The Musical Passage project. Interview with Mary Caton Lingold

This interview discusses the development of the Musical Passage project with Mary Caton Lingold, Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she specializes in music and literature, sound studies, and digital humanities. In 2016, she co-created the website Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica with historian Laurent Dubois and composer David K. Garner to raise awareness of three musical compositions played by enslaved Africans in Jamaica in the 1680s. These compositions are part of the famous travelogue of Hans Sloane (1660–1753), an Anglo-Irish physician, naturalist, and collector who is considered a major figure in British history. An essential source for the history of slavery in Jamaica, this account has been the subject of several studies, including that of R. C. Rath (1993) who emphasizes the importance of musical notations, that provide insight into the first forms of transmission of African culture to the Americas. Building on this work, Mary Caton Lingold deepens our understanding of Sloane's account of his voyage by raising new questions about the history of music in the context of the Jamaican plantations. In particular, she suggests that this source reveals the early influence of African slave performances on emerging art forms in the Caribbean. This music was played in a context of exchange between Africa and Europe that had been developing since the Middle Ages, as many scholars have now demonstrated. The Musical Passage website presents this new thinking. It also allows visitors to hear how the three compositions might have been performed in Jamaica in the 1680s. The interview discusses the original versions on the site, as well as recent reinterpretations by African-American and Jamaican musicians. In particular, the Rastafari group Inna de Yard, led by Earl “Chinna” Smith, is featured. Their improvised interpretations of these songs have led to new ways of looking at the history of this music and how it lives on in our collective memory today.