltern
history’’ that Dipesh Chakrabarty has proposed in his influential study,
Provincializing Europe. Subaltern histories, Chakrabarty warns,
will have a split running through them. On the one hand, they are ‘‘histories’’ in
that they are constructed within the master code of secular history and use the
accepted academic codes of historical writing (and thereby perforce subordi-
nate to themselves all other forms of memory). On the other hand, they cannot
ever afford to grant this master code its claim of being a mode of thought that
comes to all human beings naturally, or even to be treated as something that
exists in nature itself. Subaltern histories are therefore constructed within a
particular kind of historicized memory, one that remembers history itself as
an imperious code that accompanied the civilizing process that the European
Enlightenment inaugurated in the eighteenth century as a world-historical
task. It is not enough to historicize ‘‘history,’’ the discipline . . . The point is to
ask how this seemingly imperious, all-pervasive code might be deployed or
thought about so that we have at least a glimpse of its own finitude, a glimpse
of what might constitute an outside to it.1

Chakrabarty’s eloquent summary presents an ideal program for the

present study, though no one book could ever hope to accomplish
the deconstruction of history through its own troubled aims and
means, as he envisions. Nevertheless, we may recognize a central, if
only slightly more modest initial task of a postcolonial musicology in
the charge to remember music history as itself ‘‘an imperious code that
accompanied the civilizing process that the European Enlightenment
inaugurated in the eighteenth century.’’
The aim of this study, likewise, is to further the ongoing process of
‘‘changing the subject’’ of music history, in recognition of that subject’s
original pluralism.2 The introductory chapter (‘‘On colonial difference
and musical frontiers: directions for a postcolonial musicology’’) sets
out theoretical issues involved in this historiographical revision, sug-
gesting ways in which attention to early Atlantic colonialism can
undermine the disciplinary idealization of Europe and its polities as
self-contained, self-determined cultural entities. To the extent that
early colonial sites of musical representation and production in Lima,
Port-au-Prince, Boston, or Quebec, for example, come to seem inter-
connected with European metropolitan sites – and vice versa – the prob-
lem of identifying and historicizing early modern ‘‘European’’ music
becomes irreducibly vexed, perhaps even at some level inseparable
from the problems of crafting histories of music in colonial Peru,
Saint-Domingue, or North America. The introduction concludes by
outlining a hopeful deconstructive approach that places European
music cultures in encounter with colonial situations, in order to clear
a space for a more ecumenical music history.

xvi

 
Cambridge University Press
789-;-<21-9??;<-8 - Native American Song at the Drontiers of Early Modern Music
Olivia A. Bloechl
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The succeeding chapters focus on musical encounters between early

modern French and English people and indigenous people in eastern
North America and, to a lesser extent, parts of the Caribbean and north-
eastern South America. The chapters in the first part, ‘‘Transatlantic
savagery,’’ trace the colonial application of several distinct Protestant
and Catholic discourses of music, and show how these discourses were
themselves altered in their encounter with native American music. As
European discourses expanded to accommodate knowledge of native
American song, defining the boundary between the musics of the col-
onizers and the colonized became both more necessary and more
fraught. Chapter 2 (‘‘Protestant imperialism and the metaphysics of
New World song’’) argues that Protestants’ representations of native
American song were shaped by a specifically Protestant metaphysics
and politics of music that encouraged comparisons between the sacred
musics of native Americans and European Catholics. The third and
fourth chapters (‘‘The voice of possession’’ and ‘‘The voice of proph-
ecy’’) present histories of European discourse on possessed and inspired
vocality, respectively, and they analyze the structural and historical
relation of these discourses to Europeans’ representation of entranced
song in the colonies.
The second part, ‘‘Staging the Indian,’’ has a series of case studies of
English and French music spectacles with characters identified as
‘‘Indians,’’ ‘‘Americans,’’ or ‘‘savages.’’ Each chapter traces the rela-
tionship between the musical characterization of native American
figures in these spectacles and their representation in relevant contem-
porary discourse, including the travel writings considered in the first
part. Chapter 5 (‘‘Musicking Indians in the Stuart court masque’’) sur-
veys royal masques with Indian characters performed at the courts of
James I and Charles I. Masque texts, costumes, and choreographies,
together with their music, generally portrayed Indians as characters
who emblematized disorder, though they also sometimes presented
them as noble figures who affirmed the Stuarts’ power to bring order
to Britain and its colonies. Two masques even presented noble and
ignoble Indians side by side, which destabilized English aristocratic
colonial ideologies in performance by juxtaposing potentially incom-
patible profiles of Indians. Chapter 6, ‘‘Savage Lully,’’ focuses on the
portrayal of Indian figures in French ballets de cour and operas with
music by Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to Louis XIV. Unlike in
the English context, French colonial policy for most of the seventeenth
century emphasized the political and cultural assimilation of native
Americans, and I find an analogous principle of aesthetic integration
in Lully’s music for Indian characters. Finally, Chapter 7 (‘‘Rameau’s
Les Sauvages and the aporia of musical nature’’) looks at the last entrée
of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera-ballet, Les Indes galantes, and the

xvii

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Olivia A. Bloechl
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keyboard piece, also entitled Les Sauvages, that served as a musical

source for part of its concluding divertissement. More so than in either
of the preceding case studies, French Enlightenment discourse on sav-
agery involved a deep-seated ambivalence that disturbed philosoph-
ical efforts to determine the origin and nature of ‘‘primitive’’ expressive
utterance. This chapter finds a structural connection between the apo-
ria of ‘‘primitive’’ song that emerged in speculative philosophical writ-
ing and the uncertainties concerning music’s ontology that animated
1730s critical discourse on French opera. The chapter concludes by
analyzing Rameau’s own attempts to musically characterize ‘‘savages,’’
which were likewise marked by a split expression whose plurality, his
critics feared, implied an absence of reason at the heart of French opera
itself.
I have retained original spellings in citing primary English-language
sources, though I have expanded the ampersand and modernized the
orthography. Citations from prose texts in other languages are given in
English, with necessary excerpts from the original provided parentheti-
cally. French original quotations are modernized only when the origi-
nal spelling would mislead the reader; non-agreement of number and
gender is therefore un-modernized. Poetic citations are given in the
original language with English translations beneath. All translations
are my own unless otherwise indicated.

xviii

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

 On colonial difference and
musical frontiers: directions for
a postcolonial musicology

A m o n g the many costume and spectacle designs hel d at the Louvre is

the fascinating but enigmatic figure of America i n Figure 1.1. The o r i -
g i n a l depicts a cross-dressed female figure seated on a large alligator, her
m o u t h opened i n song as she accompanies herself o n a lute. Like most
other Americans or " I n d i a n s " in seventeenth-century iconography, the
figure in this d r a w i n g wears a high feathered headdress, and her l o n g
feathered mantle, rarely used in French costume designs, is clearly an
adaptation of American imagery in the travel literature. Other features
1

carry more ambiguous geographic or cultural associations. For exam-

ple, earrings such as those shown here usually appeared i n designs for
N o r t h African characters, though French designers also sometimes
assigned them to East Indians. Moreover, the figure's face in this d r a w -
i n g is shaded a b r o w n color, which often indicated an association w i t h
N o r t h or sub-Saharan Africa and with a French poetics of blackness. 2

The indeterminate identity hinted at with the figure's costume and

appearance is intensified b y her performance on a lute. I n the light of
the lute's predominant seventeenth-century association w i t h European
h i g h culture, the instrument seems at first glance w h o l l y o u t of place
3

in the hands of a performer whose iconography gestures toward her

identification with America, Africa, and Asia, b u t not Europe. We
m i g h t indeed be forgiven for wondering, somewhat indelicately, w h a t
a Jute is doing in the hands of a n Indian?
Several factors complicate this sense of the instrument's difference in
relation t o the performer. The lute's associations w i t h elite culture were
c o m m o n l y parodied in burlesque costume designs for French court
ballets before the 1660s. French artists often substituted grotesquely
distorted lutes for parts of musicians' bodies or decorated burlesque
costumes with lutes.* Moreover, lutes and related instruments were
1

occasionally given t o exotic figures in the spectacles, w h i c h potentially

extended the instruments' associations beyond Europe. For instance,

1
 Native American Song

Figure 1.1 Young woman with lute, Musee d u Louvre, Paris,

Collection Rothschild, 2161 d.r. © Photo RMN, Thierry Le Mage

the Ballet de la Douairiere de Billebahaut (1626) featured recits for m a n -

dolin-players personifying America, Asia, the Arctic regions, Africa ,
and Europe, as shown i n the w e l l - k n o w n costume drawings for this
ballet. A lutenist costumed as an American also appears in the back-
5

ground of the commemorative image Le Soir (Figures 1.2a-b), w h i c h

shows a performance of Richelieu's Ballet de la Prosperite des amies de
France (1641) attended by Louis XIII and the royal family. 6

Burlesque parody of the lute's elite social status and the instrument's
cross-cultural travesti in the hands of exoticized performers w o u l d
likely have left its dominant cultural associations largely intact, or even
reinforced them. If this were the case, neither the h i g h social status no r
the European identity of the lute w o u l d be truly jeopardized by their
temporary subversion in the image of America considered here. Such
an interpretation is perhaps supported by the existence in the same
collection of several related images, w h i c h show other exotic allegorical
figures performing o n lutes (seated on a snail, an ostrich, and a tortoise,
respectively). Hie series likely alludes to the parts of the w o r l d , an
7

overtly imperial theme that recurred i n French court spectacles

throughout the century a n d i n decorative art for the royal chateaus,
especially Versailles. The lute's stable appearance in the four L o u v r e
images suggests its identification w i t h the perfect harmony that, i n

2
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

Figure 1.2a Le So/c Courtesy of the Bibliotheque nationals de France

Christian Neoplatonic thought, underlay the created order. Neopla-

tonic ideas of cosmic harmony had long formed an important part of
the lute's symbolism, and they also played a vital role i n Bourbon royal
propaganda, identifying absolute monarchy w i t h the harmonic order-
ing o f the w o r l d . By placing lutes i n the hands of exotic performers,
8

then, the Louvre drawings may have emblematized their political sub-
jugation, b y showing their cultural integration, or "harmonization, "
w i t h the French regime (see Chapter 6).
T h i s interpretation attributes an integrity and resiliency to the lute's
identity that allows the instrument to affect the identity of the exotic
performer i n the d r a w i n g w h i l e its o w n symbolic associations remain
intact. The lute's association w i t h unearthly harmony and the quality of
n o b i l i t y was indeed persistent. Yet this identity was rooted i n the lute's
genealogy (much as w i t h dynastic nobility), and the many, often dis-
tinct reiterations of the instrument's historical a n d mythical origins i n
contemporary discourse indicate an anxiety around the question of
w h e r e the lute came f r o m , and what it signified i n the hands of diffe-
rent performers. I n the seventeenth century, this anxiety arose i n part

3
 Native American Song

Figure 1.2b Detail of Le Soir. Courtesy of the Bibliotheque nationale

de France

from the increased accessibility of lutes, lute instruction, and lute music
to wealthy bourgeois, which called the instrument's nobility into ques-
tion. However, it also responded to an uncertainty concerning the kite's
proto-ethnic and religious identification, owing to its mixed heritage.
The lute's prestige in the early modern period derived in large part
from its identification w i t h cultural, philosophical, and religious line-
ages that European elites valued highly. Particularly important was the
instrument's association with Greek, Roman, and Christian heritages
that had long been important resources for European dynastic self-
fashioning - evident, for example, in the association of the lute w i t h
Apollo, Mercury, the Hebrew K i n g David, and the angels. ' Similarly, in
1

the Louvre drawings the lute symbolized the classical, Christian iden-
tity that the French kings claimed for their own lineage and, by exten-
sion, that of the nation. The lute's prestigious classical and Christian
heritage made it an attractive symbol for Bourbon royal representation.
However, the official versions of the lute's genealogy recounted in

4
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

Bourbon propaganda and elsewhere obscured another ancestry, w h i c h

d i d not accord quite so well w i t h a dominant sense of what i t meant to
be French, or even European, i n the seventeenth century. M o d e r n scho-
lars have definitively traced the lute's origins to central Asia, and the
direct predecessors of the lute (especially the "Cid") came to Europe via
the North African M u s l i m conquest of al'Andalus, as the Iberian pen-
insula was k n o w n under Umayyad and later Islamic rule. The precise
transmission of the lute to northern Europe is uncertain, b u t the most
likely route is via the Kalbid-influenced Sicilian court of the late thir-
teenth century. With the spread of lute performance throughout the
Italian peninsula i n the fourteenth century came a shift i n the instru -
ment's cultural symbolism, as according to Douglas A l t o n Smith the
lute's "foreign - and heathen - associations slipped into convenient
oblivion . . . while the instrument and its musical style were completely
assimilated by the Italians." The poets Petrarch and Boccaccio inaugu-
rated the enduring association between the lute and the ancient Greek
lyre, w i t h the result that the instrument's colonial diasporic transmis-
sion was displaced in favor of a more prestigious classical and Chris-
tian past, "its Islamic heritage forgotten or i g n o r e d . "
10

Attempts to mitigate the lute's troubled origins are characteristic of

elite European music writings in the early period o f external colon-
ization. However, such attempts never fully succeeded, and for this
reason colonial-era music sources, such as the image of the American
lutenist in Figure 1.1, can tell us much about what was at stake i n
Europe's representations of its own, as well as others' music. Postcolonial
theory is helpful here, if adapted to the unique circumstances of early
colonial music cultures, since some aspects of colonial power relations
have remained fairly constant across the long history of European
colonization. Among these is a selective memory of origins, evident
in early modern discourse on the lute.
Postcolonial theorist H o m i Bhabha has emphasized the centrality o f
colonial processes to the characteristically ambivalent memory of colo-
nial o r postcolonial nations. According to Bhabha, colonialism desta-
bilizes national "genealogies of ' o r i g i n ' , " which are always involved
in historical or other forms of collective memory, but w h i c h are
particularly fraught in colonial situations. While selective memory
characterizes most human collectives, what distinguishes colonial or
postcolonial nations is their necessary forgetting of cultura l difference,
in the negative sense of an ancestry that is disavowed in national dis-
course. The difference that colonialism injects into the self-representa-
tion o f nations is, i n Bhabha's words, "the repetition that w i l l not return
as the same, the minus-in-origin that results i n political and discursive
strategies where adding to does not add up b u t serves to disturb the
calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of

5
 Native American Song

subaltern signification." "Subaltern signification/' as Bhabha defines

11

it, indicates cultural memory that is barred f r o m being plausible know-

ledge, but that also ensures the impossibility of secure memory by
virtue of its exclusion. I n national contexts, subaltern memory can
recall an unwelcome colonial past; h y b r i d cultural production; geno-
cide, ecocide, or enslavement; racial or ethnic mixture; or past
migrancy. It is, i n short, any aspect of national histories or other forms
of memory that makes i t impossible to really know w h o w e are and
where we come from, because we have always already come from
somewhere else in a time other than now.
Applied to early modern Europe, Bhabha's correlation of the ambi-
valence of national memory w i t h past or present colonialism needs revi-
sion on several counts. First, his conception of the modern nation-state
only corresponds in a limited way to early modern nations, w h i c h were
more porous and mutable and which were usually organized around
dynastic rulers, not an empowered citizenry. Early European colo-
nialism also involved other types of polities in addition to nations. 12

Inhabitants of the principalities, kingdoms, city-states, and nations of

Christendom associated the term "empire" generally w i t h a powerful
ruler's dominion, and specifically w i t h the Roman empire, the Holy
Roman empire, and w i t h the dynasties that claimed their legacies, as
well as w i t h the burgeoning Ottoman empire. This idea of " e m p i r e "
was also, of course, extended to colonial and trade dealings with
peoples and territories outside Eurasia, as w i t h American colonization.
However, even early commercial empires, such as the Portuguese,
depended on relations w i t h powerful royal or noble patrons and were
thus promoted as opportunities for enhancing dynastic prestige.
A l l of these factors distinguish early modem from modern empires.
Nevertheless, adapted to early modem imperialism and also to the
unique properties of music cultures, Bhabha's w r i t i n g on colonialism
and collective memory helps us understand how accounts of an instru-
ment's origins focus anxieties concerning imperial conquest in
Europe's past and present. By the seventeenth century the nations of
Christendom's Atlantic r i m inhabited a colonial condition in a double
sense, as postcolonial and colonizing civilizations. These nations had
13

their own complex, regional histories of colonial conquest, but they all
laid claim to the imperial legacy left by the Roman conquest of western
Europe and Britain. The prestige accorded to classical cultural and
political forms, together w i t h the Holy Roman empire's association
with the development of Christianity, assured the near-universal ven-
eration of the Roman imperial heritage among Christian elites. H o w -
ever, the colonization of the Iberian south by the Umayyad dynasty and
other Islamic powers i n the eighth through the fifteenth centuries argu-
ably left a competing legacy of large-scale, long-term conquest on

6
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

E u r o p e a n soil that, together w i t h the memory of the Crusades and the

t h r e a t of the encroaching Ottoman empire, established the powers of
^ M u s l i m N o r t h Africa and Asia M i n o r as arch-rivals and enemies of
e a r l y modern Christendom. The Atlantic nations' relationship w i t h
e m p i r e was further complicated by their efforts to establish colonies,
p l a n t a t i o n s , and trade outposts i n the Americas and elsewhere from the
f i f t e e n t h century onward , because European external colonization
r a i s e d the specter of Europe's o w n subjugation to foreign, non-Chris-
t i a n powers. While Roman imperial conquest could be recuperated as
t h e precursor of an autonomous, Christian, conquering Europe, the
p a s t reality and present threat of conquest b y M u s l i m powers came
t o haunt Christendom's sense of its o w n identity. Genealogies traced to
R o m e (and hence to Greece) obscured the Islamic imperial ancestry of
m a n y European political and cultural forms, including important
aspects of its musical theory and practice. This alternate European
14

ancestry went largely unacknowledged i n the early modern period,

because its memory of M u s l i m Arab dominance threatened the
religious, cultural, and proto-racialist hierarchies that sustained Euro-
p e a n distinctions between colonizer and colonized, " c i v i l i z e d " and
"savage."
The ideological preference of one origin story over another always
leaves traces. The lute's discourse of origins is a small but significant
case in point, since divergent early modern accounts of the lute's
genealogy, symbolism, and performance decorum never added u p to
a coherent whole. Even the powerful Christian Neoplatonism of the
lute's early m o d e m symbolism could not preclude other, less desirable
aspects of its heritage f r o m emerging i n iconography and discourse. In
j u s t one example, the prolific author of conduct manuals, Francois de
Grenaille, warned his female readers against too high a regard for the
l u t e , on account of its base origins. His disenchanted account of Mer-
c u r y ' s creation of the lute from a tortoise shell is unorthodox, to say the
least: " A s to the musical instruments that form the principal ornament
of the consort, I am astonished that they should be taken for miracles,
seeing as they are for the most part no more than images of a gutted
t o r t o i s e . " It is difficult to know how common was Grenaille's rather
15

tactless assessment, but what matters here is that such minor depart-
ures from the lute's conventional mythology highlight the possibil-
i t y of a more radical differentiation, w h i c h I w i l l refer to here as a
"subalternity."
The distinction I want to make between oppositional knowledge - as
i n Grenaille's statement - and a more drastically divergent, subaltern
signification - w h i c h Grenaiile's statement o n ly intimates - is illus-
trated by commentary on the lute's origins i n the Burwell lute
tutor, an anonymous manuscript treatise from late seventeenth-century

7
 Native American Song

England. The section on "The Origin of the Lute or the Derivation of

16

the Lute" attributes several distinct beginnings to the instrument. The

opening places the lute's origins in heaven ("if wee trust piously the
Divines"), and points to its first earthly appearance i n the consort that
accompanied the angels' announcement to shepherds of the b i r t h of the
Christ child. According to the treatise, the lute " l i g h t e n e d " the shep-
herds' "rude understandings amidst the thicke clouds of Judaism" and
taught humans the "shape and figure of the instrument." Thereafter the
church adopted the lute, and i t gained its present ascendancy first i n
Italy, where "they use nothing but lutes and voices for to answer and
agree the better w i t h the musick of the angells." However, the genea-
logy falters as the author returns to the purported Hebrew origins of the
lute, recalling its traditional identification w i t h the cithara: "Judaisme . . .
sunge anthemes w i t h instruments of musick but as there light was
but grosse and rude soo the musicall instruments were then but i n
the infancy and imperfection." Hie cithara recalls still another origin
in pagan antiquity, which "made gods of those that have beene the first
inventors of the lute." The semi-divine musician Orpheus is, of course,
chief among these, and the treatise's author segues into other w e l l -
w o r n classical associations: Mercury's creation of the lute, A m p h i o n ' s
musical construction of the city of Thebes, and Arion's performance on
the back of a dolphin. The author tries to rehabilitate the lute's Hebrew
and pagan beginnings by casting them as prefigurations of Christian
Europe's perfection of the instrument, but for all that its plural origins
remain irreconcilable w i t h the desire for a single, Christian ancestry.
The third chapter again asserts the lute's Italian origins, w h i l e n o t i n g
the present-day preeminence of French lutenists: "The first and most
famous lute masters wee confesse were the Italians w h o were the first
authors of the lute as all the w o r l d must acknowledge and that the
french have beene the most famous i n that." However, the next state-
ment implies that the Italians i n question are not the lute's fourteenth-
century progenitors but the ancient Romans, whose conquest of the
Gauls, we learn, accounted for France's subsequent dominance on
the instrument. The lute treatise thus acknowledges the role of con-
quest in the lute's European adoption and even alludes to the secretive-
ness of this knowledge: " A l t h o u g h there is some confusion i n the
French to acknowledge that they have beene subdued b y the Romanes
yet they must not be ashamed to acknowledge that they owe there skill
to their conquest." Yet the lute's (and by extension Europe's) imperial
genealogy is also disavowed. I n the context of the contradictory, m u l -
tiple origins that the author attributes to the lute the allegation that
France's cultural preeminence was rooted i n its imperial past is scan-
dalous, though manageable due to the cultural prestige generally
accorded to Rome. The English author's pointed recollection of the

8
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

imperial genealogy of French culture notably does not extend to

England's o w n imperial history, which is nevertheless i n play. More-
over, w h i l e it obscures England's o w n ambivalent relation to empire,
the focus on French lutenists' Roman tutelage also displaces k n o w l -
edge of the lute's transmission by w a y of Umayyad or Kalbid music
cultures, respectively. Though the lute's transmission t h r o u g h M u s l i m
conquest was nearly unthinkable i n the context of the treatise - far
more so than England's ambivalence toward Rome - its subaltern rela-
tion to w h a t could have been thought forms a condition of the treatise's
representation of the lute.
A t no point does the text thematize or even allude to the lute's trans-
mission via the h y b r i d colonial and postcolonial cultures of the north-
ern Mediterranean. If we regard the treatise as provisionally closed and
thus as legible on its o w n terms (in the manner of a structuralism or a
stricter sort of hermeneutics), this critical aspect of the lute's past is
unavailable as a topic or even an implicit meaning of the text. Under
these conditions the problem of colonialism (past and present) w o u l d
seem to be largely exterior - thus, irrelevant - to the treatise, or at best
marginal to its concerns. A n d yet the plural genealogies assigned to the
lute and the treatise's allusion to the Roman origins of French musica-
lity respond noticeably to a pressure, albeit one that is not named or
figured i n the text. I identify this pressure w i t h an otherness that acts
on, and in relation to, the treatise and its readers, yet is absent w h e n
addressed by historical or hermeneutic questioning. These subaltern
relations, w h i c h I mark i n the treatise's saying, are largely excluded
from its expression, or what it says, for reasons h a v i n g to do w i t h the
ambivalence of colonial discourse: its orientation t o w a r d what it cannot
not want.
A t the heart of this study is the thesis that among the conditions
shaping European music and its discourses was the pressure of an
otherness that bears witness to colonial domination. This idea of the
" w i t n e s s " is influenced b y philosopher Kelly Oliver's w r i t i n g on the
ethical and historiographical importance of w h a t bears witness to
atrocity, beyond the intersubjective process of "recognition." Oliver
notes the double nature of eyewitness testimony: as an address that
testifies to w h a t happened, providing a basis for historical and legal
processes; and as an address that bears witness to w h a t is beyond the
recognition of both the witness herself and of discourses such as l a w or
history that rely on empiricism and an actualized subject. As her pri-
mary example, Oliver considers testimony by survivors of Holocaust
atrocities. W i t h Giorgio Agamben, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,
Frimo Levi, and others, Oliver observes that those w h o witnessed the
horrors of mass annihilation cannot testify to the full truth of its his-
tory. Whereas historians have traditionally listened for what can be

9
 Native American Song

expressed directly in such testimony - especially w h a t can be trans-

lated as historical fact - Oliver advocates a psychoanalytic-influenced
historiography that listens as well for the performative, affective
" t r u t h " of an address that attests to extreme forms of oppression, which
destroy the very possibility of witnessing. 17

European colonization, which perpetuated genocide, ecocide, and

cultural-spiritual devastation on a massive scale, also w o r k e d to anni-
hilate the possibility of witnessing to its atrocities. There are nonethe-
less key differences between the Holocaust survivors' testimony that
Oliver considers and the kinds of "witness" that appear i n archives
relevant to music or song. The archives that speak to early colonial
musical encounters include written and material artifacts, repertories,
performance traditions, and oral traditions, rather than the testimony
of living or recently deceased witnesses. Moreover, the written,
notated, and material portions of the archive, which have been most
accessible to historians, were largely controlled by European colonial
agents. Description, transcription, mimicry, allusion, or other attempts
by Europeans to reframe indigenous song cultures from colonial per-
spectives are neither ethically nor historiographically equivalent to
first-person, survivors' testimony. Such testimony can perhaps be
recovered from ethnohistorical and hybrid oral traditional-historical
accounts of indigenous responses to European colonialism i n the
Americas. European colonial writings also sometimes report indigen-
ous peoples' responses, including resistance to the Europeans' cultural
invasion, though these reports (especially their ventriloquizing) need
to be treated w i t h caution. Yet even European music discourses and
performances that seem to lack any memory of colonial violence often
bear traces of such a witness, which is not available for translation as
historical fact or interpretation, but whose silence itself opens these
discourses and performances to deconstruction.
This difference that attests to colonial violence is most readily per-
ceptible i n music as an exoticism, or i n representations of music as
savage, primitive, or monstrous. Yet it is also subtly active in other
musical texts from the period, as a nearly agential pressure that pre-
vents the emergence of a self-identical European subject b u t that does
not constitute a discrete oppositional figure, gesture, or style process.
The former instance, of difference as something at least minimally
figured i n music or its discourses, is addressed i n studies of gender,
racial, sexual, or other forms of difference i n music, particularly those
studies informed by cultural theory or hermeneutics. The latter, far
18

less accessible process has not, for the most part, been explicitly con-
sidered i n music historical studies concerned w i t h difference, though i t
is sometimes broached obliquely, for example, i n studies that trace the
workings of "desire" i n music. Subalternity, which is prevented from

10
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

reaching recognizable articulation in music or discourse, is typically

subsumed i n the necessary focus of progressive musicological w r i t i n g
on more or less recognizable figures of difference. I discuss this further
below, b u t for n o w w i l l simply emphasize that I a m not recommending
an exchange of one focus for the other i n our w r i t i n g s . Rather, I want to
call our attention to processes by w h i c h difference that can be figured
as the " o t h e r " approaches only i n the train of an unwelcome, subaltern
difference, w h i c h Spivak, following Derrida, terms the "quite-other." 19

Several poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists have urged that

we recognize such provisional distinctions among states of alterity, so
as to resist neglecting or eclipsing a drastic otherness i n favor of an
otherness that is amenable to political action, progressive history, or
ideological recuperation. Dipesh Chakrabarty's distinction between
" m i n o r i t y histories" and "subaltern pasts" i n his essay o n postcolonial
historiography, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histor-
ical Difference, is particularly useful in this regard. Chakrabarty identi-
fies " m i n o r i t y h i s t o r y " as history that masters "the problems of telling
the stories of groups hitherto overlooked - particularly under circum-
stances i n w h i c h the usual archives do not e x i s t . " Anti-racist, femi-
20

nist, or queer-positive histories of past music cultures are classic

examples of m i n o r i t y history, inasmuch as these proceed from an
oppositional stance vis-a-vis dominant histories and a i m to expand
the possibilities for historical knowledge. Crucially, m i n o r i t y history
always involves processes of incorporation, where once-oppositional
forms of memory are gradually accommodated as historical knowledge.
Incorporation, of course, is desirable and necessary, since i t broadens the
range of pasts that the historical disciplines deem relevant; but it also
transforms those pasts and their oppositional potential b y bringing them
w i t h i n the ken of rationally defensible knowledge. O n the contrary,
"subaltern" relations to the past f o r m the boundaries beyond w h i c h
history cannot go and still retain its status as an authoritative and
respectable branch of knowledge. Chakrabarty notes that "subaltern
pasts represent moments or points at w h i c h the archive that the historian
mines develops a degree of intractability w i t h respect to the aims of
professional history." Subaltern pasts "resist historicization;" moreover,
they "cannot ever enter academic history as belonging to the historian's
o w n p o s i t i o n . " What is subaltern i n relation to academic practices of
21

history, then, are those forms of memory that act as limits beyond
w h i c h historical knowledge cannot lay claim to authority, to being
"good history." Writing as an historian, Chakrabarty does not advocate
that we abandon history, which is unlikely anyway. Rather, he urges that
we learn to practice history i n ways that disturb the operation of a
universalizing translation by which history forgets w h a t is subaltern
as the basis for its o w n memory.

11
 Native American Song

Taken to its conclusions, the idea that early European music and music
discourses were entangled i n colonial relations, past and present,
compromises the stability and integrity of the subject - Europe - that
most musicological research assumes as a basis for, as w e l l as an object of
its knowledge. Yet, if postcolonial theorists are right, the possibility of
Europe or its polities as integral cultural entities was already compro-
mised by their efforts at domination, w h i c h oriented them irreversibly i n
the direction of an other. The following section examines the methodo-
logical and political implications of this altered subject, b u t we can get
a sense of what i t involves by returning to the curious lutenist and her
instrument in Figure 1.1. When I discussed this image above, I proposed
that the instrument's status as an elite, French-identified instrument
would have survived its cross-cultural travesti i n the hands of a colonial-
identified figure. This presumed stability of the lute's class and proto-
national identities, even when juxtaposed w i t h a figure of difference,
accords w i t h the French courtly practice of permitting high-born persons
to personify low, grotesque, or comic characters, w i t h o u t jeopardizing
their own social identity. The assumption of exotic personas by royalty,
peers, or notables in the court ballets and fetes worked similarly. Cross-
cultural performances at court nevertheless exploited volatile tensions
inherent i n the French social hierarchy. Notwithstanding nervous asser-
tions to the contrary, such performances hinted at the possibility that
nobility and even royalty was not i n fact stable and divinely authorized,
but was instead susceptible to mobility and dissimulation.
We may likewise pursue the suspicion - contrary to the lute's power-
ful association w i t h nobility, Christianity, and a French or European
heritage - that its identity was mutable and based on an uncertain
origin. A p p l i e d to the Louvre drawing, this raises the possibility of
an illicit, two-way relation of identification between the lute and its
performer's persona: not n o w the unidirectional civilizing and d o m -
inating force symbolized by the lute's presence, but also a pressure i n
return from the foreclosed possibility of colonial difference as an his-
torical agency, figured i n this drawing in the person of the lutenist.
Reading against the contours of meaning authorized by classical
French exegesis, we encounter surprising interdependencies between
the identities of lutes and those of Indians, alligators, or feathers. This
unsuspected relation between an icon of European identity and icons of
American colonial difference suggests a subaltern memory of the lute
as itself enfolding an otherness, w h i c h disturbs its mimetic reflection of
dynastic or imperial power. Reading against the grain of the image, we
glimpse something of the lute's o w n hybridity.
Though such oblique, even heterotopic orders of meaning are often
inaccessible through methods that music history has traditionally
employed, neither are they mere fantasies, arbitrarily or ideologically

12
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

imposed at several centuries' remove. There are nearly always hints, if

we pay attention. Listen again to the author of the B u r w e l l lute treatise,
recounting the lute's Orphic origins:
Orpheus stopped the course of rivers with his playing caused the trees to
daunce tamed the wild beasts made them sociable and kind to one another
there is nothing that brings more the w i l d nature of the Indians to a gentle
constitution than musick and especially the lute. 22

This is a strange answer to a stranger riddle: W h a t does Orpheus have

to do w i t h Indians, and Indians w i t h lutes?
Here is another riddle, w h i c h this study tries to answer: What is
Europe, that i t produced this text? Or, further: W h a t is its music, that
a lute w i l l have been played b y a "savage"?

Colonial diachrony
Perhaps this is making too m u c h of one errant lute. I t is undoubtedly
extending the discussion beyond what early m o d e m performers, com-
posers, audiences, or writers likely w o u l d or c o u l d have made of the
instrument. Yet the questions I w a n t to ask of sources like the Louvre
drawing or the Burwell lute tutor are not w h o l l y of the present either,
since they respond to something i n these texts that does not add u p and
so provides an opening for a deconstructive address that, even i f tried
in good faith, w i l l witness something other than w h a t is said.
The deconstruction practiced by one i m p o r t a n t strand of postcolo-
nial theory exploits an "out-of-joint," radically diachronic time that is
in tension w i t h the synchrony or linear diachrony of historical chrono-
logy, description, analysis, and interpretation. The latter procedures
23

are indispensable to minority history, of w h i c h this study is, i n part, an

example. But I have found the poststructuralist theorizing of colonial
diachrony to be most useful here, as an aid for recalling the disingen-
uousness of historicism's continuous times and spaces, w h i c h involve a
metaphysics of presence that transcends colonial differance. A postco-
lonial music historiography that includes deconstruction among its
tools thus needs to develop a tolerance for the " u n c a n n y " (unheimlkh)
or haunted time of diachrony, because only this allows an experiment
of the subaltern as subject of her o w n history. 24

Bhabha's characterization of diachronic time as unheimlkh (following

Freud) acknowledges the interdependence of spatial and temporal
metaphors i n western anthropological and historical t h o u g h t . Colo- 25

nial or postcolonial subalternity undoes b o th " d i m e n s i o n s . " As neither

the familiarity of an interiority nor the delimited strangeness of an
exteriority, belonging neither here nor elsewhere, the subaltern resists
the fixity of geometric spatial relations and the knowledg e they make

13
 Native American Song

possible. Subalternity is thus, i n a sense, unplottable, and w h e n sub-

alterns are identified as belonging to here or there, according to a
cultural or national geography, they are no longer subaltern but, as
Spivak writes, are already "inserted into the long road to hegemony." 26

This partly accounts for the out-of-placeness (or Unheimlichkeit) mat the
idea of a "savage" lutenist exhibits vis-a-vis European music history,
because the illicit relation of its terms undermines the separation of
metropolitan and colonized space that was a basis for the Euro-
pean colonial imaginary from the seventeenth century o n w a r d . If the
subaltern is identifiable neither w i t h Paris/London/Seville nor w i t h
Louisiana/Virginia/New Spain - in other words, if the music practices
and discourses of the early colonial metropolis cannot be f u l l y distin-
guished from those of the colonies - a strange interdependency results,
that undermines the independence of colonizers and colonized.
Likewise w i t h time. Historicism that is oriented t o w a r d a past that is
entirely determined, dead and gone, or toward a present regarded as
fully distinct from past and future, has forgotten its o w n shedding of
subalternity i n the process of translation. Subaltern history, by contrast,
makes its uncomfortable home i n the becoming of diachronous time,
which is a seemingly impossible proximit y not o n l y of distinct
moments in time imagined as a series (as i n fantasies of time-travel),
but even of incompatible time schemes. A w e l l - k n o w n example is the
uncanny time evoked i n Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, i n w h i c h the
eponymous character appears as something unspeakable f r o m the past
that returns to haunt the home of the former slavewoman Sethe. I n
Beloved, Morrison realizes the diachronic time of racial or postcolonial
memory as a present haunted by radically incompatible states of being,
a time in which, as Bhabha remarks, "something is beyond control, b u t
it is not beyond accommodation." 27

A v i v i d instance of the "something beyond c o n t r o l " of subaltern

diachrony arises i n academic w r i t i n g that tries to reconcile the distinc-
tive temporalities of mysticism, possession, ecstasy, or other altered
states w i t h the secular, disenchanted time that is the basis of historical
thought. Historians of religion have recently experimented w i t h ways
of disarming the rationalism of historical narrative in relation to these
sacred modalities, while still communicating effectively i n a secular
mode. Another model is foun d in recent feminist, queer-positive, or
2H

postcolonial efforts to acknowledge an ethical relation w i t h ancestors of

various sorts in our histories, biographies, performances, or inter-
pretative studies. For example, Paula G u n n Allen's biography of the
Powhatan woman Pocahontas experiments w i t h a h y b r i d biographical
method that combines Algonquian ?nnnz'tow-centered forms of m e m o r y
w i t h conventions of Anglo-American secular historiography. I n the 29

field of musicology, Suzanne Cusick and Elisabeth Le G u i n have b o t h

14
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

w r i t t e n about an unsettling proximity of musical practitioners claimed

as cultural (if not biological) ancestors, and about the effects of these
relations on our musical and musicological practice. Both scholars
explore the bodily sensorium as an ethical matrix or, i n terms closer
to w h a t I am using here, as an instrumental agent whose agency
depends on some k i n d of congress w i t h another w h o is n o t quite
present, in both senses of the t e r m .30

The a i m of this scholarship as I understand i t is not the recuperation

of a mysticism, transcendence, or ecstasy per se. A l l of these conditions
offer a n unmediated experience of a noumenal (or beyond-human)
power, and they thus involve the sublation of alterity i n t o presence,
w h i c h resolves the dilemma that diachrony entails. It is true that w h e n
we t r y to suspend the closure of a disembodying a n d universalizing
rationalism, i n recognition of its violence, we risk encountering entities
whose unplottable, diachronous agency is singular. However, what is
31

singular is b y definition not identical w i t h the fullness of a noumenal

presence. Rather, w h a t is both disturbing and hopeful i n efforts to
32

accommodate in historical w r i t i n g what testifies to colonial violence

is the very singularity of this witness, w h i c h is unpredictable i n relation
to our metaphysics, ethics, and power politics, as w e l l as our efforts to
produce histories of culture.
Of course, none of this sits easily with norms of music history. We are
not used to granting ancestors, gods, or spirits agency i n our histories, let
alone colonials (or postcolonials). The prospect of doing so is perhaps
daunting, but well w o r t h attempting in the hope of m o v i n g the music
disciplines beyond Eurocentrism. Indeed, I submit that we have little
choice but to look toward diachronic historiographies of many sorts
as w e try come to terms w i t h the contested inter-cultural encounters
of Atlantic colonialism. Rationalist and universalist spatial-temporal
schemes can only be of limited use i n relation to situations of perform-
ance, creation, representation, or exchange in which at least t w o distinct
cosmologies and ideologies of music were in play, each of w h i c h differs i n
turn f r o m those that inform our present-day histories. I n other words,
33

the spaces and times f r o m which and about which w e make histories of
music - particularly, but not exclusively, colonial or postcolonial histories -
already defy the ideals of universalist notions of time and space. To open
our music histories to other, even singular ways of being i n space,
time, and, therefore, song is simply to grant what already was.

Colonial Orpheus
A diachronic temporality emerges in the Burwell lute treatise's o d d
juxtaposition of the semi-divine musician Orpheus (narrated i n a m y t h -
ical past tense) w i t h American Indians (narrated i n w h a t is already an

15
 Native American Song

"ethnographic present"), cited above. This superimposition of m y t h -

ical and proto-ethnological time schemes is jarring to m o d e m readers,
so much so that i t seems to present a riddle n o t unlike w h a t Jorge Luis
Borges noted i n an apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia (the Heavenly
Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), w h i c h "exercises chaos" in its clas-
sification of animals. I n addition to seemingly arbitrary divisions
("those that belong to the emperor," "mermaids," or "those that trem-
ble as if they were mad") the classification scheme incorporates several
indeterminate or infinite categories of animals: "those that are i n c l u d e d
in this classification," "innumerable ones," and "etcetera." Remarking
34

on the irreducible plurality that this classification presents, Michel

Foucault famously observed that

there is a worse kind of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking
together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the disorder i n which frag-
ments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension,
without law or geometry, of the heteroclile.,. [I]n such a state, things are "laid,"
"placed," "arranged" in sites so very different from one another that it is
impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus
beneath them all (emphasis in original). 35

As is often the case in Foucault's writings, his commentary here

addresses something like subaltern difference, without naming i t as such.
In regard to the Burwell treatise, is there a logic that w o u l d allow us
to make sense of its enjambment of magical Orphic performance on the
"lute," and lute performance i n the service of colonial re-education?
Specifically, what in the text might account for the introduction of
Indians at this moment? Is their strange appearance merely a result
of the inappropriate (or "incongruous") coupling of a b a d analogy, or
is i t the sign of a "heteroclite" disorder at w o r k i n this practical music
treatise whose provenance is notably not " C h i n a " (which Foucault
glossed as "the mythical homeland" for the "distortion of classifica-
t i o n " in Borges's encyclopedia), but rather the King's England, and
imperial Great Britain? 36

Let us first try to read the Burwell lute tutor on its o w n terms. Once again:

Orpheus stopped the course of rivers with his playing caused the trees to
daunce tamed the wild beasts made them sociable and kind to one another
there is nothing that brings more the wild nature of the Indians to a gentle
constitution than musick and especially the lute.

Indians are introduced into the treatise via an analogy that likens the
civilizing power of Orphic performance to the colonial pacification of
native American peoples through musical acculturation. We might
analyze its terms as such:
Orpheus : Transformation of beasts AS X : Transformation of Indians

16
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

Both operations are mediated b y the lute. So far so good, except for two
nagging details. First: as noted, there is no apparent impetus for the
appearance of Indians per se i n the second term of the analogy. We
w o u l d expect to f i n d a reference to Orpheus i n a treatise on the lute,
and a transformative, civilizing power was long attributed to Orpheus's
musical rhetoric. However, the introduction of "Indians" per se as an
object of this civilizing power is prepared neither by conventional lute
discourse nor by themes developed elsewhere i n the treatise. The refer-
ence to " I n d i a n s " injects a foreign element whose alien status is not
relieved b y the analogical form. If "Indians" are not, then, w h o l l y
assimilated by the analogy, w i t h its formal relations of resemblance,
then w h a t kind of knowledge of them is possible i n the w o r l d of the
treatise or its readers? Foucault has argued that the f o r m of the analogy
enjoyed an unparalleled authority in early modem Europe, due to its
ability to elicit knowledge through an exegesis of resemblances h i d d en
in w o r l d and text. If analogy was an enforced rite of passage f o r early
37

m o d e r n knowledge, then the unanticipated introduction of Indians as

a term of the analogical relation w o u l d seem to prevent the smooth
passage of the analogy to its conclusion, i n the manner of an aporia.
A second, related problem occurs. Althoug h the agent in the first
term of the analogy is identified as Orpheus, the agent i n the second
term is left curiously unspecified. Unless lutes play themselves, this
raises a question as to who or what is wielding this instrument that
p u r p o r t e d l y brings "the w i l d nature of the Indians to a gentle consti-
t u t i o n . " Since the English played lutes and also sought to " c i v i l i z e "
native Americans, historical inference suggests a "colonial English
lutenist" as the missing agent, as follows,

Orpheus : Transformation of beasts AS English : Transformation of Indians

However, English lutenists are never associated with colonialism in the
treatise. A l t h o u g h Roman imperialism is connected w i t h French lute
culture, the English author scrupulously avoids reference to England's
o w n imperial legacy, never mind its external colonization. I t is thus
something of a scandal to supply the colonizing English as the agency
behind the transformation i n the second term, though this is perhaps
mitigated by the ensuing parallel w i t h Orpheus, w h i c h associates
English music and English colonialism w i t h the classical tradition's most
p o w e r f u l and prestigious musician. Alternatively, we may infer that the
agency behind the transformation in the second term is provided by the
Indians themselves, performing on lutes. Yet this creates another prob-
l e m , in that a parallel between Orpheus and Indian musicians becomes
thinkable if we insert " I n d i a n lutenists" as the missing term of the
relation (see below). This undermines the analogy's derogatory align-
m e n t of Indians w i t h beasts, but i t also collapses the power relation that

17
 Native American Song

is integral to the myth of Orphic musical magic: never to m y k n o w l -

edge is Orpheus confused w i t h the beings he charms. I f the first
38

realization of the analogy, w i t h the colonizing English as the missing

agent, is scandalous or "incongruous," i n Foucault's sense, i t preserves
the necessary distinction between English a n d Indians. O n the contrary,
the second realization, as follows,
Orpheus : Transformation of beasts AS Indians : Transformation of Indians
appears absurd, because i t collapses the difference between the subject
and object of magical/colonial transformation, d i s r u p t i n g the f o r m of
the analogy itself.
The treatise's introduction of a colonial version of the Orpheus m y t h
is characteristic of late seventeenth-century w r i t i n g on music i n the free,
if disruptive congress that i t assumes between traditional European
music discourses and colonial discourse o n music i n the Americas,
which I discuss i n the f o l l o w i n g chapters. I n that broad context a ref-
erence to native Americans i n a lute treatise may appear less excep-
tional; yet the existence of a transatlantic colonial n e t w o r k of music
discourse and performance does not diminish the strangeness of the
specific conditions in w h i c h the Burwell treatise introduces and quali-
fies Indians as musically colonized subjects, by w a y of an analogy w i t h
Orphic musical magic. I n particular, the absence in the treatise of an
identifiable agent behind the musical civilization of Indians highlights
something like a "heteroclite" disorder i n the treatise, w h i c h is charac-
teristic of early colonial identification. The treatise's displacement of
colonizing agency onto a musical instrument - the lute - directs atten-
tion away from the curious absence of the h u m a n agents of coloniza-
tion. Yet the irreducible plurality that emerges from the place where the
colonizing subject should be overwhelms the f o r m of the analogy, gene-
rating questions that disturb its economy: W h o is this lutenist, and
what does she/he want?

Engaging postcolonial theory

In this chapter I have focused o n some points in the archive i n which an

instrument, here the lute, acts as a fetish, that is, as an uncanny object
that masks lack or difference a n d restores self-identity, or presence. With
Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists I have selectively implemented
psychoanalytic concepts here, because they allow us to glimpse aspects
of past music cultures that escape an historicist approach. However,
psychoanalytic criticism cannot of itself articulate the conditions that
provided for the lute's meaningfulness, its representation, or its per-
formative efficacy in early modern Europe; nor can it really address the
workings of power in shaping these conditions and their effects.

18
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

I n p u r s u i n g these problems, the chapters that f o l l o w are influenced

by the aims and methods of a Foucauldian genealogy, whose attention
to the deep m u t u a l implication of knowledge and p o w e r extended, i n
the best moments, even to his o w n archaeological analyses. W i t h 40

Foucault's writings as a g u i d i n g force, then, this s t u d y pursues the

genealogical question of h o w French and English colonial encounters
w i t h native A m e r i c a n music altered the conditions that allowed
Europe's music cultures to develop as they d i d i n the sixteenth t h r o u g h
the early eighteenth centuries. A second component is also genealo-
gical i n that i t attempts to trace the lingering effects of inherited
colonial an d neocolonial ideologies and practices on o u r o w n histor-
iographies of early music.
A genealogical approach w i l l thus try to b r i n g its o w n limits into
view, as far as this is possible. This requires a healthy skepticism
t o w a r d music historiographies that obscure the deep connections
among colonialism, slavery, or other forms of collective violence, and
the musical performances, representations, institutions, and material
culture that were arguably party to this violence. Genealogical dis-
course critique w o r k s to disclose the power relations that connect these
dimensions, i n the interest of producing more just histories. However, a
genealogical approach also requires vigilance i n relation to such w e l l -
meaning efforts, i n particular, against the p o w e r f u l compulsion for
discourse critique to return a reformed, b u t essentially undisturbed
Europe as the preferred subject and object of knowledge.
Genealogical discourse critique is often misunderstood as operating
in relation to a n e t w o r k of imaginative verbal representations, w h e n it
is clear f r o m Foucault's later writings that he regarded discourses as
provisional formations of authoritative statements that are performa-
tive, material events, always i n the midst of altering circumstances and
being altered i n t u r n . Recent analyses of colonial "discourses" have
41

tended to emphasize their constative over their performative and

w o r l d l y dimensions - highlighting the " s a i d " over the " s a y i n g " (or
acting) of discourse. This has resulted i n an overemphasis on detailing
representations of the colonies and colonial subjects at the expense of
considering h o w colonial knowledge and culture affected the circum-
stances i n w h i c h colonialism could operate, and vice versa. Privileging
the analysis of representations accords suspiciously w e l l w i t h old
" N e w C r i t i c a l " methods and their latter-day, n a r r o w l y hermeneutical
descendents, whose sturd y institutional prestige probably accounts
for the readiness w i t h w h i c h a moderated version of Foucauldian dis-
course critique entered the methodological lingua franca of the A m e r i -
can humanities b y the 1980s. The widespread habit of reducing
42

discourse critique to an analysis of representations or idioms may also

respond to E d w a r d Said's practice (though not his declared aim) in

19
 Native American Song

Orientalism, whose influence on colonial discourse studies can hardly

be overstated. Said himself pointed to Foucauldian discursive pro-
cesses as key to understanding the "enormously systematic discipline
by which European culture was able to manage - and even produce -
the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientific-
ally, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment p e r i o d . " Said43

thus proposed something very much i n the spirit of Foucault's demand

that we link knowledge production w i t h material or w o r l d l y power;
yet it has often been pointed out that Said's analysis tended to empha-
size a narrowly critical engagement w i t h individual authors and canon-
ical works, at the expense of a more pluralist and multidirectional
understanding of colonial power i n orientalist discourse.
Recent music scholarship on colonialism, orientalism, or exoticism
has relied almost exclusively on Said's writings, w i t h hardly a gesture
toward later, arguably more challenging w o r k i n postcolonial studies. 44

Musicological studies, i n particular, have emphasized that aspect of

Said's scholarship that is most amenable to adaptation as a minimally
contextual close critical analysis of notated musical scores. This study
too is indebted to Said's critique of colonial violence i n literature,
music, and the arts, but i t also presses music historians to engage w i t h
colonial legacies beyond the relative security of musical "texts" under-
stood as representing, mimicking, or alluding to a legible colonial dif-
ference. I address this i n detail below, but for now w i l l simply note that
subaltern difference is not available as such for music hermeneutical or
critical interpretation, because these methods address explicit or
implicit meanings embedded i n musical texts treated as provisionally
stable. The "quite other" is unwelcome and incomprehensible i n colo-
nial situations of dominance, and, for this reason, it is unlikely that she
would appear as a legible exotic figure or gesture i n Europe-identified
musical works, especially those produced i n colonial situations. As a
rule, radical difference is excluded from authorized cultural forms of
colonizing societies, including those works or performances that pur-
port to represent colonial difference as "exoticism." A s I have argued,
such musical events are nonetheless shaped by a subalternity that dis-
turbs their representation or mimicry.
Foucauldian discourse critique, i n its fullest sense, can help us recog-
nize the relevance of colonial relations for the history of Europe's music
cultures, yet it is not, in itself, sufficient. Foucault's o w n w o r k has
been criticized by postcolonial theorists for its failure to h i g h l i g h t the
formative role of European imperialism in the discursive configura-
tions described in works like The Order of Things, Madness and Cixrili-
zation, Discipline and Punish, or The History of Sexuality (this in spite of
evidence that Foucault's thinking of "otherness" in The Archaeology of
Knowledge was fundamentally reshaped by the years he spent i n Tunisia,

20
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

from 1966 to 1968, witnessing firsthand the legacy of French colon-

ization). For all their considerable insight into the contingency of
European and social, cultural, and disciplinary formations, Foucault's
writings are, as Robert J. C. Young remarks, "scrupulously eurocen¬
tric," and there is a palpable sense of imperialism and colonial dis-
course as silent agents of the discursive "positivities" he describes. 46

Scholars associated w i t h the Subaltern Studies group have been particu-

larly cogent i n their criticism of this aspect of Foucault's w r i t i n g s ,
even as Foucault's analysis of the power/knowledge nexus has
been undeniably productive for postcolonial theory. For example,
47

Gayatri Spivak points to a moment i n Power/Knowledge w h e n Foucault

analyzes, i n his words, the emergence i n the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries of "a new mechanism of p o w e r " that "is more depend-
ent u p o n bodies and what they do than the Earth and its p r o d u c t s . " 48

Spivak notes that Foucault's analysis avoids the critical fact that
this n e w mode of production "is secured by means of territorial impe-
rialism - the Earth and its products - 'elsewhere'." Here, too, coloni-
zation is displaced b y more manageable scenes of differentiation,
and the exercise of colonial power is either absent or is figured other-
wise, i n the subjugation of Europe's internal subalterns. As Spivak
remarks,

sometimes it seems as if the very brilliance of Foucault's analysis of the cen-

turies of European imperialism produces a miniature version of that heteroge-
neous phenomenon: management of space - but by doctors; development of
administrations - but in asylums; considerations of the periphery - but i n terms
of the insane, prisoners, and children. The clinic, the asylum, the prison, the
university - all seem to be screen-allegories that foreclose a reading of the
broader narratives of imperialism. 49

Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy have offered p o w e r f u l per-

spectives f r o m w h i c h to mark the contingency of western modernity
in relation to what Spivak terms the "strange guardians" at its mar-
g i n s . Yet Foucault's own writings tend to turn back from a more
50

radically oppositional postcolonial perspective that w o u l d identif y

colonization and its discourses as founding conditions for the opera-
tion of western reason. Though Foucault acknowledges that "ethnol-
ogy . . . is situated w i t h i n the particular relation that the western ratio
establishes w i t h all other cultures" and, further, that ethnology always
addresses itself "to that w h i c h constitutes [man's] outer l i m i t s , " he
disavows the enabling condition of colonial domination: "Obviously,
this does not mean that the colonizing situation is indispensable to
ethnology." 51

W i t h such disquieting slips, Foucauldian discourse critique reinsti-

rutes "Europe" as a self-identical subject of history (or ethnology), even
as i t aims at showing its contingency. In m y view this conservative

21
 Native American Song

tendency i n Foucault's w r i t i n g does not necessarily disable the radical

potential of his mature critique. Moments of silence or d i s a v o w a l i n
regard to colonialism open Foucault's writings themselves to a c r i t i q u e
that deconstructs their limits i n the hope of better realizing their critical
potential. While postcolonial music studies cannot adopt Foucauldian
methods or epistemic analyses w i t h o u t addressing their disregard of
colonialism (and music), neither can we really dispense w i t h the
nuanced genealogy of Europe that Foucault and other l i k e - m i n d e d
theorists have produced f r o m its margins, i n a more general sense of
marginality. I n m y view, such genealogies are a necessary s u p p l e m e nt
to musicology's histories and analyses of early modern music, because
these w i l l tend to return an undifferentiated subject of Europe w i t h o u t
the distance permitted b y cultural theory or alternative f o r m s of
memory,
Musicologists have, of course, engaged a number of the questions I
have raised here, and the existing body of research o n colonial matters
provides a foundation for future w o r k i n this area. I n the final section I
address some of the strengths and weaknesses of this research, a n d I
conclude by setting out some methodological directions that the f o l -
lowing chapters try to implement,

Colonial difference and music history

In recent years there has been a welcome resurgence of interest a m o n g

music scholars i n the music repertories and institutions that g r e w o u t
of Europe's, and particularly Spain's, early colonization of the Americas.
Building on Robert Stevenson's foundational writings on m u s i c i n
the Americas, most musicological scholarship that deals w i t h early
52

European colonialism has taken one of t w o approaches: focusing either

on European-influenced music performed i n the colonies, or o n
European representations, imitations, or evocations of i n d i g e n o u s
American music, including exoticism. The present study has bene-
53

fited greatly from this body of w o r k and seeks to contribute to i t . Yet

this scholarship, much of it admirable i n other respects, has persistently
tended to ascribe historical agency exclusively to Europe and E u r o p e an
(usually elite, Christian, and male) subjects. This disciplinary habit,
which is itself a legacy of European colonial ideologies, has l i m i t e d
the apparent relevance of colonialism and the colonies for E u r o p e a n
music history by continually reiterating the contradictory g r o u n d
of Europe's self-sufficiency and difference from its colonial "else-
wheres." Early music scholarship's conservation of a coherent
54

European cultural identity has thus quietly but p o w e r f u l l y l i m i t e d

the kinds of questions that can reasonably be asked concerning e a r l y
colonialism and renaissance and baroque music.

22
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

As one example of h o w this happens, I w o u l d point to a contribution

("Music in New Worlds") b y Victor Coelho i n the recent Cambridge
History of Seventeenth-Century Music, Coelho's study addresses "musical
repertories and their contexts" i n European colonial missionary and
trade networks, and he presents as a case study the export and devel-
opment of European music i n the Portuguese colony of Goa, on the
western coast of I n d i a . Coelho's chapter is i n general a compel-
55

ling contribution to our knowledge of music in European colonial

situations, but i t is limited by certain ideological assumptions that
undermine its ability to challenge a Eurocentric approach to, i n this
case, Goanese or Portuguese music histories. I n one example, near the
beginning of the chapter Coelho champions, i n his w o r d s , the " f u n d a -
mental" importance of "documentary and source studies," including
archival research, for w o r k on music i n European colonialism (p. 89).
This is uncontroversial, i n a sense, as few w o u l d deny the necessity of
good archival and editorial w o rk that makes colonial musical sources
available. The problem arises inasmuch as documentary and source
studies are made to appear as ends i n themselves, to the exclusion of
other, more politically engaged problems, questions, and methods. It is
not necessary to rehearse here arguments dismantling the certainty,
objectivity, and political neutrality claimed b y even moderated neo-
positivisms, which Coelho himself addresses (p. 90). Rather, I want to
emphasize a more challenging (and unacknowledged) point, that the
absence of a skeptical, transculturalfy literate, a n d interventionist
approach to colonial sources w i l l , as if by default, reinstate " E u r o p e "
as the subject and object of the knowledge musicologists produce, even
if we restrict ourselves to the seemingly neutral w o r k of chronicling
the histories of colonial documents, repertories, performances, or
institutions.
I n a brief discussion of postcolonial historiography, Coelho acknow-
ledges the dominance of "Europe" as musicology's preferred object and
assumed subject position, but his methodological response and its
working out i n the b o d y of the chapter does not really challenge this.
Though he rightly denounces, w i t h Chakrabarty, the nonreciprocal
mandate that historians of postcolonial groups or regions be conver-
sant in European history (but not the other w a y around), Coelho blunts
the edge of Chakrabarty's critique w h e n he concludes that " I n d i a n
history, when filtered through a Western genre of history . . . is b u t a
variation on a master European narrative" (pp. 90-1). This is far too
reductive. A m o n g other things, i t forgets that European "master nar-
ratives," including those of music, were forged i n the crucible of early
modem colonialism and slavery and that they never lose this doubled
origin - the debt of their belonging both "here" an d "there." Positing
postcolonial histories as simply derivative f r o m colonial epistemologies

23
 Native American Song

and ideologies repeats the ideological fiction of "Europe" as something

still dominant, independent, and whole. We cannot afford to grant this,
nor that a Eurocentric historiography of postcolonial cultures (or of
colonial pasts) may, i n Coelho's words, "be inevitable, given that it is
difficult to present any f o r m of history as we understand the term
without some recourse to Western structures of historical thought"
(p. 91). The tacit appeal here to a native oppositional perspective pure
of all colonial "taint" w o u l d counter a self-identical European subject
of history w i t h its mirror image: a postcolonial subject desired as
authentic, articulate, and untainted by the colonial past and its legacy.
If this were the only recourse against a neocolonial historiography, the
prospects for a postcolonial music history w o u l d indeed be g r i m .
The problem is not just one of method, but also of historical sources
that seem to be, as Coelho observes, "inescapably prejudiced and Euro-
centric" (p. 91). For example, travelers' and missionaries' accounts of
performance i n indigenous communities are often abtisive or demon-
strate ignorance of what they describe. These sources' participation in
56

colonial ideologies nevertheless extends beyond their misrepresenta-

tion or "prejudice," whose violence, it is often implied, could have been
mitigated through better representations or more accurate knowledge.
Sympathetic and contextually accurate representations of native American
performance d i d sometimes occur, especially i n later ethnological
accounts of indigenous singing or instrumental performance. Yet nei-
ther ethnological nor other kinds of colonial w r i t i n g are ideologically
neutral because they get the details right or adopt a sympathetic
approach. This is because what is at issue vis-a-vis these sources' rela-
tion to colonial violence is not primarily their representational content
or tone per se, but rather their activity toward and response to a musi-
cal difference of the colonies that involves the knowledge they produce
in unstable colonial and neocolonial power relations.
Musicologists w i l l perhaps most readily recognize the political effi-
cacy of music manuscripts, prints, and instruments that crossed the
Atlantic, since many were involved in colonial performances that were
aimed at conversion, education, and other kinds of enforced accultura-
tion, Exoticist compositions too were active i n shaping colonial rela-
tions, by confirming or altering social and political ideologies.
However, the involvement of these sources i n colonial situations
opened them i n turn to a subalternity whose diachrony disturbed the
colonizers' organization of temporal, spatial, and, of course, power
relations. Diachrony i n its general sense inheres in the historicism of
all musical discourse or performance; but the " t i m e - l a g " proper to
music and music discourses i n colonial situations is distinctive and
radical, i n that they span the uncanny time-distance between the
European metropolis and the colony. This presents an obstacle to the

24
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

narrative ordering of European music history, as musical "events" and

their "enunciation" appear to fracture across "the temporal difference
of the colonial space." For example, the conservative style of much
57

Latin American cathedral music through the end of the eighteenth

century is a point of non-contemporaneity, or "time-lag," for the chro-
nology of progressive style change i n European music history. Baroque
music scholarship still often treats colonial Latin America as, at best, a
backwater of European music history. However, w e m i g h t consider
whether apparent anachronisms, such as the presence of works b y
Morales and Palestrina i n a Guatemalan cathedral manuscript recopied
repeatedly up to 1760, point to a diachronic delay between the musical
"event" - its composition, publication, or performance - and its colo-
nial "enunciation" - its transmission, subsequent performances, or
reception. " If we suspend the ideological assumption that music his-
5

torical progress in Europe was essentially independent of musical

events in the colonies, then we have to account for the disturbance that
an eighteenth-century performance of a Palestrina mass b y Maya and
Ladino musicians i n a Guatemalan parish church generates vis-a-vis
our received idea of a "Palestrina mass," which is routinely abstracted
away from such local, colonial situations (or "enunciations"). 59

How might music historical narratives change if colonial "outposts"

of European musical activity were understood not as diversions from
the "real" flow of music historical events i n Europe, b u t as an eddying
and rebounding of that flow that turned back a continuous music his-
torical time, and w i t h i t a coherent cultural entity k n o w n as "Europe"
(or "Spain," "France," or "England")? A t the least, it undermines the
plausibility of a European musical past innocent of colonialism, recog-
nizing this as a strategic amnesia. I t also forces the question of the
interestedness of academic musicology in repeating this forgetfulness.
The present of musicology is still one i n which the discipline's genea-
logical relation to colonialism is nearly unthinkable (at least w i t h i n the
discipline). Due to a florescence of w o r k from the 1990s onward on
exoticism i n western music, it is n o w widely acknowledged that at
least some European or Euro-diasporic music was influenced by colo-
nialist and racist ideologies. However, i n the absence of an identifying
marker of the "colonial " or "racial" i n Euro-identified classical music,
the default assumption has been a play of the same, w i t h conflict and
difference presumed to arise from relations "internal" to Europe or the
west. Yet both " m u s i c " and "musicology" are deeply rooted i n colonial
ideologies and institutions, as Gary Tomlinson has shown i n a series of
studies on colonial topics. As Tomlinson notes, an idea of music arose
60

i n the eighteenth century that distinguished music f r o m language, but

posited their common link to w r i t i n g technologies. Music's difference
from a rationalized idea of language seemed to connect i t to the natural

25
 Native American Song

expressivity that speculative philosophers attributed to original human

vocality; yet its modernity - w h i c h Rousseau famously perceived i n its
literate harmony - also removed it f r o m its origins. Though Enlighten-
ment writers emphasized different aspects of this aporetic relationship
they commonly held that European music's literate modernity
removed it from their o w n and other peoples' "song" (or sometimes,
in cruder terms, "noise"), w h i c h could therefore seemed non-modern,
however this was valued. I n the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -
coinciding w i t h the height of European colonization - the relation
between "literate" (especially instrumental) and " o r a l " musics hard-
ened into an essentialized difference that was made to coincide ideo-
logically w i t h the absolute cultural and racial differences that Europeans
posited between themselves and colonial peoples. Tomlinson has also
pointed out that recognizably anthropological and historical approaches
to music date from the eighteenth century and flourished i n the later
high colonial period. This coincidence is more than suggestive, since,
among other connections, European institutions that organized the
production of music and knowledge about music spanned colonial
metropolises and the colonies themselves. Moreover, European histor-
iographies and anthropologies of music both cultivated a universalized
knowing subject whose knowledge was empowered by a spatio-cultural
or temporal distance from tine "music" or "song" under consideration. 61

This combined legacy of western ideologies and institutions of music

has tended to reinforce the fantasy of a unique, superior, and self-
determined Europe, whic h colonialism required. Tomlinson's call for
a postcolonial history of song or music is an effort to acknowledge this
genealogy and disrupt its continuing effects o n scholarship. While his
62

writing on early colonial topics has much i n common w i t h other music-

ological work i n this area (a shared debt to Robert Stevenson's schol-
arship is one point of contact), his poststructuralist approach is a
departure from historiographies that assume the enduring legibility
of European music performance, notation, and discourse, even i n col-
onial situations. With its attention to the "stark, inaccessible otherness"
of the pasts that postcolonial history tries to comprehend, Tomlinson's
historiography attempts to remain vigilant t o w a r d its o w n desire to
translate the difference of colonial pasts into good historical k n o w -
ledge, even i n the service of progressive aims. This critical orientation
is called for in any historiographical situation involving, i n Tomlinson's
words, "a dialogue of complementary comprehension and mystification,
of knowledge at once full and thwarted. " However, special conditions
pertain when we address "an overtly colonial encounter," in w h i c h case

this colloquy between historian and past other is not the only prominent dia-
logue. It is entangled with another one, the one between past actors themselves.

26
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

between conquerors and conquered, between colonizers and colonized. In this

dialogue, too, masterful knowledge of others and others' evasion of knowing
mastery stand in productive and tense proximity.

The postcolonial historiography evoked here operates i n an openly

compromised, "dialogical" relationship to colonial pasts that are them-
selves encountered as an in-progress dialogue between "colonizers and
colonized." 63

The diachrony involved i n colonial relations and i n postcolonial

memory differentiates historical knowledge, i n Derrida's sense oidiffe-
rance. Tomlinson's historiography as well as, clearly, m y o w n are
engaged in a Derridean effort to bring this differentiation into view
wherever possible, that is, up to the limits of the impossible. The 64

critique of limits that is involved i n these efforts has been inaccurately

identified as nihilism, solipsism, or a blithe relativism, charges that are
frequently levied at Derrida's work as well. A full consideration of this
reception i n musicology is outside the scope of my argument here, so I
w i l l simply note that these charges mistake an acknowledgment of past
violence and the strong potential for its renewal - whether in forms of
memory or in other human relations - for a certain prognosis of its
repetition. It is true that such certainty w i t h regard to the future, were
that possible, w o u l d be cause for despair. On the contrary, the strength
of poststructuralist approaches, at their best, is what I take to be their
passionate and profoundly hopeful orientation toward the singularity
of a future that is not yet possible, but that opens the present to what is
unforeseen. Paradoxically, this future-orientation involves a respon-
siveness to the indeterminacy of the past, a situation that those w h o
engage in performance w i l l already have experienced.
The problem of colonial difference that is active i n histories of music
is also at issue i n the w o r k of historical criticism, or musical hermeneu-
tics. I noted above that "exoticism" has served as a dominant heuristic
permitting the critical apprehension of colonialist or racist ideologies in
"western" music. Studies of exoticism owe their existence in large part
to a movement in the last two decades to document the ideological
power of musical stylistic difference coded as femininity, queerness,
blackness, foreignness, and so forth. This ideological criticism was a
vital catalyst for the "new musicology" of the 1980s and 1990s, and it-
has for the most part resembled minority history, i n that it has overtly
sought to expand the range of what can reasonably be addressed in
musicology. Though the approach that I am advocating is in keeping
w i t h this movement, since it is partly concerned w i t h colonial diffe-
rence as figured in music and as represented i n music discourses, I am
also asking us to acknowledge the contingency of these figures of dif-
ference - which are at least minimally palatable - i n relation to other,

27
 Native American Song

subaltern orders of meaning, which b y definition are not present and

available for critical scrutiny. Music historians w i l l and should continue
the work of minority history, b y engaging w i t h difference as it is fig-
ured in music and its discourses; but, again, w e w i l l find ourselves
reinstating a disturbed b u t still dominant "Europe" i f we shy away
from deconstructive questions that can potentially interrupt its return.
Frankly speaking, if we limit our histories to what was or could plau-
sibly have been composed, performed, written, or heard b y colonial
music cultures, then we are tacitly agreeing to abide by their interested
and compromised conditions. W i t h respect to the music of a colonizing
society, this predisposes our histories to perpetuate neocolonial ideol-
ogies i n the present. This is even so i n relation to figures of difference
that seem to us to seriously disrupt the business-as-usual of dominant
musical or discursive processes. We fail i n some respect if w e forget to
remember that, for all their disruptive potential, these figures w i l l have
colluded in the impossibility of other performances, other representa-
tions. I n the music of colonizing societies, colonial subalternity w i l l
occupy this limit.
Subaltern relations that attest to colonial violence are active, but
absent i n music and its discourses, and for this reason they do not
constitute an explicit representation, mimicry, allusion, or evocation.
The pressure of the quite-other w i l l thus tend to evade interpretation or
conceptualization. It may be that some experiences of music i n per-
formance can accommodate the approach of a drastic alterity that is
already, i n Bhabha's words, " o u t of control," b u t criticism, much less
history, rarely addresses itself to such evanescence. N o r am I convinced
that it can, except perhaps i n a comparably performative mode, which I
explore by way of conclusion.
Ethical philosopher Edith Wyschogrod has urged historians to adapt
methods explored in postmodern fiction, whereby "the alterity of the
other can be made thematic without actually appearing": " b y bringing
forth the silences of the other rather than by forcing silence into speech,
by devising strategies of encounter that simultaneously attest and pre-
serve that silence." I wonder if we might f i n d ways of adapting
65

Wyschogrod's strategies to music history and criticism. Encounter is

of course risky, going beyond " w h a t was" toward " w h a t m i g h t have
been," or even "what w i l l have been." Such performative encounters
w i l l also likely involve the ethical call of " w h a t ought not to have
been." I n regard to criticism, we might ask, w i t h Wyschogrod, whether
it is possible to somehow elicit the "unbreachable difference" of the
"present of the" music, "the past it brings to light, and the conditions of
its production," which here include the conquest of other persons, or
the dominating knowledge or mimicry of their music. This w o u l d
involve writing of musical specifics or even the singularities of

28
 On colonial difference and musical frontiers

performances, b u t b y engaging also w i t h what is n ot quite there, w h i c h

is strange: perhaps the before of a gesture, or its foreclosed possibil-
ities. It m i g h t involve a l l o w i n g difference as f i g u r e d i n music to
encounter and rebound on self-identity that is f i g u r e d or, more often,
simply is, as a w a y of b r i n g i n g to light their relation and hinting at
what is impossible by virtue of their relation. Above a l l , t h o u g h, a postco-
lonial criticism w o u l d remain aware of w h a t i t cannot do, w h i c h is
make an alterity that is radical reveal its meaning as a recognizable
presence.
Wyschogrod recalls the words of an imprisoned Aztec priest i n Borges's
story, "The W r i t i n g of the G o d , " as a parable illustrating the hopeful
disturbance of a history that tries to accommodate a silence i t cannot
control, r e w o r k i n g language as intervention. In the story, the priest is
imprisoned along w i t h a tigre (or jaguar) w h o m he can glimpse over a
w a l l that separates them. The tigre's skin is marked w i t h a formula that,
if spoken, w o u l d make the priest omnipotent and free, w o u l d restore
his religion, and w o u l d r i d his w o r l d of the conquistadores. But the priest
remains silent, saying only,

Long years I devoted to learning the order and arrangement of the spots on the
tiger's skin ... More than once I cried out to the vault above that it was impos-
sible to decipher that text. Gradually, I came to be tormented less by the con-
crete enigma that occupied my mind than by the generic enigma of a message
written by a god. 66

We are not priests, of course, and for the " g o d " of Borges's parable we
should understand not the fullness of a noumenal presence, but an
otherness that turns back music historical, anthropological, or herme-
neutic w r i t i n g as and at its frontiers. N o r am I advocating a pious
silence: as Derrida reminds us, "there is no responsibility that is not
the experience and experiment of the impossible." Rather, Borges's
67

priest models a possibility of crafting encounters through w h i c h

silences, hybridities, or incommensurate processes m a y attest to the
nearness of another, w h o m it is beyond our power to make speak in
a c o m m o n language.
A n example f r o m the French travel literature w i l l illustrate h o w this
m i g h t w o r k i n relation to colonial texts or performances. The following
passage is f r o m the Jesuit missionary Paul le Jeune's Relation of 1634,
w r i t t e n to his superiors i n Paris f r o m the mission house i n Quebec. It
appears i n the m i d s t of a long chapter on the "beliefs, superstitions, and
errors of the Montagnais [Labrador Innu] savages." Le Jeune writes,
On the twenty-fourth of November, the Sorcerer assembled the Savages, and
entrenched himself with some robes and blankets in one quarter of the Cabin,
so that neither he nor his companions could be seen. There was a woman with
them, u>ho marked on a triangular stick, half a spear in length, all the songs they recited.

29
 Native American Song

I begged a woman to tell me what they were doing in this enclosure, and she
answered me that they were praying; but I believe she responded to me in this
way because, when I prayed and they asked me what I was doing, I told them,
"Nata'iamihiau missi ca Khichitat," " I am praying to him who made all things;"
and so when they sang, when they howled, beating their drums and their
sticks, they told me that they were making prayers, without being able to explain to
me to whom they were addressed. The renegade told me that this superstitious rite,
which lasted more than five hours, was performed for a dead person; but, as he
lies oftener than he tells the truth, I give it for what it is. They call this superstition
"Ouechibouan." After these long orisons, the Sorcerer gave the pattern of a
little sack, cut in the form of a leg, to a woman, to make one of leather. This she
filled, I thought, with Beaver hair, for I felt the leg and it seemed to me to be
supple and full of fine hair. I asked often what it was, and why they made this little
crooked sack, bid they never told me. I only know that they call it "Manitoukathi";
meaning, leg of the Manitou, or of the Devil; for a long time it was hung in the
Cabin, at the place where the Sorcerer was seated; afterward, it was given to a
young man to wear hung from his neck. It was one of the accompaniments of
these long prayers, which I have just described; but 1 have not been able to find out
for what purpose it was used (my emphasis). 68

Among many notable aspects of this account is the presence i n the

ritual scene, and in the scene of colonial w r i t i n g , of another writer in
addition to le Jeune. Unlike the Jesuit, the unnamed I n n u w o m a n w h o
marked the passage of songs on a stick was probably an initiate of the
rite in progress. In the context of the missionary's account, the Innu
woman's music writing clearly wields an authority that outstrips his
o w n , and her appearance i n the course of description sounds an anx-
ious note that resonates throughout the passage. The Jesuit's authority
as a writer in this setting is insecure, as is clear f r o m his account of the
Innu initiates' repeated refusal to share sacred knowledge w i t h h i m .
His presence was apparently tolerated i n the ritual space, but his par-
ticipation was deliberately limited, though at least one of the partici-
pants seems to have translated the goings-on into terms that he could
understand: "prayer." If the people deflected his questions, his out-
sider status undoubtedly played a role, but he was also probably ask-
ing the wrong questions. The Jesuit's w r i t i n g is devoted to describing,
evaluating, and attempting to explain sacred ritual elements and
actions, from a perspective that assumes a right and ability to know
w i t h certainty, and his questions reflect his ambitions. By contrast, the
Innu woman's writin g may have served a mnemonic purpose, perhaps
as a material nexus linking the manitou agency of singing to the w o r l d
of the people. Whatever its specific role, it seems, at the very least, to
have been integral to the performance of the songs and other actions of
the ouechibouan ritual. In this context, the Jesuit's f o r m of music w r i t i n g ,
which aimed at abstracting the ouechibouan songs as meaning, was itself
alien and, apparently, unwelcome.

30
 0)1 colonial difference and musical frontiers

We may provisionally animate the Innu initiate as an imagined

reader of European colonial texts and performances, w i t h respect for
what that encounter w i l l not disclose. We may likewise invite the
figures of the I n n u and Jesuit writers as mutually (though differently)
resistant readers of the chapters that follow, w i t h the same caveat. What
is held in reserve as and at the frontiers of colonial " m u s i c , " and what
deflects our interested address from the present is beyond the ability of
this writer to say. But what may be possible, as a beginning, is an
orientation of our writings toward these figures of the undecidable,
as troubled and troubling ancestors w h o made this text possible, and
as those who witness and judge i n turn from its margins.

31
 NOTES

Preface
1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histor-
ical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 93.
2. Ruth A. Solie, "Changing the Subject," Current Musicology 53 (1943): 55-65.

Chapter 1. O n colonial difference and musical frontiers:

directions f o r a postcolonial musicology

1. As in the engravings for the 1593 edition of Jean de Lery's Histoire d'un
Voyagefaict en la terre du Bresil (1578), issued as part 3 of Historiae americanae
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Theodor de Bry, 1593).
2. On early modern poetics and politics of blackness, see Philip D. Beidler
and Gary Taylor, eds., Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieiml
through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Kim E. Hall, Things
of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Margo Hendricks and Patricia
Parker, eds„ Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994).
3. Douglas Alton Smith, " A Brief History of the Lute as Cultural Symbol," in
Philippe Canguilhem el ah, eds., Luths et luthistet en Occident (Parts: Cite de
la musique, 1999), 43-50.
4. See Marie-Francoise Christout, Le ballet de cour an XVlle Steele (Geneva:
Editions Minkoff, 1987), 76, 79, 89.
5. Album Rabel Daniel, Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des dessins, Inv. 32619, 32625,
32632, 32637, and 32641.
6. For this identification see Ange Beijer, "Une rnaquette de decor recernmont
retrouvee pour le 'Ballet de la Prosperity des armes de France' (1641):
etude sur la mise en scene au Palais Cardinal avant I'arriveo de Torclli,"
in JeanJacquot,ed., he lieu theatral a la renaissance (Paris: Editions du centre
national de la recherche scientifique, 1964), 377-404.
7. Louvre, Paris, Baron Edmond de Rothschild Collection, Inv. 2800 d. R.,
2865 d. R., and 2866 d. R. A drawing elsewhere in the collection (Inv.
2948 d. R.) groups the figures seated on a snail and an ostrich (Inv. 2800
d. R. and 2865 d. R.) together with the figure seated on an alligator (Inv.
2161 d. R.), indicating a firm connection among at least these three designs.
8. Renaissance translations and reinterpretations of Neoplatonic philosophy
fueled much, though not all European speculative thought on music

222
 Notes to pages 4-10

through the end of the seventeenth century. See Gary Tomlinson, Music
in Renaissance Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and
Penelope Gouk, Music, Science, and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). For a discussion of
Neoplatonism in French royal symbolism, see Robert M. Isherwood, Music
in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY, and
London: Cornell University Press, 1973), 1-54.
9. See Douglas Alton Smith, A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renais-
sance (n.p.: The Lute Society of America, 2002); and Matthew Spring, The
Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and its Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001).
10. Smith, A History of the Lute, 26, 27.
11. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 157,
162.
12. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn (New York: Verso,
1991/2003).
13. Medievalists' adaptation of postcolonial theory has yielded a growing
literature on the medieval as a postcolonial period. See Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen, Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000);
Margaret R. Greet and John Dagenais, eds., Decolonizing the Middle Ages,
Special volume of the journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000);
Bruce Holsinger, "Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies and the Geneal-
ogies of Critique," Speculum 77 (2002): 1195-227; and Ananya Jahanara
Kabir, ed., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating
Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
14. Thomas J. Mathieson, Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiq-
uity ami the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
15. Frangiis de Grenaille, Les Plaisirs des dames (Paris: Gervais Clousier, 1641),
298. Cited in David Ledbetter, Harpsichord and Lute Music in Seventeenth-
Century France (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1987), 8, 146n87. English translation adapted from Ledbetter.
16. See Tlw Burwell Lute Tutor, ed. Leslie Hewitt (Leeds, UK: Boethius, 1974);
and Thurston Dart, "Miss Mary Burwell's Instruction Book for the Lute,"
Galpin Society lournal 11 (1958): 3-62.
17. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing beyond Recognition (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
18. The most influential studies of difference as figured i n music and its dis-
courses include Jonathan Bellman, ed., The Exotic in Western Music (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998); Georgina Born and David Hesmond-
halgh, eds.. Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appro-
priation in Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2000); Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Susan McClary, Feminine
Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Susan McClary,
Georges Bizet, Carmen, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992); and Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).

223
 Notes to pages 11-15

19. Gayatri Spivak, " A Moral Dilemma," in Howard Marchitello, ed., What
Happens to History (New York and London: Routledge, 2001) 215-36.
20. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 98-9.
21. Ibid., 101,105.
22. The Burwell Lute Tutor, 2v.
23. I am not referring to the dialectic of synchrony and diachrony familiar
from objectivist historiographies of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, but to the poststructuralist idea of diachrony developed espe-
cially by Althusser, Derrida, and Levinas, and adapted by postcolonial
theorists such as Bhabha. See Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies, 2nd
edn (New York: Routledge, 2002), 15-31 and 75-104. I am grateful to
Tamara Levitz for reminding me of the particular debt that this argument
owes to Jacques Derrida's "haunrology," in Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
24. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 9.
25. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: Hoiv Anthropology Makes its Object
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
26. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 310.
27. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 12.
28. See, for example, Mary Keller, The Hammer and the Flu te: Women, Pmver, and
Spirit Possession (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002);
and Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American
Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
29. Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).
30. Suzanne Cusick, "Dancing with the (In)grate," in Todd M. Borgerding, ed..
Gender and Sexuality in Early Music (New York: Routledge, 2002), 283-8;
Suzanne Cusick, "Gender, Musicology, and Feminism," in Nicholas Cook
and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), 471-98; and Elisabeth Le Guin, Bocclwrini's Body: An Essay in Carnal
Musicology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2005). My use of "instrumental agency" is an adaptation of Keller's argu-
ment in The Hammer and the Flute, where she reconceives agency to accom-
modate the peculiar ontology of possessed women's bodies.
31. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 83.
32. Edith Wyschogrod's ethical thought is helpful here, especially her writing
on postmodern saintliness. Wyschogrod is generally concerned with the
problem of ethics after the "cataclysm," whose supreme recent example is
the technologically enabled mass extermination of human beings, in Saints
and Postmodernism, Wyschogrod denies that mysticism, transcendence, or
ecstasy are intrinsic to the figure of the saint, whose "radical altruism" she
reclaims for a postmodern ethics. Recuperating saintliness in the present is
not a nostalgic return to a premodem hagiographic discourse, "because
who in the century of mass-made death could attain ecstasy without amne-
sia?" (p. 252). Rather, it looks toward altruistic practices that emerge out of
an "excessive and w i l d " (p. 255) desire to relieve the suffering of another,
whose suffering is, however, "always greater than the intention that strives

224
 Notes to pages 15-22

to relieve i t " (p. 256). What is instructive here is Wyschogrod's nuanced

account of an ethical experience of singularity that resolves neither into
the pure negativity of absence nor the unrelieved positivity of presence.
Edith Wyschogrod, Sm'nfs and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially 34-9, 233-57.
33. Gary Tomlinson, "Unlearning the Aztec cantares (Preliminaries to a Post-
colonial History)," in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter
Stallybrass, eds., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 261-2.
34. Jorge Luis Borges, "John Wilkins' Analytical Language," in Selected Non-
Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999), 229-32,
35. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
2nd edn (New York: Pantheon, 1994), xvii-xviii.
36. Ibid., xix.
37. Ibid., 17-45.
38. On adaptations of the Orpheus myth, see John Warden, ed., Orpheus: The
Metamorphoses of a Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982).
39. See especially Bhabha's essay, "The Other Question," reprinted in The
Location of Culture, 66-84.
40. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon, 1972); Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Power, Know-
ledge," in Language, Counter-Memonj, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); and Foucault, The Order of
Things.
41. The best overview of Foucault's methodology remains Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Herme-
neutics, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
42. The main conduit for Foucauldian methods in musicology was Tomlin-
son's Mi/sic in Renaissance Magic, which pursued a discourse critique close
to Foucault's own, though adapted to music history.
43. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 3.
44. See many of the essays in Bellman, The Exotic in Western Music.
45. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993); and
Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2001), 395-410.
46. Robert J. C. Young, "Foucault on Race and Colonialism," New Formations
25 (1995): 57-65.
47. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "A Small History of Subaltern Studies," in Habitations
of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 2002), 3-19; and Young, Postcolonialism, 337-59.
48. Michel Foucault, Power[Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 104.
49. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 279.
50. Ibid., 176.
51. Foucault, The Order of Things, 377-9. Bhabha comments on this passage in
The Location of Culture, 192-7.
52. Robert M. Stevenson's prolific scholarly output in this area is too large to
detail in a single note. His most influential English-language writings on

225
 Notes to pages 22-5

American music include his Music in Aztec and inca Territories (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1968) and his numerous publica-
tions on colonial archival sources in Latin American cathedrals. Publica-
tions that are the most relevant for the subject of this study include Robert
M . Stevenson, "Written Sources for Indian Music until 1882," Ethnomusi-
cology 17:1 (1973): 1-40; Robert M. Stevenson, "English Sources for Indian
Music until 1882," Ethnomusicology 17:3 (1973): 399-42; and Robert M.
Stevenson, "American Tribal Musics at Contact," Inter-American Music
Review 14 (1994): 1-56.
53. See, for example, Victor Anand Coelho, "Music in New Worlds," in Tim
Carter and John Butt, eds., Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 88-110; David E. Craw-
ford, "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Early Sources for an Eth-
nography of Music among American Indians," Ethnomusicology 11 (1967):
199-206; John Koegel, "Spanish and French Mission Music in Colonial
North America," journal of the Royal Musical Association 126:1 (2001): 1-53;
Carol E. Robertson, Musical Repercussions of 1492 (Washington, IX":
Smithsonian Institution, 1992); and Ian Woodfield, English Musicians in
the Age of Exploration (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1995). I discuss Gary
Tomlinson's writings below.
54. See Stephen Feld, "A Sweet Lullaby for World Music," Public Culture 12:1
(2000): 145-71. Timothy D. Taylor discusses a related post- or neocolonial
"authenticity of positionality" in Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World
Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997), 21-8.
55. Coelho, "Music in New Worlds," 91.
56. For a general overview of the early travel literature, see Mary Baine Camp-
bell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Margaret Hogden, Anthropology in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1964); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American
Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982); and Gordon M . Sayre, Les Sauvages Americains:
Representations of Native Americans in French ami English Colonial Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
57. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 171-97, 236-56, here 244.
58. Robert J. Snow, ed., A New World Collection of Polyphony far Holy Week and
the Salve Service: Guatemala City, Cathedral Archive, Musk MS 4, Monuments
of Renaissance Music 9 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
59. Robert Stevenson, "European Music in 16th-century Guatemala," Musical
Quarterly 50:3 (1964): 341-52.
60. Gary Tomlinson, "Ideologies of Aztec Song," Journal of the American
Musicological Society 48 (1995): 343-79; Tomlinson, "Unlearning the A/tec
cantares; Gary Tomlinson, "Vico's Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno)
Musicology," Musical Quarterly 83 (1999): 344-77; Gary Tomlinson,
"Montaigne's Cannibals' Songs," repercussions 7-8 (1999-2000): 209-35;
and Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the Netu World: Indigenous Voices in
the Era of European Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

226
 Notes to pages 26-37

61. See Tomlinson," Vico's Songs"; and Gary Tomlinson, "Musicology, Anthro-
pology, History," in Martin Clayton et al., eds., The Cultural Study of Music
(New York: Routledge, 2003), 31-44.
62. Tomlinson, "Unlearning the Aztec cantares," 260-2.
63. Ibid., 261-2.
64. I am influenced here by Derrida's late writings on the impossible and John
Caputo's development of this work. For an introduction to this exchange,
see Mark Dooley, ed„ A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 21-49.
65. Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 32.
66. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Writing of the God," reprinted in The Aleph and
Other Stories, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 2000), 91. See
Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 32-3.
67. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans.
Pascale-Anne Braultand Michael B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1992), 44-45.
68. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleve-
land, OH: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901): 6:205-207. English translation
adapted from Thwaites. Hereafter cited as JR in notes.
69. See Spivak's method of reading by way of the "native informant," in A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 9, 33, 49, 50, and passim.

Chapter 2. Protestant imperialism and the metaphysics of

N e w W o r l d song

1. John Vicars, Gods Arke Overtopping the Worlds Waves (London: Printed by
M. Simons and J. Macock, 1645). As cited in Peter Le Huray, Music and the
Reformation in England, 1549-1660 (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1967), 54.
2. See Friedrich Blume, Protestant Church Music: A History, 2nd edn (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 507-74, 691-707; H. P. Clive, "The Calvinist
Attitude to Music and its Literary Aspects and Sources," Bibliotheque
d'Humanisme et Renaissance, Travaux et Documents 19 (1957): 80-102, 294¬
319; and 20 (1958): 79-107; Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England;
and Ruth M. Wilson, Anglican Chant and Chanting in England, Scotland, and
America 1660-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
3. Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-
Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press,
1999), 7.
4. See Crawford, "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents; Stevenson,
"American Tribal Musics at Contact"; and Victor Yellin, "Musical Activity
in Virginia before 1620," Journal of the American Musicological Society 22:2
(1969): 284-9.
5. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America
(Ithaca, NY, and London*. Cornell University Press, 2000), 41-76.
6. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Mary Thomas

227