ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with reports about the affective and somatosensory effects of music on the listener – one written in the mid-sixteenth century by the Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry about Brazilian Tupinambá singing; the other in the early eighteenth century by the missionary ethnographer Joseph François Lafitau about Canadian Iroquois and Huron music. These reports, the later one an interrogation and attempted reenactment of the earlier, offer differing possibilities for historical representation and experiencing the past through music.
In contrasting the two, the chapter forges connections between discrete areas of inquiry – music history, the history of the senses and emotion, and reenactment. It asks whether it is possible to rigorously represent the past through the affective. In so doing, it looks for a middle ground between academic history’s quest for objectivity and reenactment’s self-referentiality – reenactors’ pursuit of subjective, transformative experience and insistence on historical authenticity. In examining how one form of sensory input generates the signs of another, the chapter opens the door for a radical interdisciplinarity. Finally, it allows us to think about how the restaging of somatosensory experience might be used to deepen our understanding of the past and bring it into relation to the present. If an emotional response is to constitute historical evidence, how can individual testimony be reexperienced by others through the medium of sound?
