Acoustemologies in Contact Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity

In this fascina� ng collec� on of essays, an interna� onal group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural confi gura� ons of sound impacted communica� on, comprehension, and the categorisa� on of people. Addressing ques� ons of iden� ty, diff erence, sound, and subjec� vity in global early modernity, these authors share the convic� on that the body itself is the most in� mate of contact zones, and that the culturally con� ngent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars.

mercy of the spirits of the island, who operate under Prospero's control and Ariel's command. When the Italians finally encounter the island spirits, they first hear a 'solemn and strange music' and then receive a seemingly transparent gesture of welcome: a banquet and a 'gentle' dance.
Solemn and strange music, and PROSPERO on the top (invisible). Enter several strange shapes, bringing in a banquet, and dance about it with gentle actions of salutations, and inviting the King etc. to eat, they depart. [….] ALONSO. What harmony is this? My good friends, hark! GONZALO. Marvellous sweet music! ALONSO. Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these? [….] GONZALO. If in Naples I should report this now, would they believe me? If I should say I saw such islanders (For certes, these are people of the island), Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet note Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our human generation you shall find Many -nay almost any. [….] ALONSO. I cannot too much muse Such shapes, such gesture and such sound, expressing (Although they want the use of tongue) a kind Of excellent dumb discourse. 3 The courtiers are quick to interpret the music and movements as welcoming gestures from the island's inhabitants. They find the performance fantastic, but not unfamiliar, remarking on the strange stories they have read in travelers' tales even as they comment on the 'monstrous shape' and 'dumb discourse' of the 'people of the island'. Yet as soon as King Alonso determines that it is safe to accept these gestures of welcome at face value -'I will stand to and feed' -and to partake of the banquet, the tenor of the music and performance changes drastically. 4 Thunder and lightning. Enter ARIEL, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes.
ARIEL. You are three men of sin, whom destiny, That hath to instrument this lower world And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch up you, and on this island Where man doth not inhabit -you 'mongst men Being most unfit to live -I have made you mad [….] He vanishes in thunder. Then, to soft music, enter the shapes again and dance with mocks and mows, and carry out the table. 5 The sudden change and the accusations that follow -as Ariel demands that Alonso take responsibility for his role in the theft of Prospero's dukedom -drive Alonso and his companions to a kind of temporary madness, a desperate guilt. Their willingness to accept the spirits' music, dance, gestures of welcome, and offered banquet as genuine is also proven to be imprudent. Ariel decries their presumptuousness in imagining that they are welcome, wanted, and forgiven for past crimes anywhere, least of all on an island where they are strangers. This kind of reversal -a gentle welcome turned hostile assault -is not Shakespeare's invention, nor is the centrality of music and sound to the tableau.
When early modern English travelers relate their exchanges with the people they have met in far-flung places, they frequently include descriptions of music both familiar and strange, performed by both foreign visitors and Indigenous peoples. As with Alonso and his companions, however, the presence of music and its seemingly transparent meanings may enable perilous miscommunications. Incidents that we might describe as failures of musical interpretation or sudden alterations of meaning in musical exchanges proliferate in reports of English and European encounters in the Americas. In this chapter, I argue that the English carried with them an epistemology of musical meaning predicated on the ways that music functioned in European entertainments, particularly those associated with the outdoors and with English country estates.
The term 'entertainment', both a synonym for performance and the name of a specific genre of dramatic performance in early modern England, recurs frequently in episodes of colonial encounter that involve music, performance, dance, and other such gestures. Importantly, 'entertainment' has an inherent instability; as an exchange it points directionally both up and down the social scale from high to low and from low to high. The primary denotative meaning is provision: monarchs, lords, and masters make provision for those under their protection, whether material or financial, providing money, goods, food, land, or shelter for servants, soldiers, and livestock. To entertain is to retain service and repay that service with worldly care. Yet to entertain is also to provide amusement, courtesy, and welcome; and in this case entertainment is often offered by the recipients of patronage or largesse to those monarchs, lords, and masters, as a token of love and loyalty. Entertainment describes the offer of hospitality, especially banquets, or the offer of pretty speeches, music or dance. Entertainment thus became the name for a dramatic performance offered as part of a larger gesture of welcome for an elite guest at court or at a country estate.
When the term entertainment is used to describe an exchange between parties of unequal status, it serves to demonstrate a hierarchical relationship understood and accepted by all. When used to describe an exchange between parties of uncertain relative status, it becomes part of a language of conduct, deployed as an interpretive and argumentative strategy. This is true not only in the context of the country house entertainments, transcripts and descriptions of which circulated in printed prose accounts, and in which aristocratic hosts vied for political power and royal favor, but also in the colonial periphery where the term appears frequently in accounts of exchanges between the English and others, including Indigenous groups, in promotional literature about the Americas. 6 These two kinds of texts share in a discursive field that is at once green, pastoral, and open, and also violent, political, and contested.
Promotional literature emerges at the moment of the English colonial enterprise in Virginia and elsewhere in the Americas and the rise of aspirational and nationalist travel literature, such as Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations (1589), which attempted to demonstrate that England was the rival of other European nations in its voyaging and colonizing exploits. In the 'New World', there were no clear answers to questions such as who could lay claim to land and the power that came with it, and who was the guest and who the host; thus the familiar yet complex custom of welcome-as-performance takes on a structural function. Certainly, English aristocrats, ambassadors, and monarchs were accustomed to receptions on this level when they traveled to the continent or received important guests from abroad. As I will show, however, it is in the context of English experiences in North America that the familiar form of the country house entertainment as welcome takes on a crucial importance. There, participants struggled to establish their relative social identities and their relationships to a new and newly contested land against barriers of extreme linguistic and cultural difference. Under such circumstances, music became an unreliable narrator, presumed to communicate where words failed, and often foiled by incommensurate cultural assumptions.
to the colonies. The boundaries of the genre are amorphous, encompassing text and image, print and manuscript, personal and corporate interests, and an incredibly varied history of textual transmission and cross-pollination. For an introduction to the genre of promotional literature, see . Paul Lindholdt has compared promotional literature to 'the prospectus printed by modern corporations to attract potential investors', noting that reading audiences would have included not only investors, adventurers, and potential settlers, but also armchair travelers seeking diversion and education in stories about foreign lands (pp. 58-62). Studies of promotional literature tend to focus on a single tract, author, or theme rather than on the genre as a whole, while promotional tracts or 'literature' are considered valuable by some only as historical documents, and unreliable ones at best.

Entertainment on the English Estate
Within English territories, royal and aristocratic country house entertainments were nationalist in their aims. At these lavish events aristocrats welcomed royal guests to their country homes with multi-day celebrations that included dramatic and musical performance, dance, speeches, exchanges of gifts, feasting, and hunting; entertainments were staged in various locations -indoors and out, in green spaces, rooms of state, and purpose-built structures such as arbors, man-made lakes, and temporary buildings. 7 These performances involved multiple authors and a myriad of actors, some professional, and many local amateurs. As the king or queen traveled the countryside, ritually claiming the lands and estates that made up his or her kingdom, the aristocrats, servants, city, and country folk who participated in these gestures of welcome could perform fealty and, at the same time, present their suits for patronage or blessing to the monarch in person; the sheer cost of such a welcome entertainment was a testament to the loyalty and love of the monarch's subjects.
The following example and illustration, from The Honorable Entertainment at Elvetham (1591), recounts the elaborate festivities offered by Edward Seymour, the Earl of Hertford, for Queen Elizabeth on the occasion of her visit in September 1591 (see Fig. 3 The festivities not only showcase the Earl of Hertford's loyalty to the queen, but also his bid for a favored position in her court -enacted before all those who were present to see the exchange in September 1591, as well as those who read about the event and saw the accompanying illustrations in the pamphlet, which appeared in print later the same year. In this example, the Queen is feted with feasting, music, and performance in structures -a room of state, a canopy by the pond, and the pond itself, a body of water enhanced with stage design to become a performance space -all built especially to receive her. The sounds the narrator describes as accompanying the dinner (despite voicing the decision to 'omit' these details) include the unspecified 'variety of consorted music' and the blast of 'ordinance discharged'. 10 These sounds of more ordinary tribute to an elite guest who is both urbane courtier and military leader, then give way to a more bizarre display. The Earl has 'some sportes prepared' -a water pageant in which Queen Elizabeth's power is demonstrated by her dominion over not only the people on her lands, but also a 'pompous araie of sea-persons', strange creatures with 'grisly heads' and multi-colored beards, who nevertheless approach the Queen to give her tribute by 'cheerfully sounding their trumpets'. Within the genre of the court masque or country house entertainment, this kind of submissive gesture from exotic or otherworldly beings -even Nereus himself -is a familiar move indicating the reach and potency of royal power. The narrator goes on to emphasize the congruence between sound and scene: 'The melody was sweet, and the show stately', and seems to find reassurance in this balance, a representation of the fair exchange of service for benevolent rule. 11 It is important to note that, while in comparison with colonial holdings, the country estate stands as the epitome of domestic stability, even the green space of the English country house with its private forest or chase can be understood as a contested space. The green space of the chase serves to determine the boundaries of the country estate and by extension the nation as culturally imagined. And it follows that within this boundary region or interstitial space, borders are in fact ill-defined, constantly under negotiation. Welcome is never a done deal, though through performances such as that described above, 'grisly' strangers may seem to be domesticated and rendered docile subjects of the Queen.

European Entertainments Abroad
The forms and gestures of country house entertainments traveled well and, from the perspective of European travelers, they arrived overseas intact. In the periphery, entertainments consisting of a variety of activities including conversation, feasting, music, dancing, impromptu and scripted dramatic interludes, and hunting, are crucial in conveying welcome. 12 The complexity of the ritual reflects the complexity of the intended (and unintended) messages that welcome delivers. Entertainments contain messages of respect as well as threats of dominance, gestures that emphasize commonly held beliefs as well as defiant proclamations of cultural difference. 'The voiage made by Sir Richard Grenville, for Sir Walter Raleigh, to Virginia, in the yeere 1585', for example, describes an encounter between two rival powers, the English and the Spanish, on Hispaniola. Here, banqueting, polite conversation, music, exchange of gifts and an invigorating hunt on horseback are all incorporated into a ceremony of welcome and hospitality. 13 The subtext of the meeting, however, is that of parley between two competing military and colonizing powers in the very theater where the contest waxed hottest.
The Spanish Gouernor receiued [Sir Richard Grenville] very courteously, and the Spanish Gentlemen saluted our English Gentlemen, and their inferiour sort did also salute our Souldiers and Sea men, liking our men, and likewise their qualities, although at the first, they seemed to stand in feare of vs, and of so many of our boats, whereof they desired that all might not land their men, yet in the end, the courtesies that passed on both sides were so great, that all feare and mistrust on the Spanyardes part was abandoned.
In the meane time while our English Generall and the Spanish Gouernor discoursed betwixt them of diuers matters, as of the state of the Country, the multitude of the Townes and people, and the commodities of the Iland, our men prouided two banquetting houses couered with greene boughs [….] and a sumptuous banquet was brought in serued by vs all in Plate, with the sound of trumpets, and consort of musick wherwith the Spanyards were more then delighted [….] The Spanyardes in recompense of our curtesie, caused a great heard of white buls, and kyne, to be brought together from the Mounteines, and appointed for euery Gentleman and Captaine that woulde ride, a horse ready sadled, and then singled out three of the best of them to be hunted by horsemen after their manner, so that the pastime grew very plesant, for the space of three houres [….] After this sport, many rare presents and gifts were giuen and bestowed on both partes, and the next day wee plaied the Marchants in bargaining with them by way of trucke and exchange for diuers of their commodities, as horses, mares, kyne, buls, goates, swine, sheepe, bul hydes, sugar, ginger, pearle, tabacco, and such like commodities of the Iland.
The 7. day we departed with great good will from the Spanyardes from the Iland of Hispaniola: but the wiser sort do impute this greate shew of friendship, and curtesie vsed towardes vs by the Spanyards rather to the force that we were of, and the vigilancie, and watchfulnes that was amongst vs, then to any harty good will, or sure friendly intertainement. 14 By describing the general and governor 'discours [ing]' about various topics including the successes of Spanish colonizing efforts on Hispaniola and sharing in that bounty, the author of this account suggests that the English may (and should) someday be capable of hosting such an event in their own territories. The English offer of a banquet and music is 'recompensed' by the Spanish hunt in a battle for the title of best 'curtesie'. The peaceful meeting between two rival powers implies an agreement or concession that the Spanish have firm control of the island. However, there is also the suggestion that the two groups are competing, though subtly, to decide who is the guest here and who the host. Following a mutual display of force in which the English are apparently at an advantage, the détente becomes frivolity, then an oddly commercial bartering for goods and staples. Finally, the narrator asserts that this display of good will has only been possible because of the English party's greater numbers. In this instance, entertainment reflected both the rivalry of two maritime powers, and the specific power dynamics of this one encounter. Under different circumstances, the groups might well have exchanged fire, rather than pleasantries. This knife's edge (conflict or camaraderie) is present in many accounts of entertainments. In this account, however, it is clear that the forms of the entertainment and its meanings (however complex, multi-layered, or contradictory) are familiar to all. Each major figure (the general and the governor) clearly represents a European nation, acting as an extension of that nation's policies, positions, and customs. In such episodes, the social hierarchy is anything but static, and the outcome of the careful negotiation of participants' relative roles is not predetermined as it is in country house entertainments.

Entertainment in the Periphery
In meetings between English and Indigenous people in the Americas, the forms of welcome also appear familiar, at least to English chroniclers, while the meanings of welcome are in fact far from clear. While inattentive to the diversity of Indigenous cultures in the vast area of North Eastern America, often indiscriminately using the term 'Indian', authors of promotional literature are exacting in their descriptions of the gestures and activities that constituted face-to-face interactions between English colonists and peoples like the Algonquian of coastal New England and the Powhatans of the Mid-Atlantic. 15 In the de Bry engraving that illustrates the 'Arrival of the Englishmen' (see Fig. 3.2) in the 1590 edition of Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report, an English ship approaches a Virginia shore. 16 Thomas Hariot traveled to Virginia in 1585, as part of Grenville's voyage. His short Briefe and True Report (1588), was first published to attract support for future voyages to Virginia. It was then reissued as part of Theordor de Bry's 'Grand Voyages', accompanied by large engravings based on the paintings of John White, for which Hariot wrote short captions. In the image, the small English vessel has successfully passed through dangerous shallows where the wrecks of other ships are visible; its passengers look toward the small island of Roanoke, while one sailor at the prow holds up a cross. On the island, Indigenous people engage in hunting, farming, and fishing, and a small raiding party faces off against a group of armed defenders. The historical record of early encounters between English and Algonquian people on and around Roanoke is both conflicted and one-sided, marginalizing the experiences of Algonquian men and women, forgetting the Algonquians' own elaborate social codes around diplomacy and intercultural exchange, and erasing much of the violence of these meetings. 17 Instead, the image conveys a simplistic narrative about a series of unsuccessful European attempts to reach land and make peaceful contact with the Indigenous people who have gone on with their pastoral lives, undisturbed by the voyages of exploration that are, for the English, a great national enterprise. Now that moment of successful contact is imminent, as the caption describes: Wee came vnto a Good bigg yland, the Inhabitante therof as soone as they saw vs began to make a great an[d] horrible crye, as people which [n]euer befoer had seene men apparelled like vs, and camme a way makinge out crys like wild beasts or men out of their wyts. But beenge gentlye called backe, wee offred them of our wares, as glasses, kniues, babies, and other trifles, which wee thought they delighted in. Soe they stood still, and perceuinge our Good will and courtesie came fawninge vppon vs, and bade us welcome. The English 'arrival' quickly becomes their 'welcome' and 'entertainment' by the 'inhabitants'. This move refigures what might be understood as an English invasion or conquest of an existing society as a positive reception: a welcome arrival, in a mode familiar from country house entertainments. The inhabitants' 'amazement' is then written as the awe of the subject viewing an approaching monarch or lord, allowing the author to imply that the English are now in possession of this new land. 19 In contrast with the entertainment shared with the Spanish, recounted in 'The voiage made by Sir Richard Grenville', the suggestion of a meeting of equals who are also rivals is missing. Here, the exchange of gifts is one-sided, from the English to the Algonquians, and the gifts themselves are not 'rare presents' but 'wares' and 'trifles'. In a more commercial transaction, gifts elicit welcome from an otherwise non-committal or hostile group. There is also the suggestion that this commercial exchange favors the English, whose gifts are not as valuable as the welcome they receive. Contradictions abound in this encounter, seemingly readable as 'welcome'. 20 The inhabitants are somehow infantile -distracted and swayed by trifles -and also mature hosts capable of 'reasonable curtesie'. This episode introduces an account, not of similarities between Algonquian and English culture, but of cultural differences in both manner of living and forms of entertainment (feasts and banquets). Communication would seem to be impossible between these culturally disparate groups -the Algonquians greet the English with 'crys' and antics that the English describe as inarticulate, bestial, insane. Nevertheless, the passage offers complex semantic interpretations of these noises; they cry 'as people which never before had seen men appareled like us'. 21 Moments later, moreover, despite language barriers and other stark differences, the English respond with 'calls' of their own. Miscommunication is recast as clear agreement, with the Algonquians 'perceiving' English 'courtesie' and returning their own with legible gestures such as 'fawninge' and 'bidding welcome'.
Presenting a subjective interpretation of events as objective and authoritative, Hariot's account denies the possibility that this encounter between English and Indigenous people might be anything other than amicable. This kind of translation, it should be understood, is a show of power; the move is familiar from country house entertainments.
In a second episode, this one also included in Hakluyt's massive anthology of accounts of travel and exploration, Principall Navigations (1589), a group of English settlers in Virginia fail to interpret a song correctly, hearing welcome where they should hear warning: 22 In the euening [….] about three of the clocke we heard certaine sauages call as we thought, Manteo, who was also at that time with mee in boate, whereof we all being verie glad, hoping of some friendly conference with them, and making him to answere them, they presently began a song, as we thought in token of our welcome to them: but Manteo presently betooke him to his peece, and tolde mee that they ment to fight with vs: which word was not so soone spoken by him, and the light horseman ready to put to shoare, but there lighted a vollie of their arrowes amongst them in the boate, but did no hurt God be thanked to any man. Immediatly, the other boate lying ready with their shot to skoure the place for our hand weapons to lande vpon, which was presently done, although the lande was very high and steepe, the Sauages forthwith quitted the shoare, and betooke themselues to flight: we landed, and hauing fayre and easily followed for a smal time after them, who had wooded themselues we know not where. 23 The English party hope to have 'friendly conference' with the group of Indigenous people, who the narrator refers to as 'Savages', and they interpret their song optimistically, as a 'token of [….]  a man whom they call Manteo, that the song is not a welcome but a warning, 'that they mean to fight', and are immediately attacked with a volley of arrows. 24 The passage recounts a series of sounds: calling out, singing out, and the volley of arrows flying and landing (a sound we can almost hear, but that is not described). The misinterpretation of the call and the song as welcome establishes a failure of communication between the two groups from the first instance of contact. That failure is not recognized in the written account but rather compounded. The marginal note, for example, reads, 'a conflict begun by the savages', enacting yet another unfounded interpretative act through the claim that the exchange was in fact a 'conflict', that the arrows which did not 'hurt' anyone represented an act of violence thwarted only by chance, and that this supposed 'conflict' was unprovoked and instigated solely by the 'savages'. Seen through a different lens the passage recounts not a welcome but a series of warnings: the call, the song, and the volley of arrows. Yet the English fail to receive any one of these messages; the fact that the arrows do not injure anyone is read as a miracle rather than as a warning shot. Here, music occasions miscommunication on multiple levels, both in the moment of encounter and exchange as well as in the record and rehearsal of the moment in printed prose. The episode as recounted reflects the unfounded certainty that English travelers and colonists will always know what music means, that music signals the universal language of entertainment, that the very presence of song counteracts any perceived threat. 25 Authors of promotional literature and travel narratives about the Americas sought to evaluate the status of Indigenous peoples, but found that their customs of music, dress, diet, and even land-ownership and use were a mystery. In the colonial context, not only the power of entertainment to elevate practitioners by establishing their civility, but also the very meanings of such gestures come under direct pressure. Established correlations between behaviors and social status did not comfortably apply either for settlers (who might well be self-made men rather than gentlefolk) or for Indigenous people whose customs and hierarchies differed (sometimes greatly) from English ones. Ultimately, wherever the term 'entertainment' recurs, whether in domestic or foreign contexts, we can attend to such uncertainty around social position and relation, questioning those authors who employ 'entertainment' rhetorically in order to imply settled relations where in fact turmoil and contest persist. borders, the efficacy of such works must be interrogated: 'it is important to ask precisely what particular methods of collaboration enact a crossing of borders in the first place and how such border crossings effect the everyday lived encounters of those musicians who take part in performance or those audience members who witness the performance' (113)(114). For more on the decentering of settler colonial sensory experience, see also, Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvzpv6bb