Three New Publications on Music and Colonialism in Early Modern Southeast Asia

The impacts of colonialism, trade, and intercultural knowledge transfer on music and the performing arts in the Malay–Indonesian archipelago have long been prominent topics of historical research. Three new publications by David R. M. Irving (one co-authored with Estelle Joubert, Dalhousie University), focusing on the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), contribute new data and interpretations to musicological and ethnomusicological literature in this field. First, an essay on the soundscapes of the first recorded voyage of circumnavigation – begun by Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 and completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano in 1522 – looks afresh at the accounts of Antonio Pigafetta and other survivors. The chapter critically analyses these texts, which arguably contain the earliest collective descriptions of listening on a ‘global’ scale, and surveys related documents. Second, a chapter on Iberian sources for music and dance in the early modern Moluccas (Maluku, eastern Indonesia, also known as the ‘Spice Islands’), adds new knowledge to the history of performing arts in that region. Previously the earliest prominent descriptions of music that scholars discussed were those by Dutch writers in the eighteenth century; this work shows, though, that many details can be drawn from Portuguese and Spanish textual records from the mid-sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, including ethnographic observations and the letters of Jesuit missionaries. Finally, a study by Joubert and Irving shines new light on a little-known source of European music theory and the contexts of its production: a work in Dutch attributed to Jan Frans Gratiaen (an official based in Ceylon/Sri Lanka) and published in Batavia/Jakarta in 1792. It appears to be the most extensive text on this topic printed in Asia before the nineteenth century, yet it was almost entirely plagiarised from two treatises by Dutch theorist Jacob Wilhelm Lustig. These three publications offer new perspectives on the complex world of music and colonialism in early modern Southeast Asia, and add to new kinds of approaches currently being formed within the burgeoning field of ‘Global Music History’.