Harmony on the Edge. Musical Encounters Between Early Modern Europe and South America

Harmony on the Edge investigates how notions of music and sound were deployed during early modern global encounters to describe, categorise, and evaluate different types of human.

Focusing on the territory covered by the Viceroyalty of Per in Spanish South America, this project addresses a wide range of European authors, travellers, and missionaries who inquired into the musical customs and musical aptitudes of indigenes during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It asks i) how Europeans experienced and understood the sounds and musicality of indigene South Americans, ii) how these musical experiences fitted into European scientific, political or religious agendas, and iii) which kinds of musical exchange took place between Europeans and locals.

It pays special attention to the ways cross-cultural appropriations were materially expressed in the manufacture and collection of musical instruments and the physical bodies of performers and dancers.

The project suggests that conceptualising the music and sound of locals was crucial in the experience of otherness, at the same time it followed a broader inquiry into the common and defining features of humankind.

Building a new interdisciplinary dialogue between intellectual and colonial history, history of the human sciences, history of science, ethnomusicology, historical anthropology and material culture studies, this project proposes a novel methodology for the study of early modern encounters, and a new conceptual approach to music as a field of inquiry into the nature of human beings.

This action takes place in Chile and France and involves exhaustive archival research (written, visual and material sources), academic publications, a museum exhibition, training and dissemination activities, and a secondment in the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle.