Abstract
This chapter argues for a simultaneous Phonographic Revolution in both early modern France and early China, understood as a reconceptualization of writing as recordings of the singing-speaking voice. To make this claim, the chapter juxtaposes two mid-eighteenth-century Parisian quarrels—the operatic ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ and the Orientalist debate on ancient Egypt and China—with contemporary Chinese philology, which drew, in turn, on folksong and opera cultures. Parallelisms and connections between the two scholarly cultures show that both moved simultaneously towards a theory that all writing systems are fundamentally phonographic. These concurrent remappings of writing vis-à-vis the voice offer a new heuristic of modernity oblique to the teleology of Western industrial and scientific progress.
Highlights
Acoustemologies in Contact attends to embodied, sensory experience in historical and cultural flux, and to the transcultural relations that flourished in the period that we — for expediency’s sake — call ‘early modernity’
The interest in the preservation and appropriation of Nahua song and dance practices as a tool for conversion was motivated by the idea that the strong collective effect of singers, dancers, and percussionists could be rechanneled for the promotion of Christian devotion
Audible Nahua influences must have triggered the imagination of attentive listeners during the liturgy, casting a new light on the post–Tridentine desire to harness the affective power of music and reaffirm the place of the sensuous in religious rituals
Summary
Patricia Akhimie is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University — Newark. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (2018), and co-editor of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (with Bernadette Andrea, 2019). Cusick is Professor of Music on the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University and Honorary Member of both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology; she has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to the musical cultures of early modern Italy and of contemporary North America Her 2009 book Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power received the ‘Best Book’ award for 2010 from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Wilbourne is Associate Professor of Musicology at Queens College and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York, and (since 2017) Editor-in-Chief of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture Her first book, Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte, was published in 2016 by University of Chicago Press, and an edited collection in honor of Suzanne G. In 2011, Wilbourne was awarded the Philip Brett Award for excellence in queer music scholarship for her article, ‘Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love’; in 2017–2018, she was the Francesco De Dombrowski Fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence
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