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Moravian Soundscapes
A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania
Sarah Justina Eyerly (Author)
9780253047663
Hardback, published 5 May 2020
290 pages, 39 b&w illus., 1 map, 15 tables - 39 Illustrations, black and white - 15 Tables, black and white - 1 Halftones, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.599 kg
Eyerly's deeply personal connection to the subject matter, her ability to convey an understanding of the culture of the Moravian community without sounding overly didactic, and her meticulous scholarship result in finely crafted prose which evokes a palette of sounds, fragrances, and emotions of the time and space of the early Moravian Pennsylvanian missions.
In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.
About the Companion Website
Acknowledgments
Note on Naming, Terminology, and Archival Sources
Prologue: The Pennsylvania Wilds
Introduction: Sounding New Histories of the Moravian Missions
Peale
1 Penn's Woods
Bethlehem
2 Friends & Strangers
Herrnhut
3 Sound & Spirit
Moravian Run
4 1782
Epilogue: Petquotting
Glossary: A Moravian Vocabulary
Bibliography
Index