Musical Passage: Sounding History

In this presentation, we will dialogue about the creation of the Musical Passage website (musicalpassage.org), which presents musical material published in Hans Sloane’s 1707 text Voyage to the Islands by offering contemporary interpretations of the songs. We will discuss the ways in which learning to play these songs, as part of a collaborative process involving ourselves and the composer and music theorist David Garner, enabled us to gain new perspectives on the history of Afro-Atlantic music and of seventeenth-century Jamaica. And we will discuss the ways in which a workshop held in Jamaica, in which our interpretations formed the basis of performances of these songs by a group of Nyabinghi musicians, gave us further insight into the historical processes we seek to understand. Broadly, our presentation will insist on the ways in which placing musical interpretation and historical interpretation in dialogue with one another offers new openings and ways of thinking about the past.