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Sacred Sound, Space & Afro-Eurasian Encounters in the Christian Kingdom of 17th-Century Ethiopia
The Jesuit mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia (1557-‐1632) was one of its earliest and arguably most challenging projects in the early modern period. New ambitious architectural projects were undertaken as symbols of religious renewal and state supremacy, and music was also central to Jesuit conversion practices. Drawing on 16th-‐ and 17th-‐century travelers’ accounts, new Jesuit archival documentation and indigenous sources, this talk explores the role of music and ritual sounds in relation to the sacred spaces of new churches erected on the Ethiopian highlands and examines the musical art of conversion developed by European Jesuit missionaries hailing from Portuguese India placed in the wider context of a vibrant indigenous royal Ethiopian court culture, local material economies of patronage that shaped these cultural dynamics, and the influences of foreign designs on both music and architecture. By combining sonic and visual practices, these Afro-‐Eurasian entanglements offer significant broader insights into the workings of an intertwined early modern Indian Ocean World, sacred musical migrations and transmissions, African agency in foreign relations, interconnected global music histories across three continents, and the role of embodied aurality and architecture in constructing identity and religious proselytism in the Horn of Africa.
Dr. Janie Cole is a research scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music, a visiting professor in Yale’s Dept. of Music, and an affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies. She is also a research officer for East Africa for the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-Centring AfroAsia (2018-), and a research associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-). She is the executive director of Music Beyond Borders: www.musicbeyondborders.net
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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2194754-0
