Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:34:19am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Colonial Frameworks in 18th-Century Music Session Chair: D. Linda Pearse Discussant: Sarah Eyerly | |
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Afterlives of Seven Years’ War Songs: Joseph Marin’s Chants de guerre University of Pittsburgh In this paper, I share ongoing research tracing the transatlantic lives of two Northeast American Indigenous-style war songs transcribed in a 1785 French music theory treatise, Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon’s De la musique considérée en elle-même. Working with French and British colonial archives, I have been able to identify Chabanon’s informant as Canadian Seven Years’ War veteran Joseph Marin de La Malgue (1719-74). According to Chabanon, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville introduced him to a “M[sr]. Marin” who had been captured in battle and put through the gauntlet but then spared thanks to the “noble courage” he showed in singing his death song. Romanticized narrative aside, this incident was likely Marin’s 1759 capture at La Belle Famille, during the British siege of French-held Fort Niagara. This suggests that the two “chants de guerre” among the four notated “songs of the natives of North America” in Chabanon’s treatise were Marin’s personal war songs, which he sang and possibly co-created during his colonial service. While Robert Stevenson (1973), Victoria Lindsay Levine (2002), and Steven Kovaciny (2026) have discussed these transcriptions, they have not before been linked to Marin and his service during the Seven Years’ War (1754-63). Marin was born into a Canadian military and fur trading family, and he worked with eastern Plains and lower Great Lakes nations before being recalled east to serve as a colonial officer. Like Bougainville (who served with him), Marin learned to sing war songs like those sung by Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and other war leaders, in the service of recruiting and sustaining the multi-nation Indigenous-colonial coalitions that Britain and France relied upon to pursue the war. Although musical analysis is not my focus here, the transcribed war songs’ melodies, performance indications, and extemporized French lyrics are consistent with the kinds of songs that colonial officers and officials reportedly sang alongside their Indigenous counterparts in war councils. Recognizing the links between published transcriptions like these and the mid-eighteenth century's intercolonial wars contributes to our understanding of these wars’ intercultural dimensions, and it makes it possible to recontextualize deracinated Indigenous or Indigenous-adjacent songs whose afterlives took them across the Atlantic. | |