Please join us for the next Five College Renaissance Seminar on Thursday, May 1, at 4:30pm at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies (650 E. Pleasant St., Amherst).

Janie Cole (Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Connecticut):
"Music, Space, and Afro-Eurasian Migrations in the Christian Kingdom of Early Modern Ethiopia"

The Jesuit mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia (1557-1632) was one of its earliest and arguably most challenging projects in the early modern period. New ambitious architectural projects were undertaken as symbols of religious renewal and state supremacy, and music was also central to Jesuit conversion practices. Drawing on newly-discovered sources, this talk explores the role of music and ritual sounds in relation to the sacred spaces of new churches erected on the Ethiopian highlands and examines the musical art of conversion developed by European Jesuit missionaries hailing from Portuguese India placed in the wider context of a vibrant indigenous royal Ethiopian court culture, local material economies of patronage that shaped these cultural dynamics, and the influences of foreign designs on both music and architecture. By combining sonic and visual practices, these Afro-Eurasian entanglements offer significant broader insights into the workings of an intertwined early modern Indian Ocean World, sacred musical migrations and transmissions, African agency in foreign relations, interconnected global music histories across three continents, and the role of embodied aurality and architecture in constructing identity and religious proselytism in the Horn of Africa.

Dr. Janie Cole's (PhD University of London) research encompasses a broad range of subjects with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, source studies and global music histories, including on music and the anti-apartheid struggle in 20th-century South Africa and musical constructions of Blackness, apartheid struggle movement politics, violence, resistance, trauma, and social change; musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration; and the intersection of music, consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France.

Her current work focuses on early modern musical culture at the royal court in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and intertwined sonic histories of entanglement with the Latin Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world. She is the author of two books, A Muse of Music in Early Baroque Florence: the Poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane  (Olschki, 2007) and Music, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy: Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 2 vols. (Olschki, 2011), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters.

She co-organized the landmark international conference on Music in Africa and its diffusion in the early modern world (1300-1650) at Tours University’s Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (2022) and spearheaded the groundbreaking international Symposium on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Identity (1400-1700) at Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2024).

Dr. Cole served as Council Member of the Renaissance Society of America as Discipline Representative in Music (2015-17) and is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies at the Renaissance Society of America (2018-)  and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly. She serves on the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music’s Fellows’ Review Committee (2024-). She is the co-founder of the International Musicological Society Study Group Early African Sound Worlds and founder of the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble, which develops musical performances rooted in indigenous East African music and its historical links to a pre-colonial Indian Ocean World sound- and visualscapes (with the première of Gabriel’s Odyssey (2021)). She is the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders, a platform for public musicology and engaged scholarship.

This talk is generously supported and co-sponsored by the Amherst College Program in European Studies and by UMass Amherst's Department of Music & Dance.

For more info: 

https://www.umass.edu/renaissance/events/music-space-and-afro-eurasian-migrations-christian-kingdom-early-modern-ethiopia-janie-cole 

We look forward to seeing you next Thursday!

Evan MacCarthy & Sanam Nader-Esfahani, co-convenors of the Five College Renaissance Seminar