3. Performance in the Periphery: Colonial Encounters and Entertainments

When early modern English travellers relate their exchanges with the people they have met in far-flung places, they frequently include descriptions of music both familiar and strange, performed by foreign visitors and Indigenous peoples alike. The presence of music, however, and its seemingly transparent meanings enables perilous miscommunications. Failures of musical interpretation or sudden alterations of meaning in musical exchanges proliferate in reports of English and European encounters in the New World. This chapter argues that the English carried with them an epistemology of musical meaning that was predicated on the ways that music functioned in European entertainments, particularly those associated with English country estates.