[…] Continuation of Part I […]
Music theoretical judgments help to articulate Ligon’s understandings of the human as a category also in a somewhat later portion of his book devoted to careful empirical documentation of local flora and fauna. Describing an evidently thrush-like bird, he indulges some musings about quarter tones:
[It is] the colour of a Feldefare [fieldfair, Turdus pilaris], but the head seemes too big for her body, and for that reason they call her a Counsellor; her flying is extream wanton; and for her tune, ‘tis such as I have not heard any like her, not for the sweetnesse, but the strangenesse of it; for she performes that with her voice, that no instrument can play, nor no voice sing, but hers; and that is, quarter notes, her song being composed of five tones, and every one a quarter of a note higher then other. Mr. John Coprario, a rare composer of Musick, and my dear friend, told me once, that he was studying a curiosity in musick, that no man had ever attempted to do; and that was, of quarter notes; but he not being able to go through with it, gave it over: But if he had liv’d to have gone with me to the Barbadoes, this bird should have taught him.
(1657, 60)
For Ligon, the Counsellor bird’s quarter tonal singing seems at first to imply a notion of species difference. The musically knowledgeable (then, just as now) could have easily refuted him, but Ligon describes the Counsellor’s quarter tonal song as that which human instruments cannot play, nor human voices sing.
But what began as an observation of putatively inhuman ability transfigures itself by the time the passage quoted above concludes with mention of the composer John Coprario. Ligon ventures that perhaps Coprario could have developed quarter tonal abilities if he could have just voyaged to Barbados to study with the Counsellor bird. An interesting rhetorical substitution has taken place. While Ligon’s description of the Counsellor bird’s quarter tonal song began stationed at the notion of the bird’s inhuman abilities, it ends by betraying a rather different notion of quarter tonal scales and intervals as merely non-English rather than non-human. But for colonial powers in the early modern Atlantic, the non-human and the non-European were intertwined categories.[1] Thus, in Ligon’s narrative, the concept of quarter tonal sound polices species, geographical, and emergent racial boundaries; and his description of the Counsellor bird alludes further to certain early modern European attitudes, which held that non-Europeans like Macow were notionally animal until proven otherwise.
I am interested, ultimately, neither in condemning Ligon for being a person of his time who acquired, chafed sometimes against, and participated in its prejudices—nor in excusing him for that very fact. One point I am interested in making concerns how music theoretical knowledge and its categories, for Ligon, were part of his rhetorical machinery for reiterating some of his prejudices. But I am certainly uninterested in endorsing what I would consider to be the trite conclusion, which I shall merely describe: that Ligon, laden with the anthropological condescension customary to people like himself, nevertheless articulated a limited form of recognition towards an enslaved African and alluded to an alternate possibility to the racial animus of the colonial project. The most reflection-worthy and vexing takeaway from Ligon’s True and Exact History is not the lesson about reading historically distant subjects in proper view of their historical distantness, but a rather more disquieting possibility with eminently 21st-century relevance: that the seemingly recuperative idioms of liberal, humanist recognition can function both as explicitly benevolent judgments and implicitly as mechanisms that in fact help to advance rather than counteract projects of domination—there is actually no contradiction between these.[2] As Columbus once wrote, in his own explicitly recuperative gesture of proto-liberal humanist recognition, the intelligence he discerned in the Indigenous Taíno he met at landfall in 1492 attested for him to their potential as “good and intelligent servants.”[3] For Ligon, likewise, his admiration for Macow’s abilities was continuous his belief in the viability of enculturating enslaved people into English norms (and into English Christianity as well). One broader discursive effect of Ligon’s narrative and its musical observations is that they acted to police lines of anthropological difference that rendered non-Europeans as sub-humans or non-humans by nominating individuals like Macow as exceptions to that colonial principle, thereby presuming that ontological demarcation in the process. As music theorists continue unearthing colonial concepts in music theoretical texts and their circulation, it is worth remembering as well to excavate how music theoretical concepts circulated in colonial texts to advance colonial dominion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Charry, Eric. 1996. “Plucked Lutes in West Africa: An Historical Overview.” The Galpin Society Journal 49: 3–37.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Epstein, Dena J. 1975. “The Folk Banjo: A Documentary History.” Ethnomusicology 19 (3): 347–71.
Field, Christopher D. S. 1974. “Musical Observations from Barbados, 1647-50.” The Musical Times 115 (1577): 565–67.
Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harrison, Peter. 2005. “‘Fill the Earth and Subdue It’: Biblical Warrants for Colonization in Seventeenth Century England.” Journal of Religious History 29 (1): 3–24.
Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hu, Zhuqing (Lester). 2021. “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74 (3): 501–569.
Ligon, Richard. 1657. A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London: Humphrey Moseley.
Nunn, Erich. 2016. “‘A Great Addition to Their Harmony’: Plantation Slavery and Musical Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.” The Global South 10 (2): 27–47.
Parrish, Susan Scott. 2010. “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths.” The William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2): 209–48.
[1] For explorations of how early modern English thought conceptualized non-Europeans in terms of animality, see, for instance, Peter Harrison, “‘Fill the Earth and Subdue It’: Biblical Warrants for Colonization in Seventeenth Century England,” Journal of Religious History 29, no. 1 (2005): 3–24.
[2] Theoretical elaborations of this point regarding the perhaps counterintuitive intimacies of recognition and domination can be found in Saidaya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and in music studies in Zhuqing (Lester) Hu, “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism, Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 3 (2021): 501–569.
[3] This passage from the diary of Columbus’s first voyage is quoted by Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 90.