Conditioned Ears:How to Listen to Mohican-Moravian Hymnody Glenda Goodman (bio) THE digital companion to "Singing Box 331" invites readers to pursue a nonlinear path through the project, but I choose to start where the authors begin the print article: in the archive.1 Separately and at different times, Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly looked down into Box 331 and extracted remarkable booklets of Mohican hymn lyrics. The lyrics represent a dormant tradition of Moravian singing; generations have passed since the hymns, written in the 1740s, were last sung. Wheeler and Eyerly, in other words, offer us a scenario of both literal and metaphorical archival silence—silent room, silent booklets, voices fallen silent, silenced presence in the historical record.2 But the authors do not languish in the lachrymose: they usher us forward, first noting that the archive was in fact a site of energetic engagement by previous visitors, including members of the Mohican descendant community, and then bringing us into the productive world of [End Page 380] the authors' collaborative approach to unmuting these sources. They introduce us to a network of collaborators who created and used the hymns in the eighteenth century, and to the network of collaborators "re-sounding" them in the twenty-first century. In doing so, Wheeler and Eyerly make a strong case for the historical significance of hymnody for fashioning and maintaining intercultural socioreligious networks. They also demonstrate the insufficiency of textual reading; some historical sources need to be interacted with and performed. In short, this is a project of realization: it both brings music back into being and brings sounds into historical and communal consciousness. The project also raises, and does not fully answer, further questions about the reliability of interpreting historical sources, whether those are ones we read or ones we hear. Wheeler and Eyerly are not the first scholars to engage with Native Christian hymnody, nor are they the first to do so through collaboration. Michael D. McNally's work on Ojibwe hymnody and Luke Eric Lassiter, Clyde Ellis, and Ralph Kotay's scholarship on Kiowa hymnody all reflect on the powerful meaning of Native Christian music.3 In those cases, however, the subjects consisted of continuous hymn-singing traditions that had been adapted to the needs and interests of the contemporary communities. Wheeler and Eyerly confront a tradition that has been ruptured, and they address this not simply by reconstructing past soundscapes and musical practices but also by recomposing and creating new ways to engage with the materials, which, they assert, represent a new way of understanding—a historical epistemology through musical sounds. In and of itself, this interest in past soundscapes is not new: historians have acknowledged that listening constituted an important way by which people in the past experienced the world; musicologists have developed nuanced frameworks for uncovering and understanding specific historical music-making practices; and ethnomusicologists have assessed culturally diverse "acoustemologies," as Steven Feld influentially termed the epistemologies humans develop in different sonic environments.4 Yet Wheeler and Eyerly's "re-sounding" approach to re-creating Mohican-Moravian hymnody is particularly constructive and wonderfully rich in its interdisciplinary reach: they blend the musicological expertise necessary to make sense of the archival sources, historical contextualization that centers Native agency, and collaboration that attends to the [End Page 381] interests of the descendant community. That said, even as they focus on the meaning and experience of making music—of literally re-sounding the sources—they do not plumb the consequences of the new experiences of listening that they are making possible. Musical sources can serve as exceptional windows onto the past but carry with them particular challenges. As Wheeler and Eyerly state, however much one wants to enliven such a source—not simply "capture the past" authentically but hear the "aural testimony" of a diverse and complex past—resuscitating the source requires great sensitivity to one's biases and position.5 Just as historians know there is no neutral way to understand colonial encounters, so too there is no innocent way to re-create colonialist music. The hierarchies of power present in all forms of interaction were (and are) present in musical interactions as well. Facing this fact...