Audible Geographies in Latin America:

Sounds of Race and Place Dylon Lamar

Robbins
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Audible Geographies
in Latin America

Sounds of Race and Place

Dylon Lamar Robbins

Audible Geographies in Latin America
 Dylon Lamar Robbins

Audible Geographies
in Latin America
Sounds of Race and Place
Dylon Lamar Robbins
Department of Spanish and Portuguese/Center
for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
(CLACS)
New York University
New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-10557-0 ISBN 978-3-030-10558-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10558-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966130

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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For PM, LA, FL, OB, SR
 Preface: As a Listener

As this is a book on sound, I should say something about myself as a

listener. There are a number of threads carried throughout the following
discussion that trace trajectories and suggest continuities between listeners
of different kinds, between mediations of different kinds, between places of
different kinds. Their shared criterion is that of difference. And across these
gaps and fissures, there are bridges and contacts of varying scale, the cir-
culation and dispersal of objects and ideas, or the simultaneity of a shared
experience, virtually or otherwise. Sound, or what was heard, is a question
that implies a listener in every case. And what I have heard or listened for
in different objects, whether through conjecture or as a matter of fact, has
transpired relationally, just as what I attempt to describe in these chapters is
a relationality that coalesces in the instance of listening, as a connection is
implied between the listener and the sounded.
Some record stores have been like libraries to me. And in those cases
when their owners were exceptionally distracted, or at least patient enough
with my unprofitable habits, I would spend a great deal of time passing
over their stock, almost always buying nothing. At times patient and thor-
ough, at others agitated and desultory, my fingers would rove over their jazz
records. The softly worn edges, protective plastic sleeves, grainy images, and
the occasional bold design all shaped my inadvertent encounters with each
record. Each one had begun its trajectory as mass merchandise and had now
seen its path narrowed toward that of an artifact, tempered with stains and
scratches, old price tags, promotional stamps, radio-station affiliations, the
hand-written names and notations of their former owners and users, and sig-
nificantly, their tracks marked and caked with the audible residue of their

vii
viii      Preface: As a Listener

uses. But it was the liner notes that set the pace for me on these occasions,
for the thought of listening without the accoutrements afforded textually,
as transcendentally stimulating and inviting as it could be, always felt more
complete with its contextualization. While consuming more liner notes than
records, I would check recording dates, personnel, composers, and venues. I
would savor the incidentally revealed idiosyncrasy, the tragic circumstance,
the scandalous anecdote. And in some of the larger stores, I would pass over
so many records that I could visit entire movements or periods in an after-
noon. On one of those visits, I encountered Mile Davis’ ESP (1965), which
is, after all, a very special record, for it inaugurates one of Miles’ most adven-
turous periods: his final departure from the standard repertoire, and the
beginning of his transition from the fully acoustic and harmonically sophis-
ticated to the electrified, funk-infused jams that would alienate some of his
fans while garnering him others. I was surprised and somewhat displeased
to find that the notes that I had grown to expect were missing from this
record, and in their place, I found a Cummingsesque hodgepodge of Miles’
song titles, authored apparently by jazz critic, journalist, and Rolling Stone
co-founder, Ralph J. Gleason. It was a gathering of upper and lower-case
letters bound by the full range of punctuation into a prosaic nonsense. My
afternoon’s exploration of pertinent facts and information had been inter-
rupted by a poem. My expectations, moreover, were being toyed with, (dec-
ades after the fact, even) and I recall looking down my nose at that record
with a quiet contempt for its whimsy and excess.
These disappointments were small in comparison to everything else
involved in that and other similar encounters. For it was in moments like
that one and in places like those—record stores, sebos, flea markets, yard
sales, trash heaps, or any other improvised and informal archives—that
many of the central questions premising this book began to take shape. To
be clear, this is not a book about Miles Davis or Jazz, nor about musical
avant-gardes, journalism, or the ambivalent exchanges between artists and
critics. It is, however, about sound and listening, and about the social inflec-
tions of the practices they involve and the different techniques and tech-
nologies that they entail for some listeners. Questions involving sound and
objects, listening and reading, inscription, reproduction, and transmission.
Questions that arise from the contours of the circuits of these objects and
their different placements in time, and thus, historical questions. Questions
concerning empire and coloniality. Questions that respond to territory and
topography, to migration and belonging. Questions emerging from the
diverse qualifications and intersections traversing instances of listening and
 Preface: As a Listener     ix

sounding, and how the convergence of all of these convene spectators and
listeners, readers and writers, as they interact with and are affected by each
other, and as they ask of us that we listen, possibly audio-visually, for “histo-
ries of [their] listening.”1
Despite these greater implications, my sense of listening has been gen-
erally guided by more practical concerns than speculative or philosophical
ones. It was in the midst of some of these record researches that I was joy-
fully engaged in playing saxophone with different groups in Austin, Texas
while studying physics and music. It was a class on wave motion and optics,
with the calm, monk-like Melvin Oakes, that helped me recognize things
akin to sound evident just about everywhere, audible or not. There was a
type of listening that happened in those demonstrations, as well as in the
laboratory. And there was a listening that accompanied playing with groups
like East Babylon Symphony whose foundation was a familial one anchored
by the Baylon Jaceldo brothers—Eugene, Teodorico, Raymundo—and their
extended family of long-time friends playing compositions with Tagalog
titles fusing gamelan with Mingus and Ornette, berimbau with Afrobeat.
Their stretch of Manor Road was inhabited by so many other musicians,
and their living room could feel as much like a place of worship and study
as an impromptu crossroads of different places and sounds—sounds like
Barney Battista’s alto, Dwayne’s bass and humor, occasionally the drum-
mer Zarak Simmons, Lou Guerra on bass, or Ephraim Owens on trumpet.
There was also Hong Ting and her piano boldness, Curtis Williams’ trum-
pet, the occasional santiaguero guitar of Bobby Alemán, and the gentle spirit
of the late Idowu Adewale, whose bass and approach were shaped by playing
and recording with Fela Kuti (although he was humble and quiet about it).
There was the listening I experienced in a handful of quartets and quintets
with Alex Scott and Dave Wolf, in Javier León’s Afro-Caribbean ensemble,
and in the twenty-one-piece big bands comprised of other students from the
music department gathered to read and play compositions and arrangements
by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Tite Curet Alonso, Antonio Carlos
Jobim, Thad Jones, Charles Mingus, Sammy Nestico, Maria Schneider, and
Cheo Feliciano. Greg González, Adrián Quesada, and Beto Martínez helped
me hear tradition and innovation in their fusion of funk, rock, and cumbia,
for things like their imaginative theater accompaniment of a Pastorela. It was
in the midst of this, finally, that I came to think more carefully about sound
and film collaborating in the composition and live performance of musical
accompaniment to screenings of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with
Graham Reynolds and an expanded iteration of the Golden Arm Trio.
x      Preface: As a Listener

There was a special moment among several others that captures, I feel,
a sense of listening that I shall attempt to describe here. It happened on a
stage at the Ritz Upstairs in Austin, Texas, sometime probably in the fall
of 1999. I was playing tenor saxophone for a Latin soul fusion group, Blue
Construct, and somewhere amidst one of the tunes, while waiting to take
a solo, or maybe just after one, things fell into place in the rhythm section
in an exquisitely synchronous way. I do not think that it was anything that
I could see but, rather, something I could feel with what must have been
my entire body, a body given over to what I was hearing with my ears and
which managed to permeate, what felt like at least, the innermost reaches
of my being, displacing the sensation of anything else. I opened my eyes in
the midst of the intensity to look at Hamilton Price, the bass player, whose
sound was so low, round, and full, only to see him already looking at me
with a sense of open-mouthed elation. The keyboardist, Carl Settles, had his
head tilted downward, his eyes closed, his smile, calm and avuncular. And
the drummer, Lorenzo Dwayne Jackson, Jr. “D. Madness,” certainly had
his head tilted back, with his dark glasses aimed at the ceiling. He was like-
wise absorbed in that moment of collective ékstasis. We were all listening
together, each of us maybe hearing something different. It was a listening
that was meditative and all-encompassing, focused and intense, and it is one
whose possibility I have considered at different junctures in the following
pages, even when those sounds were not necessarily musical.
But the other side of that listening was an awareness of the differences in
the ways we may listen, and the roles of other senses and a greater sensorial
economy in shaping how one may sense, or not, sound. It is with this in
mind that I am compelled to recall here something I learned about listening
from D. Madness. It was again in his company, now on a different night, at
another venue, sometime after a set. We had opened for an out-of-town act,
and were lingering afterward to hear the next group. I was talking to him at
the bar, I recall, pressed by a crowd, when he told me his mom was supposed
to meet him there at the club that evening. If I may remember correctly,
my own memory plausibly shaped by ableism, he asked me to look out for
her. And with a tragically thoughtless sense of goodwill, I asked him—a
blind, expansively creative multi-instrumentalist in the spirit of a Rahsaan
Roland Kirk—I asked him what she looked like. So deeply embedded I was
in my ocularcentric ableism, that the implications of my asking a blind man
what his mom looked like took a few very long seconds to sink in. The look
on his face was justifiably his only response to me. It is a look that I still
remember, of course, an expression that struck me as disbelief, dismay, and
 Preface: As a Listener     xi

certainly disappointment with the unshakeable stability of my own vantage

point. It was my incapacity to perceive one of the most palpable and inflex-
ible of privileges shaping the places we navigated together—the privilege of
sight. This was a reality that my effusive apology could not rearrange or mol-
lify. And he deployed, as a listener, a facial expression that could commu-
nicate more to me at that moment, I believe, than could have any sound,
for it was his way of making it clear that, although blind, he knew very well
what it meant for me to see him at that moment. Despite all those shared
experiences, all that joyous musicking, all the sense(s) of convergence and
coincidence, we were and are all traversed by so many differences, indeed,
among them the possibility to see what you hear. Beyond the experience of
sensation, moreover, D. Madness helped me eventually understand through
his gesture the possibility of a sense-informed epistemology that one may
call upon independent of that sensation. And it is with this in mind that I
elaborate the following somewhat self-consciously with a critical vocabulary,
premises, and categories at times metaphorically or literally visual while at
others more carefully attuned to the audible. Despite a curiosity for and a
desire to engage a more phonocentric episteme in the subsequent pages, I do
so from and within an insurmountably audio-visual framework.

New York, USA Dylon Lamar Robbins

Note
1. Feld, Stephen, “Acoustemology,” in Keywords in Sound, David Novak and
Matt Sakakeeny, editors, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015,
p. 15.
 Acknowledgements

This did not happen on its own, and much of what is here is so for the
generosity of others. The guidance and feedback, early on, of Arcadio Díaz
Quiñones, Pedro Meira Monteiro, and Gabriela Nouzeilles was invaluable in
the long-term development of the manuscript as they nudged it in different
directions at key junctures. A number of other interlocutors have chimed
in along the way with support and insights, including especially Beatriz
González Stephan, Adela Pineda Franco, Julio Ramos, and Marta Peixoto.
There were two great homes for me during the course of this work, and I
feel especially fortunate for the imaginative and unflagging support of my col-
leagues at New York University in The Department of Spanish and Portuguese
and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). They
have given generous amounts of space and time, advice and solutions, research
support and care. The timely recommendations of Marta Peixoto, Sybille
Fischer, Jill Meredith Lane, and Jordana Mendelson have made this a bet-
ter book. Two great chairs and a fantastic director piloted things seamlessly
throughout: first Gigi Dopico, and second, Jo Labanyi, with Jill Meredith Lane
directing, guiding, and nudging from day one. Helpful feedback in the devel-
opment of the manuscript and input regarding materials was offered by Shaun
Vigil, Glenn Ramirez, and two anonymous reviewers at Palgrave, as well as by
Alejandra Bronfman, Barbara Browning, Barbara Weinstein, Faye Ginsburg,
Mary Louise Pratt, Jens Andermann, Sarah Pearce, Zeb Tortorici, Laura Torres
Rodríguez, Marta Aponte Alsina, Aurea María Sotomayor Miletti, Ana Lydia
Vega, Otávio Schipper, Sérgio Krakowski, Christopher Dunn, André Botelho,
Michele Nascimento Kettner, Fernando Acosta, Omar Alejandro Dauhajre,
Noraliz Ruiz, Ana Dopico, Raydel Araoz, Dean Luis Reyes, Carlos Venegas,

xiii
xiv      Acknowledgements

Robert Stam, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Javier García Liendo, Camilo
Hernández Castellanos, Alejandra Josieowicz, Ivor Miller, Ned Sublette, Sybil
Cooksey, Katherine Smith, Jessica Gordon Burroughs, Ruth Goldberg, Bill
Toles, Manuel Zayas, Rafael Cesar, Rosa Aparecida do Couto Silva, Francisco
Quinteiro Pires, and The Reverend Daryl T. Hay.
The staff of the following institutions was very helpful as well: Cinemateca
Brasileira, Instituto Moreira Salles, the Arquivo Nacional, Instituto Superior
de Estudos Brasileiros (ISEB) at the Universidade de São Paulo, Biblioteca
Nacional José Martí, the Cinemateca at ICAIC (especially Mario Naito), the
New York Public Library, the Benson Latin American Studies Library at the
University of Texas at Austin, and the Rare Books and Special Collections at
Princeton University.
My body wrote this, and it was not always very cooperative, especially
toward the end. Geoff Stankus and Howard Lee shielded my shoulder from
surgery and managed chronic pain without medication. And the inimitable
artisan–scientist Dr. Todd McNiff and the always insightful and supportive
Dr. Darrell Greene helped keep things on track.
And much love and many thanks to my family and to Perla Masi for their
love and support throughout. This was wrought especially from her time.
The next one will be hers, but it will be on me.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography 1

2 Clinical Listening and Corporeal Resonance

in the Brazilian Belle Époque 31

3 Hearing Voices, Seeing Tongues: Speech as Gestural

Economy in Havana (1899–1924) 85

4 Rhythm, Diasporas, and the National Popular State 147

5 Noises in Cuban Revolutionary Cinema 201

6 Epilogue: (Re)Sonorous Tempest 239

Bibliography 245

Index 269

xv
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Gottschalk’s Concerto monstro, Jornal do Commercio

of November 24, 1869 3
Fig. 1.2 Vende-se: An assortment of machines, tools, animals, and
people for sale on the day of Gottschalk’s Concerto monstro in
Rio de Janeiro. Jornal do Commercio of November 24, 1869 11
Fig. 1.3 Inconsciente mecânico [Mechanical unconscious] by Otávio
Schipper and Sérgio Krakowski. Photo by Otávio Schipper 14
Fig. 2.1 Carlos Monteiro de Souza in “Le phonographe au Brésil et en
Portugal” L’Amérique: 27 août 1889, n° 16 bis, 5 39
Fig. 2.2 Phonograph demonstration, Gazeta de Notícias,
December 4, 1889, 4 42
Fig. 2.3 From J. Leonard Corning, “The Use of Musical Vibrations
Before and During Sleep—Supplementary Employment of
Chromatoscopic Figures—A Contribution to the Therapeutics
of the Emotions,” Medical Record Vol. 55. No. 3. Jan 21, 1899, 82 46
Fig. 2.4 Paul Regnard Bourneville, and J. M. Charcot.
1876. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
(service de M. Charcot). Vol. III, 205 60
Fig. 2.5 Paul Regnard Bourneville, and J. M. Charcot.
1876. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
(service de M. Charcot). Vol. III, 173 61
Fig. 3.1 “Ojo al cristo,” Cuba cinematográfica: Revista Ilustrada,
August 1, 1917, 2 86
Fig. 3.2 Experimental Phonetics Laboratory, Department One,
from Dihigo Mestre. “La fonética experimental en la ciéncia
del lenguaje,” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias,
vol. XII, no. 1 Enero, 1911, 54 88

xvii
xviii      List of Figures

Fig. 3.3 Detective Ramírez in blackface, Cuba cinematográfica: Revista

Ilustrada, August 1, 1917 98
Fig. 3.4 Íreme from La hija del policía o en poder de los ñañigos,
Cuba cinematográfica: Revista Ilustrada, August 1, 1917 99
Fig. 3.5 Finger printing techniques conforming to Presidential Decree
no. 1173 of 1911, from Fernando Ortiz, La identificación
dactiloscópica, 1913, 257 120
Fig. 3.6 From Fernando Ortiz, La identificación dactiloscópica. Informe
de policología y de derecho público, 263 121
Fig. 3.7 Gramophone writing voice curves, Scripture, Elements
of Experimental Phonetics, 60 128
Fig. 3.8 Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus, Scripture, Elements
of Experimental Phonetics, 25 129
Fig. 3.9 Vowels in flames, Scripture, Elements of Experimental
Phonetics, 26 129
Fig. 3.10 The Wave Siren, Dihigo Mestre, “La fonética experimental
en la ciencia del lenguaje,” 73 130
Fig. 3.11 Koenig’s portrait presiding over the wave siren
at the University of Havana, from Dihigo Mestre,
“La fonética experimental en la ciencia del lenguaje,” 55 131
Fig. 3.12 Dihigo’s “weapon” of choice, from Dihigo Mestre,
“La fonética experimental en la ciencia del lenguaje,” 58 132
Fig. 3.13 Traces of national tongues, Scripture, Elements of Experimental
Phonetics, 323 133
Fig. 3.14 Tongue guides, from Dihigo Mestre, “La fonética experimental
en la ciencia del lenguaje,” 75 134
Fig. 5.1 The comparsa “El alacrán” cutting cane—“There you
go… This year no one goes without participating
in the Peoples’ Harvest!” The alacrán comparsa singing
the virtues of cutting sugar cane. “Apuntes de la Segunda Zafra
del Pueblo,” Bohemia, año 54 no. 9, March 2, 1962, 114 203
Fig. 5.2 Scaffolding Float with Íremes in the Primer Carnaval Socialista.
Bohemia, año 54 no. 8, March 2, 1962, 105 204
Fig. 5.3 Tuning a conga with the anti-imperial flames of effigy,
and then… the conga de comparsa. “Belleza y alegria del
carnaval popular,” Revolución, February 19, 1962, 10 205
Fig. 5.4 An íreme dancing upon the head of Uncle Sam for the Primer
Carnaval Socialista of 1962. Bohemia Año 54 no. 6,
February 11, 1962 206
Fig. 5.5 Carnaval poster variation on a classic image (1848) by
Federico Mialhe of a Día de Reyes celebration suggesting
the continuities between past and present. Bohemia, Año 54
no. 6 February 11, 1962 207
 List of Figures     xix

Fig. 5.6 Self as other—the mirror above the bar in P.M. 219
Fig. 5.7 Pello el Afrokán, eighth notes, mochas and sugarcane,
from “Un mozambique para la caña,” Hoy, April 13, 1965 224
Fig. 5.8 ATTACKED, from Desde la Habana… 232
Fig. 6.1 Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças (1970)—Glauber Rocha 242
 1
Introduction: Notes for an Audible
Geography

There is an ecology of sound that is subject to an anthropology of noise.

—José Miguel Wisnik, O som e o sentido: uma outra história das músicas1

And I opened my eyes in the boat, upon the song of the sea. The sea was sing-
ing. We set out from the Cape, with storm clouds and heavy winds, at ten at
night; and now, at dawn, the sea is singing. The skipper straightens up and
listens carefully, with one hand on the plank and another on his heart: the
helmsman, leaves the rudder halfway: “That’s nice”: “That’s the most beauti-
ful thing I’ve heard in this world”: “I’ve only heard something that beautiful
two other times in all my life.” And then he laughs: the vaudous, the Haitian
sorcerers, will know what that is: today is the day of a vaudou dance at the bot-
tom of the sea, and the men of the earth will now know: sorcerers are casting
their spells. The slow music, vast and harmonious, is like the unified sound of
a tumultuous orchestra of platinum bells. The resonant echo vibrates sure and
true. The body feels as if it were clothed in music. The sea sang for an hour,—
more than an hour.—The boat pitches to and fro, en route to Montecristi.
—José Martí, “Diario de Montecristi a Cabo Haitiano”2

Sonorous Tempest
The pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869) fell ill
during his farewell concert in Rio de Janeiro on November 25, 1869. He
had traversed a hemispheric itinerary by this juncture, one of several con-
necting San Francisco to Panamá, Perú to the West Indies, Cuba, Puerto

© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. L. Robbins, Audible Geographies in Latin America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10558-7_1
2    
D. L. Robbins

Rico, and St. Thomas to New York, to Washington, and to his native
New Orleans. Speaking first French, then English, Italian, and Spanish, he
was the honored guest of presidents and monarchs, social organizations and
writers’ circles, and he had a reputation for virtuosic performance, prolific
and copious composition, and a drive toward dissipation, disquiet, and over-
exertion. He was a Southerner, yet an abolitionist, while his Jewish father,
was a merchant and sometimes slave trader. His francophone mother’s fam-
ily had come to the Mississippi Delta from Haiti [Saint-Domingue] dec-
ades before his birth. Those that did not flee the “insurrection,” he would
report, “were all massacred,” save his grandmother and great-grandfather, the
Count de Bruslé, who would evade capture, incredibly, dressed in the guise
of his slave “an old mulattress ‘woudou,’” only to die, shortly after, fighting
with “the colonial troops.” He would ask, moreover, “what cause,” in light
of “the grand form of Toussaint Louverture,” was “more legitimate than that
of [the enslaved] in their agony rising in one grand effort to reconquer their
unacknowledged rights and their rank in humanity?”3 Nonetheless, the very
sound of the word “Saint-Domingue,” had the force to muster in him over-
poweringly “somber memories” and “melancholy,” carried by the voice of his
grandmother in her “recitals” of the “terrible” events there while gathered
around the fireplace of his childhood home on Rampart St in New Orleans.4
Yet it would be in other latitudes, in Rio, before a large audience at the
Theatro Lyrico Fluminense, dressed in a white tie and tails, that his pale and
sickly body, “subjected to a series of syncopes,” would crumple at the piano
just a few bars into Tremolo, the second piece of his program.5 The first piece
that evening, in an ironic anticipation of the fate that would agonizingly
befall him in a matter of weeks, had been his composition, Morte!.
Only a few evenings before, his Concerto monstro had premiered on
that very stage. It was to be his grand departure from Rio de Janeiro after
a warm and personal reception by both the Imperial family and the
Republican bourgeoisie (see Fig. 1.1). It was an ambitious production with
an elaborate set including Brazilian and American pavilions and illumi-
nated by suspended chains of gaslights specially installed for the occasion.6
The 650 musicians were gathered from the theater’s standing orchestra, pri-
vate ensembles, a select group of teachers, and the musical regiments of the
different branches of the Brazilian military, the rest of which was engaged
at that very moment in a devastating and unpopular war in Paraguay.7 He
had been working intensely in the months prior composing and arranging
for the concert, and rehearsing the different groups of musicians for a three-
part program including his symphony La nuit des Tropiques among a num-
ber of other pieces. One journalist would describe their occupying the entire
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
3

Fig. 1.1 Gottschalk’s Concerto monstro, Jornal do Commercio of November 24, 1869

breadth and depth of the stage, including “a mass of drums” and military
bands with their “brilliant uniforms lending an even greater shine to the
compact mass of men.”8 The concert, he would add, was a “sonorous tem-
pest” reigned over by the “musical genius,” who would conduct the “army
of musicians.”9 The finale sounded to the journalist like the din of “bat-
tle,” in which could be heard “the march and formation of battalions, the
screams of the wounded, and combat accompanied by actual musket and
artillery fire,” a reference, no doubt, to the discharge of a cannon during the
performance.10 If this and the other period responses are a fair indication,
then it was the sonic analogue of the war underway near the southern border
4    
D. L. Robbins

rendered in what was perceived by the public as the latest of tendencies in

musical aesthetics, and all staged according to a masculinist nationalism of
conquest and sacrifice. It was also a more transparently paradoxical pres-
entation. It was, in this regard, a grandiose staging of militarist, Republican
nationalism, sponsored by a monarch. It was a celebration of Brazilian
nationalism, furthermore, presided over by—his unique musical sense not-
withstanding—a composer from the United States. It was produced by a
vocal abolitionist in, by 1869, one of the few remaining slaveholding nations
in the hemisphere. And unlike the similarly elaborate performances held
ten years earlier in Havana’s Gran Teatro Tacón, there is no evidence in the
period descriptions of the Brazilian spectacle that Gottschalk had showcased
any of the Afro-diasporic musical traditions or instruments that he almost
certainly heard during his nearly six months in Rio de Janeiro—nearly half of
whose residents were enslaved according to a register from only two decades
prior.11 He was renowned, after all, for a diverse repertoire of compositions
that were infused with a rhythmic vocabulary of Central and West African
origin that he knew from his childhood in Southern Louisiana, and his
wide-ranging travels throughout the Americas. The second movement of his
La nuit des Tropiques is a particularly obvious example of his dialogue with
these traditions, and yet it is noteworthy that there is no mention of it in
the numerous period reviews of the Concerto monstro, despite its having been
featured there. They were sounds, presumably, that were either too unex-
ceptional to comment despite their being relevant to reviews of his earlier
concerts in Rio, or they were sounds, on the other hand, whose presence in
any recollection of this concert would have clashed with the staging and the
sounding of the state, including, among other pieces, an elaborate orchestra-
tion of the Brazilian national anthem, the Grande fantasia triunfal (Variations
on the Brazilian National Anthem).12 Perhaps they were sounds whose omis-
sion would have been necessary to impart the projected “racelessness” of the
modernity being showcased. Their missing register in the period reception
of the concert signals an important concern with analyzing a performance
practice through a number of mediated registers, while appealing to a central
distinction involving sound and its perception through listening that carries
implications well beyond the context of music. It is a reminder of the essen-
tially relational character of sound, of the inevitable implication of a listener,
and of the influence of a greater totality in its reception and cognition that
implicates a blend of other senses according to a historically inflected matrix.
Audible Geographies is, broadly speaking, an examination of instances
like this one. It is not, to be clear, an examination or analysis of musical
genres or form, nor organized around musicians and performers or the
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
5

other reception contexts implied by Gottschalk’s concerts throughout the

Americas. My concern here, alternatively, is with listeners like Gottschalk,
just as it is with listeners like the anonymous journalist who heard a war in
the sounds of strings and brass, woodwinds and percussion, while not hear-
ing those other shards of sound organized according to an Afro-diasporic
temporal rationale that were likely sounded at different moments there.
It explores the audibility of place as a racialized phenomenon, and it is an
inquiry into the latent logic of these procedures and thus dialogues with
work in African-American and American studies concerned with the audi-
bility of difference, while listening for the different tenors of their articu-
lations in other languages.13 It is a foray into assorted contexts in which
an attention to sound would participate in shaping not only processes
of racialization, but also their positions in informing notions of place. As
Steven Feld would suggest with respect to a very different context than the
ones addressed here, “the ways in which sound is central to making sense,
to knowing, [and] to experiential truth” are “particularly relevant to under-
standing the interplay of sound and felt balance in the sense and sensual-
ity of emplacement, of making place.”14 Ana María Ochoa has asked related
questions of different listeners in circumstances similar to those under con-
sideration here, and with an exceptional care for thinking through the impli-
cations of listening across boundaries—whether national or ethnic, social or
regional.15 This is part of a larger critique involving a greater sensorial range
of a central problem set in Latin American and Caribbean Studies regard-
ing the involvement of writing and the primacy of an imperial language in
regulating public space and in marking regional, ethnic, and linguistic dif-
ferences through the law.16 This is frequently referred to via the shorthand
of the “lettered city,” a term coined by the Uruguayan critic Angel Rama
to describe this relationship with state-affiliated intellectuals—writers of
many kinds, novelists and lawyers, poets and pedagogues.17 Whereas the
tensions between oral and lettered cultures have stimulated a more thor-
ough problematization of the ocularcentrism of power, a sustained engage-
ment with listening and with a wider spectrum of sound beyond music is
a relatively recent development, with Ochoa’s work in particular signaling
a set of concepts and a critical vocabulary that underscore how “the aural
is not the other of the lettered city but rather a formation and a force that
seeps through its crevices demanding the attention of its listeners, some-
times questioning and sometimes upholding, explicitly or implicitly, its very
foundations.”18
And when Gottschalk convokes a large audience to conduct before them
a number of musicians personally assured to him by the Brazilian Emperor,
6    
D. L. Robbins

he does so amidst these many tensions and provides an opportunity to fol-

low some of those “seeping sounds” as they trace the lines of empire and dias-
pora. That performance of the state in the Concerto monstro, organized and
supported through the genre of written and read symphonic music, is conso-
nant—albeit imperfectly—with the status attributed to written language, and
it provokes a wider consideration of the different types of cultural agents that
may, likewise, participate in similar processes yet from the vantage points of
diverse disciplines, like medicine or musicology, filmmaking or phonetics.
When listening through the keyhole of a journalist’s recollection, as we have for
the Concerto monstro, questions arise as to the roles of media technologies and
their unique implications in both shaping the representation of an event while
responding to and stimulating shifts in truth criteria and modes of spectator-
ship. While we may listen only speculatively to print media or to a photograph,
we may still consider how they engage ideas about the visual that are under-
stood in relation to sound, as well as how their meanings may be organized or
arranged according to the epistemologies of sounded phenomena.19 After all,
Gottschalk exemplifies his recognition of this relationship between print and
sound through his journalistic publications, his music criticism, his travel writ-
ing, and especially the salon styled piano parts he authored and published, a
condition echoed through Machado de Assis’ tragic character Pestana, the pia-
nist and composer that suffers the sales of his printed sheet music upon faintly
hearing them played by others in the story of 1896 “Um homem célebre.”20
We can also question how print prefigures, as an inscription, reproduc-
tion, and transmission technology, some of the functions and uses of sound
recording in its initial iteration, as Lisa Gitelman locates in Thomas Edison’s
work from the telegraph through to the phonograph.21 The logic of inscrip-
tion is likewise present in the commodification of music through the record,
as too with the movie camera, the radio, and also the telegraph. One of my
concerns in Audible Geographies is to locate these media, through inscription
and diffusion, in relation to empire and coloniality. This is a direction sim-
ilar to that of Alejandra Bronfman and Tom McEnaney in their respective
treatments of the radio in the Caribbean and Latin America, which I seek
to build upon through an analysis of the roles of these logics in the working
methodologies of different disciplines, whether the case of neuropathology,
experimental phonetics, musicology, or filmmaking.22 These are processes
prefigured, as well, in other technologies, like the phonograph, which was
introduced into the Brazilian market by the Edison company representa-
tive Carlos Monteiro de Souza, as I discuss in Chapter 2. The first commer-
cially recorded Brazilian popular music, finally, was carried out years later by
the Casa Edison in Rio de Janeiro under the guidance of the salesman and
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
7

entrepreneur, Fred Figner.23 Cinema, likewise, was introduced by a Lumière

representative, Gabriel Veyre, into Cuba and Mexico.24 And the telegraph,
years before was subject to conflicts between competing foreign enterprises as
they sought to assure preferential access to markets.25 In light of these tech-
nologies’ trajectories as well as the ties to other media through the logic of
inscription, I am interested here in exploring some related questions. How,
for example, may we account for the phonograph’s significance in a context
in which an ongoing pathologization of Afro-Brazilians informs prevailing
ideas regarding listening and consciousness? Or, additionally, does the possi-
bility of recording sound alter the status of visual evidence in assessing pop-
ular speech in Havana, or is listening for difference in speech a photographic
exercise? What would be the implications, moreover, of a musical nationalism
when recordings drift across political boundaries, and musicians from a range
of locales listen to each other in a metropolis? Or, finally, when the porta-
bility of sound recording managed to catch up with the portability of the
movie camera, what would happen with all the sonic excess that is inevitably
netted in the process, and how is it managed socially? My interest here is in
how listeners addressed these questions both through and with the mediation
they entail. It is in this spirit that Audible Geographies explores a sequence of
cases in different periods and places, whether Salvador da Bahia in the 1890s,
Havana in the 1910s or 1960s, or Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the 1930s
in order to revisit some central concepts in sound studies—among them,
resonance, voice, audition, and noise. How were they formulated, at times
only implicitly, in Latin American and Caribbean slaveocracies? By listening,
finally, across linguistic boundaries, we may muse upon some of the other
sounds, histories, and places in the Afro-Americas, while re-situating different
media in a context in which their imperial legacies may be more easily heard.

Sensorial Economies, Sonic Regimes

Treatments of Gottschalk’s life and work read in instances like his Brazilian
Concerto monstro a statement of Pan-American ideals, a heroic, romantic
nationalism blending musical aesthetics with republican political princi-
ples, or an icon of a complex and iniquitous process by which elements of
Afro-diasporic musical culture would be absorbed into nationalist regimes.26
It is certainly relevant in this sense that a so relentlessly itinerant musician
would be the champion of diasporic musical practices that conformed little
to political boundaries, yet which were presented as signatures of place as
in, for example, his composition Bamboula billed on occasion as a “black”
8    
D. L. Robbins

or a “Creole” dance, or his Ojos Criollos, published as a “Cuban” dance.

The styles of music he played, its bourgeois institutionalization, the ven-
ues in which he performed, his relative whiteness, his masculinity, his
nationality, and French education were all factors that—notwithstanding
his calamitous financial difficulties, familial tragedies, and fragile health—
certainly affected his proximities to power and therefore the possibility of
these narratives. They also assured the relative abundance of archival evi-
dence from which to reconstruct his spectacular trajectory through regions
that, to say the least, already hosted similarly inspired musicians. He was,
in this sense, comparatively more exceptional in relation to a North
American context than, say a Brazilian or Cuban one, which hosted com-
posers and performers like Domingos Caldas Barbosa (1739–1800), José
White Lafitte (1836–1918), Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847–1935), or Claudio
Brindis de Salas (1852–1911), as well as an unregistered number of pop-
ular performers that engaged in the daily labor of modestly weaving tra-
ditions together while beyond the reach of pen and paper and likely in
venues whose names are no longer known. These are figures referenced
fleetingly in period crónicas or depicted iconically in fiction, like the clari-
netist, Pimienta, in Cirilio Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1839, 1882), or the
guitarist and vocalist, Ricardo Coração dos Outros, in Lima Barreto’s Triste
fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1911). Counterexamples aside, those prevail-
ing narratives of Gottschalk’s life and work, on the other hand, also harbor
unexamined opportunities to reflect upon more general and wide-sweeping
processes, which is the reason for my interest in him here: as an articula-
tion of ideas linking sound and place, media and racialization. His memoirs
speak to his greater sonic sensibility, and they suggest music as an organ-
ization of sound whose social inflection is understood in relation to other
classes of sounds—sounds like noise, sounds like speech, or sounds that
signal “here” and others that signal “elsewhere.” They permit, in this sense,
the consideration of a greater sonic regime by which they are organized in
moments of audition, not unlike that featured in the Concerto monstro, for
which the musical sounds of a symphonic march were wed with the “non-
musical” sounds of artillery fire to impart a bellicose and statist nationalist
affirmation. It is the same by which the ebullient ostinato patterns drawn
from the composer’s enthusiastic love for Afro-diasporic musics go largely
unrecognized in descriptions of this concert despite having been performed
on that occasion. It is a relationship likewise implied in one of Gottschalk’s
composition principles reported by Alejo Carpentier to have been offered by
the adventurous, traveling performer to the young Cuban pianist Nicolás
Ruiz Espadero, namely that “all the rules [of musical composition] consist
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
9

in nothing more than injuring pleasantly the cultivated ear.”27 There is yet
another unexamined opportunity to consider, according to a wider scheme,
the sensorial economy through which listening relates to the other senses,
most notably in the Concerto monstro, the union of sound and vision that
interact asymmetrically as power relationships on the one hand, and on the
other, models of consciousness and self that are rendered in the moment of
reception and inscribed, reproduced, and transmitted by way of a range of
technologies, here the newspaper, and elsewhere, as I shall touch upon in the
subsequent chapters, the phonograph, the radio, the cinema, or any other of
the numerous related technologies that would begin to emerge right around
the moment of Gottschalk’s performance. These technologies materialize a
wider episteme and subsume this sonic regime and sensorial economy into
a more general set of relationships involving political economy and empire,
labor regimes, territory, and the body, and thus racialization and place.
One of these technologies is the telegraph and it is insinuated exemplarily
throughout Gottschalk’s own sonic sensibility.
This is a sonic sensibility evident, to be sure, in the musical structure of
his compositions, ones that organize temporally a predominantly European
harmonic palette and tonal system according to rhythmic structures drawn
from the performance practices of descendants of West and Central Africans
in the Americas and incorporated by the composition into European song
forms, which is a principle evident in a number of similar composers and
performers throughout the Afro-Americas and a driving concern of figures
like Mário de Andrade in the fashioning of a “national” symphonic sound,
as discussed in Chapter 4. This is a musical mapping of geographical, impe-
rial, and racialized relations, and it is a musical analogue that echoes, how-
ever distortedly, other less musical but equally sounded phenomena with
wider implications as part of a sonic regime and a sensorial economy. As
Radano and Olaniyan have observed, “the narratives of modern western
empires are tales in which audibility conspicuously involved musical inter-
ventions carrying real consequence in social and cultural activity.”28 And
these activities, as suggested by some of the examinations they gather, also
entail a spectrum of nonmusical sounds, which may range from the institu-
tionalized and the public to the intimate, to the affective and interpersonal.
This becomes clearer in Gottschalk’s memory of a memory, which is
how he would recall the events of the Haitian Revolution that compelled
the flight of his grandmother, first to Jamaica and then to New Orleans.
It is a history that he knows through her “recitals,” through the sounds of
her voice, through the strains of “strange rumors” that he would listen to,
together with his siblings in his childhood home while attended to by their
10    
D. L. Robbins

domestic slave, Sally, as she would cook her sweet potatoes by the fire, inter-
rupting on occasion the sounds of the matriarch’s narrative with her own
words in order to “exorcise a ‘zombi’” whose presence she felt in a brush of
air across her cheek.29 This is the Sally that would speak in a muffled voice
just beneath the grandmother’s stories to a “bewitched” portrait of Napoleon
above the fireplace—an illustrative arrangement—sonic and corporeal—of
the epistemologies converging in his living room.30 It is, likewise, the pri-
vate counterpart and iniquitous pact premising the public display of the
Concerto monstro, revealing how the social contract of the nation may be tied
by a sonic filament to a domestic one—the gendered convergence of politi-
cal, social, and racialized distinctions. Sally would “fill [Gottschalk’s] head,”
furthermore, with stories that he never tired of hearing—“naïve legends” of
“inexpressible charm” recounted in a “picturesque language” along with the
“Creole ballads” and their “simple and touching melod[ies]” that go “right
to the heart and make [one] dream of unknown worlds.”31 And this scene
of listening is the context for his recollection of the “terrible insurrection”
for which “the blood has disappeared” and whose “stains [have been] wiped
out” by time.32 While that visual evidence has vanished, what has lingered,
hanging in the air decades later and far from their place of origin, are an
arrangement of sounds—the voice of his grandmother, and the voice of
Sally, the contours of her melodies, the sonic profile of her Creole. They are
arguably also the sounds of the many instruments and songs that he will call
upon in his composition and performance practices. They are the sounds, he
will suggest, of the Creole introduced into Southern Louisiana and Santiago
de Cuba by people fleeing the Haitian Revolution. And by relation, they are
certainly the sounds of the Afro-Haitian Tumba Francesa he would first hear
in Santiago de Cuba—a practice fusing West and Central African musical
traditions in Cuba by way of Haiti—and which he will supposedly bring
to Havana for his production of La nuit des Tropiques in 1859.33 They are
sounds, to recall the work of Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, or Elizabeth
Travassos, whose corporeality signal in their performance an audible reg-
ister of an event and a history.34 And they comprise, as I set out to argue
here, a significant piece of an audible geography of movement and migra-
tion, revolution and displacement, a sonic mapping among others signaling
points of a greater constellation of an Afro-Latin America that may evoke
simultaneously and ambivalently competing and diaphanous senses of place.
“Place,” as Edward Casey proposes, “is more an event than a thing.”35 It is
conceptually, in this regard, a productively paradoxical convergence of tem-
poral and spatial criteria tied indelibly to lived experience through emplace-
ment practices, like that of the young pianist before the fire, or those of his
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
11

grandmother and Sally. And despite the centrality of Sally’s stories and the
sounds of her speech and voice as they traced out moving melodies and sus-
tained his grasp of place, Gottschalk would assert that the “[negro was] very
inferior morally to the white” and that to not be a “free and intelligent man”
is to otherwise be a “servile machine.”36
This last point is vital to delineating a greater sonic regime, or other-
wise the range of sound beyond the fold of music. To examine this series
of relations, it is helpful to consider how events like the Concerto monstro
are situated in a wider relational ontology. Returning to the full-column
announcement for the concert on the last page of the Jornal do Commercio
of November 24, 1869 (see Fig. 1.1), we may see it there splayed across
the page between a list of winning lottery numbers, the announcements of
events in other theaters, and a few hundred awkwardly worded classified ads
announcing a range of items and services—apartments and shops for rent,
services for hire, as well as a reckless sequence of things for sale—a fire-proof
lockbox, “a nice goat with good milk,” a sewing machine, “a beautiful pair

Fig. 1.2 Vende-se: An assortment of machines, tools, animals, and people for sale on
the day of Gottschalk’s Concerto monstro in Rio de Janeiro. Jornal do Commercio of
November 24, 1869
12    
D. L. Robbins

of Belgian canaries,” “a thrush [sabiá ] that sings painfully,”—including a

number of human beings, not unlike Sally who would intone melodies for
Gottschalk37 (see Fig. 1.2). There is “a parda [mixed-race woman] with a
nice figure along with three of her children, in good health,” “a good-look-
ing black girl, outstanding baker, […] and a perfect washer and presser,”
“a twenty-three-year-old crioulo [a black man born in Brazil], a master of
his art, that cooks English, French, Italian, and Portuguese [cuisine],” “a
good nurse maid, parda, 22 years old, and her son of 54 days,” as well as
“two twenty-year-old crioulas […] strong, robust, and flawless.”38 The page
in entirety is a snapshot of a web of racialized social relations speaking to
the gendered economy of largely domestic slaves, merging commerce with
care and entertainment, where people and the services that are demanded of
them are intermingled with nonhuman animals, real estate, and machines.
The machine in the context of slavocracy, furthermore, is necessarily situ-
ated according to the ruling epistemology in relation to the slave, in ref-
erence to their value as commodity and labor, and consistent with a range
of functions within the slave economy, whose residual coloniality will be
obscured through the nationalization of Afro-diasporic cultures throughout
the Americas. Technology and the machine is another constitutive relation
that could be considered in light of the “various and diverse kinds of human
beings” described by Silva as being produced by the logics of Western
Modernity to sustain a model of androcentric white supremacy presented as
a “natural” universality.39 These are a network of relations evident sonically
and whose phase over time, as this book will examine through a sequence of
cases and contexts, does not necessarily coincide with the ruptures and tran-
sitions of a political history, and yet whose asymmetrical distinctions may
shift through exchanges and encounters across its many boundaries.
Beyond his assertion that slavery is a condition akin to being a “machine,”
Gottschalk offers an illustrative window upon the ambiguities and differ-
ent faces of the machine-body continuum, beginning with the Brazilian
journalist that would “see” in the performance of his piece Ojos Criollos—
among other features—“flaming,” and “electric” eyes, which—owing to
the specific translation of the term criollo to Brazilian Portuguese as crioulo,
that is, a slave born in the Americas—becomes the eyes of the slave body.
Although metaphorical, the journalist’s descriptions resonate tellingly with a
wider imaginary involving the machine-body, which is a central and recur-
ring theme in Audible Geographies as it manifests varyingly in a number of
different moments through the consideration of inscription, reproduction,
and transmission technologies, a relationship that I shall return to in this
discussion. Gottschalk’s own virtuosity and strenuous performance sched-
ule, for instance, was as much cause for admiration as alarm, with his own
 1 Introduction: Notes for an Audible Geography    
13

lamentation that his playing had become “machine-like,” supporting one

period critic’s observation that he was an “automaton pianist.”40 It is in his
discussion of the slave as “servile machine” that he will recall bitterly being
visited after a performance in 1863 in Washington, DC by a professor of
physiology who was convinced that the performer’s technique would dis-
prove a colleague’s assertion as to the maximum speed of nerve impulses in
the human body, to which Gottschalk would express his displeasure at being
classified as “among the most powerful known motors.”41 And in 1869, a
Brazilian journalist would suggest that he could hardly see the keys move
when he played as if they were “tines touched by an electric current.”42 These
associations between physiology and electro-mechanics, and the greater rela-
tionality between bodies of different kinds and machines were coincident
with the logic of slavocracy, and were certainly a more pervasive rationale in
the context as is indicated in Rachel Price’s work on the slave body, the stage,
and the ambivalent pretenses of electrotherapy that would give rise tortur-
ously to an early instance of telephony, coincidentally in one of the very
theaters in which Gottschalk would stage his grandiose orchestrations.43
My contention here is that we may find this logic manifest in instances like
these and that they speak to the central roles media technologies will play in the
processes of racialization examined in the subsequent chapters. It is a logic man-
ifest, for example, in the very audio-visual criteria for sound convened in scenes
of listening whether in attempts to comprehend the unique sociability stimu-
lated by the phonograph in 1890s Brazil, or even in how a criterion of produc-
tivity will sort sounds in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution. It is, finally, in
looking at his audience in a small Nevada mining town, which, as of 1865, was
connected not by railroad, but by telegraph, to the world beyond its boundaries:

It often happens to me when playing to look at my audience. There are cer-

tain passages where I am so accustomed to see their countenances brighten
up, that in civilized audiences I am wont to consider it an indissoluble thing
like cause and effect. For example, the close of Murmures Eoliens or even Last
Hope, or the end of Ojos Criolos [sic]. Here, I perceived that it is exactly as if I
was speaking Chinese; they hardly understand it, and inquisitively regard me
exerting myself with that curious and vacant air which other ignoramuses, for
instance, cast upon the hands of a telegraph operator.44

It is a remarkable description of a scene of listening in which a number of

important threads appear that bind the greater configuration addressed in
Audible Geographies and which I include here as a window upon them. It ren-
ders the sensorial economy by which listening is subjugated to vision as he
seeks visible evidence to assess the public’s listening. We may also note the
Another random document with
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TO HEIGHTEN THE COLOUR AND THE FLAVOUR OF GRAVIES.

This is best done by the directions given for making Espagnole. An

ounce or two of the lean of unboiled ham, cut into dice and coloured
slowly in a small stewpan, or smoothly-tinned iron saucepan, with
less than an ounce of butter, a blade of mace, two or three cloves, a
bay-leaf, a few small sprigs of savoury herbs, and an eschalot or
two, or about a teaspoonful of minced onion, and a little young
parsley root, when it can be had, will convert common shin of beef
stock, or even strong broth, into an excellent gravy, if it be gradually
added to them after they have stewed slowly for quite half an hour,
and then boiled with them for twenty minutes or more. The liquid
should not be mixed with the other ingredients until the side of the
stewpan is coloured of a reddish brown; and should any thickening
be required, a teaspoonful of flour should be stirred in well, and
simmered for three or four minutes before the stock is added; the
pan should be strongly shaken round afterwards, to detach the
browning from it, and this must be done often while the ham is
stewing.
Obs.—The cook who is not acquainted with this mode of preparing
or enriching gravies, will do well to make herself acquainted with it;
as it presents no difficulties, and is exceedingly convenient and
advantageous when they are wanted in small quantities, very highly
flavoured and well coloured. An unboiled ham, kept in cut, will be
found, as we have already said, a great economy for this, and other
purposes, saving much of the expense commonly incurred for gravy-
meats. As eschalots, when sparingly used, impart a much finer
savour than onions, though they are not commonly so much used in
England, we would recommend that a small store of them should
always be kept.
 BARON LIEBEG’s BEEF GRAVY.

(Most excellent for hashes, minces, and other dishes made of cold
meat.)
For particulars of this most useful receipt, for extracting all its
juices from fresh meat of every kind in the best manner, the cook is
referred to the first part of the chapter on soups. The preparation, for
which minute directions are given there, if poured on a few bits of
lean ham lightly browned, with the other ingredients indicated above,
will be converted into gravy of fine flavour and superior quality.
With no addition, beyond that of a little thickening and spice, it will
serve admirably for dressing cold meat, in all the usual forms of
hashes, minces, blanquettes, &c., &c., and convert it into dishes as
nourishing as those of meat freshly cooked, and it may be
economically made in small quantities with any trimmings of
undressed beef, mutton, or veal, mixed together, which are free from
fat, and not sinewy: flavour may be given to it at once by chopping
up with them the lean part only of a slice or two of ham, or of highly-
cured beef.
 SHIN OF BEEF STOCK FOR GRAVIES.

There is no better foundation for strong gravies than shin of beef

stewed down to a jelly (which it easily becomes), with the addition
only of some spice, a bunch of savoury herbs, and a moderate
proportion of salt; this, if kept in a cool larder, boiled softly for two or
three minutes every second or third day, and each time put into a
clean, well-scalded pan, will remain good for many days, and may
easily be converted into excellent soup or gravy. Let the bone be
broken in one or two places, take out the marrow, which, if not
wanted for immediate use, should be clarified, and stored for future
occasions; put a pint and a half of cold water to the pound of beef,
and stew it very gently indeed for six or seven hours, or even longer
should the meat not then be quite in fragments. The bones of calf’s
feet which have been boiled down for jelly, the liquor in which the
head has been cooked, and any remains of ham quite freed from the
smoky parts, from rust, and fat, will be serviceable additions to this
stock. A couple of pounds of the neck of beef may be added to six of
the shin with very good effect; but for white soup or sauces this is
better avoided.
Shin of beef, 6 lbs.; water, 9 pints; salt, 1 oz.; large bunch of
savoury herbs; peppercorns, 1 teaspoonful; mace, 2 blades.
 RICH PALE VEAL GRAVY, OR CONSOMMÉ.

The French, who have always at hand their stock-pot of good

bouillon (beef soup or broth), make great use of it in preparing their
gravies. It is added instead of water to the fresh meat, and when this,
in somewhat larger proportions, is boiled down in it, with the addition
only of a bunch of parsley, a few green onions, and a moderate
seasoning of salt, a strong and very pure-flavoured pale gravy is
produced. When the best joints of fowls, or of partridges have been
taken for fricassees or cutlets, the remainder may be stewed with a
pound or two of veal into a consommé, which then takes the name of
chicken or of game gravy. For a large dinner it is always desirable to
have in readiness such stock as can easily and quickly be converted
into white and other sauces. To make this, arrange a slice or two of
lean ham in a stewpan or saucepan with three pounds of the neck of
veal once or twice divided (unless the thick fleshy part of the knuckle
can be had), and pour to them three full pints of strong beef or veal
broth; or, if this cannot conveniently be done, increase the proportion
of meat or diminish that of the liquid, substituting water for the broth;
throw in some salt after the boiling has commenced, and the gravy
has been well skimmed, with one mild onion, a bunch of savoury
herbs, a little celery, a carrot, a blade of mace, and a half-
saltspoonful of peppercorns; stew those very gently for four hours;
then, should the meat be quite in fragments, strain off the gravy, and
let it become sufficiently cold to allow the fat to be entirely cleared
from it. A handful of nicely prepared mushroom-buttons will much
improve its flavour; and the bones of boiled calf’s feet, or the fresh
ones of fowls, will be found excellent additions to it. A better method
of making it, when time and trouble are not regarded, is to heat the
meat, which ought to be free of bones, quite through, with from a
quarter to half a pint of broth only, and when on probing it with the
point of a knife no blood issues from it, and it has been turned and
equally done, to moisten it with the remainder of the broth, which
should be boiling.
 Lean of ham, 6 to 8 oz.; neck or knuckle of veal, 3 lbs.; strong
broth, 3 pints (or veal, 4 lbs., and water, 3 pints); salt; bunch of
savoury herbs; mild onion, 1; carrot, 1 large or 2 small; celery 1/2
small head; mace, 1 large blade; peppercorns, 1/2 saltspoonful; 4
hours or more. Or: ham, 1/2 lb.; veal, 4 lbs.; broth, third of a pint;
nearly 1 hour. Additional broth, 3 pints: 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 hours.
 RICH DEEP-COLOURED VEAL GRAVY.

Lay into a large thick stewpan or saucepan, from half to three

quarters of a pound of undressed ham, freed entirely from fat, and
from the smoked edges, and sliced half an inch thick; on this place
about four pounds of lean veal, cut from the best part of the knuckle
or from the neck (part of the fillet, which in France is often used for it
instead, not being generally purchasable here, the butchers seldom
dividing the joint); pour to them about half a pint of good broth,[54]
and place the pan over a brisk fire until it is well reduced; then thrust
a knife into the meat, and continue the stewing more gently until a
glaze is formed as we have described at page 10. The latter part of
the process must be very slow; the stewpan must be frequently
shaken, and the gravy closely watched that it may not burn: when it
is of a fine deep amber colour, pour in sufficient boiling broth to cover
the meat, add a bunch of parsley, and a few mushrooms and green
onions. A blade or two of mace, a few white peppercorns, and a
head of celery, would, we think, be very admissible additions to this
gravy, but it is extremely good without. Half the quantity can be
made, but it will then be rather more troublesome to manage.
54. When there is no provision of this in the house, the quantity may be made
with a small proportion of beef, and the trimmings of the veal, by the
directions for Bouillon, Chapter I.

Undressed ham, 8 to 12 oz.; lean veal, 4 lbs.; broth, 1/2 pint; 1 to 2

hours. Broth, 3 to 4 pints: bunch of parsley and green onions, or 1
Portugal onion; mushrooms, 1/4 to 1/2 pint: 1-1/2 to 2 hours.
 GOOD BEEF OR VEAL GRAVY. (ENGLISH RECEIPT.)

Flour and fry lightly in a bit of good butter a couple of pounds of

either beef or veal; drain the meat well from the fat, and lay it into a
small thick stewpan or iron saucepan; pour to it a quart of boiling
water; add, after it has been well skimmed and salted, a large mild
onion sliced, very delicately fried, and laid on a sieve to drain, a
carrot also sliced, a small bunch of thyme and parsley, a blade of
mace, and a few peppercorns; stew these gently for three hours or
more, pass the gravy through a sieve into a clean pan, and when it is
quite cold clear it entirely from fat, heat as much as is wanted for
table, and if not sufficiently thick stir into it from half to a whole
teaspoonful of arrow-root mixed with a little mushroom catsup. Beef
or veal, 2 lbs.; water, 2 pints; fried onion, 1 large; carrot, 1; small
bunch of herbs; salt, 1 small teaspoonful or more; mace, 1 blade;
peppercorns, 20: 3 to 3-1/2 hours.
 A RICH ENGLISH BROWN GRAVY.

Brown lightly and carefully from four to six ounces of lean ham,
thickly sliced and cut into large dice; lift these out, and put them into
the pan in which the gravy is to be made; next, fry lightly also, a
couple of pounds of neck of beef dredged moderately with flour, and
slightly with pepper; put this, when it is done, over the ham; and then
brown gently and add to them two or three eschalots, or a Portugal
onion; should neither of these be at hand, one not large common
onion must be used instead. Pour over these ingredients a quart of
boiling water, or of weak but well-flavoured broth; bring the whole
slowly to a boil, clear off the scum with great care, throw in a
saltspoonful of salt, four cloves, a blade of mace, twenty corns of
pepper, a bunch of savoury herbs, a carrot, and a few slices of
celery: these last two may be fried or not as is most convenient. Boil
the gravy very softly until it is reduced to little more than a pint;
strain, and set it by until the fat can be taken from it. Heat it anew,
add more salt if needed and a little mushroom catsup, cayenne-
vinegar, or whatever flavouring it may require for the dish with which
it is to be served; it will seldom require any thickening. A dozen small
mushrooms prepared as for pickling, or two or three morels,
previously well washed and soaked, may be added to it at first with
advantage. Half this quantity of gravy will be sufficient for a single
tureen, and the economist can diminish a little the proportion of meat
when it is thought too much.
 PLAIN GRAVY FOR VENISON.

Trim away the fat from some cutlets, and lay them into a stewpan;
set them over a clear fire, and let them brown a little in their own
gravy; then add a pint of boiling water to each pound of meat. Take
off the scum, throw in a little salt, and boil the gravy until reduced
one half. Some cooks broil the cutlets lightly, boil the gravy one hour,
and reduce it after it is strained. For appropriate gravy to serve with
venison, see “Haunch of Venison,” Chapter XV.
 A RICH GRAVY FOR VENISON.

There are few eaters to whom this would be acceptable, the

generality of them preferring infinitely the flavour of the venison itself
to any which the richest gravy made of other meats can afford; but
when the flavour of a well-made Espagnole is likely to be relished,
prepare it by the receipt of the following page, substituting plain
strong mutton stock for the veal gravy.
 SWEET SAUCE, OR GRAVY FOR VENISON.

Add to a quarter-pint of common venison gravy a couple of

glasses of port wine or claret, and half an ounce of sugar in lumps.
Christopher North’s sauce, mixed with three times its measure of
gravy, would be an excellent substitute for this.
 ESPAGNOLE (SPANISH SAUCE).

A highly-flavoured Gravy.
Dissolve a couple of ounces of good butter in a thick stewpan or
saucepan, throw in from four to six sliced eschalots, four ounces of
the lean of an undressed ham, three ounces of carrot, cut in small
dice, one bay leaf, two or three branches of parsley, and one or two
of thyme, but these last must be small; three cloves, a blade of
mace, and a dozen corns of pepper; add part of a root of parsley, if it
be at hand, and keep the whole stirred or shaken over a moderate
fire for twenty minutes, then add by degrees one pint of very strong
veal stock or gravy, and stew the whole gently from thirty to forty
minutes; strain it, skim off the fat, and it will be ready to serve.
Butter, 2 oz.; eschalots, 4 to 6; lean of undressed ham, 4 oz.;
carrots, 3 oz.; bay leaf, 1; little thyme and parsley, in branches;
cloves, 3; mace, 1 blade; peppercorns, 12; little parsley root: fried
gently, 20 minutes. Strong veal stock, or gravy, 1 pint: stewed very
softly, 30 to 40 minutes.
 ESPAGNOLE, WITH WINE.

Take the same proportions of ingredients as for the preceding

Espagnole, with the addition, if they should be at hand, of a dozen
small mushrooms prepared as for stewing; when these have fried
gently in the stewpan until it appears of a reddish colour all round,
stir in a tablespoonful of flour, and when it is lightly browned, add in
small portions, letting each one boil up before the next is poured in,
and shaking the pan well round, three quarters of a pint of hot and
good veal gravy, and nearly half a pint of Madeira or sherry. When
the sauce has boiled gently for half an hour, add to it a small quantity
of cayenne and some salt, if this last be needed; then strain it, skim
off the fat entirely should any appear upon the surface, and serve it
very hot. A smaller proportion of wine added a few minutes before
the sauce is ready for table, would perhaps better suit with English
taste, as with longer boiling its flavour passes off almost entirely.
Either of these Espagnoles, poured over the well bruised remains of
pheasants, partridges, or moor fowl, and boiled with them for an
hour, will become most admirable game gravy, and would generally
be considered a superlative addition to other roast birds of their kind,
as well as to the hash or salmi, for which see Chapter XV.
Ingredients as in preceding receipt, with mushrooms 12 to 18;
Madeira, or good sherry, 1/4 to 1/2 pint.
 JUS DES ROGNONS, OR, KIDNEY GRAVY.

Strip the skin and take the fat from three fresh mutton kidneys,
slice and flour them; melt two ounces of butter in a deep saucepan,
and put in the kidneys, with an onion cut small, and a teaspoonful of
fine herbs stripped from the stalks. Keep these well shaken over a
clear fire until nearly all the moisture is dried up; then pour in a pint
of boiling water, add half a teaspoonful of salt, and a little cayenne or
common pepper, and let the gravy boil gently for an hour and a half,
or longer, if it be not thick and rich. Strain it through a fine sieve, and
take off the fat. Spice or catsup may be added at pleasure.
Mutton kidneys, 3; butter, 2 oz.; onion, 1; fine herbs, 1 teaspoonful:
1/2 hour. Water, 1 pint; salt, 1/2 teaspoonful; little cayenne, or black
pepper: 1-1/2 hour.
Obs.—This is an excellent cheap gravy for haricots, curries, or
hashes of mutton; it may be much improved by the addition of two or
three eschalots, and a small bit or two of lean meat.
 GRAVY IN HASTE.

Chop fine a few bits of lean meat, a small onion, a few slices of
carrot and turnip, and a little thyme and parsley; put these with half
an ounce of butter into a thick saucepan, and keep them stirred until
they are slightly browned; add a little spice, and water in the
proportion of a pint to a pound of meat; clear the gravy from scum,
let it boil half an hour, then strain it for use.
Meat, 1 lb.; 1 small onion; little carrot, turnip, thyme, and parsley;
butter, 1/2 oz.; cloves, 6; corns of pepper, 12; water, 1 pint: 1/2 hour.
 CHEAP GRAVY FOR A ROAST FOWL.

When there is neither broth nor gravy to be had, nor meat of which
either can be made, boil the neck of the fowl after having cut it small,
in half a pint of water, with any slight seasonings of spice or herbs, or
with a little salt and pepper only; it should stew very softly for an hour
or more, or the quantity will be too much reduced. When the bird is
just ready for table, take the gravy from the dripping-pan, and drain
off the fat from it as closely as possible; strain the liquor from the
neck to it, mixing them smoothly, pass the gravy again through the
strainer, heat it, add salt and pepper or cayenne, if needed, and
serve it extremely hot. When this is done, the fowl should be basted
with good butter only, and well floured when it is first laid to the fire.
Many cooks always mix the gravy from the pan when game is
roasted, with that which they send to table with it, as they think that it
enriches the flavour; but to many persons it is peculiarly distasteful.
Neck of fowl; water, 1/2 pint; pepper, salt (little vegetable and spice
at choice): stewed gently, 1 hour; strained, stirred to the gravy of the
roast, well cleared from fat.
 ANOTHER CHEAP GRAVY FOR A FOWL.

A little good broth added to half a dozen dice of lean ham, lightly
browned in a morsel of butter, with half a dozen corns of pepper and
a small branch or two of parsley, and stewed for half an hour, will
make excellent gravy of a common kind. When there is no broth, the
neck of the chicken must be stewed down to supply its place.
 GRAVY OR SAUCE FOR A GOOSE.

Mince, and brown in a small saucepan, with a slice of butter, two

ounces of mild onion,. When it begins to brown, stir to it a
teaspoonful of flour, and in five or six minutes afterwards, pour in by
degrees the third of a pint of good brown gravy; let this simmer
fifteen minutes; strain it, bring it again to the point of boiling, and add
to it a teaspoonful of made mustard mixed well with a glass of port
wine. Season it with cayenne and pepper and salt, if this last be
needed. Do not let the sauce boil after the wine is added, but serve it
very hot.
Onions, 2 oz.; butter, 1-1/2 oz.: 10 to 15 minutes. Flour, 1
teaspoonful: 5 to 6 minutes. Gravy, 1/3 pint: 15 minutes. Mustard, 1
teaspoonful; port wine, 1 glassful; cayenne pepper; salt. See also
Christopher North’s own sauce, page 119.
 ORANGE GRAVY FOR WILD FOWL.

Boil for about ten minutes, in half a pint of rich and highly-
flavoured brown gravy, or Espagnole, half the rind of a Seville
orange, pared as thin as possible, and a small strip of lemon-rind,
with a bit of sugar the size of a hazel-nut. Strain it off, add to it a
quarter pint of port or claret, the juice of half a lemon, and a
tablespoonful of Seville orange-juice: season it with cayenne, and
serve it as hot as possible.
Gravy, 1/2 pint; 1/2 the rind of a Seville orange; lemon-peel, 1
small strip; sugar, size of hazel-nut: 10 minutes. Juice of 1/2 a
lemon; Seville orange-juice, 1 tablespoonful; cayenne. See also
Christopher North’s own sauce, page 119.
 MEAT JELLIES FOR PIES AND SAUCES.

A very firm meat jelly is easily made by stewing slowly down equal
parts of shin of beef, and knuckle or neck of veal, with a pint of cold
water to each pound of meat; but to give it flavour, some thick slices
of lean unboiled ham should be added to it, two or three carrots,
some spice, a bunch of parsley, one mild onion, or more, and a
moderate quantity of salt; or part of the meat may be omitted, and a
calf’s head, or the scalp of one, very advantageously substituted for
it, though the flavouring must then be heightened, because, though
very gelatinous, these are in themselves exceedingly insipid to the
taste. If rapidly boiled, the jelly will not be clear, and it will be difficult
to render it so without clarifying it with the whites of eggs, which it
ought never to require; if very gently stewed, on the contrary, it will
only need to be passed through a fine sieve, or cloth. The fat must
be carefully removed, after it is quite cold. The shin of beef
recommended for this and other receipts, should be from the middle
of the leg of young heifer beef, not of that which is large and coarse.
Middle of small shin of beef, 3 lbs.; knuckle or neck of veal, 3 lbs.;
lean of ham, 1/2 lb.; water, 3 quarts; carrots, 2 large, or 3 small;
bunch of parsley; 1 mild onion, stuck with 8 cloves; 2 small bay-
leaves; 1 large blade of mace; small saltspoonful of peppercorns;
salt, 3/4 oz. (more if needed): 5 to 6 hours’ very gentle stewing.
Obs.—A finer jelly may be made by using a larger proportion of
veal than of beef, and by adding clear beef or veal broth to it instead
of water, in a small proportion at first, as directed in the receipt for
consommé, see page 98, and by pouring in the remainder when the
meat is heated through. The necks of poultry, any inferior joints of
them omitted from a fricassee or other dish, or an old fowl, will
further improve it much; an eschalot or two may at choice be boiled
down in it, instead of the onion, but the flavour should be scarcely
perceptible.