Sound is social. It offers an entry point into worlds otherwise difficult to comprehend and renders listening a consequential mode of contact. Like reading a novel or moving through a gallery, listening situates people within diverse cultural practices that extend beyond the individual. Sound does not merely accompany social life but actively structures how relations are enacted, perceived and sustained. Listening is a mode of orientation through which people inhabit space, recognize authority and register belonging or exclusion. For nineteenth-century music studies, attending to listening offers a way to confront archives shaped by empire and enslavement. Music’s capacity to place listeners within social worlds, sometimes willingly and other times under duress, is central to understanding cultural exchange in early America. From Canada to the Caribbean, sound signalled labour and leisure, diplomacy and discipline, even devotion and healing. In these settings, listening became interpretive as much as experiential. Auditory practices were a potent form of encounter that spurred negotiation or resistance within deeply imbalanced power systems. Two recent monographs highlight the social functions of music and sound across markedly different settings and timeframes: Mary Caton Lingold’s African Musicians in the Atlantic World moves from the late seventeenth century into the early nineteenth, while Daniel Robert Laxer’s Listening to the Fur Trade concentrates on the British North American fur trade between 1760 and 1840. Both books show how certain sounds helped create social worlds even as those sounds generated divergent meanings among listeners.
Mary Caton Lingold’s African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery follows African-descended musicians as they shaped Atlantic musical culture. She reconstructs ‘soundworlds’ forged by African and African-descended people under slavery, foregrounding listening as both a method and historical practice. Lingold insists on the persistence of African musical knowledge across the Middle Passage and into the plantation Americas, resisting narratives that frame enslavement as a total cultural rupture. Through a series of tightly focused case studies ranging from West African court music to Caribbean festival culture, she shows how enslaved and free Black musicians shaped the music of the African diaspora in the Atlantic world. Lingold uses the term ‘African Atlantic music’ to describe the convergence of African musical traditions and hybrid performance customs that endured under slavery and colonization in the Caribbean. She argues that through musical exchange, ‘enslaved communities gave birth to “Black music”’ and asserts that this music was created by people who endured slavery rather than by the impact of the institution itself (p. 3). That distinction restores agency to historical actors whose musical practices have often been flattened into evidence of domination or survival alone (pp. 6–7). Her concept of ‘sound legacy’ points to audible traces of African soundworlds that endure despite archival gaps and the limits of notation for capturing sound transmitted outside the written record (p. 13). Lingold frames the origins of Black music in the Americas as the convergence of several soundworlds, sustained through listening and embodied knowledge under the most violent conditions of displacement.
Daniel Robert Laxer’s Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840 shifts the focus to mainland North America, showing how sound structured social relations in the British fur trade. Like Lingold, Laxer reorients historical inquiry around listening, but he does so within commercial contexts shaped by travel, negotiation and intercultural alliances. He treats the fur trade as a site of sustained encounter between Europeans and Indigenous communities, arguing that sound was central to maintaining reciprocal business relationships. Laxer uses ‘soundways’ – practices of producing and interpreting specific sounds – to trace how music, dance and environmental sound guided contact across distance and argues that, unlike settler colonialism, the fur trade depended on ‘ongoing exchanges based on reciprocal relationships’ mediated through music and dance, which facilitated interaction across cultural boundaries (pp. xiv, 5). He describes the pragmatic function of music during trade: for Europeans, it facilitated peace-making and commercial exchange, while for Indigenous people it signalled how outsiders were received and incorporated into communities (pp. 50–1, 61). In addition, he convincingly demonstrates how the movement of goods and people generated sonic meanings, even later in the nineteenth century (as his concluding chapter shows), when increasing constraints were placed on Indigenous musical traditions through Christian missionization and colonial reform. Laxer ultimately presents the fur trade as a dynamic mode of exchange through which listening and performance formed social relations along the North American frontier.
This review essay brings Lingold and Laxer’s monographs together to consider early American music through the analytic lens of listening. Although the two books are situated in markedly different contexts – Lingold within the Atlantic slave system and Laxer in the North American fur trade – both treat music as an underexplored social practice through which power was negotiated, reproduced and sometimes contested. Placed side by side, the books also frame listening as a historically situated practice shaped by labour regimes and colonial hierarchies. Unlike approaches that privilege notation, single authorship and stable repertories, this review foregrounds sound as an activity embedded in practice, objects and movement across space and time. Because both books move fluidly between music and other kinds of sound, I use sound as a larger category and treat music as one of its most consequential forms. The essay is organized around three analytic categories that emerge across both monographs: soundworlds, socially constituted collectives sustained through practice and listening rather than fixed geography; soundways, modes of sonic navigation through which people oriented themselves amidst changing environments; and audible exchange, where capitalism, labour and coercion impacted musical interaction. Bringing Laxer and Lingold into conversation highlights several points of convergence while also exposing moments of theoretical tension. Nonetheless, both authors reveal that listening can serve as a historical method for interpreting social relations under conditions of violence, silence and uneven power.
Soundworlds
Laxer and Lingold both suggest that a world is not only a physical place but also a social collective brought into being through sensation and shared experience. Soundworlds emerge where sonic practices organize social relations – through ritual, labour, entertainment or governance – and where listening itself becomes a learned practice. Soundworlds are constituted through participation within and recognition of shared sonic systems. Although the term ‘world’ carries a geographic connotation, the soundworlds described in these books are defined less by fixedness than by movement. Although she never defines the term, Lingold uses soundworlds to name the social reach of musical practice across the Atlantic, especially where performance and listening gathered dispersed people into shared forms of recognition without requiring stable settlement or shared language. Her usage is close to Steven Feld’s original definition of soundworlds, which treats sound as a way of knowing and inhabiting place, even when that sense of place must travel or be remade under pressure.Footnote 1 Lingold’s Atlantic case studies uncover how African music survived forced migration, traveling through bodies and instruments across the Middle Passage and into plantation societies. Most of her examples come from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and she uses them to trace the influence of African traditions on other musical styles in the Americas. On plantations, she argues, music maintained cultural diversity: distinct African songs, dances and ensemble routines persisted even as new customs helped displaced people build community (p. 5). Lingold explains that African musicians ‘transmitted sounds across space, creating worlds of musical expression that came to define the diaspora’ (p. 2). She builds many chapters around particular historical actors, allowing individual lives to carry a broader story of African musical expression moving from West and West Central African performance traditions into the contingent settings of ships, ports and plantations, where those traditions were reworked without disappearing. Laxer likewise notes that while ‘control of singing reflected hierarchy’, communal songs presented an image of solidarity that bridged cultural divides and fostered collective identities (p. 151). In both books, movement helps produce musical meaning, and sounds accrue new associations through circulation and repetition.
Material objects help sustain soundworlds, especially when written documentation is hard to find. Lingold treats instruments as repositories of African musical logic, arguing that construction materials and the feasibility of production shaped which instruments persisted under American slavery. A type of xylophone called the balafon, for instance, did not flourish in the Americas in the same way as the banjo – also of African origin – because it required more labour-intensive production and depended on materials that were harder to obtain (p. 61). Even so, Lingold argues that sound and technique can outlive objects, since ‘the instrument’s sounds and playing technique’ remained central to diasporic soundworlds in parts of Latin America, with audible legacies extending into steelpan traditions (pp. 61, 63). Soundworlds thus generate meaning through performance, notation and objects all the same. Both Europeans and Africans carried distinct musical traditions into the Caribbean through the instruments they played and by their culturally specific methods of preservation, including oral transmission (p. 65). In Listening to the Fur Trade, Laxer likewise attends to objects such as drums, fiddles, jaw harps and even firearms, showing how their soundings shaped interaction in North America. At times, however, his distinction between ‘material’ and ‘intangible’ risks understating how deeply embedded soundways are in objects themselves, since many of the intangible practices in his archive depend on tools, instruments and the routines that kept those objects in use (pp. 4–5, 13).
Soundworlds also raise questions about historical value. The worlds Lingold and Laxer reconstruct sit largely outside the realm of Western music, yet they are no less coherent or consequential. Laxer treats paddling songs and dance tunes as analytically equivalent to composed repertory. In fact, he places them at the centre of social and economic life in the fur trade. For instance, in the sixth chapter he describes how paddling songs, or chansons d’aviron, arose from the movement of trade and became an important part of French-Canadian identity for centuries. Laxer argues that Canadian folklorists neglected Indigenous influences on these songs and used them to promote an explicitly French-Canadian national identity, asserting that these discussions primarily focus on how ‘folk songs were interpreted as living relics of a long and illustrious history’ (pp. 133–4).Footnote 2 Along similar lines, Lingold critiques musicological conventions that privilege notation and European narratives alone, contending that treating such sources as plain evidence marginalizes African-descended musicians as peripheral figures and maintains stereotypes of Black sound such as the ‘happy slave’ myth used to justify the institution of slavery (pp. 117–18).
Extramusical objects like shells and metal rings were used by African musicians across Senegambia, the Gold Coast and the Central African Kingdoms (p. 36). Lingold points to (but does not reproduce) a manuscript painting from 1740s Kongo that depicts African musicians celebrating the Mass behind a Roman Catholic priest; the illustration includes musicians playing xylophones, ivory horns and drums to accompany the liturgy (see Figure 1). The scene preserves a musical world in which African instruments and Catholic ritual sounded together, suggesting how local practices continued, adapted and acquired new meanings under European colonization. Still, not everyone approved. Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese traveller, described performances that incorporated these objects as ‘mingled and confused noyse’.Footnote 3 Other contemporary accounts cast ‘muddled’ or ‘rough’ sounds as essentially African and distinguished them from ‘clear’ or ‘articulated’ examples in Western music (pp. 38–9). Lingold claims that such early descriptions helped produce categories through which Black sound became racialized in a manner that has shadowed musical discourse since the late seventeenth century (p. 41). Her approach models how soundworlds can be studied without recourse to notation and formal analysis while still making original claims about historical musical meanings.
African musicians accompany the Mass behind a Roman Catholic priest, playing xylophones, ivory horns, and drums. Manuscript painting from Missione in prattica. Padri cappucini ne Regni di Congo, Angola et adiacenti, Central Public Library, Turin, MS 457.
Soundworlds do not exist in isolation. They meet, overlap and transform through contact, often under unequal conditions of power. As sounds cross boundaries, listeners assign divergent meanings, and repeated encounters produce syncretic forms; that is, new local practices built from recognizable materials. Laxer mentions audible pluralism several times throughout his book. In the first chapter, for example, he describes how firearms like cannons and muskets punctuated the soundscape of the fur trade and signalled multiple meanings for European and Indigenous listeners alike, including hunting, warfare, signalling and ceremonial saluting (p. 25). One striking example of differential listening emerges in Indigenous religious interpretation: the Omushkego Cree compared the sound of cannons to thunderbirds, ‘powerful non-human beings’, and even used firearms to communicate with them (pp. 29–30). Such divergent interpretations did more than register cultural difference; they also created occasions for new sonic practices. When a sound moved between communities, listeners translated it through existing cosmologies, rituals and musical habits, and those repeated encounters could transform unfamiliar noise into a meaningful signal or performance. In African Musicians in the Atlantic World, Lingold also explains how soundworlds collided in places like Jamaica. One contemporary European source designated ‘Europeans, creoles, Indians, Negros, Mulatos’, and other ethnic groups as inhabitants of the island (p. 97).Footnote 4 This list reflects a crowded social landscape of overlapping languages and performance traditions. Such proximity occasionally fostered creolization, or new local styles built from parts drawn from multiple cultures. Lingold resists narratives of creolization that imply the dilution or disappearance of African customs, emphasizing instead what she calls ‘natal traditions’ that persisted alongside emergent diasporic practices (p. 108). Both books portray soundworlds as dynamic relational formations shaped as much by creative exchange as coercion.
Soundways
Soundways provide a bridge between distinct sound events and broader soundworlds. Laxer defines them as ‘methods and understandings of sound-making customs’ (p. 108). The definition shifts attention away from static sonic environments and toward action and sensory experience. Soundways foreground how people learn to listen as well as how sounds cue certain behaviours and become routine within specific communities. The term itself stems from historian Richard Cullen Rath’s How Early America Sounded, which Lingold also references several times. In Rath’s foundational study, soundways emerge from sounding objects and from repetition over time; meaning accrues through use and memory.Footnote 5 Laxer focuses more on how sound organizes movement through space, explaining that ‘soundways followed unwritten yet culturally prescribed rules, serving to mediate understandings of proper human engagement with the landscape, its history, and its meaning’ (p. 108). Lingold does not rely on the term, preferring soundworlds instead, but her argument depends on a similar premise. She explains that ‘despite and perhaps also because of the triangular slave trade’, enslaved and free Africans circulated musical forms throughout the Atlantic under conditions shaped by coercion and misrecognition (p. 49). In both books, soundways function as historically situated patterns that link sound, movement and social orientation.
Laxer allows the concept of soundways to develop gradually over the course of his book. Apart from a brief entry in the special terms section, the concept does not receive sustained attention until the fifth chapter, where he describes soundways as ‘methods and understandings of sound-making customs’ composed of gunshots, vocalizations, prayers, oral stories and songs (p. 108). He elaborates that ‘soundways followed unwritten yet culturally prescribed rules, serving to mediate understandings of proper human engagement with the landscape, its history, and its meaning’ (p. 108). Laxer situates the concept in relation to R. Murray Schafer’s ‘soundscape’ and Steven Feld’s ‘acoustemology’, although he does not clearly explain the relationship among these ideas (pp. 108–9). Schafer describes a soundscape as any ‘acoustic environment’, but specifically treats ‘the world as a macroscopic musical composition’.Footnote 6 Feld, meanwhile, defines acoustemology as ‘the world sonified’ and enacts ‘the acoustics of ecology and the ecology of acoustics’ as a way of knowing.Footnote 7 Whereas these terms tend to describe ambient sonic environments, Laxer uses soundways to emphasize practice, circulation and temporality. He also traces how sounds recur and accumulate meanings across distance. Lingold and Laxer both demonstrate how soundways can be reconstructed in the present through fragments and embodied knowledge rather than by means of a complete documentary record. The result is a fractured yet comprehensive picture akin to a collage or mosaic. As Laxer deploys the term, soundways appear fundamentally migratory – wandering, impermanent and contingent – rather than fixed.
Soundways render movement intelligible by connecting travel, listening and interpretation (in that order) across space and time. Laxer illustrates this migratory quality through detailed examples. Soundways shaped travel along rivers and portages: paddling songs synchronized rowing patterns, while bells, gunshots and shouting marked departures, arrivals and moments of danger. Departing West from Montreal, French-Canadian and Indigenous voyageurs heard bells from the Catholic church, which signalled both sacred time and imperial presence (p. 111). In their canoes, what Laxer calls ‘sites of socialization’, voyageurs shared worlds with one another through collective sonic experiences. Guides attended closely to soundways as cues for navigation or danger during journeys (pp. 113, 115). Ringing stones – sonorous rocks known for the tones they produced when struck – were ‘a defining feature of the area for Anishinaabe peoples as well as fur traders’ that further oriented travellers through the Great Lakes region (p. 126). During such journeys, soundways functioned less as discrete environments than as sequences of sonic markers or as modes of temporal navigation, a point made clear in Lingold’s discussion of an enslaved African man named Ukawsaw Gronniosaw. Tracing his movement from eastern Nigeria to the Gold Coast and then across the Middle Passage in the 1720s, Lingold notes that Gronniosaw ‘would have experienced familiar sounds that helped him to make sense of his changing surroundings’ even before enduring the conditions of the slave trade (p. 19). His narrative describes encounters with ‘sounds so entirely new to me’, including horns and drums that invoked power and authority.Footnote 8 Lingold emphasizes that horns in West African courts signalled rank and command, meanings that did not disappear in Atlantic contexts but were reinterpreted under slavery, where older sonic signs of authority were read through new regimes of coercion and surveillance (p. 20).
Listening is one way through which soundways acquire meaning, and both authors emphasize that it is socially learned. Lingold repeatedly underscores that European observers often misunderstood African music because they lacked the listening skills necessary to apprehend it. Laxer turns to the same issue from another angle, showing how Indigenous listeners interpreted sounds such as gunfire through cosmological frameworks that carried a certain force into their own ceremonies and rituals at trading posts and other sites of encounter where Europeans staged ceremonial salutes and other public sonic displays (pp. 41, 46–7). Both authors invite readers to listen across historical distance. Lingold, for example, co-produced a website (www.musicalpassage.org) that includes recordings using period instruments and vocal techniques. She suggests that ‘each individual tune presents a window into a world of musical practice that was diversified and expansive’, highlighting work songs, songs describing Maroon ‘rangers’ – armed patrols who tracked and confronted runaway communities – and music composed by Jamaican Set Girls categorized as ‘Jamaican Airs’ (pp. 123–4). Both authors also show that reconstructing soundways requires methodological pluralism. They draw on a wide scope of primary sources, including travel narratives, missionary accounts, material objects and oral tradition. Lingold explicitly cautions against treating listening as a transparent route to recovery, noting that soundways are often available to scholars only through texts, transcription and the interpretive frames those sources impose (p. 15). Laxer, while less explicit on this point, nonetheless demonstrates how soundways faded or fractured through missionization and colonial reform later in the century. In both books, soundways name routes and practices of sounding and listening that include music but also surpass it; the category gathers songs and instruments together with bells, gunshots, shouted calls and other recurring sonic markers. The phenomenology of sound plays a crucial role in both books, even as it raises questions about how scholars listen to past worlds shaped by violence and dispossession.
Audible Exchange
Soundworlds are shared and sustained across soundways, and it is through this process that music becomes a site of exchange. Exchange extends beyond the circulation of material goods to include the transmission of emotion, knowledge and cultural norms. Lingold and Laxer each situate music within economic systems shaped by labour, capitalism and colonialism, although they do so with different emphases and ethical stakes. For Lingold, musical exchange unfolded within the Atlantic slave system, where sound circulated alongside enslaved bodies that were commodified through forced labour, and by means of musical practices that took shape within that same system. One of her most compelling case studies centres on the handmade xylophone (a sound-producing instrument) of an enslaved musician named Macow, who lived in Barbados in the 1640s and was a survivor of the Middle Passage. Macow’s story was relayed by Richard Ligon, an English royalist who fled to Barbados during the English Civil War.Footnote 9 Lingold describes the encounter between Ligon, who showed Macow his Italian lute and examined the construction of Macow’s xylophone, as a moment of exchange, resulting in a brief episode of mutual demonstration and attention that still unfolded within slavery’s constraints (p. 52). Laxer, in contrast, shows how music accompanied the fur trade’s travel of goods and people, functioning as a medium through which alliances were forged, maintained and eventually constrained. He argues that music, as ‘intangible cultural exchange’, has been largely ignored by scholars of the fur trade despite its centrality to everyday interaction (pp. 4–5). In both cases, exchange is audible and embodied, meaning that it happens through listening, performance and the movements and encounters of the people involved.
Lingold’s analysis demonstrates how musical exchange operated within the Atlantic slave system, where the conditions of trade were fundamentally asymmetrical not because ideas failed to move in both directions, but because slavery determined the conditions of encounter. Audible exchange was foundational to interactions between European travellers and native Africans, and she frames these moments of contact within broader routes of migration and contact that also carried music (pp. 21–2). Musical encounters between Europeans and Africans often occurred under coercion, yet they nonetheless involved negotiation, adaptation and strategic listening. Enslaved musicians performed for white audiences at festivals and public events, but they also cultivated soundworlds that exceeded planter surveillance and control. One striking example appears in a work song from Barbados transcribed by the English abolitionist Granville Sharp that was based on a melody provided by another Englishman named William Dickson. The text ‘massa buy me he won’t kill me’ explains the economic value of singing bodies under slavery (pp. 125–7). Lingold interprets the song as ‘a kind of boasting, in which the singer signals their worth – yes, through the economy of slavery – but with a threatening overtone’ (p. 128). This claim of value also warned of the consequences when the needs of enslaved people were ignored. Labour politics surrounding Black subjectivity undergirded the performance. As Lingold observes, African-descended musicians were compelled to make sound intelligible to colonial listeners even as they preserved meanings that the listeners did not understand. Exchange thus became a musical nexus where agency and constraint coexisted.
Laxer’s account of audible exchange in the fur trade emphasizes reciprocity, especially during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Music and dance structured diplomatic encounters, with pipe ceremonies, war dances and social dances serving as formalized modes of binding relationships. These performances operated as cultural scripts through which trust was established and obligations clarified. Laxer explicitly characterizes trading posts as sites of musical exchange that included a wide variety of instruments including violins, viols, lutes, guitars, flutes, spinets, organs and harpsichords (pp. 192, 194). Fiddle music, however, was the most common and socially significant. George Nelson described New Year’s Day in 1809 by noting, ‘we dance all night, and Ausgé sings for us as a mean substitute for the fiddle’ (p. 202). The remark assumes the fiddle as the expected sound for dancing, and its absence registers as a lack. Instruments and supporting materials like strings and songbooks, in fact, were prominent in fur trading areas. Musical supplies made performance possible and kept repertories in circulation. Excavated jaw harps suggest how small instruments moved through trading posts and into everyday use. In Laxer’s account, they were traded with Indigenous peoples, and they also appear in purchase records for servants and voyageurs (p. 207). Laxer provides excellent tables that indicate the presence of jaw harps and violin strings at North West Company trading posts between 1820 and 1821 (p. 208). The fiddle was also common in Indigenous circles. As he explains, ‘the homemade fiddle and kettle drum, in Indigenous hands, were used to play and accompany Scottish reels for dancing’, producing a novel product reflective of the ‘cultural diversity, exchanges, and collaboration common in the dances of the fur trade’ (p. 212). Laxer argues that such exchanges revolved around shared systems of trust and operated as tools for intercultural interaction (pp. 50–1).
The transactional nature of exchange reveals traces of cultural negotiation in musical activities, but it also exposes some conceptual limits of the term, particularly since many individuals mentioned in both books were forced into participating in exchange rather than willing participants. Lingold makes this tension explicit by foregrounding violence and surveillance as conditions under which music circulated within the Atlantic slave system. For instance, musical gatherings on plantations generally occurred in the evening after work or on Sundays and Christian feast days, and took place within schedules set by plantation labour and Christian calendars under the persistent threat of violence (pp. 69–70). Music moved, but largely within a political economy of slavery that was never neutral. Laxer’s language of exchange raises a different problem. In the early decades of the fur trade, European traders were often few in number and dependent on Indigenous knowledge and local economies, so exchange also describes real negotiation on the ground. Just because (unlike missionaries of the late nineteenth century) ‘fur traders did not interfere with traditional Indigenous hunting and healing practices’ does not mean that musical interaction at trading posts was free of power imbalances (p. 189). The distribution of power was not uniform across time or place. It hardened as imperial authority consolidated and as missions and reform organizations expanded their reach. Even in Laxer’s earlier chapters, reciprocity operated within a context of expanding colonial authority, and Indigenous participation in musical exchange did not imply equal access to political or economic resources. By the early nineteenth century, missionization and moral reform increasingly replaced exchange with regulation, targeting dances, songs and ritual practices deemed incompatible with Christian norms. Around the 1820s, prevailing cultural institutions and missionaries reduced the amount of music and dancing at trading posts (pp. 221–3). Peter Erasmus, a young Métis man, recalled restricting himself to playing ‘church hymns’ on his violin instead of dance tunes (p. 224). This account suggests that exchange captures moments of cultural negotiation only if it also keeps the compulsion in view. Sound makes power perceptible but does not always loosen its grip.
Listening Otherwise
African Musicians in the Atlantic World and Listening to the Fur Trade together demonstrate the analytic power of music for understanding early American history by treating listening as a historically situated practice. In foregrounding soundworlds, soundways and audible exchange, Lingold and Laxer show how sound mediated social life at every level, from intimate bodily practices to large systems of labour, travel, diplomacy and extraction. Their shared emphasis on listening presses music scholars to reckon more explicitly with the persistence of cultural knowledge carried through performance and memory. Lingold makes this point with particular force in her epilogue, where she turns to the story of Tena, a woman enslaved in Georgia during the 1820s, whose song appeared uncredited in a 1927 collection compiled by Carl Sandburg.Footnote 10 Lingold introduced the song to a group of girls at a singing class in Durham, North Carolina, describing the exercise as ‘listening through performance’, a form of historical ethnography in which the music is ‘lifted off the page’ (p. 156). Although this method intentionally deprioritizes Western notions of accessing the past solely through notation, it nonetheless depends on Sandburg’s transcription as a point of access. Lingold uses the song to recover traces of Tena’s life and to ask how musical knowledge endured through family stories, embodiment and care when the archive preserved almost nothing else. Tracing Tena’s life and music to eastern Africa, Lingold shows that the sonic archive of slavery survives not in notation or text alone but also through practices that carry feeling, technique and historical relation across time. Her final plea is for scholars to hear the musical archive of slavery as legacies that ‘may be experienced in sound, in performance, in image, in practices of care, in religious expression, in landscape’, and in other forms she highlights throughout the book (p. 163).
Read together, these books suggest that sound and music in early America functioned as social knowledge, shaping how people worked, moved, negotiated, worshiped and endured within unequal worlds. Laxer exemplifies how sound made the fur trade habitable and intelligible to the people moving through it. Songs set the pace of travel, dances gave form to sociability, and certain sounds marked danger, distance and arrival. Listening helped turn movement into coordination and encounter into relations. For nineteenth-century music studies, the implications are significant. Both authors recover forms of sound that archives preserve unevenly, then show how those sounds organized labour, ritual, exchange, kinship and survival. Like Lingold, Laxer reflects on archival silences that structure the history of the fur trade, arguing that its sonic legacies ‘provided all of the necessary circumstances for the sharing and development of new soundways and musical traditions’ (p. 236). He further suggests that contemporary scholars might listen for these histories through traces preserved in present-day communities. Musical meanings emerge not only from scores but also from repeated acts of engagement – paddling, dancing, signalling, worshiping – that oriented people within social worlds. This approach invites scholars to reconsider what counts as musical evidence and whose listening practices have mattered historically. Ultimately, Lingold and Laxer remind us that music inserts listeners into longstanding social worlds and reveals the distance between ourselves and the audible past. The sounds of early America carry legacies of slavery, trade, missionization and colonial reform, even as they testify to resilience, creativity and practices of care. Listening to them helps us recover traces of the past and reveals how those histories persist in the present. African Musicians in the Atlantic World and Listening to the Fur Trade offer both histories of sound and timely provocations, urging us to listen closely to the social worlds that comprise historical sound, both audible and elusive.
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