Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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at the Florida State University, and my husband, sound designer and composer Andy Nathan.
We began the project by conducting fieldwork to collect the GPS locations for all of the sites that existed in Bethlehem in 1758, and all known Moravian mission locations in Pennsylvania, in addition to other neighboring settler and Native communities.58 Some of these settlements, buildings, and places were quite easy to locate. Bethlehem’s Gemeinhaus, and other communal buildings such as the Single Brothers’ House, the blacksmith shop, and pottery shop are either extant or have been rebuilt based on data gleaned from archaeological excavations and other historical evidence. Locating other places, though, often required extensive archival and historical research, as well as some degree of informed speculation based on the location of known geographical features such as streams or hills, or spatial data gleaned from a combination of historic and contemporary maps.
The most important part of the process of locating eighteenth-century places was “learning in place”—walking, driving, and studying the natural and built topography of historic Moravian places by experiencing them in the present. At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate the value of the many days and miles of driving and walking my collaborators and I undertook. When Andy and I, along with our two sons, hiked through the forests along the Moshannon Creek in central Pennsylvania to map and photograph places visited and traversed by eighteenth-century Moravians along the Great Shamokin Path, I didn’t truly comprehend the ways that my historical understanding of those places would be informed by experiencing them with my family in the present. The days that Mark and I spent trekking Bethlehem’s streets, ducking under railroad bridges, and venturing through fields and nearby creeks, provided invaluable knowledge that we would not have gained without experiencing those places in person.61
We learned that modern place names often revealed layers of history that had since disappeared from human memory or archival documents. As we searched for the location of the mission of Friedenshütten, we found that the place where the mission had once stood along Wyalusing Creek was still marked as “Moravian Street.” In our frustrating search for the location of the Rose Inn, when eighteenth-century maps were confusing at best and contradictory at worst, we discovered that a modern street built over the former site of the inn was fortuitously labeled “Rose Inn Avenue.” Nearby, almost completely covered with grass, a memorial stone in the yard of a family home still marked the inn’s location. Even venturing beyond the bounds of Pennsylvania, we discovered, for instance, that the Moravian mission on the Ma Retraite Plantation in Suriname had not completely vanished. The plantation itself had now become a neighborhood bearing the same name in the capital city of Paramaribo. While buildings and memories may have disappeared, historic places were often recorded on the contours of the landscape, or in the names of streets, rivers, or neighborhoods. Modern roads still followed older pathways. Despite the efforts of modern engineers in the 1960s to carve straight pathways through the challenging terrain of the Allegheny Mountains, Interstate 80 conforms for the most part to the ancient contours of the Great Shamokin Path. These historical and modern intersections were discoverable with the right data and with a curiosity to seek the right places.
In the process of looking for past places, though, my collaborators and I also learned that while the mill trace, the King’s Road, the Minisink Path, and the site of the Rose Inn still existed, if you knew where to look for them, the sounds of eighteenth-century Bethlehem had vanished. How could we represent the acoustic environments that had once characterized life in Moravian communities? Were those soundscapes irrecoverable? Sometimes, when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, it helps to return to where you started. If we could map eighteenth-century Bethlehem, for instance, by using extant historic buildings, then we could also enter those buildings to learn more about how they operated as acoustic spaces. In addition, there are twelve museums in modern-day Bethlehem dedicated to historic preservation and education about the city’s Moravian past. Their collections house historic tools and implements, musical instruments, and other elements of Moravian material culture that once contributed to its soundscapes. And, every Thursday through Saturday, Bethlehem’s current blacksmith, Philip Trabel, utilizes the forge in the rebuilt blacksmith shop to make horseshoes, nails, and other metal products. Perhaps the sounds of Bethlehem had not entirely vanished. It would be possible, at least, to conduct acoustic studies and produce field recordings in some locations.
We began by recording the plantation bell at Burnside Plantation, a former Moravian farm that is now a museum on the outskirts of Bethlehem. We also obtained permission to do field recordings of hymn singing inside of the Old Chapel, the worship spaces in the Single Sisters’ House and Gemeinhaus, and to record Trabel’s work in the blacksmith shop.62 During the process of field recording, we also collected decibel readings at approximately five-foot intervals from the sound sources (singers, bells, forge). Then, we processed the readings through a mathematical formula for understanding sound decay over distance. The particular formula we chose was capable of taking into account various types of landscapes in Bethlehem over which sound might have traveled, including agricultural fields, coniferous and deciduous forests, grass lands, shrub lands (low trees and bushes), water, and urban or built environments. Our assessment of the historical topography around Bethlehem was based on a 1758 map by the Moravian cartographer Christian Gottlieb Reuter. Reuter helpfully designated varying terrains by type on the map, including particular species of trees. The resulting “sound boundary” maps, which can be found on the website under chapter 2, allowed us to understand what the geographic limits of Bethlehem’s soundscapes might have been, and how people might have understood the boundaries of their community by listening.63
We also wanted to represent sounds and places that were no longer present, and for which it was not possible to create field recordings. In seeking to replicate the diversity of acoustic environments and perceptions of sound that once existed in eighteenth-century Bethlehem, we took advantage of the spatial frameworks provided by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software and aural cartography or sound mapping.64 We had already collected the spatial data necessary to reconstruct the built environment of Bethlehem, so it was only one further step to add sound to the maps. We felt that sound maps held great potential for offering the multisensorial approach to historic space that characterized daily life in Bethlehem. They could also allow us to reconstruct some sense of the Moravians’ cultural, social, and aesthetic perceptions of sound. Placing