Conference Agenda

Albrecht Dürer’s artwork contains numerous images of musicians and musical instruments. From musical angels and piping satyrs to the artist himself measuring the proportions of a lute or playing the drum to soothe the melancholic Job, or his rendition of a performance of the city’s musicians in the mural in the Great Hall of Nuremberg’s Rathaus, and numerous illustrations for the Emperor Maximilian, it is clear that the artist was more than a little fascinated with music. What were some of the factors that played into Dürer’s obsession with music? It is known that he cultivated relationships with musicians, some of them among most illustrious citizens of his native Nuremberg, several known for their skill in music. Among these were his father-in-law Hans Frey, a well-known harpist, his friend, and patron Willibald Pirckheimer, skilled in playing the organ and lute, and Hans Neuschel, the brass player and member of a family of instrument builders. Drafted around the same time as Sebastian Virdung’s Musica Getutscht, 1511, arguably the earliest pictionary of its kind printed in Europe, Dürer’s images provide an additional perspective to our understanding of the availability and structure of musical instruments available in his time.
Dürer's treatise on geometry records his understanding of certain theoretical relationships between visual proportion and musical harmony and is also an aid to the discovery of his knowledge of musical composition and his interest in the lute or other instruments. Evidence of the artist’s familiarity with musical notation is found in a manuscript fragment containing tablature in his own hand. There is speculation that musical imagery in a work by Heinrich Isaac is related to the visual iconography in one of Dürer’s paintings. These and other surviving documents reflect the artist’s desire to be seen as knowledgeable in music, both practical and theoretical; they also offer a glimpse into understanding his preferences and biases. This paper explores how Albrecht Dürer, dubbed "the German Leonardo, contributed to ways in which we can visualize the musical soundscape of early-16^th-century Nuremberg.

When musicologists of the late 19^th century discussed the origin of musical instruments, they often asked, what came first, the flute or the drum? This conversation tended to include the broader origins of music where people debated whether humans first developed a capacity for pitch or rhythm? Some who believed in an original “purely rhythmic” music referenced this theory when making misinformed statements about “primitive” peoples. Now, with the discovery and dating of 40,000-year-old bone flutes from the Swabian Jura Mountains in Germany, human musicality and instrument making is much more ancient and advanced than thought a few decades ago. These instruments existed alongside some of the earliest examples of iconography, anthropomorphic sculpture, and complex tools. They signal a cultural explosion in human music making, visual art, language, and symbolic thought. So, what do these ancient instruments tell us about the development of human music?

This paper will consider possible uses and meanings of both the flutes and Paleolithic music in relation to animal imitation, shamanism, and social cooperation. Furthermore, recent scholarship shows that our ability to experience and connect pitch, rhythm, timbre, and emotion co-evolved with other traits such as our abilities to vocalize, synchronize, make tools, and interact socially. Therefore, musicality was in place long before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa over 50,000 years ago. Percussion, wind, or even string instruments could conceivably predate this time when considering archeological evidence from the Middle Paleolithic period.

Although the debate over what came first – the human capacity for pitch or rhythm – has become somewhat irrelevant, the trope that music began as “purely rhythmic” continues to confront music scholarship and pedagogy. Because the analysis of Paleolithic music and culture has tended toward Eurocentrism, this paper shows how recent discoveries outside of Europe are constructing a new narrative.

Keyboards often served as essential commodities in early modern European overseas exploration and expansion, circulating as a motivation of colonial, diplomatic, commercial, and religious interests. Yet while we know much about the circulation and use of keyboards in trading centers, missionary activities, ambassadorial ventures, and educational institutions in the New World and Asia, few studies have focused on their presence and cultural functions in Africa. Drawing on late Renaissance travelers’ narratives, missionary records and indigenous sources, this paper presents three case studies from the North-East African highlands, West-Central and Southern Africa, to explore the dissemination, musical functions, and cultural significance of the earliest documented Western keyboards in sub-Saharan Africa, and how musical performance served as a construct for representation, identity, agency, and power in Afro-European encounters and colonial perspectives. First, it focuses on one of the earliest recorded encounters between the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and Latin Europe in 1520, namely between a Portuguese embassy and the court of King Lebnä Dengel, to provide new details on keyboards used for diplomacy and gift-giving, the local faranji (foreigners) community of musicians, and the first recorded European instruments to be brought into Ethiopia. Second, musical encounters in South Africa in Cape colonial society during the 1650s between the retinue of Jan van Riebeeck and the local indigenous Khoekhoe community reveal the use of keyboards in colonization processes. Finally, early references to missionary keyboards taken to the Kingdom of Kongo during the 1490s and possibly one of the earliest ethnographic visual representations of a European keyboard in Africa from the 1650s point to the possibility that harpsichords had reached West-Central Africa by the mid 17^th century (if not earlier), being employed as identifiers of power and cultural appropriation. These Afro-European encounters offer tantalizing views on the spread of keyboard instruments across three continents and how they were used as colonial, evangelical, and political tools by European powers, thus giving broader insight into the role of Renaissance keyboards in constructing cultural identity and the collisions of political, social and cultural hierarchies in Africa in an entangled global early modern.