Among early modern colonizers’ narratives of the invasion and expropriation of the so-called New World, a great many and perhaps most devoted some space to documenting the musical and performance customs among the Indigenous people they encountered there and the enslaved Africans they brought there. Occasionally, even (indirect) music theoretical judgments surfaced in colonizers’ writings and their translations. For instance, ideas of Indigenous musics being poorly tuned and inharmonious helped their authors articulate broader societal and ontological judgments of non-Europeans—whose musicking always carried metaphysical, social, theological, extramusical significances to European ears.
Not counting the many musicians who arrived in the Americas to establish colonial churches, one of the most musically learned authors who documented the project of advancing European settlement in the Americas was surely Richard Ligon, whose A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) offers the 17th century’s most detailed window onto the English colonial project in the Caribbean. A royalist, he left England in 1647 during its period of civil wars and bought a 50% stake in a sugarcane plantation in Barbados. Ligon was no musical slouch: he rubbed shoulders with those involved in the musical life of the crown, and was a close friend and, eventually, estate executor to the composer John Coprario (1570–1626)—a favorite of the royal family.[1] He even brought a theorbo (a long-necked lute) to Barbados.
Among scholars within and outside of music studies, one of Ligon’s most cited discussions concerns his musical encounter with a West African man named Macow (also spelled “Macaw” in the literature) enslaved on the plantation, whom he refers to as the “chiefe musition” and keeper of the plantain grove on the plantation. About the aforementioned theorbo, Ligon records that one day:
He [Macow] found me playing on a Theorbo, and sinking to It which he hearkened very attentively to; and when I had done took the Theorbo in his hand, and strooke one string, stopping it by degrees upon every fret, and finding the notes to varie, till it came to the body of the instrument; and that the neerer the body of the instrument he stops, the smaller or higher the sound was, which he found was by the shortning of the string, considered with himselfe, how he might make some trial of this experiment upon such an instrument as he could come by, having no hope ever to have any instrument of this kind to practise on. (1657, 48–49)[2]
Scholars have noted how Ligon assumed, in a prejudiced trope that persists today, that Africans do not practice musics involving deliberate pitch, counterpoint, and harmony.[3] In an ambivalent moment of both explicit admiration and implicit assumptions of Macow’s benightedness as a non-European, Ligon interpreted Macow’s encounter with the instrument as a demonstration of his technical ingenuity with an instrument utterly foreign to him. Ligon was unaware that West African musical cultures have used many such instruments, like the kora, gunbri, and seperewa.[4] Macow, however, as an expert practitioner of the traditions he belonged to was demonstrating an ingenuity of a completely different kind than what Ligon imagined, because he would have recognized the general principle of the theorbo’s construction from past sonic experiences on the continent he was born on.
This passage is noteworthy in a music theoretical sense because of how it alludes to quadrivial musica speculativa and its own instrumentarium. For the musically knowledgeable among the readers of his text (such as, perhaps, his friends among royal musical circles), the image of Macow stopping and striking a single string of the theorbo at various intervals would have recalled traditions of monochord experimentation and the high prestige of speculative canonics. Perhaps Ligon himself, with his own musical knowledge, pictured Macow as the musicus calculating string lengths and interval ratios before the monochord. The allusion to speculative music theoretical discourses of tuning and monochord experiments here functions to render Macow’s behavior legible within staunchly European regimes of comprehensibility.
The next episode in Ligon’s narrative is equally remarkable for its early modern crossing of anthropological judgments with music theoretical understandings of scales, solmization, and tuning and temperament. A day or two later, Ligon finds Macow in the plantain grove building a wooden idiophone. Macow was:
sitting on the ground, and before him a piece of large timber, upon which he had laid crosse, sixe Billets, and having a handsaw 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; for the shorter they were, the higher the Notes which he tried 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 tones, 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.
(1657, 49)
There are numerous music theoretical conditions of possibility for how Ligon developed this passage. Ligon had to draw on understandings of hexachordal solmization to probe Macow’s hearing, understanding, and craftsmanship. Believing that Macow had no prior understanding of melodic instruments, Ligon was astonished because he thought that showing Macow his theorbo just one or two days earlier instantly enabled Macow to grasp the pitch domain of musical sound itself. Susan Scott Parrish’s analysis of this passage holds that Ligon believed Macow was mimicking the gamut of the theorbo, meaning that Ligon judged the intervallic dispositions and temperament of Macow’s instrument to be similar enough to that of his theorbo—if he indeed was interpreting the situation as Parrish describes.[5] Macow, however, was instead executing an instrumental design familiar to him perhaps to reciprocate Ligon’s organological show and tell. Ligon’s backhanded admiration for Macow and the seemingly benevolent gesture of pronouncing Macow as an exception to certain assumed “rules” about the character, abilities, and cultures of African societies is premised upon Ligon’s inability to understand musical pitch variation as a meaningful possibility among African musical practices.[6] It was with the help of music theoretical judgments that Ligon skeptically and provisionally extended some measure of anthropological inclusion and human recognition to Macow in the passage quoted above.
[1] As reported by Christopher D. S. Field, “Musical Observations from Barbados, 1647-50,” The Musical Times 115, no. 1577 (1974): 565.
[2] In this essay, I quote a handful of passages from Ligon’s original text. Orthographically, I have preserved 17th century spelling and punctuation, but I have converted instances of the long “s” (ie. “ſ”) to the standard “s.”
[3] See Erich Nunn, “‘A Great Addition to Their Harmony’: Plantation Slavery and Musical Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” The Global South 10, no. 2 (2016): 34–35.
[4] Ligon was evidently unaware of work by Richard Jobson who, in 1623, published observations of stringed instruments in Gambia, as recorded by Dena J. Epstein, “The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History,” Ethnomusicology 19, no. 3 (1975): 350. Eric Charry notes that “Lutes have been played in West Africa since at least the fourteenth century, when both Al-‘Umarī and Ibn Battūta noted that they were used in royal ceremonies in old Mali” in Charry, “Plucked Lutes in West Africa: An Historical Overview,” The Galpin Society Journal 49 (1996): 3.
[5] See Susan Scott Parrish, “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths.” The William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2010): 239.
[6] This elevation of pitch over the time domain of music, of course, persists in all Euro-Western music theory curricula (though not without challenge in at least some classrooms).
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