Studies of musical cultures that arose from Protestant Christian evangelizing in the early-modern world have long been overshadowed by a scholarly concentration on more than half a millennium of Catholic missions or Protestant activities from the nineteenth century onwards. Since the publication of Robert Stevenson's classic study Protestant Church Music in America: A Short Survey of Men and Movements from 1564 to the Present (New York: Norton, 1966) there have been numerous excellent dissertations and articles about Protestant Christian music in North America, yet still relatively few monographs that focus in detail on the processes of musical interaction between Protestant missionaries and Indigenous communities. Sarah Justina Eyerly, who is based at Florida State University and is currently making waves with her work on Moravian missions and Indigenous hymnody in North America, has made an important and timely contribution to this field with her new book Moravian Soundscapes: A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania. (Incidentally, her article on Mozart contrafacta among Inuit communities of Labrador (‘Mozart and the Moravians’, Early Music 47/2 (2019), 161–182), and the continuous local tradition of performing these works, recently received the Marjorie Weston Emerson Award from the Mozart Society of America.)
Framed by a Prologue and Epilogue, Moravian Soundscapes contains an extensive Introduction and four chapters, together with four brief but insightful autoethnographic reflections – one preceding each chapter – which make for essential reading by introducing ways into the topic that ground the author's historical and historiographical interests firmly in the context of her own lived experience. In a feat of historical reflexivity, the author writes herself into the narrative by critically examining her own position as a direct descendant of some of the eighteenth-century figures discussed in the book. She also sets out her motivations for undertaking research in this field. Usefully for the reader, the front matter provides informative notes on ‘naming, terminology, and archival sources’ (xv–xvi), while the end matter includes a two-page glossary of Moravian terminology (227–228). The Prologue (1–6) opens by introducing her ancestor Johann Jacob Eyerly junior, a German missionary who travelled by foot across Pennsylvania in 1794. He wrote in detail about what he saw and heard, referring to the Indigenous human history of the forest as well as cataloguing its flora, and listening carefully for the sounds of settlement as he came close to Bethlehem. Eyerly describes his report of this journey – which is rich in the description of the natural environment and its ‘acoustic ecology’ – as an inspiration and springboard for the writing of her book. She refers to her recognition of certain continuities between her ancestor's descriptions of the natural sounds of Pennsylvania and her own personal experience growing up in this same environment, where sounds in the forest became part of her sense of home, and of belonging to this place.
These revelations open up significant questions about the very processes of and reasons for writing history – in this case, music history – about settler colonies and religious missions, especially when the historian or musicologist is descended from the historical actors that feature in these stories or has been raised within the culture(s) that arose from their actions. Yet as Eyerly writes (in quotable prose that is a constant feature of her narrative style), ‘History is never objective. It is dependent on personal experience, and individual and collective interpretations of written and musical sources, material culture, land usage and property rights, and the legacy of human encounters over many generations’ (4). She points out that every single site of human habitation in Pennsylvania has Indigenous lands as its underlying foundation, noting the interconnectedness of historians and Indigenous communities today and declaring her own goal for the book to be one of ‘creat[ing] a new narrative . . . that acknowledges past legacies and traumas, and . . . moves forward to chart new stories that are inclusive and honest’ (5). The foregrounding of soundscapes – the ‘ongoing and ever-changing soundscapes’ of Pennsylvania – in the Prologue thus promises a theoretical framework and scholarly mechanism that can dissolve certain cultural boundaries, or productively complicate the interpretation of them, within colonial-era contact zones.
The rest of the book, from the Introduction to the Conclusion, is framed by the infamous massacre of the Indigenous (Delaware and Mohican) Moravian community of Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782. The Introduction recounts this episode – which had major social, political and cultural repercussions in the decades that followed – in graphic detail. Some ninety-six Indigenous Moravians, defenceless and unarmed, were murdered by a militia from Washington County, Pennsylvania. These devout Indigenous Christians sang hymns in the final moments of their lives, and accounts by two survivors of this sonic memory entered into legend (9). The book's foregrounding of this massacre, which occurred towards the end of the American Revolutionary War (and which was acknowledged as a national tragedy by US presidents George Washington and, much later, Theodore Roosevelt) centrally positions Moravian hymnody as a hermeneutic window onto the past. As Eyerly puts it, ‘the legacy and history of Moravian hymnody is . . . the legacy of a musical tradition that represented Native culture and the value of adaptation and the building of relationships and cultural ties even in the face of colonialism’ (15).
The book's Introduction, subtitled ‘Sounding New Histories’, provides a brief history of German Moravian missions throughout the Atlantic world. In the Americas missions were founded in Greenland and Labrador in the far north, in the colonies of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, in various Caribbean islands and in parts of Guyana and Suriname. Across the ocean there were also missions in Ghana and South Africa. Eyerly discusses modes of evangelizing and community formation in these missions that ranged from instituting social structures (especially the communal Oeconomie or Economy) to forms of decision-making through lot-casting (with photographs of artefacts from the Mission Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), and especially the practice of singing. Communal singing and a formal choir system not only structured each individual mission society but also provided forms of connection between them, creating a ‘worldwide community based on divinely communicated sound’ (25). Most importantly, Moravian hymnody was multilingual: it provided forms of direct spiritual agency in the devotions of Indigenous converts by using local languages, and it also involved the singing of macaronic hymns (the texts of which used multiple languages or included loanwords) that reflected the diversity of the global Moravian community (25).
The Introduction also gives a detailed description of and user guide for the book's accompanying website (https://moraviansoundscapes.music.fsu.edu), which contains sound recordings, iconography, timelines and interactive maps. With a vast range of data, this website provides archaeological depth to the history of these Moravian soundscapes. The past, the present and the intervening period of transition are all reflected here and allow the user to engage more profoundly with the embodied histories and ideas that are represented in the book, through sensory experiences in sound and image.
Preceded by a two-page interlude that recalls a hike by the author in 1989 to locate a forgotten Moravian graveyard, chapter 1 transports the reader directly to the forest known as Penn's Woods. This chapter brings the sounds of the forest to life: it not only discusses the human musicking that took place under the canopy but embraces all parts of the soundscape, including noises produced by animals and the weather. Of particular interest from a methodological standpoint is the way that knowledge about Indigenous hunting practices is woven into this history of an entire soundscape, drawing from an eighteenth-century Moravian chronicle by George Loskiel that gives an account of the lives and times of Indigenous individuals. This chapter also demonstrates in rich detail the diversity of source materials available to the historian of soundscapes: Eyerly draws on manuscript diaries and accounts of journeys, maps that were sketched by hand or engraved and printed, travelogues published in North America and Europe, hymn texts (sometimes with references to tunes that date back many centuries) that were written in situ and which circulated in manuscript or print, and paintings of key figures. Hymnody remains at the forefront of the narrative and pervades every part of Moravian daily life, in travel, evangelization, worship and communal living. A detailed interpretation of all these sources – whether iconography, prose description or devotional hymn texts – connects the German and Indigenous Moravians to early Pennsylvania and constructs a sense of aural history that is supported and amplified by the online resources (with useful pointers given in bold).
Chapter 2 is prefaced by a two-page interlude in which Eyerly recollects her first visit to the important Moravian centre of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 2002: here she describes the point at which she and her father discovered their genealogical connection to Johann Jacob Eyerly Jr, representing the beginnings of her archival forays into the subject. This second chapter, ‘Friends & Strangers’, focuses on the Gemeine (community) of Bethlehem and its rich musical life and complex social structures. Significantly for the musicologist, the name given to groups of people in distinct domestic units – which were governed by hierarchies of age, gender and civil status – was ‘choirs’. Eyerly gives a detailed account of how daily life functioned in the society, describing the cooperative Economy system and the kinds of trades carried out to support it. This context is essential for the framing of an analysis of musical practice in the community, which both depended on and interacted with the other kinds of daily activity. There was a strict schedule of worship and work (117–118), with meditation or inspiration stemming from scripture, hymns and other religious texts infusing the quotidian practices of the entire community, and hymns being sung before, after and during many activities. Attention was also given to special days such as Easter and the kinds of instruments used in worship (122–123).
The second half of the chapter takes the title ‘Friends & Strangers’ as its focus, examining how the community interacted with Moravian and non-Moravian travellers to Bethlehem. Questions of integration into and acceptance by the Moravian community are treated, as are the issues of relationships between European and Indigenous Moravians. Hymns in multiple languages remained a means of communication and interface between many different groups of people. Improvisation of hymns was an important practice. In the last part of the chapter Eyerly turns to Indigenous hymnody and examines the musical lives of Native Moravians, especially the man known as Joshua Jr, who became ‘fluent in European musical practices’ and was ‘already fluent in Native musical practices, and could speak German, English, Delaware and Mohican' (140). She also speculates about the extent to which Moravian archives can reveal details about Indigenous musical practices within Moravian communities, given that the often one-sided texts focus mostly on ‘aesthetics of singing’ (142).
A charming description of the German town of Herrnhut and Eyerly's visit there to access the Moravian archives in 2004 is the prelude to chapter 3. A brief but deep reading of some of the documents she encountered there evokes the trials faced by some of the eighteenth-century missionaries and the violent ends they met, together with the spiritual solace that hymn-writing and -singing provided in their lives. In the chapter immediately following, ‘Sound & Spirit’, the theological dimensions and metaphysical aspects of Eyerly's research come to the fore. Here the focus is on the German missionary Johann Christoph Pyrlaeus (born 1713) and his Mohican companion Tassawachamen, also known as Joshua (senior, father of the Joshua mentioned above, born c1720), who at the outset are described as singing a hymn together in Mohican. (Pyrlaeus, incidentally, studied theology in Leipzig, and saw performances directed by J. S. Bach at the Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche, as well as possibly participating in or attending the Collegium Musicum (157).) Eyerly gives the original text of the hymn together with its English translation, and a link points the reader to sound recordings on the companion website, which present reconstructed performances of hymns in the Mohican language. Although these are performed in four-part harmony with organ accompaniment, it is not a far cry for the reader to imagine two unaccompanied vocalists – one German, one Mohican – singing the melody together.
Both Pyrlaeus and Joshua converted to Moravian Christianity as adults (156), and like other Moravians around the world they improvised hymns: Eyerly states that this was ‘a tangible representation of their commitment of body, mind, heart, and soul to the Moravian Church’ (155). Hymns and the Singstunden (singing meetings) in which they were performed are the primary focus of this chapter. A key figure in discussion of the Singstunde is the Saxon nobleman and Moravian bishop Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), who made a return journey to Pennsylvania to further the cause of the Moravian missions, and who met Joshua as well as other native converts. Zinzendorf wrote extensively about the Singstunde and the improvisation of hymns, and also the metaphysical nature of hymn-singing and the mystical powers that the practice could elicit. In his German home of Herrnhut, he was depicted in an allegorical devotional painting of c1750 as singing before a representation of the crucified Christ, bringing every sense to life (page 170 includes a reproduction of the image).
Besides discussing the spiritual powers of hymns and their transformative powers for believers (172–174), Eyerly also describes concisely the sonic structures of Moravian hymns, referring to Moravians learning ‘the basic harmonic structures of around twenty chorale tunes, which could be used to sing the majority of the hymn verses in the Auszüge [guides for Singstunden]’ (163). She mentions practices of contrafaction: the improvisation of new melodies for existing texts, or vice versa. Most importantly, she points to sacred singing as a point of intercultural convergence for European and Indigenous people. She notes that ‘for Joshua and other Native Christians, the idea of divinely gifted songs may have been similar to Native musical traditions that they had learned as children’, claiming that ‘sacred music in Mohican communities was granted to human singers through contact between the finite world and the infinite or supernatural’ (165).
In a five-page interlude entitled ‘Moravian Run’, Eyerly reflects on how a quotation in a 1954 yearbook belonging to her mother sparked her quest to delve into the history behind some of the historical names mentioned there. This is a brief but beautiful example of archival detective work, sifting through secondary studies to find clues that led back to specific primary sources; supported by links to a number of online resources from the companion website, it concerns a lengthy cross-country migration by Moravians in 1772 and the baptism and subsequent death and burial of a young boy named Nathan. Eyerly reflects how the childhood stories she heard about Moravians were connected to the very individuals and communities she had studied in her recent professional musicological and historical research. Chapter 4, entitled ‘1782’ but spanning a longer period, examines the history of the Moravian missions and communities in Pennsylvania and surrounds in the aftermath of the Seven Years War – when the communal Economy of Bethlehem was disestablished – and during the long and hard years of the Revolutionary War. The last four decades of the eighteenth century were a period of considerable upheaval for the Moravians in Pennsylvania, and the situation of Indigenous Moravian Christians within a complex web of competing colonial and revolutionary interests was precarious. There were forced resettlements of Native Christians from 1763 onwards and frequent violence from settler communities (203). The Native Christians nevertheless maintained their sung worship, and Eyerly notes that Joshua Jr performed on the spinet before a group of Pennsylvanian elite, including the governor (206).
The chapter ends with a return to the story of the Gnadenhütten massacre of 1782, with further vivid details that are as chilling to read today as they must have been to hear about at the time. What is particularly poignant about the contemporaneous testimonies is the centrality of singing, and the fact that this group of Native Christians sang right up to the end of their lives ‘because song was essential to daily life, and it was essential to death’ (217). Eyerly reflects on the tragic repercussions of this event for other surviving Indigenous Moravian communities, who moved further away from scenes of conflict. She points out that the ‘multicultural “singing utopias”’ of the Moravian missions occupied a space that did not fit easily into the increasingly binary context of frontier politics (218). Despite occasional public appearances of cultural conformity with the musical norms of the colonial elite (as expressed by Joshua Jr's spinet performance), the hybrid nature of Native Moravian musicking in singing and hymnody was also something that marked them as ‘different’ from Christians of other ethnic backgrounds. Eyerly notes that ‘in every sense, this was a community that was Native and Christian . . . It was the very hybridity of the congregation's German-Native songways that allowed the Christian members of the American militia to dismiss the Moravians’ prayers and songs as foreign, alien, and hostile, rather than the demonstrable signs of a fellow Christian community’ (217). Added to this liminal cultural identity was the minority status of the German-speaking Moravian denomination, which remained in the shadows of the much larger Catholic or Protestant communities in colonial North America (218), rendering the Native Moravians doubly marginalized from the perspective of those controlling the hegemonic structures of power in the thirteen colonies and then in the newly independent United States.
The book's short Epilogue (223–226) begins with discussion of a letter sent by leading Moravians to President George Washington in 1789. Owing to the losses and suffering of the Moravian community, the United States government gifted land to the Moravian Church, and it was this territory that Sarah Eyerly's ancestor surveyed and described in 1794. Eyerly reflects on the subsequent settler history of Pennsylvania, and the long silence regarding Indigenous communities who were displaced from their lands and moved further west. Describing how an archaeological field trip during her primary-school years allowed her to come into contact with material evidence of Indigenous cultures, she considers how her foray into archives and other traces of the past have allowed her to know more about the local communities who lived on this land before the arrival of her own family. Her recent meetings with Mohican descendant communities and listening to their singing of Mohican-language hymns have added a new dimension to this line of enquiry, and it is clear that collective engagement of this kind can be an enriching experience for all participants. The sound recordings on the book's companion website and the author's other collaborative projects exploring Indigenous hymnody are a testament to that.
Moravian Soundscapes was gripping to read: it provided an immediate interface with the sonic past of Pennsylvania through the author's reflexive interpretation of the writings of her own ancestors and their contemporaries; parts of the narrative made me sit still with apprehension, but others made me relax into the ambience of idyllic scenes, masterfully evoked. The author's prose is rich in imagery and metaphor, building a detailed and picturesque soundscape of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. I can say without hesitation that this book offers some of the most beautiful examples of musicological writing that I have read over the past two decades. The intended readership clearly extends beyond music scholars to those interested in American history, religious history and many other branches of the humanities. It also provides a great example of research influenced by historical musicology's ‘global turn’, and a model for how innovative methodologies can engage with traditional kinds of source materials in exciting ways. I recommend it to everyone interested in sacred music, eighteenth-century soundscapes and social histories of trans-Atlantic communities.
