(2024)
Cole, Janie
Keyboards served as essential commodities in early modern European overseas exploration and expansion, and circulated as a motivation of colonial, diplomatic, commercial and religious interests. Yet while we know much about the circulation and use of keyboards in trading centres, missionary and ambassadorial ventures, and educational institutions in the New World and Asia, few studies have focused on their presence, dissemination and cultural functions in sub-Saharan Africa, aside from some traces in the kingdom of Kongo and in South Africa.
Drawing on 15thâ17th-century travellersâ accounts, Portuguese dignitariesâ letters, and the voluminous surviving Jesuit documentation, this essay explores the dissemination, musical functions and cultural significance of the earliest documented Western keyboards, including harpsichords, in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in the early modern period, exploring themes around musical circulation, keyboards as diplomatic and evangelical tools, and how keyboard music served as a construct for representation, identity, agency and power in Afro-European encounters and colonial perspectives. It draws on two significant encounters between Ethiopia and Latin Europe during the early modern age of exploration, namely some of the earliest documented Ethiopian contacts with European music on Ethiopian soil from both secular and sacred contexts. First, one of the earliest documented encounters between a Portuguese embassy and the Ethiopian royal court of King LebnĂ€ Dengel in 1520 provides significant new insights into the use of European music, a harpsichord and other keyboard instruments for diplomacy and gift-giving, the local faranji (foreigners) community, and arguably the earliest recorded Western keyboards to be brought into Ethiopia in a complex dissemination itinerary from Lisbon to Shewa, via Goa. The 1520 import of a harpsichord to the North-East African highlands appears to be the earliest documented exemplar of the use of a harpsichord as a diplomatic tool in sub-Saharan Africa. Then, encounters between Portuguese Jesuit missionaries from Goa and the Ethiopian indigenous communities during the Jesuit period (1557â1632) on the highlands reveal the import of keyboards for Jesuit missionary strategies and their musical art of conversion, which employed music as both evangelical and pedagogical tools, and blended indigenous and foreign elements.
These Ethio-European musical encounters offer tantalizing views on the spread of keyboard instruments in Portuguese courtly and Jesuit liturgical musical traditions across three continents, and how they served as central components of ambassadorial and evangelical ventures by colonial powers. The sources provide new documentation about how keyboard instruments were transmitted along the Portuguese routes of discovery, allowing the Oriental and Old Worlds to collide in interconnected musical experiences, thus giving broader insight into the role of harpsichords and other keyboards in constructing identity, religion, and the collisions of political, social and cultural hierarchies outside of Europe in an entangled global early modern period. Further investigation is now needed into other African locales to discern how widespread the use of Western keyboards was on the continent and how these were perceived by local indigenous communities in the context of wider Afro-Eurasian encounters and relations in these distant outposts of Renaissance music.
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