Conference Agenda

Based on my archival research in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (GStA PK) in Berlin, this paper investigates the connection between Brandenburg-Prussia’s early modern colonies in West Africa (1680–1720) and the trafficking of enslaved Africans who were intended for service as military and court musicians in early eighteenth-century Prussia. The historiography on these Black musicians currently resembles a patchwork, dispersed across multiple disciplines—a fragmentation that is due in part to the near-total destruction of the Prussian military archive during World War II, and, more generally, the marginalization of early modern German colonialism in both scholarship and public discourse.

My paper opens a new avenue of inquiry by examining GStA PK’s extensive holdings on the Brandenburg African Company, Brandenburg-Prussia’s trading company invested in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, through the methodological lens of colonial music and sound studies. These sources reveal King Frederick William I of Prussia’s ambitious plans during the 1710s to transport a large number of enslaved boys and young men from West Africa to Prussia and train them as military Hautboisten. I reconstruct both the development of this project and the reasons for its failure, as well as the King’s subsequent efforts to obtain enslaved musicians through intermediaries in London and elsewhere.

Building on Saidiya Hartman’s understanding of the archive of slavery as a record of commodification and the fungibility of the Black body, and Jörg Jochen Berns’s work on technologies of power in early modern court ceremonial, I argue that these musicians were conceived both as extractable musical labor and as instruments of state display. In military parades, court festivals, and other public spectacles, enslaved performers were meant to symbolically evoke the fiction of Prussia as a global colonial power especially after 1720, when it had lost all its colonial possessions.

By bringing colonial trade records into dialogue with the study of military and courtly soundscapes in early eighteenth-century Berlin, this paper shows how music and sound functioned as tools of imperial representation, and, more broadly, sheds light on the intertwined and still understudied histories of Black musicians, colonialism, and race-making in the Holy Roman Empire.

Hans Sloane’s Voyage to the Islands contains the earliest published musical transcriptions from Jamaica. The two pages of notation are embedded within a nearly 1000-page history devoted to botanical, zoological, and medical documentation of colonial Jamaica. Attributed to the elusive “Mr. Baptiste,” likely a Black musician trained in a French Caribbean colony, the transcriptions are subjects of recent studies analyzing their musical structure, authorship (Lingold 2023), ceremonial origins (Corbett 2025), and instrumentation (Gaddy 2022); Maria Ryan (2021) further analyzes how pieces like this were orally transmitted through systems of ear training and teaching.

While previous studies have largely viewed the musical examples in isolation, this paper situates them within Sloane’s natural-historical project and the epistemic frameworks of its readers. Patterns of wear, marginal annotations, acquisition records, and ownership histories reveal how European and Anglo-American readers – mostly trained as naturalists, physicians, and collectors – encountered, interpreted, and in some cases performed Baptiste’s transcriptions. Examining several extant copies at Harvard University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the John Carter Brown Library, I analyze physical evidence of use and trace histories of previous owners, whose careers and social lives were entrenched in colonial trade systems and extractive knowledge networks. For example, provenance research identifies one Gloucester, MA owner as a merchant, customs collector, and composer of Masonic music, demonstrating how the volume circulated within overlapping networks of Atlantic trade and musical culture.

These material traces illustrate how colonial readers understood Baptiste’s music within the same extractive colonial logics motivating Sloane’s indigenous plant collections and appropriation of Black medicinal knowledge (Iannini 2012). Sloane’s own medical case studies describe his invasive and coercive treatments performed on enslaved patients, embedding the musical transcriptions in a volume that both records and enacts colonial violence. Jamaican music was rendered legible through an imperial archive formed inside what Vincent Brown calls the “morbid environment” of colonial Jamaica – a social world structured by violence and plantation capitalism.

Though occupying only two pages of the volume, the transcriptions reveal how Black musical knowledge was classified, appropriated, and transformed into collectible property within European frameworks of science.

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.