Comparative Organography in Early Modern Empires

Music & Letters, Vol. 90 No. 3, ß The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/ml/gcp010, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

COMPARATIVE ORGANOGRAPHY IN EARLY MODERN EMPIRES BY DAVID R. M. IRVING* For all types of instruments that are used in diverse parts of the world, the reader is referred to the historiography of the Indies, in which these subjects are treated, leaving nothing more to be desired. unidentified Jesuit in Manila, Observationes diversarum artium, late seventeenth century

TRAVELLERS, TRADERS, AND MISSIONARIES within the global networks of European imperial powers in the early modern period made significant contributions to the comparative study of the world’s musics.1 In their writings, they sought not only to compare and contrast many non-European practices with those of classical antiquity, but also to equate them with contemporaneous practices in Europe. Song, dance, and instrumental traditions of non-Europeans were observed and described in relation to their ritual and symbolic significance, while published accounts allowed readers in Europe to familiarize themselves with the ‘exotic’ through text, image, and music notation. Much has been written about early modern intercultural encounters that occurred through the performative exchanges of song, dance, and instrumental music. But there has been relatively little attention devoted to the processes by which Europeans collected, transmitted, studied, and classified non-European musical artefactsçespecially instrumentsçin the early modern period. Unlike real, live non-European musicians, musical instruments could be boxed up and shipped back to Europe for minute examination, after having been presented as gifts, bought, traded, or stolen.2 Failing acquisition of any physical specimens, it was still possible for detailed plans, diagrams, and descriptions to be produced for transmission and publication. Similarities and differences between European and non-European instruments could be noted, and theories formulated to explain the reasons for divergence or convergence in instrumental construction and practice. This type of scholarship in the early modern periodçlet us call it comparative organographyçwas corollary to the development of ethnology, or

*Christ’s College, Cambridge. Email: [email protected] 1 By ‘networks’ I imply global connections that were devised for trade, conquest, colonization, diplomacy, and communication. Individual travellers, traders, and missionaries venturing beyond the geographical reach of European colonial empires still remained part of these networks for as long as they maintained contact with any other agent of European expansion. 2 The transportation of non-European performers to Europe in the early modern period was a relatively uncommon occurrence, but not unknown; see, for example, Roger Savage, ‘Rameau’s American Dancers’, Early Music, 11 (1983), 441^52.

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the study of peoples. It was made possible by the early modern frameworks of empire and trade routes. And it had far-reaching consequences, since European nations without overseas empires were able to draw from intra-European dissemination of knowledge about the wider world as a result of the concurrent development of print culture and the circulation of published literature. Descriptions of non-European music and musical instruments were most often embedded in Europeans’ narratives of heroic voyages, geographical surveys, or hagiographic discourses on religious missions. By the end of the eighteenth century, pertinent data had been woven into large compendia of music history and theory, and a small handful of works devoted purely to the discussion of a specific non-European musical system had been published. As illustrated in this article’s epigraph, the historiography of extra-European exploration provided the source texts to which those interested in non-European musical instruments most commonly referred in the early modern period.3 In the light of more detailed and systematic research in our own times, what Europeans thought of music and musical instruments found throughout the wider world during the early modern period may seem irrelevant. But early modern comparative organography remained the initial, necessary groundwork. In fact, no other group of people (loosely bonded through social, political, and religious systems) compiled so diverse a range of observations on musics from around the worldçnor reproduced them so methodicallyças early modern European imperialists, missionaries, and itinerant travellers.4 The enormous proliferation in Europe of descriptive texts on the one hand, and physical specimens on the other, attests to the curiosity and interest in nonEuropean instruments displayed by early modern Europeans. However misleading or simply inaccurate their writings may have been, they are invaluable from philological and historical viewpoints as evidence of scholarly development in music criticism. Moreover, they provided crucial building blocks for the development of comparative musicology, which would in time reform itself as ethnomusicology. Treatises by Praetorius, Mersenne, Kircher, Bonanni, and La Borde all mention nonEuropean instruments to a lesser or greater extent.5 The information contained in these works provided the building blocks for organologists, including Guillaume Andre¤ Villoteau and Victor-Charles Mahillon in the nineteenth centuryçnot to mention Francis William Galpin and Curt Sachs in the twentiethçwhose empirical studies led ultimately to the system of organological classification devised by Erich M. von Hornbostel

3 The original text of the epigraph reads: ‘Pro instrumentis omnis generis usitatis in diversis mundi partibus remittit se ad historiographos indiarum, qui fuse ea tractant, nec quicquam aliud desiderari poterit.’ ‘Musicalia speculativa’, in Observationes diversarum artium, Manila, late 17th c., Biblioteca Nacional de Espan‹a, MS 7111, p. 591. This (as yet unidentified) Jesuit writer is paraphrasing a passage from Athanasius Kircher, SJ, Musurgia universalis, sive, Ars magna consoni et dissoni: in X. libros digesta, 2 vols. (Rome, 1650), i. 530. 4 Medieval travellers from European and non-European backgrounds alike had of course described instruments from cultures other than their own, but early modern European organography is the first large body of evidence to have a truly global range of reference. 5 Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, 3 vols. (Wittenberg; Wolfenbu«ttel, 1615^1620); Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle: Contenant la the¤ orie et la pratique de la musique ou' il est traite¤ des consonances, des dissonances, des genres, des modes, de la composition, de la voix, des chants, & toutes sortes d’instrumens harmoniques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1636 ); Kircher, Musurgia universalis; Filippo Bonanni, Gabinetto armonico pieno d’istromenti sonori indicati, e spiegati (Rome, 1722); Jean Benjamin de La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, 4 vols. (Paris, 1780).

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and Sachs in 1914.6 Seminal work has been carried out in our own times by Jeremy Montagu, John Burton, and Margaret J. Kartomi.7 I use the term ‘organography’ here to distinguish early modern writings on instruments from the complex discipline of organology that began to evolve in the nineteenth century towards its fully-fledged form today.8 Organological literature is vast, butçtogether with writings by historical musicologists and ethnomusicologistsçit has often overlooked the early modern writings on global instruments (comparative organography) that contributed to organology’s development. In this article, I seek to show how non-European musical instruments and their descriptions acted as transportable, material evidence of ‘exotic’ musics for early modern European scholars, and as visual representations of musical and cultural differences for eyewitnesses and European readers alike. As such, these objects were literally instrumental in developing paradigms for the study of non-European musics; they also acted as a means of assessing common humanity through the taxonomic trends and comparative ethnological thinking of the early modern period. As we shall see, observations made about non-European musical instruments demonstrate Europeans’ curiosity about the musical practices of others (and vice versa), their desire to empathize with other cultures through musical exchange, or their refusal to acknowledge or appreciate foreign musical aesthetics. I. DIFFUSION, TRANSMISSION, AND REPRESENTATION

The early modern periodçthe age of European exploration and expansionçmust be viewed as a critical stage in the worldwide process of intercultural contact: it represented a time when societies were no longer isolated, when taxonomies and epistemologies had to be revised, when intercultural exchanges were made, and when long-distance relationships were intensified. In essence, it encapsulated a type of conciliation between widely dispersed peoples who were unaware of each other’s existenceçan encounter that had tragic consequences for many societies. As Europeans and non-Europeans came into contact with each other, they had to test and reassess their own understanding of what it meant to be human, and to determine what cultural trappings were associated with human identity. However much we may lament the violence of intercultural collisions, it remains an inescapable truth that many of the world’s peoples came to know and engage with

6 See, for example, writings on instruments by Guillaume Andre¤ Villoteau in Description de l’E¤gypte, ed. E. F. Jomard (Paris,1809^22); Victor-Charles Mahillon, Catalogue descriptif et analytique du Muse¤ e instrumental du Conservatoire royal de Musique de Bruxelles (Ghent and Brussels, 1880^1922); and Francis William Galpin’s A Textbook of European Musical Instruments: Their Origin, History and Character (London, 1937); and Curt Sachs’s The History of Musical Instruments (New York, 1940). See also Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, ‘Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch’, Zeitschrift fu«r Ethnologie, 46 (1914), 553^90. It is important to note that the four-class system of instrumental classification devised by Mahillon in 1880 and subsequently adapted by Hornbostel and Sachs was modelled on the Indian scholar Rajah Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore’s Yantra Kosha: or, ATreasury of the Musical Instruments of Ancient and Modern India, and of various other countries (Calcutta, 1875). See Joep Bor, ‘The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780 ^ c.1890’, International Folk Music Council Yearbook, 20 (1988), 51^73 at 64. 7 Jeremy Montagu and John Burton, ‘A Proposed New Classification System for Musical Instruments’, Ethnomusicology, 15 (1971), 49^70; Margaret J. Kartomi, On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (Chicago and London, 1990). One of the most recent seminal texts for modern organology, representing the synthesis of a lifetime’s work, is Jeremy Montagu’s Origins and Development of Musical Instruments (Lanham, Md., 2007). 8 Current organology is defined as ‘the study of musical instruments in terms of their history and social function, design, construction and relation to performance’; Laurence Libin, ‘Organology’, New Grove II, xviii. 657. In this article, I use the adjective ‘organological’ when and as it pertains to instruments.

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each other during the early modern period through networks that emerged as a result of European imperialism. Of course, European contact with parts of Asia and North Africa had been established since antiquity, and extended by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century; Eurasian trade along the Silk Road had also engendered many types of cultural exchanges. But the initation of seaborne colonial and commercial enterprises by Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Low Countries from the last decade of the fifteenth century onwards marked the beginning of sustained and regular intercourse on a global scale with the Americas, India, East and South-east Asia, the Pacific region, and Africa. Multidirectional intercultural contact forged a new awareness of the world that resulted in constantly accelerating global circulation of commodities, knowledge, technology, and people.9 This was early modern globalization. The first major phase in the development of comparative organography can be traced alongside the patterns of discoveries made by navigators and explorers from the first trans-Atlantic voyage of Columbus in 1492 to the British and French voyages in the Pacific during the final third of the eighteenth century. Literary sources dating from this period contain invaluable records of first encounters between mutually alien cultures, although they must be read with caution, and interpreted in the light of the context in which they were produced. Early modern observations about unknown environments and peoples were often composed in a manner that conformed to the hopes and expectations of the patrons who funded exploratory expeditions. As such, they often perpetuated the biased views of conquerors from Christian nations, or sought to synthesize non-Christian cultures as one conglomerate whole, placing them in opposition to Christian Europe in a type of comparative ethnology.10 But while events and peoples in distant lands could only be recorded and communicated to Europe through the interpretative filter of the author, artefacts that were carried home in triumph could provide indisputable proof of other, ‘exotic’ cultures. The material artefact of the instrument acted as a physical embodiment of the differences or similarities between European and non-European musics. Early modern organographers could discuss a diverse range of characteristics of musical instruments, such as their production and sound, their use and context, their value and social status, and their symbolism. Like so many trophies, musical instruments or their depictions symbolized the distance travelled by the collector, while testifying to an appreciable level of active engagement with non-European cultures. Their curiosity value earned them pride of place in early modern European collections and even visual assessment alone could evoke a wholly alien aesthetic sphere. Yet the irony of European observations of non-European instruments during the early modern period is that every single European instrument known at the time had originated

9 It also brought about new ways of narrating national identities and consolidating mythologies in support of colonialist enterprises, as Edward W. Said points out in Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993). 10 Katherine Brown has pointed out the need to ‘challenge our present-day understanding of historical reliability by reading these texts in the light of the contemporary culture and circumstances that produced them’. Other dichotomies were also apparent in these writings; Brown notes that ‘the most important of these was that of the medieval worldview of traditional Christianity versus the embryonic worldview of scientific rationalism. Other important oppositions included Protestantism versus Catholicism, Anglicanism versus Puritanism, Royalists versus Cromwell, the Portuguese versus the other European traders, superstition versus rationalism, absolute monarchy versus embryonic democracy, woman as Madonna or whore, and Europe versus the Mughal Empire’. Katherine Brown, ‘Reading Indian Music: The Interpretation of Seventeenth-Century European Travel-Writing in the (Re)construction of Indian Music History’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 9 (2000), 1^34 at 3.

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elsewhereçmainly the East.11 These had been so thoroughly adopted into European practice, and incorporated within European aesthetic ideals, that they had become indigenized and their differences forgotten. Thus the encounter with non-European instruments in the early modern period refigured a dichotomy of Europe vs. Otherness. For Europeans who never left their continent, imported musical instruments could evoke the type of sound-world existing in distant lands. Even though only a relatively small clique (of scholars, the nobility, and patrons) was able to see and hear them at first hand, the general reader could learn something of particular specimens through the silent medium of published descriptions and illustrations. Images of these instruments were a means of evoking the sounds of musics that defied notation by Europeans, thus conveying their resonance even to readers non-literate in musical notation. As early as 1618, Michael Praetorius included in his Syntagma musicum three plates (one is reproduced in Pl. 1) of ‘drawings of foreign, rustic and primitive instruments, some used in Muscovy, Turkey and Arabia, others in India and America, in order that we Germans might have some information about them, even though no knowledge of how they are played’.12 Visual comparison allowed Europeans to see types of ‘exotic’ instruments, to estimate their sizes (the engraver went so far as to provide a scalebar), and to imagine the sounds that might be produced. It seems, however, that the presence of ‘exotic’ instruments in Europe often served an ornamental function. Only a few European musicians attempted to play non-European instruments in Europe (although many percussion instruments were eventually adopted and adapted into European practice13 ); in any case, these sorts of performances were, as we shall see, rare and incongruous affairs that allowed for nothing more than superficial comparisons to be made with the standard European instrumentarium. Since the agents of collection and transmission generally had little knowledge of the playing technique of non-European instruments or their cultural significance, instruments themselves were useless in the hands of practitioners or theorists without detailed accounts of the complex cultural practices in which they were embedded. In 1777, Charles Burney wrote to his correspondent Matthew Raper in China begging for more information about the Chinese sheng (mouth-organ), adding that ‘our Queen [Charlotte] has one, but no one here can judge of its Effects for want of skill

11

Physical similarities noted between instruments of the Near East and Europe were undoubtedly due to the fact that these instruments had derived from common ancestors less than a millennium previously. According to Timothy McGee, ‘the Crusades were for Europe a source of very practical knowledge about the culture of the eastern Mediterranean. . . . Such musical instruments as the rebec, lute, and shawm, originally from the Islamic world, were introduced into Europe by the returning Crusaders’. Timothy J. McGee, ‘Eastern Influences in Medieval European Dances’, in Robert Falck and Timothy Rice (eds.), Cross-cultural Perspectives on Music (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1982), 79^100 at 97. Performance techniques varied enormously, however, and in spite of the visual resemblances of instruments, many sounds were described disparagingly by Europeans. See Ian Woodfield, English Musicians in the Age of Exploration (Sociology of Music, 8; Stuyvesant, NY, 1995), 270. For a general historical survey of Europe’s cultural and economic dependence on Asia, see John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge, 2004; 2nd rev. edn., 2006 ). 12 Michael Praetorius, The Syntagma musicum of Michael Praetorius. Vol. 2, De organographia, First and Second Parts, trans. Harold Blumenfeld, 2nd edn. (NewYork, 1980), g. ‘So hab ich auch der Au
la«ndischen / Barbarischen und Bemrischen Instrumenten / so zum theil in der Mu
cam / Tu«rcten und Arabien / zum theil in India und America gebraucht werden / Abconterfenung mit hinzu seken wollen / damit sie uns Teutschen / zwar nicht zum gebrauch / besondern zur wissenschafft auch befantsein mu«chten.’ Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, ii (Tomus Secundus De Organographia, 1619), introduction. 13 See James Blades and Jeremy Montagu, Early Percussion Instruments from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Early Music Series, 2; London, 1976 ).

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PL. 1. ‘Exotic’ instruments: ‘1./2. Satyr pipes. 3. American horn or trumpet. 4. A ring which the Americans strike much like a triangle. 5. American shawm. 6. Cymbals which the Americans play upon like our bells. 7. A tambourine which they throw into the air and then catch. 8./9. American drums.’ Michael Praetorius, Syntagma musicum, ii: De Organographia (1619), pl. XXIX. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

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in playing upon it’.14 On the other hand, Jean-Philippe Rameau possessed an ‘orgue de barbarie’ on which he played Chinese melodies transcribed by the Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Haldeçeven though the instrument seems to have come from or via the Cape of Good Hope.15 Rameau may have considered that a ‘barbarian’ instrument from Africa was compatible with Chinese musical style,16 but he was exceptional for actually playing the instrument at all. Europeans interested in non-European music or performance practices generally had to resort to descriptions of ceremonies written by eyewitnesses. As many of the earliest sources documenting non-European instruments relate directly or indirectly to voyages, it is sailors, merchants, and missionaries who are mainly responsible for most of the literature about maritime and land-based exploration. The copious numbers of published traveloguesçincluding anthologies such as Purchas his pilgrimes, The¤venot’s Relations de divers voyages curieux, or the Churchill brothers’A Collection of Voyages and Travelsçwere recognized by scholars and general readers alike as ideal and unique sources for data concerning ‘exotic’ musical practices.17 Among the most highly educated early modern European travellers were missionariesç particularly Jesuits, whose expertise in disciplines such as mathematics, astronomy, acoustics, and physics earned them positions of favour in several Asian high courts. Jesuits’ reports and letters, which were often published and circulated widely, were considered at the time to provide some of the most reliable observations of distant places. Like other religious organizations and groups of colonists, the Society of Jesus relied on global routes of trade and communication for its worldwide mission in the early modern period, and made full use of these systems for the transportation of its equipment. European instruments were therefore disseminated throughout the rest of the world as the belongings of travellers, commodities to be sold or distributed in colonies, equipment for Christian missions and churches, or gifts to non-European rulers.18 By contrast, the contexts in which non-European instruments were transported back to Europe ranged from the presentation of curious artefacts (as trophies or ornaments) to the provision of ethnographic data for scholars, to the bestowal of gifts (often from one monarch to another). For example, Captain James Cook transported a comprehen-

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Charles Burney, The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, i: 1751^1784, ed. Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ (Oxford, 1991), 234. In writing about Chinese music theory, Rameau comments: ‘cela se trouve dans une Orgue de Barbarie, apporte¤e du Cap de Bonne-espe¤rance par M. Dupleix, dont il a eu la bonte¤ de me faire pre¤sent, & sur laquelle peuvent s’exe¤cuter tous les airs chinois copie¤s en Musique dans le III.e Tome du R. P. du Halde, & dans la page 380 du XXII.e tome in-12 de l’Histoire des voyages, par M. l’Abbe¤ Prevo“t’. Jean-Philippe Rameau, ‘Nouvelles re¤flexions sur le principe sonore’, Code de musique pratique (Paris, 1760), 192; facsimile in Jean-Philippe Rameau, The Complete Theoretical Writings of Jean-Philippe Rameau, ed. Erwin R. Jacobi (Miscellanea, 3; [Rome], 1967^72), iv. 216. A few decades later, La Borde contended that this instrument had been improperly described by Rameau. He gave an illustration of the instrument in question (a type of xylophone), with the following caption: ‘Instrument Chinois. Que Rameau appelle improprement Orgue de Barbarie dans son Code de Musique. Cet Instrument a e¤te¤ aporte¤ des Indes par M. le M.is Dupleix et apartient maintenant a' M. l’abbe¤ Arnaud.’ La Borde’s description of the instrument’s provenance (‘les Indes’) is unilluminating. In the context of Chinese music, La Borde may have objected to Rameau’s use of the word ‘orgue’ for a percussive instrument, since ‘orgue’ was more properly applied by early modern Europeans to the sheng and related instruments. La Borde, Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne, i, 2nd plate after p. 142. 16 As Anthony Pagden has noted, ‘in European eyes most non-Europeans, and nearly all non-Christians, including such ‘‘advanced’’ peoples as the Turks, were classified as ‘‘barbarians’’’. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man:The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, new edn. (Cambridge, 1986 ), 13^14. 17 Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes, in fiue bookes: the first, contayning the voyages and peregrinations made by ancient kings (London, 1625); Melchisedec The¤venot, Relations de diuers voyages curieux qui n’ont point este¤ publie¤ es, new edn. (Paris, 1696 ); A Collection of voyages and travels: some now first printed from original manuscripts. Others translated out of foreign languages, and now first publish’d in English, ed. Awnsham and John Churchill (London, 1704). 18 On the role of keyboard instruments as diplomatic gifts, see Ian Woodfield, ‘The Keyboard Recital in Oriental Diplomacy, 1520^1620’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115 (1990), 33^62. 15

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sive collection of artefacts from Oceania (including many musical instruments) to Britain in 1771,19 and, as we have seen, Queen Charlotte of Britain (wife of George III) possessed a Chinese sheng. In some cases, instruments from abroad were imported to Europe for sale; there was, for instance, a thriving trade in ivory horns (oliphants) from north Africa, which were producedçand often adorned with intricate carvingsç for the European market.20 Ivory was instantly recognizable to Europeans as a rare and valuable commodity from exotic climes. Once disembedded from its point of origin and transported to Europe, it both represented and evoked faraway localities, bringing them within the realms of immediate experience. We see that in many cases the physical make-up of instruments often reflected the different environments in which the world’s peoples lived.21 Local natural resources available to particular societies not only dictated the types of instruments that were built in those areas, but also ensured that some instruments were more highly prized than others since the materials used varied in value. The components of certain instruments could also demonstrate different levels of technological proficiency: for instance, the use of metal strings implied the knowledge of extrusion techniques, while the methods of wood-carving used could indicate the ingenuity of craftmanship and familiarity with fundamental principles of acoustics. Of course, some societies chose not to make use of particular resources or technologies, for their own cultural reasons. Just as the wheel and axle in the pre-Columbian Americas were used only for children’s toys, Amerindian cultures appear to have made use of the bow and arrow for hunting and warfare without ever choosing to adapt the bow-string for any musical purpose.22 But global networks of trade and communication diffused raw materials and construction techniques throughout the world in the early modern period, just as they do today. For example, extra-European environments were the source of many raw materialsçconsidered luxury items in Europeçthat were gradually introduced into the manufacture of European instruments, such as ebony, ivory, pernambuco wood, silk, and tortoiseshell. While silk is the only one of these materials that could have any immediately recognizable difference in sound production, others contributed to the aesthetic function of the instrument, which was especially significant within domestic settings and the culture of amateur musicians. Yet early modern European bow-makers, having experimented with many different types of hardwoods from around the world, appear to have made the deliberate choice of using snakewood, then pernambuco, as their favoured materials for bow sticks, as these woods were strong and dense, but light.23 We can only speculate as to how differently the design of the European bowçand, in consequence, the music it producedç may have developed had these makers not had access to these particular woods from

19 Wilfred Shawcross, ‘The Cambridge University Collection of Maori Artefacts, Made on Captain Cook’s First Voyage’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 79 (1970), 305^48 at 305. 20 Many oliphants were produced in parts of Africa where the Portuguese had set up regular trade; they were often ornamented with carved scenes of African or European life. Those that are end-blown, rather than side-blown (as is typical in Africa), are thought to have been produced in Africa for the European market. 21 For a thorough treatment of the effect of different environments on the course of history for different peoples, see Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies, 2nd edn. (New York, 1999). 22 No string instruments existed in the Americas before the advent of sustained connections with Europe and Africa from the turn of the sixteenth century. See Montagu, Origins and Development, 196; also Robert Murrell Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory (Berkeley, 1968), 22^7. 23 See Robert E. Seletsky, ‘New Light on the Old Bowç1’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 286^96 at 288; id., ‘New Light on the Old Bowç2’, ibid. 415^26 at 415.

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the Americas. Like so many other aspects of early modern European culture, music was inextricably intertwined with the processes of incipient globalization. II. IDENTIFICATION AND UNDERSTANDING

Identifying the cultural specificity of certain instruments is a crucial part of organological observation. But at the point of initial contact between European and nonEuropean cultures, early modern explorers were often unaware of non-European instruments’ deep cultural significance, even after they had recognized such objectsç and particularly in their first encounters with peoples who had no prior experience of Europeans. In the earliest record of contact between Europeans and the Ma~ori of Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, Abel Janszoon Tasman described how Ma~ori men shouted at his ship and blew an instrument that sounded ‘like a Moorish trumpet’.24 The response in kind, ordered by Tasman, was a series of trumpet blasts in alternation with those of the Ma~ori, and finally cannon fire. The next day, brutal conflict ensued. Mervyn McLean observes that Tasman was ‘unaware that he had probably received and accepted a challenge to fight’.25 Misunderstandings of this sort were common in early modern exploration, although the sounds of instruments with warlike associations in European cultures, such as drums, were sometimes heeded for their message in the right contexts. Nevertheless, almost nothing could be taken for granted in interpreting different peoples’ sonic signals and their cultural resonance. It was only through sustained intercultural engagement that opposing parties could come to any mutual tolerance of each other, but this engagement was rarely on equal terms. In the Americas, many indigenous cultures were systematically eradicated, although chroniclers (indigenous and European alike) often left extensive ethnographic documentation of what had gone before. The earliest Spanish descriptions of Aztec musical instruments identified some that were reserved for the most solemn rituals (and which often accompanied human sacrifice),26 but since many of these instruments, such as rattles and conch trumpets, were assimilated into musical practices for Christian worship, it can be assumed that their associations with heathen rituals were quickly overlooked by missionaries. They saw the instruments as aides for conversion, especially once numbers of converts began to swell. Lists of equipment required for missions even began to include tiny aerophones, or percussion instruments such as rattles and drums, since they were thought to please non-Europeans.27 Dictionaries of indigenous languages produced by missionaries in the early modern period often contain seminal organological data, describing not only construction techniques but also the natural resources used. Since many of their definitions document practices that disappeared when

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Mervyn McLean, Maori Music (Auckland, 1996 ), 23. Ibid. 26 See, for instance, the discussion of the a¤yotl (tortoise shell drum), chicahuaztli (long rattle board), tecciztli (conch trumpet) and chililitli (copper discs) in Robert Murrell Stevenson, ‘Aztec Organography’, Inter-American Music Review, 9/2 (1988), 1^20 at 4^5. 27 For example, the list of requirements for the Jesuit mission to the Mariana Islands, drawn up in Mexico in 1668, included the following musical instruments: whistles, little bells, rattles, a drum, recorders, gayta (implying a type of bagpipe) ‘or any other instrument [that is] easy to play’, along with standard European instruments such as a horn, a trumpet or shawms, harp, guitar, and (spare) strings. See History of Micronesia: A Collection of Source Documents, ed. Rodrigue Le¤vesque, 20 vols. (Gatineau, Que¤bec, 1992^2001), iv. 382^3. 25

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European instruments were introduced and began to dominate,28 these are particularly useful documents: in the words of Robert Murrell Stevenson, ‘anyone who has made use of the dictionaries soon comes to know them as the organologist’s best friends’.29 The syncretic nature of the local forms of Roman Catholicism that emerged in the Spanish empire was reflected in the pluralistic musical practices cultivated by the neophytes. Precolonial instruments sometimes appear to have complemented their newly introduced European counterparts. One eighteenth-century artist in Mexico demonstrated this juxtaposition clearly in his depiction of the traditional dance of the deposed Aztec emperor Moctezuma, accompanied by an ensemble of indigenous instruments on the left-hand side, and European instruments on the right.30 In areas where the mission was on a less secure footing, however, missionaries often saw the use of traditional percussion instruments as a relapse to old ‘heathen’ ways. In the Congo, for example, the Capuchin Jerom Merolla da Sorrento noted in 1682 that when missionaries heard their neophytes revert to the use of drums at feasts and entertainments, they would ‘immediately run to the place in order to disturb the wicked Pastime’. He claimed that his intended converts ‘not only make use of these Drums at Feasts, but likewise at the infernal Sacrifices of Man’s Flesh to the Memory of their Relations and Ancestors, as also at the time when they invoke the Devil for their Oracle’.31 The use of drums to communicate with the supernatural world was not confined to countries distant from Europe. In northern Scandinavia, for example, the Laps were noted to play highly decorated drums, or kannus (see Pl. 2), as the means of receiving messages from the gods. A change in the sound of the kannus, played while songs were sung, indicated that a sacrifice was pleasing to Thor. The sacrifice was never offered until sonic assent had been given.32 While gods could ‘speak’ through drums, some percussion instruments could become objects of veneration themselves, as in Brazil, where the Tupinamba¤ made offerings of food and drink to their maracas. These instruments, as Le¤ry observed, were attributed ‘some sanctity’; ‘they [the Tupinamba¤] say that oftentimes when they shake them a spirit speaks to them’.33 Similarly, the Aztecs believed that their instruments

28

The Jesuit Francisco Ignacio Alzina, for instance, observed that a dance called taruc in the Visayas (the central third of the Philippine Archipelago) was once accompanied by indigenous instruments such as bells and other small percussive devices, ‘but these were their ancient instruments and now they use guitars, harps and other musical instruments in our style’ (‘E¤stos eran sus antiguos instruments y agora usan de guitarras y arpas y otros instrumentos mu¤sicos a nuestro modo’). Francisco Ignacio Alzina, SJ, Una etnograf|¤a de los indios bisayas del siglo XVII, ed. Victoria Yepes (Coleccio¤n Biblioteca de historia de Ame¤rica, 15; Madrid, 1996 ), 213. 29 Robert Murrell Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory (Berkeley, 1968), 260. 30 Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven and London, 2004), 172. Lam. 3, Pagina 118 in Joaqu|¤n Antonio de Basara¤s y Garaygorta, ‘Origen, costumbres, y estado presente de mexicanos y philipinos’ (1763), Library of the Hispanic Society of America (New York), MS HC. 363^940,1^2. Basara¤s’s description of the instruments used can be found in Una visio¤ n del Me¤ xico del siglo de las luces: La codificacio¤ n de Joaqu|¤ n Antonio de Basara¤s, ed. Ilona Katzew (Mexico, DF, 2006 ), 118^19. 31 Jerom Merolla da Sorrento, ‘A Voyage to Congo, and Several Other Countries, chiefly in Southern-Africk, by Father Jerom Merolla da Sorrento, a Capuchin and Apostolick Missioner, in the Year 1682’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Churchill, i. 695. The passage is also quoted in Frank Ll. Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation c. 1550 to c. 1800 (Amsterdam, 1973), 96. 32 John Scheffer [ Johannes Schefferus], The History of Lapland, wherein are shewed the Original, Manners, Habits, Marriages, Conjurations, &c. of that People, trans. Acton Cremer (Oxford, 1674), 42; for the description of the drum, see p. 47; on the use of the instrument, see pp. 52^8 (also quoted in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 74^83). Some Christian elements had evidently begun to influence the designs made on the drum by this time, as can be seen in Pl. 2. 33 English translation (of edition published in Paris, 1585) in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 23. Original text: ‘ils disent que souventesfois en les sonnans un esprit parle a' eux’. Jean de Le¤ry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (original publication Geneva, 1580), facs. edn., ed. Jean-Claude Morisot (Geneva, 1975), 250.

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PL. 2. Lappish drums (kannus or quobdas), in John Scheffer, The History of Lapland, 48 [erroneously paginated as p. 50]. Reproduced by kind permission of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

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teponaztli and hue¤huetl were divine beings that had been expelled from heaven, assuming ‘the form of musical instruments’ on earth.34 For these societies, musical instruments constructed by humansçor, as in the case of seed-pod rattles, selected and adapted from natureçthus assumed a supernatural position by virtue of having been devised by humankind, with guidance that was accorded to divine powers, thus becoming a ‘creation within Creation’. Some societies, of course, represented the other extreme in the association of religious belief with instruments. Certain early modern European travellers to the Middle East were astonished to learn, for example, that the use of instruments was officially prohibited in Islam (although this ruling was often flouted in practice).35 Comparative organography proved to early modern scholars that musical instruments served a diverse range of functions throughout the world, and that their use was often governed by religious tenets. The convergence of different societies around the world as a result of sustained contact through trade, diplomacy, or colonialism in the early modern period meant that hierarchies of cultural and religious symbolism had to be recast in the light of intercultural comparisons, but in some cases they were unceremoniously suppressed by a hegemonic imperial power. III. ANTIQUITY

While for L. P. Hartley, ‘the past is a foreign country’, for early modern European travellers, the opposite was true. At a time when Eurocentric writers considered their own territory a hotbed of modernity, and all other places to ‘lag behind’ in technology, political systems, or social structures, some non-European peoples appeared to share common cultural elements with the classical civilizations of Europe itself. Europeans were familiar with the differences revealed to them by studying their own ancient cultures, and antiquity became a standard with which non-European cultures could be compared. In European eyes, certain non-European societies represented living examples of antique civilizations. We have already seen how images of non-European instruments entered the imagination of European readers; we should also remind ourselves that illustrations of musical instruments from European antiquityçGreece and Romeçwere regularly published and republished in early modern European books.36 With these two types of images presented alongside each other, non-European instruments resembling those of classical antiquity were considered to be signifiers of an emerging civilization. In early modern ethnographic descriptions, comparisons between contemporary ‘pagan’ peoples and pre-Christian European antiquity were also a means of making non-European cultures and practices more palatable to European sensibilities. For missionaries, the message was clear: if pagan Europe had been converted to Christianity, what was to stop evangelical success in the rest of the world? European religious functionaries were quick to capitalize on the comparisons that emerged between the societies of the Old and New Worlds. The French Jesuit Joseph Franc ois Lafitau, for example, documented the customs of the indigenous population

34

Stevenson, Music in Aztec and Inca Territory, 111. See the comments by Jean Chardin in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 128, 133. However, the role of music in Islam throughout the history of religion has been reassessed by a number of writers in recent times. See e.g. Amnon Shiloah, ‘Music and Religion in Islam’, Acta Musicologica, 69 (1997), 143^55. 36 See Naomi J. Barker, ‘Un-discarded Images: Illustrations of Antique Musical Instruments in 17th- and 18thCentury Books, their Sources and Transmission’, Early Music, 35 (2007), 191^211. 35

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in North America in relation to those of European ‘primitive times’.37 His publication included two detailed plates of ‘musical instruments of earliest antiquity’ças had been proposed and illustrated by Kircher in his Musurgia universalisç‘placed in comparison with those of the Americans’.38 Philip V. Bohlman notes that ‘Lafitau was a remarkable experimenter with musical ethnography . . . demonstrating that such instruments possessed no less rational functions than similar instruments of the Greeks’.39 Likewise, in the Spanish colony of the Philippines, another Jesuit named Pedro Murillo Velarde claimed that a local flute called the bangsi looked as if it came from an ancient tomb, and ‘accordingly [sounded] sad’; he also compared warlike dances of certain indigenous communities to those of the ancient Greeks and Trojans.40 For early modern ethnographers the rational nature of non-Europeans could be tested against the model of classical antiquity, and instruments were highly visible and audible markers of a civilization’s condition. Nowhere was this comparative process more evident than in the islands of the Pacific Ocean, where Europeans encountered societies that they considered to epitomize their idealized visions of ancient Greek life and customs. The isolation of many Polynesian peoples was broken in the second half of the eighteenth century, with British and French voyagers at the forefront of this endeavour.41 By this time, the philosophy of the Enlightenment prevailed, pervading the organization and operation of exploratory voyages, which carried scientists and artists instead of soldiers and missionaries.42 Vestiges of antiquity were apparent in Pacific Islander communities, and these were reflected in the voyagers’ descriptions and artistic representations of various islands and their peoples, as well as the names given to them by Europeans. Not least, connections with European classical antiquity were noted in their musics.43 In 1776, Charles Burney commented in his General History on the reports that came back from the Pacific: A syrinx, or fistula panis, made of reeds tied together, exactly resembling that of the ancients, has been lately found to be in common use in the island of New Amsterdam [Tongatapu], in the South Seas, as flutes and drums have been in Otaheite [Tahiti] and New Zealand; which indisputably prove them to be instruments natural to every people emerging from barbarism. 37 Joseph-Franc ois Lafitau, SJ, M
urs des sauvages ameriquains compare¤ es aux m
urs des premiers temps (Paris,1724). Translated as Joseph Franc ois Lafitau, SJ, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. and trans. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, 2 vols. (Publications of the Champlain Society, 48^9; Toronto, 1974^7). 38 Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians, pl. VIII and IX. See also Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Missionaries, Magical Muses, and Magnificent Menageries: Image and Imagination in the Early History of Ethnomusicology’, World of Music, 30 (1988), 5^27. 39 Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Representation and Cultural Critique in the History of Ethnomusicology’, in Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (eds.), Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology (Chicago and London, 1991), 131^51 at 137. 40 ‘El Bangsi, a' modo de flauta, que parece sale de una sepultura, segun es triste . . . Los Visayas, Zambales, y Boholanos usan un Bayle muy guerrero, con lanzas, campilanes, y otras armas, como los Griegos, y Troyanos.’ Pedro Murillo Velarde, Geographia historica, donde se describen los reynos, provincias, ciudades, fortalezas, mares, montes, ensenadas, cabos, rios, y puertos, con la mayor individualidad, y exactitud, etc., 10 vols. (Madrid, 1752), viii. 38. For further discussion of the musical dimension of early modern colonial ethnography in the Philippines, see D. R. M. Irving, Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 41 See David Irving, ‘The Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 2 (2005), 205^29; Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World, from Antiquity to the Present (London, 2002), 119^34. 42 See Pagden, Peoples and Empires, 132. 43 On European reactions to the music of Pacific Islanders, see Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus:The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford, 2008), 73^119.

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They were first used by the Egyptians and Greeks, during the infancy of the musical art among them; and they seem to have been invented and practised at all times by nations remote from each other, and between whom it is hardly possible that there ever could have been the least intercourse or communication.44

Even in the final quarter of the eighteenth century, Burney already seems to be hinting at a theory of convergent evolution for musical instruments, arguing that flutes and drums are part of a teleological ‘natural’ progression from a state of ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. He also identifies the fact that vast distances separating various human societies from others had acted as insurmountable barriers preventing communication or intercourse (musical or otherwise) until the advent of global systems of transportation in the early modern period. By this reasoning he proposes that all humans express innate musicality by means of instrument production as a result of convergent evolution in isolationçnot diffusion from other cultures. But he does not go so far as to suggest that Pacific Islanders in continual isolation from Europe would have developed music that was ‘sophisticated’ in his eyes. While the Pacific Ocean and the NewWorld represented the most distant frontiers in the early modern European consciousness, the Near East and India were regions that had been known to Europeans for far longer, since they were relatively more accessible for travellers. Many Europeans were resident in the Near East for diplomatic purposes, and their sustained contact with Oriental cultures made them more qualified than most Europeans of the time to proffer descriptions of instruments or to pass judgement on them. The eighteenth-century French writer Charles Fonton, who had lived in Constantinople at a young age and had been thoroughly immersed in the Ottomans’ language, history, and culture, described a number of Ottoman instruments in his unpublished ‘Essai sur la musique orientale compare¤e a' la musique europe¤enne’ of 1751.45 In treating the tanbur, a plucked chordophone, he identified Plato as a common element between European and Ottoman musics, but he disputed the extent of the Ottoman claim for a direct musical lineage from the Greek philosopher.46 Evidently he wished to preserve ancient Greek heritage for Europe, in defiance of Ottoman hegemony over Hellenic regions. India, too, furnished many specimens of ‘ancient’ musical instruments in common use during the early modern period that fascinated European scholars. Mersenne, for instance, reproduced a diagram of a v|~nq a~ in his Harmonie universelle, but claimed erroneously that part of it could double as a flute.47 The v|~nq a~ was sufficiently different in appearance from so many other instrumentsçits two gourds made it stand outçthat it captured the eye of many Europeans. Many early modern observers described it as pleasing in sound, even if it struck them as looking ‘odd’.48 In the late eighteenth century, this instrument was the subject of another examination, described by Joep Bor 44 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period.To which is prefixed, A Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, 4 vols. (London, 1776^89), i. 267. 45 For a biographical summary of Fonton, see Amnon Shiloah, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Critic of Taste and Good Taste’, in Stephen Blum, Philip V. Bohlman, and Daniel M. Neuman (eds.), Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana and Chicago, 1991), 181^9 at 182^3. 46 Charles Fonton, ed. Eckhard Neubauer, ‘Essai sur la musique orientale compare¤e a' la musique europe¤enne [1751]’, Zeitschrift fu«r Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 2 (1985), 317^18. What Fonton probably failed to realize, however, is that Europe owed its knowledge of many ancient Greek philosophers to the Arab world’s preservation of classical texts that had been forgotten in Europe for centuries. 47 Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, ii. 228. Also noted in Bor, ‘The Rise of Ethnomusicology’, 53. 48 See Pietro della Valle’s description, quoted in Bor, ‘The Rise of Ethnomusicology’, 52.

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PL. 3. Diagram of a v|~nq a~ in A ‘ n EXTRACT of a LETTER from Francis Fowke, Esq. to the President’, plate between pp. 296 and 297. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

as ‘highly accurate’, which culminated in the Englishman Francis Fowke publishing his observations in the first volume of the journal Asiatick Researches (Calcutta, 1788).49 Fowke described how he had compared the tunings of a v|~nq a~ and a harpsichord in order to establish the intervals of the frets.50 He also praised the ‘style, scale, and antiquity of this instrument’, and provided two engravings, one showing it being played by the virtuoso Jeewun Shah, and another presenting a clear diagrammatic representation of the instrument (Pl. 3).51 Fowke’s reference to the antiquity of the v|~nq a~ reflects the growing interest of Anglo-Indian colonial society in the histories of ancient cultures on the sub-continent. This area of inquiry was spearheaded by the seminal work of the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones (‘Orientalist Jones’, 1746^94), who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and who was in fact responsible for the publication of Fowke’s letter. Jones rendered great homage to ancient Indian languages, especially Sanskrit (whose refinement made him prefer it over both Classical Greek and Latin), and his influence undoubtedly contributed to the rise of ‘Orientalism’ as a significant academic pursuit in the following centuries. Yet at the same time he also played a pivotal role in codifying and consolidating the Occident^Orient dichotomy from a philosophical, linguistic, and literary perspective, as Edward W. Said has pointed out, thus furthering colonialist objectives (whether unwittingly or not).52

49 Ibid. 55; Francis Fowke, A ‘ n EXTRACT of a LETTER from Francis Fowke, Esq. to the President’, Asiatick Researches: or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, for inquiring into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences, and literature, of Asia, 1 (Calcutta, 1788). This article is reprinted in Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Hindu Music from Various Authors, 3rd edn. (Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies, 49; Varanasi, 1965), 191^7. 50 ‘You may absolutely depend upon the accuracy of all that I have said respecting the construction and scale of this instrument. It has all been done by measurement: and, with regard to the intervals, I would not depend upon my ear, but had the Been [v|~qna~ ] tuned to the harpsichord, and compared the instruments carefully, note by note, more than once.’ Fowke, A ‘ n EXTRACT of a LETTER’, 295. See also Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford, 2000), 178^9. 51 Fowke, A ‘ n EXTRACT of a LETTER’, 299. 52 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978; new edn., London, 2003), 77^9.

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Still, even when read in the light of this context, Fowke’s report is arguably the most detailed of any description of the v|~nq a~ made during the early modern period, and in many ways it represents the beginnings of reliable organological studies made in situ outside Europe, as it combines observations of performance practice with meticulous physical examination of construction and of sound production.53 It is also unusual for extolling the virtuosity of a named (and depicted) practitioner of the instrument, in much the same way a celebrated performer in Europe might be praised and idolized at the time. Technical proficiency on an instrumentçwhether non-European or Europeançand interculturally recognizable excellence in musical interpretation were beginning to manifest themselves as yardsticks by which any nascent notions of human egalitarianism could be measured. IV. EMPATHY AND ANTIPATHY

Anthony Pagden has noted that ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observers . . . lived in a world which believed firmly in the universality of most social norms and in a high degree of cultural unity between the various races of man’.54 This observation, made in reference to the origins of comparative ethnology, applies no less to music than to any other aspect of society or culture. Early modern European writers comparing other musics to their own often expressed sentiments of either empathy or antipathy towards foreign cultures when discussing the appearance, sound, or function of instruments. European orchestral instruments reached their relatively immutable forms (or holotypes) in the late nineteenth century, but in the early modern period the wide scope for innovation in their designçand the vast array of variant instruments from e¤lite and popular cultures alikeçmeant that travellers might be familiar with a great range of instrument types and playing styles. In turn, this allowed them to react more favourably to the alien specimens that they encountered, at least in considering their shape and size, if not their sound. For societies that would experience sustained contact with Europeans, either in the context of colonial domination (as in the case of subjugated populations in Latin America) or through regular trade (for example, Japan, until it closed its doors definitively to the outside world in 1639, with the exception of limited contact with quarantined Dutch traders), the similarities that were noted between certain Western and nonWestern instrument types also implied the capacity of non-Europeans to take up European instruments. In the eyes of colonialists, this transcultural ability would also thereby demonstrate non-Europeans’ propensity to adopt other aspects of European culture. When the Jesuit Matteo Ricci observed a Confucian ceremony in the early seventeenth century, he considered Chinese court practices to be comparable with those of Europe.55 He even seemed to imply that instrumentalists who had the technique to 53 Francis Fowke (1753^1819), the eldest son of a wealthy East India Company employee and free merchant, was a keen amateur musician, and resided in Benares, Chinsura, and Calcutta from 1773 to 1786. He collaborated with his sister Margaret (1758^1836 ) in broad enterprises that aimed at developing understanding and appreciation of Indian musical cultures. See Ian Woodfield, ‘The ‘‘Hindostannie Air’’: English Attempts to Understand Indian Music in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 119 (1994), 189^211; T. H. Bowyer, ‘Fowke, Joseph (1716^1800)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) 5http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/635604, accessed 9 Jan. 2009. 54 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 6. 55 See Matteo Ricci, SJ and Nicolas Trigault, SJ, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Iesu: Ex P. Matthaei Ricij eiusdem Societatis co[m]mentarijs, libri V. ad S. D. N. Paulum. V . . . Auctore N. Trigautio (Augsburg, 1615), 369; English translation in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, rev. edn., ed. Leo Treiter et al. (New York and London, 1998), 507.

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play Chinese instruments such as the pipa and the sheng could apply their skills to the equivalent European instruments. For Ricci, the same ran true for philosophical and intellectual capacities, and in his mind’s eye he positioned the Chinese scholarly class as ripe for conversion. In a similar vein, Juan de Torquemada compared the religious rituals of pre-Conquest Mexico to those of Catholic Europe, citing similarities between the use of instruments to summon worshippers or adorn devotions, thereby identifying pre-existing structures onto which the Christian religion could be grafted.56 The use of musical instruments was recognized as a cultural characteristic that was common to all human societies, yet the presence of instruments in one society in no way defended it from enslavement or annihilation by another. The most acute demonstration of this reality is obviously to be found in Africa, where complex instruments were observed by early modern Europeans,57 but where entire communities were apprehended by slavers for transportation to the Americas. As we shall see, the inherent ingenuity in instrument design in the African diaspora could not be suppressed, even after enslavement and trans-oceanic relocation, during which all that slaves could take with them were their cultural memories. These memories resulted in the construction of many African instruments in the Americas, among which figured xylophones and gourd-resonated bows.58 Certain other non-European populations were treated with great deference, however, particularly where potentially lucrative trading agreements were at stake. In a more peaceful type of trading mission, a French delegation to Siam in the 1680s presented French music (‘several Airs of our Opera on the Violin’) to the kingçwho received it with indifference (‘he did not think them of a movement grave enough’)çand witnessed performances of Siamese music. The leader of the group, Simon de la Loube're, reported disparagingly that ‘their Instruments are not well chose [sic], and it must be thought that those, wherein there appears any knowledge of Musick, have them brought from other parts. They have very ugly little Rebecks or Violins with three strings, which they call Tro, and some very shrill Hoboys which they call Pi, and the Spaniards Chirimias.’59 However, he was encouraged by the impression made on the Siamese by European instruments: ‘The Siameses do extreamly love our Trumpets, theirs are small and harsh, they call them Tre.’60 To La Loube're, favourable reactions of another people to his own musical instruments indicated apparent willingness to engage in cultural exchanges over and above that of trade. Just a few years before this mission, Louis XIV himself had 56

See Juan de Torquemada, Parte de los veynte y un libros rituales y Monarchia Indiana con el origen y guerras de los Indios Occidentales de sus poblac ones descubrimiento, conquista, conversion y otras cosas maravillosas de la mesma tierra (Madrid, 1723; originally published Seville, 1615), quoted in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 27^8, 39. 57 See, for example, a description by Denis de Carli of a Congolese xylophone with gourd-resonators in Michael Angelo and Denis de Carli, ‘A Curious and Exact Account of a Voyage to Congo in the years 1666 and 1667’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, ed. Churchill, i. 622. 58 See Montagu, Origins and Development, 10, 196. 59 Simon de La Loube're, A new historical relation of the kingdom of Siam by Monsieur De La Loubere, Envoy Extraordinary from the French King, to the King of Siam, in the years 1687 and 1688, trans. A. P. Gen. R. S. S., 2 vols. (London, 1693), Part II, 68; also quoted in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 87. Original text: ‘Leurs instruments ne sont pas d’ailleurs bien recherche¤s, et il faut croire que ceux ou' il para|“t quelque connaissance de la musique leur sont venus de dehors. . . . Ils ont de mauvais petits rebecs, ou violons a' trois cordes, qu’ils appellent tro“ , et des hautbois fort aigres qu’ils nomment p|¤, et les Espagnols chirimias’; cited in Michel Jacq-Hergoualc’h, E¤tude historique et critique du livre de Simon de la Loube' re ‘Du Royaume de Siam’çParis 1691 (Paris, 1987), 269^70. It is worthy of note that La Loube're identified certain Siamese instruments as chirim|¤as (Spanish shawms); these were probably examples of similar-looking Siamese shawms called Pi chawa. Diplomatic missions sent from Spanish Manila to Siam in the 17th and 18th cc. probably included players of chirim|¤a among their musical personnel, thus effecting mutual recognition of the instrument’s ceremonial role and facilitating intercultural negotiations. 60 La Loube're, A new historical relation of the kingdom of Siam, Part II, 69.

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attempted to emulate Siamese sonic rituals in Versailles for the reception of an embassy from Siam, in order to foster good relations between the two countries.61 Although intercultural encounters sometimes resulted in empathetic observations, at other times it was the alien musical aesthetic and the differences in the physical make-up of instruments that were emphasized by Europeans. Observations on strings, for instance, provided a theme for endless speculation and comparison. Such aspects as numbers of strings or playing technique were noted: in Japan, for example, the Jesuit Lu|¤s Fro¤is commented in the late sixteenth century that ‘our vihuelas have six strings, without counting the double courses, and we play [pluck] them with the hand [fingers]; those of Japan have four, and they are played with a sort of plectrum’.62 The materials used for strings could also impart particular cultural significance, or reflect environmental differences. For example, Le Chevalier Jean Chardin claimed that in Persia ‘the strings of their instruments are not gut, as ours are, because with them it is a contamination in law to touch dead parts of animals; their instruments’ strings are either of twisted raw silk or of spun brass’.63 On the other hand, some more pejorative judgements about materials used for strings point to lack of knowledge or a ‘wasted opportunity’ on the part of non-Europeans; Ricci commented, for instance, that the use of silk strings (which he called ‘twisted cotton’) in China implied ignorance of the musical uses of animal guts.64 But we should remember that the use of one string type rather than another neither confirms nor denies knowledge of particular string-making techniques; it is merely reflective of a common practice that has prevailed in accordance with other dimensions of a musical culture that is steeped in tradition rather than dependent on (or expectant of) innovation. In terms of sound quality, silk strings were nevertheless sometimes considered to be on a par with gut, at least when they were used on European instruments. The Jesuit Diego de Bobadilla wrote in around 1640 that the strings of the guitars and harps played by indigenous musicians in the Philippines ‘are made of twisted silk, and produce a sound as agreeable as that produced by our [type of] strings, even though they are made of quite different material’.65 Once the knowledge of silk strings was transmitted to Europe, and raw materials imported and manufacturing techniques developed, silk strings were adopted by some European musicians for use on plucked and bowed instruments, and in this context they have fluctuated in favour from the seventeenth century to the present day.66

61 See Ronald S. Love, ‘Rituals of Majesty: France, Siam, and Court Spectacle in Royal Image-Building at Versailles in 1685 and 1686’, Canadian Journal of History, 31 (1996 ), 171^98. 62 ‘As nossas violas tem seis cordas afora as dobradas, e tanjen-se com a ma‹o; as de Japa‹o 4 e tanjen-se com huma maneira de pentes.’ Lu|¤s Fro¤is, SJ and Josef Franz Schu«tte, SJ, Kulturgegensa«tze Europa-Japan (1585): Tratado em que se contem muito susinta e abreviadamente algumas contradic o‹ es e diferenc as de custumes antre a gente de Europa e esta provincia de Japa‹o (Monumenta Nipponica, 15; Tokyo, 1955), 246. 63 English translation in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, 132. The original text reads: ‘Vous observerez, que les cordes de leurs Instrumens ne sont pas des cordes a' boyau, comme aux no“tres, a' cause que chez eux c’est une impurete¤ legale de toucher aux parties mortes des animaux: leurs cordes d’Instrumens sont, ou de soye crue« retorse, ou de fil d’archal.’ Jean Chardin, Voyages de Monsieur le Chevalier Chardin, en Perse, et autres lieux de l’Orient, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1711), ii. 115. 64 ‘Fides instrumentis omnibus adhibent e' cruda bysso retortas, ex animalium fibris ne confici quidem posse norant.’ Ricci and Trigault, De Christiana expeditione, 21. 65 ‘Sont de soye torse, & rendent un son aussi agre¤able que les nostres, quoy qu’elles soient de matie're bien diffe¤rente’. In ‘Relation des Isles Philippines, Faite par un Religieux qui y a demeure¤ 18 ans’, in The¤venot, Relations de divers voyages curieux, i. 5. 66 Mersenne and other theorists make mention of this alternative to gut or metal. See Patrizio Barbieri, ‘Roman and Neapolitan Gut Strings 1550^1950’, Galpin Society Journal, 59 (2006 ), 147^81 at 170.

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Just as material components of instruments could be reassigned from one instrumental culture to another, some early modern scholars believed that playing techniques could be similarly transposed. Burney noted in 1776 that ‘the New-Zealand trumpet, though extremely sonorous, is likewise monotonous, when it is blown by the natives, though it is capable of as great a variety of tones as an [sic] European trumpet’.67 Evidently, a local (European) trumpeter had been commissioned by Burney to test the harmonic series on the Ma~ori instrument. But we can see that since the physics of a vibrating column of air apply universally, the technical capabilities of a European natural trumpet and a Ma~ori pu~ta~tara or pu~ka~ea would differ only according to their length, width, and bore. More significantly, the range of notes used by different musical cultures would depend on the instrument’s function, the local society’s aesthetic requirements, and the musicians’ sensibilities. Nevertheless, European scholars still assumed that professional instrumentalists were best placed to probe into the mysteries of the non-European instruments with which they were presented. In 1775, the Irish musical theorist Joshua Steele published his report on ‘the curious system of pipes, brought by Captain Fourneaux from the South Seas’ (Pl. 4). He commented that ‘the instrument was so new to me, that I should be sorry its reputation should rest intirely [sic] on my report, as I think an expert blower of the German flute might make further discoveries’.68 By overblowing and producing octaves and tierces above the fundamentals of most pipes, Steele was able to construct a series of nineteen notes, ‘sufficient for an infinite number of airs’ from nine pipes of seven different pitches.69 It is evident that some Europeans, like Steele, were able to empathize with exotic instruments only when they could be accommodated within European modes of musical theory and practice.70 The sort of Eurocentrism exemplified here by Steele is apparent in many other examples of early modern comparative organography, and we can see that the standards by which late eighteenth-century scholars sought to judge non-European instruments and their music were often based on unrealistic parameters constructed by an oversimplification of non-European musical systems and aesthetics. But we should remember that it was undoubtedly also based partly on a genuine desire to know and appreciate foreign technology and artistry. Some exotic instruments were (re)constructed specifically for inclusion within European music as a means of evoking faraway times or places, producing sounds that presented a direct contrast to the musical norms of early modern Europe. Ruth Smith has shown that Handel commissioned the building of a‘tubalcain’or carillon, supposedly after the style of the ancient Hebrews, for use in his oratorio Saul.71 While the music written for this instrument is typically Handelian, the tubalcain evoked for Handel’s audience the sound of the ancient Near East. Non-European instruments were gradually adopted for percussion in large-scale works from the seventeenth century onwards; as early as 1680, for instance, Nicolas Strungk used cymbals in the orchestration of his

67

Burney, A General History of Music, i. 216. Joshua Steele, ‘Account of a Musical Instrument, Which Was Brought by Captain Fourneaux from the Isle of Amsterdam in the South Seas to London in the Year 1774, and Given to the Royal Society’, Philosophical Transactions, 65 (1775), 67^71 at 67. 69 Ibid. 70. 70 On contemporary criticism of Steele’s comparisons, see Irving, ‘The Pacific in the Minds and Music of Enlightenment Europe’, 211^14; and Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus, 114. 71 Ruth Smith, ‘Early Music’s Dramatic Significance in Handel’s Saul’, Early Music, 35 (2007), 173^89 at 175^6. 68

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PL. 4. A ‘curious system of pipes, brought by Captain Fourneaux from the South Seas’, in Joshua Steele, ‘Account of a Musical Instrument’, 68. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

opera Esther.72 Quite apart from the quite frequent use of Turkish instruments in European Scores, more exotic borrowings included the use of South Sea percussion instruments in John O’Keeffe and William Shield’s pantomime Omai: Or, a Trip Round the 72

Blades and Montagu, Early Percussion Instruments from the Middle Ages to the Baroque, 18.

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World (1785),73 and Aztec ‘Ajacatzily’ (ayacachtli) by Gaspare Spontini in his opera Fernand Cortez, ou La Conque“te du Mexique (1809).74 This fetishization of non-European percussion became a means of symbolizing distant musical cultures and evoking exotic sound-worlds on the European stage. But it could be argued that in the early modern period it acted predominantly as a colourful percussive veneer that had little effect on European tonality or compositional structures. V. RECIPROCITY

Although we have focused so far on European encounters with the ‘Other’, it is important to acknowledge that early modern organological comparison was by no means a one-way process. Non-Europeans also encountered the alien instruments and practices of Europe, and assessed them in accordance with their own musical systems. Sometimes their responses were favourable, but they could equally react with indifference or scorn. Relatively few reactions were recorded, but many were related by Europeans, who may have been interestedçor amusedçto see reflections of themselves offered by this mirror of alterity. Of course, reports written by non-European scholars and read without the filter of subsequent European interpretation are likely to be more reliable representations of non-European reactions. The location and interpretation of additional examples of non-European reactions to early modern European music would no doubt inform or change our perspective of Europe’s place in the early modern musical world. In 1711, Le Chevalier Jean Chardin reported his interrogation by a devout Muslim who queried aspects of instrumental practice in the Christian religion: The Chief Steward, who was Mohhamadan by birth, came to me and asked if the use of instruments were [sic] permitted in our religion. I told him it was. He replied that the Mohhamadan faith forbad [sic] it quite expressly. We had a half-hour’s discussion on this subject, in which that gentleman confirmed something I had learnt a long time before, that musical instruments were forbidden by Mohhamad, and that although their use was universal throughout Persia, it was nevertheless unlawful. He told me further that instruments were above all prohibited from religious use, since it was only with the human voice that God wishes to be praised.75

To the Chief Steward, Chardin probably represented a culture and a religion that flaunted the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, but as ‘unlawful’ usage of instruments was likewise practised by his fellow believers throughout Persia, their discussion probably proceeded on grounds that were not judgemental in nature. In his response, Chardin may even have empathized with the steward, informing him that the voice was indeed the primary instrument of praising God in Europe, citing more than a mil73 John O’Keeffe, A Short Account of the New Pantomime called Omai: or, A Trip Round the World, A new edition (London, 1785), 15. 74 Stevenson, ‘Aztec Organography’, 4. 75 Translation in Harrison,Time, Place and Music,128. The original text reads: ‘Durant ce tems-la', le premier Ma|“tre d’ho“tel, qui e¤toit Mahometan de naissance, s’approcha de moi & me demanda, si l’usage des instrumens e¤toit permis en no“tre Religion? Je lui dis qu’il l’e¤toit. Il me repliqua, que la cre¤ance Mahometane le de¤fendoit bien expresse¤ment. Nous eu“mes un entretien de demie heure sur ce sujet, dans lequel ce Seigneur me confirma ce que j’avois apris il y a long-tems, que les Instrumens de Musique sont de¤fendus par Mahomet; & qu’encore que l’usage en soit universel dans toute la Perse, il ne laisse pas d’e“tre illicite. Il me dit encore, que les Instrumens e¤toient sur tout prohibez dans la Religion, n’y ayant que la voix de l’homme avec laquelle Dieu vouloit e“tre loue¤.’ Chardin, Voyages de Monsieur le Chevalier Chardin, i. 142.

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lennium of chant traditions. Speculation aside, however, it is likely that intercultural exchanges in Eurasia were sufficiently old and regular for Christians and Muslims to have formed a general impression of the place of music in each other’s religious traditions. For non-European observers, the unfamiliar was sometimes cloaked with the familiar; for example, they sometimes saw their kin or compatriots playing European instruments. In regions where the stakes for evangelistic success were high, these sorts of encounters were often deliberately orchestrated by European missionaries, who sought to impress on ‘gentiles’ who had not yet converted that adaptation or conversion was a benign process that had other cultural benefits. When a combined Japanese^ Jesuit embassy to Europe returned to Japan in 1590, the Jesuit superiors eagerly awaited an audience with the taiko~ (regent) Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536^98), which they were granted the following year. A programme of European music to be performed by four Japanese converts, who had travelled to Europe as part of the embassy, was devised to beguile the ruler. This aim was achieved with some success, as Fro¤is relates: At last, Toyotomi returned to the visitors. . . . They talked of various things, and he said that he wanted to hear the four gentlemen play some music. Then the musical instruments were brought, which had been prepared in advance. The four gentlemen began to play and sing to the cravo [harpsichord], the arpa [harp], the laude [lute], and the rabequinha [fiddle]. They performed very gracefully because they had learned much in Italy and Portugal. He listened to them with great attention and curiosity. The envoys stopped playing soon after they began in order not to cause trouble to the ruler. He ordered them to perform three times on the same instruments. Then he took each instrument in his hands, and asked the four princes questions about the instruments. He further ordered them to play the violas de arco [viols] and the realejo [reed organ]. He examined them with great curiosity. He told various things to the gentlemen, and said that he was very happy to find them to be Japanese.76

Hideyoshi, who generally resented many aspects of European influence in his domain, evidently welcomed foreign artistry and technology. Moreover, in this account he seemed genuinely pleased that his young compatriots had taken advantage of procuring knowledge and skills from afar. But his curiosity appears to have stemmed from the differences that he noticed between their European instruments and those of traditional Japanese usage. However, instruments did not save the Roman Catholic mission from orders to its detriment that were later given by Hideyoshi, which culminated in the martyrdom of twenty-six European and Japanese Christians at Nagasaki in 1597, and continued the following year with the demolition of churches, seminaries, and religious houses.77 76 English translation in Yukimi Kambe, ‘Viols in Japan in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, 37 (2000), 31^67 at 60^1. The original text reads: ‘Finalmente, tornando de novo aonde o P.e Vizitador estava, havendo-se entretanto tiradas as mezas, comessou a dizer diversas couzas e mandou que fossem diante delle os quatro fidalgos, porque queria ouvir sua muzica. E logo viera‹o os instrumentos que para isso estava‹o apparelhados, e os quatro fidalgos comec ara‹o a tanger descantando com cravo e arpa, laude e rabequinha, o que fizera‹o com muito ar e grac a e despejo, por terem mui bem aprendido em Italia e em Portugal. E mandou-os cantar, ouvindo-os com grande attenc a‹o e curiozidade, porque elles depoes que tangia‹o hum pouco deixava‹o, como por reverencia de o continuar para o na‹o enfadar; e elle lhe mandou tres vezes que tornassem a tanger e cantar com os mesmos instrumentos. E depoes tomou cada hum dos instrumentos por sy nas ma‹os e comessou sobre elles a fazer diversas preguntas aos 4 fidalgos japo‹es. Quis mais que tangessem com as violas de arco e o realejo, e tudo vio com muita curiozidade, movendo diversas praticas com elles, dizendo-lhes que, poes elles era‹o japo‹es, se aleg[r]ava muito.’ Lu|¤s Fro¤is, SJ, and Jose¤ Wicki, SJ, Historia de Japam [sic], 5 vols. (Lisbon, 1976^84), v. 308. 77 See David Waterhouse, ‘Southern Barbarian Music in Japan’, in Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco (ed.), Portugal and the World:The Encounter of Cultures in Music (Lisbon, 1997), 351^77 at 366.

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The four Japanese youths, sons of samurai, had kept travel diaries during their epic voyage to Europe, which were edited by their Jesuit patrons, translated into Latin, and published in Macau in 1590.78 According to Eta Harich-Schneider, the book was ‘meant to serve in the seminaries [of Japan] as a Latin reader and an introduction into western learning’.79 Although edited (and censored) by European Jesuits, then arranged into Socratic dialogues, their published account probably retains or at least synthesizes many of their raw observations about Europe and its arts. In particular, the youths’ descriptions of European instrumentsçespecially the organçdemonstrate their keen interest (as practitioners of European music themselves) in technical concerns.80 In the East Asian sphere, the imperial court of China was also enthralled by demonstrations of European keyboard instruments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Joyce Lindorff, ‘the clavichord or harpsichord was probably doubly intriguing: not only did it represent the Western style of music-making, it held inherent interest as an ingenious mechanical device’.81 Lindorff recounts how in 1654 the Chinese scholar Tan Qian visited the Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell at his Beijing residence, and was shown a clavichord. Tan Qian wrote a detailed description of this exotic European instrument, giving it the same name as a comparable Chinese chordophone, the qin (also known as guqin).82 Keyboard instruments were recognized by Europeans as ideal tools for making an impression on non-Europeans, as each example could incorporate displays of technology, artistry, design, and musicianship. European keyboard instruments were distinct from non-European aerophones and chordophones largely by virtue of the addition of a mechanized device that either plucked the strings or opened their pipes to a wind supply from a set of bellows. The alterity and novelty of these forms of foreign artifice were not lost on local observers. Woodfield has identified a technical description of a European organ written by an Indian scholar in the late sixteenth century (before 1596), which portrays something of the effect such instruments could have: it is described as ‘a great box the size of a man. A European sits inside it and plays the strings [i.e. keys] thereof, and two others outside keep putting their fingers on five peacock-wings [probably the bellows, shaped like peacock feathers], and all sorts of sounds come forth.’83 While an early modern European might be challenged to associate such a text with the instrument it seeks to portray, this description seems to be no less opaque than many European descriptions of Asian instruments made at around the same time. Even closer to Europe, representatives from Turkey were equally impressed when they encountered the pipe organ. On the occasion of an Ottoman embassy to France in 1720^1, the ambassador Yirmisekiz Celebi Mehmed visited the Chapelle des Invalides, noting that ‘there is a very beautiful organ which was made to be played while 78 Eduardus de Sande, SJ and Alessandro Valignano, SJ, De Missione Legatorum Iaponensium ad Romanam curiam, rebusque in Europa, ac toto itinere animadversis Dialogus, ex ephemeride ipsorum Legatorum collectus, & in sermonem Latinum versus ab E. de Sande Sacerdote Societatis Jesu (In Macaensi portu Sinici regni [Macau], 1590). 79 Eta Harich-Schneider, ‘Renaissance Europe through Japanese Eyes: Record of a Strange Triumphal Journey’, Early Music, 1 (1973), 19^25 at 23. 80 See a translation of their assessments of European musical instruments in ibid. 23^5. 81 Joyce Lindorff, ‘Missionaries, Keyboards and Musical Exchange in the Ming and Qing Courts’, Early Music, 32 (2004), 402^14 at 403. 82 ‘The qin has iron wires. The casket-like box is five feet lengthwise and about nine inches high. A middle board divides it. Above the board are 45 strings arranged over a slant, left to right, and tied to small pins. There is another slant. Under this slant are hidden small protrusions, the same in number as the strings. On a lower level is a corresponding row of 45 keys. The hand presses them and the pitch sounds as in the score.’ Quoted ibid. 407. 83 William Henry Lowe, Muntakhab-Ut-Tawa¤r|¤ kh by Abd-Ul-Qa¤dir Bin Malu¤k Sha¤h Known as Al Bada¤o¤ n|¤ (Biblioteca Indica, 97, pt. 2; Calcutta, 1884^98), 299; quoted in Woodfield, ‘The Keyboard Recital’, 48.

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we considered the beauties of the church. I had heard reports of this instrument [the organ], but I had never seen one. I had such a satisfaction in that moment, and I can say that it is a very curious instrument.’84 The technology of the pipe organ had undoubtedly been known in the Ottoman empire long before the time of this embassyç after all, several fine European organs had been presented to sultans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,85 and following the decline of the ancient Roman hydraulis the organ had been reintroduced to medieval Europe from the Byzantine empireçbut perhaps some tantalizing reports of advances in craftmanship and the size of instruments had beguiled the ambassador, who appears never to have seen an example until he visited Paris. Once organological observations had been made by non-Europeans, replicas of European instruments were sometimes made by their compatriot artisans. This process, demonstrating the cross-fertilization of ideas and technology, is arguably more significant within autonomous territories that had not been subject to cultural imperialism or colonization by Europeans: here it implies a voluntary imitation on the part of non-Europeans, as opposed to the assimilative actions of subjugated populations within European empires. The Chinese, for instance, were receptive to technological and artistic innovations from all parts of the globe, and appropriated several European instruments for their own use. After Lord Macartney’s (failed) embassy from Britain to Beijing in 1793, Sir George Staunton, author of the official account, wrote that the delegation had attracted many visitors to their residence by means of their musical band’s performances, ‘which formed a concert every evening in the Embassador’s apartments’. He noted that the Emperor’s music director was so much pleased with some of the instruments, that he desired leave to take drawings of them. He declined accepting them as presents; but sent for painters, who spread the floor with sheets of large paper, and, having placed the clarionets, flutes, bassoons, and french horns upon them, traced with their pencils the figures of the instruments, measuring all the apertures, and noting the minutest particulars; and when this operation was completed, they wrote down their remarks, and delivered them to their employer, who said it was his intention to have similar instruments made by Chinese workmen, and to fit to them a scale of his own.86

The Chinese examination of European instruments and their gradual incorporation into local musical practice over succeeding centuries is reflective of the same process that had taken place in Europe over a millennium earlier, with European absorption of ideas and technology from the East. Yet the apparent interest in instruments such as clarinets, flutes, bassoons, and French horns suggests that these particular northern European models (dating from the final decade of the eighteenth century) were hitherto unknown in China. Even more tellingly, they were probably considered to be sufficiently different from European instruments that had been taken there in previous decades to warrant exact documentation to be made, to add to grand eighteenthcentury Chinese projects of gathering universal knowledge. Although the technological 84 ‘Il y a un tre's bel orgue que l’on fit jouer tandis que nous e¤tions a' conside¤rer les beaute¤s de l’e¤glise. J’avais entendu parler de cet instrument, mais j’en avais jamais vu. J’eus en ce moment-la' cette satisfaction et je puis dire que c’est un instrument fort curieux.’ Yirmisekiz Mehmet C elebi, Le Paradis des infide' les: Relation de Yirmisekiz C elebi Mehmed efendi, ambassadeur ottoman en France sous la Re¤ gence, ed. Gilles Veinstein, trans. Julien-Claude Galland (Paris, 1981), 111. 85 See Woodfield, ‘The Keyboard Recital’, 40^6. 86 Sir George Staunton, An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China: including cursory observations made, and information obtained, in travelling through that ancient empire and a small part of Chinese Tartary, 3 vols. (London, 1797), ii. 162^3.

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and theoretical aspects of European instruments were evidently commodities that fitted into the early modern global ‘knowledge economy’ (for want of a better term), they were not always encountered by non-Europeans in such free and equal circumstances. We have focused thus far on reciprocity between Europe and powerful autonomous societies in the vast regions of Asia, but we have neglected the social stratum of the subaltern in the colonial dimension of the Americas. In the darkest moments of European imperial tyranny, musical instruments provided the means by which the oppressed could express their own creativity through the appropriation of their oppressors’ own musical instruments and practices. In his 1657 publication A true & exact history of the island of Barbados, Richard Ligon related how one of his slaves, named Macow, listened attentively to Ligon accompanying his own voice on the theorbo. Macow subsequently took the instrument in his own hands and experimented with the relationship between a rising pitch and the shortening of the string-length. This theorbo appears to have been the only means by which he could do so, for the slaves on Barbados were deprived of many materials from which they could have made stringed instruments (although they certainly manufactured drums, as Ligon described elsewhere). This was no impediment to the curiosity of Macow, however, as Ligon seems pleased to have discovered: In a day or two after, walking in the Plantine grove, to refresh me in that cool shade, and to delight my selfe with the sight of those plants, which are so beautifull . . . I found this Negro (whose office it was to attend there) being the keeper of that grove, sitting on the ground, and before him a piece of large timber, upon which he had laid crosse, sixe Billets, and having a hand-saw and a hatchet by him, would cut the billets by little and little, till he had brought them to the tunes, he would fit them to; for the shorter they were, the higher the Notes which he tryed by knocking upon the ends of them with a sticke, which he had in his hand. When I found him at it, I took the stick out of his hand, and tried the sound, finding the sixe billets to have sixe distinct notes, one above another, which put me in a wonder, how he of himselfe, should without teaching doe so much. I then shewed him the difference between flats and sharpes, which he presently apprehended, as between Fa, and Mi: and he would have cut two more billets to those tunes, but I had then no time to see it done and so left him to his own enquiries. I say this much to let you see that some of these people are capable of learning Arts.87

Macow’s testing of intervals on the theorbo and his apparent comparison of them with the scale on his own xylophone is in many ways analogous to Fowke’s examination of the Indian v|~nq a~ in the 1780s (discussed earlier). Reciprocity in organological observation is a significant aspect of early modern musical exchanges between different cultures, as it highlights the mutual interest in establishing homologies between musical systems, but the documentation of these sorts of occurrences is regrettably rare. Leaving aside the evident bigotry of the passage quoted above (although Ligon’s perspective and his engagement with his slaves were relatively enlightened for the time), we can still see the slave-owner Ligon’s recognition of musical capacity through instrumental practice as an innate human cultural trait. To Macow, the European theorbo was not simply a curiosity owned and played by his slave-master. Rather, the manipulation of this relatively elite symbol of well-to-do Europeans could represent and demonstrate 87 Richard Ligon, A true & exact history of the island of Barbados (London,1657), 49. See also discussion of this source in Christopher D. S. Field, ‘Musical Observations from Barbados, 1647^50’, Musical Times 115 (1974), 565^7, and Strunk, Source Readings in Music History, 712^15.

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universal laws of sound production, and provide just another instrument, or tool, for expression. By exploiting the theorbo and displaying theoretical knowledge of musical intervals, Macow was temporarily able to invert the social hierarchy by exerting a degree of emotional power over his slave-master, thereby occuping a liminal space that was opened to him through the use of a musical instrument as a tool of cultural intermediacy.88 VI. CONCLUSION

The musical instruments that circulated the globe during the early modern period acted as harbingers of distant musical cultures, and symbols of both difference and commonality. As human-made objects that were immediately identifiable as tools for the making of music, they could act as a point of convergence for artistic exchange and empathy in the first instance of intercultural contact. In this sense, comparative organography in the early modern period was the means by which the production of musical instruments of every known culture could be viewed as a universal human impulse. Today a large body of texts remains from this time to offer new perspectives on many aspects of global human history. Musical instruments are vital to every human society, and, as Montagu has argued, they should play a central role in our understanding of the historical processes of intercultural contact and the worldwide dissemination of musical styles.89 This article has shown that worldwide networks of transmission allowed scholars from various cultures to study artefacts from distant lands, thus contributing to the development of global taxonomies and the emerging fields of ethnology and anthropology. Before the advent of recorded sound, music’s nature as an abstract or temporal art form rendered the study of its history totally reliant on surviving material evidence (such as instruments, music notation, texts, and iconography) as well as hereditary performance traditions and accumulated knowledge. Musical artefacts and European descriptions of performance traditions within non-literate societies have been considered by musicologists to be essential in establishing the musical status quo of such non-European societies before the dawn of early modern European empires. This method is especially applicable to societies whose experiences of European imperial endeavours were detrimental to the well-beingçor even survivalçof their autochthonous traditions. A review of the comparative study of musical instruments by early modern scholars thus offers new insights into the development of organological taxonomy, and of the philosophy of music as a universal human practice. During this period of nascent globalization, from the late sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, not only did widely dispersed human societies come to be aware of their counterparts throughout the world, but they also realized that all had developed mutually recognizable musical practices. Accordingly, the use of musical instruments by non-Europeans in the age of European exploration, expansion, and exploitation was one of the defining characteristics by which peoples could be identified as fellow humans. Alongside observations on language, weapons, social customs, dress, and appearance, the comparative organography that was produced as a result 88 On liminality, see Katherine Butler Brown, ‘The Social Liminality of Musicians: Case Studies from Mughal India and Beyond’, Twentieth-Century Music, 3 (2007), 13^49. 89 Jeremy Montagu, ‘The 6th John Blacking Memorial Lecture: The Magpie in Ethnomusicology’, delivered at the XIIIth European Seminar in Ethnomusicology Conference (1997), Jyva«skyla«, Finland; available online at 5http:// pagesperso-orange.fr/esem/4. Accessed 15 Oct. 2007.

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of the formation of early modern global networks furnished a distinctive means by which the world’s peoples were able to assess their common humanity. Additionally, the worldwide transmission and use of foreign musical equipment was effectively a globe-shrinking act that could reproduce and evoke the sound worlds of distant communities and faraway lands. As much as global history may still appear to be something of an abstractionçand any attempt at a universal music history an imposing challengeçworldwide surveys and critiques of this type have much to offer today’s scholar in terms of identifying common processes and patterns in human musicality. While we move inexorably towards a globalized, commercially driven, constantly ‘plugged-in’ music culture, we should remind ourselves that we are merely seeing the latest ramifications of a chain of events initiated over a half a millennium ago, accelerating exponentially in the last century, fuelled by the globalizing impulse of the human species. In the early modern period, long periods of isolation for many peoples were suddenly broken through the processes of intercultural contact. And from comparative organography in early modern empires, we know that musical instruments were there to accompany these encounters and exchanges.

ABSTRACT Non-European musical instruments and their descriptions acted as transportable, material evidence of ‘exotic’ musics for early modern European scholars. As such, these objects and texts were literally instrumental in developing paradigms for the study of non-European musics. In this age of incipient globalization, they were also a contributing factor to the development of comparative ethnology. Drawing on a global range of reference, I assess critically a number of aspects emerging from early modern comparative organography, including diffusion, exchange, intercultural empathy, and adaptation, the use of European classical antiquity as a point of reference, and evidence of non-European reactions to European instruments.

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