Music and the New World
Objective: To describe and analyse the role of music for categorising the nature of Indigenous inhabitants of the “New World”.
This line of research will investigate how European travellers and missionaries described the music and sounds they encountered in the Americas to categorise and assess the nature of Indigenous inhabitants. The main hypothesis is that interpreting the music and sound of local populations was central to the experience of cross-cultural encounters, while also contributing to a broader inquiry into the shared and defining characteristics of humanity during this period. This line of research will therefore examine how observations of Indigenous musical practices and sensibilities were employed as arguments in debates about Indigenous ‘humanity’—ranging from the famous Polémica de los Naturales between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, to Enlightenment-era debates on slavery and the existence of different human types. To this end, the investigation will integrate testimonies and descriptions allegedly based on in-situ or first-hand experiences in the ‘New World,’ such as travelogues, missionary reports, and imperial accounts, with European studies and treatises that incorporated this information into broader philosophical, historical, medical, or political narratives.
Can animals play music?
Objective: To describe and analyse the role of music for tracing boundaries of what count as “human” in Early Modern debates.
This case study analyses the changes that took place in the rationalisation of animal song during the 16 and 17 centuries, prompted by the encounters of Europeans with the new soundscapes of the Americas and the natural and mythological visions of the pre-Columbian civilizations on the fauna and flora. At this time, the ultimately nature of music was debated in Europe, both epistemologically and aesthetically: Was music linked to the numerical, the rational and the divine, or was it to the body, the affections, and the language? The underlying question was whether the human capacity to make music was animal and instinctive or rationally constructed. We are interested in exploring how these debates were used to categorise humans and non-humans in the different sides of the Atlantic. We will draw on European, colonial and Native American sources, such as philosophical and musical treatises and musical instruments. We will also explore material practices such as the transcription of animal sound, the dissection of animal vocal organs, and the construction of automatic musical instruments and devices.
Music and Emotions in the Age of Sensibility
Objective: To analyse how music shaped ideas about emotions in the eighteenth-century; to explore how the ideas about nature and practices of composing and listening were co-constructed through music; to contribute to the development of historically informed performances (HIP).
The great impact that the concept of “sensibility” gained during the long eighteenth-century, as well as the growing interest in the nervous system and other supposed new properties of the living bodies, such as “animal magnetism” and “irritability” changed the ways in which emotions were understood. At the same time, there were theoretical reflections on how music -pitches and rhymes, melodies and voices- moved listeners, which, along with new instruments also provoked changes in the ways of composing, practising and listening. We will explore how scientific, medical, and musical treatises that circulated widely, as well as manuals on musical practice, discussed the emotions that different kinds of music triggered in a still not well-charted territory, the Hispanic world, with special emphasis in gender and ethnicity. We will also look to the other way around: how scientific perspectives on nature may have influenced aesthetic transformations in music, such as the “emancipation” of instrumental music from the human voice and the emergence of new listening practice tied to domestic chamber music and public concerts. We will explore two interconnected perspectives: nature as an external, transcendent agent that evokes emotions in the listener, as well as human emotions as integral to nature. Special attention will be given to the interplay between music, emotions, and the performative body in playing, acting, and dancing.
