About the Project

Musical Passage tells the story of an important, but little known record of early African diasporic music. This project is a collaborative endeavor by Laurent Dubois, David Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold. We aim to shed light on this unique document and to further the ongoing effort to understand the early history of one of the world’s greatest cultural movements.

Enslaved Africans and their descendants revolutionized global music, but historical records tell us far too little about their earliest practices. In this site we offer a careful interpretation of a single rare artifact, from Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica. Tucked away in this centuries-old book, are several pieces of music that make it possible to hear echoes of performances long past.

The title of our project refers both to the musical transcription at the center of the site, and also to the Middle Passage, a term that describes the Atlantic crossing that enslaved Africans endured while being trafficked from the shores of Africa to New World plantations. The Middle Passage has a longstanding significance within African diasporic history—it signifies both the dramatic severing of personal ties experienced under bondage as well as the enduring legacy of African cultural forms in the Americas.

The performers that Hans Sloane writes about in Voyage to the Islands were probably survivors of the Middle Passage, who may have continued playing music they had learned in the homelands, while also creating new performance traditions. The musical notation is striking in the diversity of styles it represents. Ultimately, we do not know exactly how it was originally played, but given Sloane’s description of musical instruments, and our collective knowledge of the period, we have made a preliminary attempt not to authentically reconstruct, but rather to create an opportunity to reflect on how this early music may have sounded. We offer the recordings here as an invitation for further study of this document and the incredible legacy that it represents. Above all, we are motivated to make audible what otherwise falls silent in the historical record. We intend this site to be of use to wide-ranging scholars of various disciplines, practicing musicians, the general public, and students of all stripes.

This project has been reviewed and published in the inaugural issue of sx archipelagos.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to speak back to our efforts here, by reaching out on Twitter, following us @musical_passage or contacting us via email at musicalpassage1707@gmail.com. You can also stream all of the recordings from the site via Soundcloud. We would be thrilled to hear your musical interpretations of the pieces and add them to our playlist. Do not hesitate to be in touch!

Jamaican Musicians Respond

On March 17, 2017, a group of musicians gathered at the Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. They were invited by Matthew Smith, Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology at UWI-Mona, and Herbie Miller, Director of the Jamaica Music Museum. The musicians listened to the recordings from the site live and began to learn and improvise on the music in front of the audience. Their insights have led to fascinating new discoveries about the music. The performers are legendary guitarist and band leader Earl “Chinna” Smith with Inna de Yard, and special guests Anthony “Sangie” Davis, Maroghini, Vivian “Scotty” Scott, and Samuel “Time” Williams. View the performances on YouTube here. The University of West Indies - Mona Chorale, under the direction of Shawn Wright, have also begun to interpret "Angola" and we look forward to continuing conversations with performers in Jamaica. Stay tuned!

About the Site Design

This website was designed in collaboration with Marc Harkness of Harkness Design and developer Dave Mello. It is built using HTML5, CSS, and libraries such as jQuery, Bootstrap, and FullPage.js. The design is optimized for use on laptops and desktops. Some functionality may not be effective on tablets and touchscreens.

Our own interpretations of the pages in Sloane’s narrative have come from very careful attention to the words in his description as well as the musical meanings conveyed in the notation. We designed the site in such a way to provide visitors with a similar experience of closely engaging with the rich, although mediated and multi-layered information on the page. By hovering, listening, and reading, we hope invite you to slow down, listen, and engage with the document carefully.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University for permission to use images of Voyage to the Islands from their collection. We also wish to thank the editorial team behind sx archipelagos, a new digital wing of the Small Axe Project, especially Kaiama Glover, Alex Gil, and Kelly Baker Josephs. We are thankful also to our co-panelists at Caribbean Digital II, Vincent Brown and Jennifer Morgan, and many members of the audience who offered us insightful feedback on the project-in-progress. At Duke, we are grateful to Lou Brown and Natalie Robles of the Forum for Scholars and Publics, for their ongoing assistance and support. We are grateful also to Ian Baucom, who helped to support Black Atlantic digital scholarship at Duke during his tenure at the Franklin Humanities Institute. The project is funded jointly by the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Forum for Scholars and Publics. Finally, we wish to thank Rich Rath for his groundbreaking research on the musical notation in Sloane. You can listen to his interpretations of the pieces here.

About the Creators

In the course of our collaboration, we have each taken the lead on different aspects of the project’s execution. Laurent Dubois has been responsible for securing institutional resources to support the project’s development and publication. David K. Garner is performer and artistic director of the musical interpretation of the pieces. Mary Caton Lingold has helmed project management and collaboration with our web designer. She also provided vocals for “Angola.” Together, we previously joined forces in the creation of Banjology, a site that explores some of the lesser known aspects of banjo history.

Laurent Dubois is Professor of Romance Studies and History and the Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. He is the author of six books, including A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean (winner of four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize), Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and most recently, The Banjo: America’s African Instrument.

David K. Garner is Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at the University of South Carolina in Fall, 2016. He is a composer whose works often draw on other music as a point of departure, from Beethoven to bluegrass. A frequent source of inspiration is the music of the American South, and he is especially interested in aspects of performance surrounding the tunes themselves including style, technique, tuning, timbre, instrumentation, and improvisation. Garner has worked with world-renowned ensembles including the Kronos Quartet, which commissioned a work based on the music of the Scottish diaspora. Awards include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, an ASCAP Young Composer Award, and first prizes in the OSSIA, Red Note, and NACUSA competitions.

Mary Caton Lingold is Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is writing a book about African Atlantic music and sound (1630-1830). She is the co-editor of Digital Sound Studies (Duke UP 2018) and a related web collection. She is founder and creator of the Sonic Dictionary, a crowdsourced database of audio recordings. Her article on musical transcriptions in Caribbean travel literature was published in issue 52.3 of Early American Literature. Contact the author if you'd like a copy.

Digital Humanities Bibliography

Our work draws on the innovations of much rich digital scholarship on the Afro-Atlantic world, as well as projects on music and sonic culture. For example, see:



Augmented Notes

African Diaspora, Ph.D

Digital Library of the Caribbean

Early Caribbean Digital Archive

Le Marronnage á Saint-Domingue

Provoke!: Digital Sound Studies

Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

Two Plantations





For Further Reading

Many scholars have informed our understanding of both Sloane’s travel narrative and specifically the music therein. We recommend the following for information about the Middle Passage, Jamaican History, Hans Sloane, and Early African-diasporic music.

Bilby, Kenneth M. True-Born Maroons. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.

Dubois, Laurent. The Banjo: America’s African Instrument. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.

Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Kriz, Kay Dian. “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica.’” The William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2000): 35–78.

Lingold, Mary Caton. "Peculiar Animations: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Music in Caribbean Travel Narratives." Early American Literature, no. 52.3 (2018): 623-654.

Rath, Richard Cullen. “African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transition.” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1993): 700–726.

Rath, Richard Cullen. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slaver: A Middle Passage from African to the American Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.