A Voyage to the Islands: Reconstructing African Music from Seventeenth–Century Jamaica

The three transcribed pieces of music in Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher and Jamaica provide a window not only into the lives of enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Jamaica, but into the limits and possibilities of historical interpretation and the location of the historian.  I have created a reconstruction of the music using homemade and acoustic instruments along with electronically sampled sounds.  Is what I have sequenced and recorded close to what was “really” played?  While this is an interesting and necessary question, in the end it points to issues not only with musical documentation but with all historical documentation.  By proceeding anyway, making the best possible interpretation while at the same time giving up a measure of certainty, it is possible to raise — and provisionally answer -- historical questions otherwise impossible to approach.  In addition, performance of the piece raises interesting issues about the standpoint(s) historians have available to take by changing their usual relations to their subject.