Early Modern European Nations and Empire

Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music

The indeterminate identity hinted at with the figure’s costume and appearance is intensified by her performance on a lute. In the light of the lute’s predominant seventeenth-century association with European high culture, the instrument seems at first glance wholly out of place in the hands of a performer whose iconography gestures toward her identification with America, Africa, and Asia, but not Europe. We might indeed be forgiven for wondering, somewhat indelicately, what a lute is doing in the hands of an Indian?

Several factors complicate this sense of the instrument’s difference in relation to the performer. The lute’s associations with elite culture were commonly parodied in burlesque costume designs for French court ballets before the 1660s. French artists often substituted grotesquely distorted lutes for parts of musicians’ bodies or decorated burlesque costumes with lutes. Moreover, lutes and related instruments were occasionally given to exotic figures in the spectacles, which potentially extended the instruments’ associations beyond Europe. For instance, the Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626) featured récits for mandolin-players personifying America, Asia, the Arctic regions, Africa, and Europe, as shown in the well-known costume drawings for this ballet. A lutenist costumed as an American also appears in the background of the commemorative image Le Soir (Figures ), which shows a performance of Richelieu’s Ballet de la Prospérité des armes de France (1641) attended by Louis XIII and the royal family.
Figure . Le Soir. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
Figure . Detail of Le Soir. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Burlesque parody of the lute’s elite social status and the instrument’s cross-cultural travesti in the hands of exoticized performers would likely have left its dominant cultural associations largely intact, or even reinforced them. If this were the case, neither the high social status nor the European identity of the lute would be truly jeopardized by their temporary subversion in the image of America considered here. Such an interpretation is perhaps supported by the existence in the same collection of several related images, which show other exotic allegorical figures performing on lutes (seated on a snail, an ostrich, and a tortoise, respectively). The series likely alludes to the parts of the world, an overtly imperial theme that recurred in French court spectacles throughout the century and in decorative art for the royal châteaus, especially Versailles. The lute’s stable appearance in the four Louvre images suggests its identification with the perfect harmony that, in Christian Neoplatonic thought, underlay the created order. Neoplatonic ideas of cosmic harmony had long formed an important part of the lute’s symbolism, and they also played a vital role in Bourbon royal propaganda, identifying absolute monarchy with the harmonic ordering of the world. By placing lutes in the hands of exotic performers, then, the Louvre drawings may have emblematized their political subjugation, by showing their cultural integration, or “harmonization,” with the French regime (see Chapter ).

This interpretation attributes an integrity and resiliency to the lute’s identity that allows the instrument to affect the identity of the exotic performer in the drawing while its own symbolic associations remain intact. The lute’s association with unearthly harmony and the quality of nobility was indeed persistent. Yet this identity was rooted in the lute’s genealogy (much as with dynastic nobility), and the many, often distinct reiterations of the instrument’s historical and mythical origins in contemporary discourse indicate an anxiety around the question of where the lute came from, and what it signified in the hands of different performers. In the seventeenth century, this anxiety arose in part from the increased accessibility of lutes, lute instruction, and lute music to wealthy bourgeois, which called the instrument’s nobility into question. However, it also responded to an uncertainty concerning the lute’s proto-ethnic and religious identification, owing to its mixed heritage.

The lute’s prestige in the early modern period derived in large part from its identification with cultural, philosophical, and religious lineages that European elites valued highly. Particularly important was the instrument’s association with Greek, Roman, and Christian heritages that had long been important resources for European dynastic self-fashioning – evident, for example, in the association of the lute with Apollo, Mercury, the Hebrew King David, and the angels. Similarly, in the Louvre drawings the lute symbolized the classical, Christian identity that the French kings claimed for their own lineage and, by extension, that of the nation. The lute’s prestigious classical and Christian heritage made it an attractive symbol for Bourbon royal representation. However, the official versions of the lute’s genealogy recounted in Bourbon propaganda and elsewhere obscured another ancestry, which did not accord quite so well with a dominant sense of what it meant to be French, or even European, in the seventeenth century. Modern scholars have definitively traced the lute’s origins to central Asia, and the direct predecessors of the lute (especially the “ūd”) came to Europe via the North African Muslim conquest of al’Andalus, as the Iberian peninsula was known under Umayyad and later Islamic rule. The precise transmission of the lute to northern Europe is uncertain, but the most likely route is via the Kalbid-influenced Sicilian court of the late thirteenth century. With the spread of lute performance throughout the Italian peninsula in the fourteenth century came a shift in the instrument’s cultural symbolism, as according to Douglas Alton Smith the lute’s “foreign – and heathen – associations slipped into convenient oblivion … while the instrument and its musical style were completely assimilated by the Italians.” The poets Petrarch and Boccaccio inaugurated the enduring association between the lute and the ancient Greek lyre, with the result that the instrument’s colonial diasporic transmission was displaced in favor of a more prestigious classical and Christian past, “its Islamic heritage forgotten or ignored.”

Attempts to mitigate the lute’s troubled origins are characteristic of elite European music writings in the early period of external colonization. However, such attempts never fully succeeded, and for this reason colonial-era music sources, such as the image of the American lutenist in Figure 00.1, can tell us much about what was at stake in Europe’s representations of its own, as well as others’ music. Postcolonial theory is helpful here, if adapted to the unique circumstances of early colonial music cultures, since some aspects of colonial power relations have remained fairly constant across the long history of European colonization. Among these is a selective memory of origins, evident in early modern discourse on the lute.

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha has emphasized the centrality of colonial processes to the characteristically ambivalent memory of colonial or postcolonial nations. According to Bhabha, colonialism destabilizes national “genealogies of ‘origin’,” which are always involved in historical or other forms of collective memory, but which are particularly fraught in colonial situations. While selective memory characterizes most human collectives, what distinguishes colonial or postcolonial nations is their necessary forgetting of cultural difference, in the negative sense of an ancestry that is disavowed in national discourse. The difference that colonialism injects into the self-representation of nations is, in Bhabha’s words, “the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding to does not add up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification.” “Subaltern signification,” as Bhabha defines it, indicates cultural memory that is barred from being plausible knowledge, but that also ensures the impossibility of secure memory by virtue of its exclusion. In national contexts, subaltern memory can recall an unwelcome colonial past; hybrid cultural production; genocide, ecocide, or enslavement; racial or ethnic mixture; or past migrancy. It is, in short, any aspect of national histories or other forms of memory that makes it impossible to really know who we are and where we come from, because we have always already come from somewhere else in a time other than now.

Applied to early modern Europe, Bhabha’s correlation of the ambivalence of national memory with past or present colonialism needs revision on several counts. First, his conception of the modern nation-state only corresponds in a limited way to early modern nations, which were more porous and mutable and which were usually organized around dynastic rulers, not an empowered citizenry. Early European colonialism also involved other types of polities in addition to nations. Inhabitants of the principalities, kingdoms, city-states, and nations of Christendom associated the term “empire” generally with a powerful ruler’s dominion, and specifically with the Roman empire, the Holy Roman empire, and with the dynasties that claimed their legacies, as well as with the burgeoning Ottoman empire. This idea of “empire” was also, of course, extended to colonial and trade dealings with peoples and territories outside Eurasia, as with American colonization. However, even early commercial empires, such as the Portuguese, depended on relations with powerful royal or noble patrons and were thus promoted as opportunities for enhancing dynastic prestige.

European soil that, together with the memory of the Crusades and the threat of the encroaching Ottoman empire, established the powers of Muslim North Africa and Asia Minor as arch-rivals and enemies of early modern Christendom. The Atlantic nations’ relationship with empire was further complicated by their efforts to establish colonies, plantations, and trade outposts in the Americas and elsewhere from the fifteenth century onward, because European external colonization raised the specter of Europe’s own subjugation to foreign, non-Christian powers. While Roman imperial conquest could be recuperated as the precursor of an autonomous, Christian, conquering Europe, the past reality and present threat of conquest by Muslim powers came to haunt Christendom’s sense of its own identity. Genealogies traced to Rome (and hence to Greece) obscured the Islamic imperial ancestry of many European political and cultural forms, including important aspects of its musical theory and practice. This alternate European ancestry went largely unacknowledged in the early modern period, because its memory of Muslim Arab dominance threatened the religious, cultural, and proto-racialist hierarchies that sustained European distinctions between colonizer and colonized, “civilized” and “savage.”

The ideological preference of one origin story over another always leaves traces. The lute’s discourse of origins is a small but significant case in point, since divergent early modern accounts of the lute’s genealogy, symbolism, and performance decorum never added up to a coherent whole. Even the powerful Christian Neoplatonism of the lute’s early modern symbolism could not preclude other, less desirable aspects of its heritage from emerging in iconography and discourse. In just one example, the prolific author of conduct manuals, François de Grenaille, warned his female readers against too high a regard for the lute, on account of its base origins. His disenchanted account of Mercury’s creation of the lute from a tortoise shell is unorthodox, to say the least: “As to the musical instruments that form the principal ornament of the consort, I am astonished that they should be taken for miracles, seeing as they are for the most part no more than images of a gutted tortoise.” It is difficult to know how common was Grenaille’s rather tactless assessment, but what matters here is that such minor departures from the lute’s conventional mythology highlight the possibility of a more radical differentiation, which I will refer to here as a “subalternity.”

The distinction I want to make between oppositional knowledge – as in Grenaille’s statement – and a more drastically divergent, subaltern signification – which Grenaille’s statement only intimates – is illustrated by commentary on the lute’s origins in the Burwell lute tutor, an anonymous manuscript treatise from late seventeenth-century