Awards

• Winner of Dale W. Brown Book Award 2022 (United States)
• Winner of Otto Kinkeldey Award, Music in American Culture Award 2021 (United States)

Overview

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments-or soundscapes-characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhutten, and Friedenshutten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds-musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman-shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

Full Product Details

9780253047694

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Reviews

Eyerly accomplishes what few scholars thought possible-creating a sonic link to early America and transporting us into the sensory and spiritual world that German-speaking Moravian missionaries and Native American Christians built and inhabited for a brief time in mid-eighteenth century Pennsylvania. Entering through the portal of her personal connections to this historical aural landscape, Eyerly's marvelous book and its compendium website transform readers into imaginative witnesses and embody a lost knowledge through digital methods, painstaking research, and a sensitive rendering of a place and time full of violence and hope. Moravian Soundscapes is an intellectual, auditory, and emotional revelation. -- Dr. Patrick M. Erben, <B>University of West Georgia</B>

Author Information

Sarah Eyerly is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Early Music Program at the Florida State University.

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