Moravian Soundscapes

A Sonic History of the Moravian Missions in Early Pennsylvania

Sarah Justina Eyerly

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780253047694, 9780253047663
• eBook ISBN: 9780253047731
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

1

PENN’S WOODS

Ein GOttes närrgen	God’s little fool
ist schon so imaginatif	Is so beautifully imaginative
ins Lämmleins seine Pleura tief:	Inside the little Lamb’s side-hole deep:
kein fischgen schwimmt,	No little fishes swim,
kein vöglein singt,	no little birds sing,
kein bäumgen blüht,	No little trees bloom,
kein hirschgen springt	no little deer spring
so applicirts das selgen	So applies the soul itself to thee,
auf sich unds wunden-höhlgen.^1	And to your little wounds-hole.

THE FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND RIVER VALLEYS OF PENNSYLVANIA had been named and mapped by Native American cultures for thousands of years before the colonial era.² Long before Pennsylvania became a territory ceded by Charles II of England to Admiral William Penn to discharge his debts, this was a landscape that had been traversed and interpreted, worshipped, storied, and sung by the people who lived there. Native places on the land and water were often endowed with names that carried mnemonic, descriptive qualities: Ahkokwesink (The Place of Mushrooms) or Ahsenesink (The Place of Rocks). The acoustic environments of forests, fields, and streams were also remembered with names that spoke of their sounds: Chekhonesink (The Place Where There Is a Gentle Sound) or Oniska (The Ringing Rocks). These place names were sounded metaphors that embedded generations of memories of animals and birds, the natural topography, or the sounds of falling water and lithophonic rocks. They were charted and mapped in rock cairns and painted trees, bark scrolls and songs. Places became intertwined with their names. To sound them was to honor and remember the ancestors who had once claimed that ancient landscape with words.

In the eighteenth century, this familiar landscape became a liminal space, wedged between the competing land claims of France, Great Britain, and the Six Nations. It would be claimed under a new name, Penn’s Woods, or “muni khikhakan eheluwensink Pennsylvania (This State Which Is Called Pennsylvania].” In this renamed landscape, both settlers and Native peoples sought to construct new and changing identities in response to each other and to rapid changes in their natural, political, and cultural environments. Along with an influx of immigrants from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, seeking new opportunities in Penn’s Colony, the first Moravian missionaries arrived in Pennsylvania in 1740. Within two years, they had established communities in the region around the Lechewuekink (Lehigh) and Lenapei Sipu (Delaware) Rivers.

See website chap1.1, Static map: “Early Moravian Missions in Pennsylvania and Ohio.” Moving outward from these mission centers, Moravian missionaries traveled frequently to Native American villages and settlements throughout eastern Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, via water or the complex network of forest trails that had been used by Indigenous communities for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. On these forest journeys through the Mahantango and Kittatinny Mountains, and the river valleys of the Lehigh, Juniata, and Susquehanna, missionaries renamed indigenous places. Mountain ridges, rivers, valleys, and springs were memorialized with new Moravian perspectives on the landscapes of Penn’s Woods: Ludwig’s Fountain, Erdmuth’s Spring, Ludwig’s Rest, Anna’s Valley, Benigna’s Creek, Jacob’s Heights. Even a Native hunting cabin in the Tiadaghton Forest came to be christened the “Coffee House” in remembrance of European places left behind.

Confronted with new and unfamiliar landscapes, European settlers, including Moravian missionaries, often fell back on familiar patterns of naming and claiming space that would transform Native country into a European-inflected landscape.³

See website chap1.2, Interactive map: “The Pennsylvania Frontier.” For Moravians, this process of claiming Pennsylvania as a Christian, and more specifically a Moravian Christian, space began immediately upon their arrival in Pennsylvania. In 1742, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf became one of the first Europeans to travel north and west of the Kittatinny Mountains into the dense forests that covered much of eastern and northern Pennsylvania. As he journeyed, he named and interpreted the places and people he encountered, committing them into an ongoing Christian narrative told through maps, diaries, names, and hymns that came to symbolize the essential features of the American colonies for a pan-Moravian audience who had never seen or heard Pennsylvania’s forests.

Hearing the Forest

The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals.

Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle

Our interactions with the natural environment are framed by the maps we draw, the stories we tell, and the songs we sing. As historian Simon Schama has argued, “landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.”⁴ Whether those landscapes are forest, grassland, mountain, sea coast, or other setting, the natural environment is the most fundamental place that we inhabit. It is in these environments that we develop our understandings of the world: attachments, connections, meanings, experiences, belongings, and exclusions.⁵ These simultaneously imagined and physical landscapes constitute the reality of our human experience on a daily level. But landscapes are not merely physical topographies: they also exist in sound.⁶ Our sense of spatiality is not grounded in only sight but in sound; we listen to perceive distance and space. Our interactions with the world fully engage the senses, and our ears are constantly attuned to a wide range of sounds: language, music, rain, even birdcalls.⁷ It is from these sounds, and other sensory data, that we form Schama’s “constructs of the imagination.” These are the landscapes of songs, maps, names, stories, rituals, and histories.

Long before Count Zinzendorf’s mid-eighteenth-century journey through Pennsylvania’s forests, this was a landscape that had been sung, storied, and mapped by Indigenous communities. According to current archaeological data, as glaciers receded from Pennsylvania around the end of the Ice Age, people migrated into the Ohio, Susquehanna, and Delaware river valleys from the more populous interior regions of the continent.⁸ Pennsylvania’s first residents would have encountered an ecological patchwork of environments in the lands south of the glacial ice. Thick forests of spruce, fir, birch, pine, and alder dominated the lower slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and the ridge and valley systems that stretched to the east and south. Over time, as the climate warmed, hardwoods such as oak, chestnut, hickory, and beech began to populate the forests along the Appalachian Plateau. These new forests supported a rich understory of edible and medicinal plants: mushrooms, berries, ginseng, chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts.⁹ In the middle canopy, dogwood, ironwood, viburnum, spicebush, witch hazel, and honeysuckle vied for sunlight and sustenance.¹⁰ On the alluvial plains along the Susquehanna and Delaware Watersheds grew carpets of wild strawberries, so notable a feature of the riparian landscape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that early European travelers would eventually write of “whole plains covered with them as with a fine scarlet cloth.”¹¹ Even during the sixteenth century, and the first recorded journeys of Europeans along these eastern river valleys, more than 90 percent of Pennsylvania’s landscape was covered in densely packed forests.

Pennsylvania’s diverse geographic regions and forests supported a great variety of animals. The grasslands of the higher elevations and pools of salt and brackish water along creeks and streams were home to deer, elk, moose, and buffalo.¹² These salt holes attracted predators such as wolves, panthers, lynx, cougars, and foxes. In the denser parts of the forest, thickets of mountain laurel, witch hazel, and chokeberry harbored bears’ dens and crouching panthers, wild cats, mountain lions, and boars hiding in the underbrush. The dense carpet of leaves on the forest floor teemed with field mice, moles, chipmunks and squirrels, as well as ticks, fleas, and beetles that carved the bark of trees or fed on the blood of passing animals. Minks, otters, muskrats, and beavers flourished along the many creeks and streams that flowed off of the Appalachian Front.

The acoustic ecologies of Pennsylvania’s forests were dynamic. Depending on the particular place, time, and season, the sounds of wind, water, fire, rustling plants and trees, and falling rocks carried quickly over dry terrain or were muffled in the humidity of a rainy day. Even the dynamic sounds of water fluctuated from ice to snow to rain, or from stream, to creek, to river. The quiet sounds of winds moving through the dense hardwood stands had their counterpoint in the vigorous blowing of salt breezes on the riparian plains of the Susquehanna. The branches of trees that remained silent and still in the heat of summer crackled in the brittle cold of winter. These natural sounds were augmented by birds, insects, and animals who responded in their calls and communications to patterns of light and dark, fluctuating seasons and climates. The dense heat of a summer day could suddenly transform into a cacophony of birds, insects, and frogs after an afternoon thundershower. Spring evenings resounded with the dense soundscapes of insects and amphibians that resonated over wetlands and along the margins of ponds.¹³ Common horseflies, mosquitos, grasshoppers, yellow jackets, wasps, and locusts clicked and scraped in densely layered soundscapes in the upper canopies of forests and along the grassy edges of meadows. The calls and songs of forest and meadow birds—pigeons, turkeys, turtle doves, woodpeckers, bald eagles, owls, wrens, bluebirds, hummingbirds, and thrushes—resounded through the skies.¹⁴

Within this densely layered landscape and soundscape of plants, animals, insects, and birds, Native American settlements clustered around Pennsylvania’s distinct geological regions and river systems. A majority of travel and commerce centered on the three major watersheds of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. An intricate network of trails and pathways linked different settlements in the river valleys, although only a few pathways, such as the Great Shamokin Path and Kittanning Path, traversed the high mountains of the Appalachian Front.¹⁵

See website chap1.3, Interactive sound map: “The Great Shamokin Path.” Rivers, streams, and springs were also crucial hubs for the spatial distribution of settlements and territorial boundaries, creating zones of human activity interspersed with forested borderlands.

For Native Americans, these borderlands of the forest were filled with the sounds and voices of stones, dirt, animals, plants, wind and air, water and fire, trees, insects. The patterns of these geophonic and biophonic soundscapes articulated distinct sonic languages that characterized particular geographic areas.¹⁶ Careful attention to and meaningful interpretation of aural cues from animals, insects, and birds, as well as wind, water, and storms were important in a typically d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Companion Website
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Naming, Terminology, and Archival Sources
• Prologue: The Pennsylvania Wilds
• Introduction: Sounding New Histories of the Moravian Missions
• Peale
• 1. Penn’s Woods
• Bethlehem
• 2. Friends & Strangers
• Herrnhut
• 3. Sound & Spirit
• Moravian Run
• 4. 1782
• Epilogue: Petquotting
• Glossary: A Moravian Vocabulary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author