Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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massacre. Hymns were central not only to the Moravians’ missionary philosophies, but also to daily Christian practice and life-ways in mission communities. Hymns and rituals involving singing served as sonic markers of history, place, and identity. The role of hymns in eighteenth-century Moravian life accomplished what Gary Tomlinson has termed “songwork,” which he defines as the place and efficacy of song in given societal circumstances.11 Moravian hymns did cultural work. They were sung at weddings, funerals, and baptisms; they accompanied manual labor; they served as forms of greeting and celebration; they comforted the sick and dying; and they regulated personal mental health. Hymn singing was not confined to the sacred space of a worship hall, but integrated into daily life.12 Moravians envisioned hymns as powerful tools to integrate people into their communities and to communicate core Moravian values both inside and outside of their communities. Study of Moravian hymnody yields a deeper understanding not only of the relationships between missionaries and Native Christians, but also of the connections of Moravian mission communities with the wider world they inhabited.13
Studying hymnody as it is embedded within historical cultures of hearing and listening is important to understanding concepts of social and religious identity and place both for European and Native Moravians. Just as religious experiences so often happened through ordinary day-to-day, person-to-person exchanges, experiences of sound were similarly intimate and heard within the confines of a meeting space, worship hall, or bedroom, or were bounded by the wider soundscapes of communities or the acoustic ecologies of the natural environment. This is as true of Moravian missions as it is of other historic and modern communities. In the context of a time period in American history when the border between settler and Native communities and nations was a shifting spatial and cultural space, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. These cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also went beyond musical traditions such as song and hymnody. The natural and human environments of early Pennsylvania were comprised of complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic soundscapes. Study of these acoustic environments is important to understanding the social, religious, and spatial relationships that characterized life in both Native and settler communities. The closer we can come to comprehending how early Americans heard their world, the closer we will be to critically understanding not only the history of the Moravian missions but also the difficult and often violent histories of the emergence of the modern American nation on Native soil during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783).14
Yet, despite the importance of sound and song to the Moravians, there have been no comprehensive attempts to study their mission communities and missionary practices from that perspective. While there is a vast and growing literature on the Moravian missions and encounters between Indigenous peoples and missionaries in early America, only recently have scholars begun to incorporate information about musical practices in Moravian mission contexts.15 Of particular note are studies by Walter Woodward, as well as Rachel Wheeler and me, on the indigenization of Moravian hymnody and the role of song as a meditator of cultural interactions between Moravian missionaries and Native Christians.16 These studies also intersect with recent publications on music and Christian missions in colonial contexts more broadly, including Glenda Goodman’s work on Native-language psalmody in New England and the soundscapes of colonial encounters, and studies by Kristin Dutcher Mann and Geoffrey Baker on music in Spanish mission contexts.17 Although music and sound are often relegated to the margins of history, or remain under the purview of musicological inquiries, sensory perceptions and cultural practices surrounding sound are important ways of understanding Indigenous responses to colonialism. This is especially true because hymns and other musical forms often embed traces of Native agency even when contained within the archival records of settler communities that are often dominated by non-Native voices.18
Recovering the sonic history of the Moravian missions also restores a part of American history that is often overlooked. In early America, sounds and silences possessed the power to unite and divide, to produce understandings and misunderstandings, and to constitute adaptive or destructive strategies for navigating an unprecedented period of cultural shift and physical copresence between European settlers and Native nations and communities. Studies by Richard Cullen Rath, Peter Charles Hoffer, Geoffrey Baker, and Sarah Keyes have demonstrated that colonial efforts to remodel the landscapes of the Americas after traditional European settlement patterns also included transformation of the soundscapes, or aural landscapes, of the Americas to resemble the familiar soundscapes of European places.19 As Sarah Keyes has argued, building fences, felling trees, and effecting other physical changes to particular ecological environments went hand in hand with transforming the American landscape into a civilized soundscape of ringing axes, lowing cattle, and clanging bells. Indigenous peoples reacted against this physical and aural encroachment, and the sounds of ritualized speech and music became crucial in encounters between colonial settlers and Native communities.20
Soundscapes also defined the nature of both settler and Native communities and their geographic boundaries. The ability to control the aural dimension of landscapes, places, and communities was inextricably intertwined with struggles for power and access to natural resources. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America to observe new systems of government, he also observed a process of sonic colonization of America’s natural environment, including its fauna: “As soon as a European settlement forms in the neighborhood of territory occupied by the Indians wild game takes fright. Thousands of savages wandering in the forest without fixed dwelling did not disturb it; but as soon as the continuous noise of European labor is heard in the vicinity, it begins to flee and retreat toward the west, where some instinct teaches it that it will find limitless wilderness.”21 This sonic space of colonization, according to de Tocqueville, stretched for almost two hundred miles west of continually advancing eighteenth-century colonial settlement.
Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes, and their attendant hymn traditions, can be understood as colonial structures that attempted to standardize, indeed to colonize, indigenous soundscapes, musical practices, and religious traditions. Moravian Christianity and the Moravian missions were intertwined with the process of colonial settlement, in the way that Matthew Hunter Price has framed Methodism as a perpetuator of colonial settler networks.22 Religious networks, such as the transatlantic missionary enterprise of the Moravian Church, were used for the economic and social gain of the worldwide Moravian Church. While these mission networks sometimes advanced the purposes of Native Christians in surviving the damaging effects of colonization, European Moravians and the church government certainly also received distinct economic advantages from their connections with the British and Danish empires that were not easily accessible to Native Christians, or which harmed them. The church purchased lands taken from Indigenous peoples through these colonial networks in places as geographically diverse as Greenland and Suriname, and thrived commercially on a global scale. In Pennsylvania, the Moravians acquired the land to build Bethlehem as a consequence of the Walking Purchase—the deceitful stripping and repurposing of Delaware traditional lands by the colonial government in Philadelphia. As George Tinker has shown, even with good intentions, missionary encounters often equated or presaged acts of cultural genocide and forced relocations of Native people.23
However, it is also important to note that there has never been a consistent or monolithic Christian missionary practice. Rather, missions are entirely dependent on the particular Christian sect and also the local cultural, social, and political context in which the missions operate. In the case of the Moravian missions, if we leave the narrative at the point of cultural genocide and seizure of Native lands, we may risk discounting the ways that individuals and indeed whole Native communities adapted and found meaning in new and changing traditions and soundscapes, despite the imposed structures of the Moravian Church or colonial agendas. Although Moravian hymn singing and the soundscapes of mission communities were a form of colonialism, on an individual and community level, people were modifying hymns and adapting them. Native Moravians were not passive actors enmeshed in colonial processes. In studying the Moravian missions, we might take some inspiration from Sarah Rivett’s reexamination of missionary transcriptions of Native American languages. Rather than emphasizing a process of language erasure, Rivett has sought to highlight the adaptive power and survivance of Native languages. Even