ABSTRACT
Crossing musical and sonic data is necessary to understand the sonic worlds—of Hell or of Eden—which the texts construct. Political and ideological reasons can explain the different positions about Ethiopian and European music and sounds. The tolerant tone and the sincere curiosity for the musical and liturgical practices of the Ethiopians are not shared by the Portuguese Jesuits some years later, in the first half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, between the discovery of the so-called marvellous country of Prester John in the sixteenth century and the rejection of things Ethiopian in the eighteenth century, the way of thinking had changed: marvelling at the strange had become vulgar. The sources talk about two sonic worlds: on the one hand, the Ethiopian one, and on the other hand, the European and missionary one. Cries reveal who people are, what they experience and what they want, and they draw a sonic identity of a place.
