This review begins with a caveat: Although the title of this book gives the impression that Native American song is a central topic of the text, the primary theme of the narrative is how Europeans'—specifically British and French—encounters with Native peoples of North America influenced European art music of the late renaissance through the late baroque eras. Perhaps one-quarter of the book directly connects to the European experience on the ground in colonial North America, while the bulk of the writing covers Stuart court masques, the ballets and tragédies lyriques of Lully, and Rameau's operas. Bloechl does not deal with direct musical transference from one continent to the other, but rather with how written accounts and iconic representations of Native Americans affected the cultures of European art music during a time of colonial expansion and religious upheaval.

The author makes clear in the opening chapter that the aim of the text is to offer a different kind of theoretical model than has been used previously in analyzing pieces such as Lully's Le Temple de la paix (1685) and Rameau's Les Indes galantes (1735), an important facet of the project given that both of these works have been extensively discussed by other authors. Bloechl has two primary theoretical influences, that of postcolonial theory (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, et al.) and the sociology of Michel Foucault. She is explicit in giving the sources of her theoretical underpinnings, stating that “with Foucault's writings as a guiding force, then, this study pursues the genealogical question of how French and English colonial encounters with native American music altered the conditions that allowed Europe's musical cultures to develop as they did in the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries” (19). Although this opening chapter is densely theoretical, in the chapters that follow the theoretical underpinnings move to the background and do not intrude upon the overall narrative.

After the introduction, the author has divided the book into two parts, with the second being roughly twice the length of the first. It is this first part that will be of greater interest to Americanists, as it deals directly with the early colonial experience of Native musical expression in a variety of forms. This section (chapters 2, 3, and 4) has its own genealogy, as it expands on sources listed in Robert Stevenson's bibliographically oriented pair of articles from the early 1970s—“Written Sources for Indian Music until 1882” and “English Sources for Indian Music until 1882”—which neatly provide an abundance of resource materials for scholars with very little ascription of meaning.Footnote ¹ Stevenson's strength when writing about indigenous American musics has always been that of an exacting bibliographer rather than a historiographer, and Bloechl's skill at weaving together the stories of early travelers, settlers, and missionaries into a fascinating account of French Catholic and English Protestant encounters with the profoundly alien cultures of the Natives is the book's highlight. These chapters are reminiscent of Gary Tomlinson's work on the musical cultures of Meso and South America at the time of European contact (Bloechl worked with Tomlinson at the University of Pennsylvania) and add emotion and interpretation to Stevenson's dry narrative.Footnote ² This part, which contains no formalistic musical analysis, relies on an intensive synthesis of sources into a coherent whole, and the three chapters contained therein offer a strikingly new look at early interactions between Native Americans and the Europeans intent on settling the New World.

Chapters 3 and 4 (“The Voice of Possession” and “The Voice of Prophecy”) describe how the early Protestant travelers, missionaries, and settlers in the post-Reformation era experienced Native singing and other performative elements of ceremonial life such as spirit possession (referred to as “inspired song” and “possessed vocality”) through the same lens as they viewed Catholicism, seeing idolatry and devil worship in rituals often meant for healing purposes. The most obvious projection of Protestant discomfort with Catholic ritual was that of mapping exorcism onto Native conceptions of spirit possession, which in Native American terms is not necessarily negative, but in the Christianity of the time almost always entailed the expulsion of devils and demons. Given that Protestant settlers, too, believed in possession (the Salem witch trials come to mind) but were ambivalent about exorcism, the openness and frequency of Native possession rituals became a central and sensationalized element in European accounts of Native life, influencing how European composers wrote “Indianness” into their works. Prophecy (“the inspired voice”), too, was common to Native peoples of the time and resonated uncomfortably with Europeans, in part because of its association with women in England and North American colonial settler communities, and because its existence as a cross-cultural phenomenon threatened British ideas of religious and cultural superiority.

Part II is where the narrative moves on to Europe and deals first with Stuart court masques, and then specifically the French composers Lully and Rameau. This territory is well trod by others (especially the Rameau pieces), and in a puzzling oversight, Bloechl does not mention, or include in her bibliography, recent work by Michael Pisani that covers the same musical repertory and also analyzes the representation of Native Americans within it.Footnote ³ Bloechl's examination of the court masques emphasizes the evolution of British musical depictions of savagery, and her argument is effective, although the musical analysis is somewhat limited. In contrast, the final two chapters abound with dense formalistic musical analysis and chronicle the shift in French compositional language depicting Native Americans from that of exotic to savage subjects.

All in all, this book is carefully researched and offers new insights into the European encounter with the Native peoples of North America. Some readers, however, might find the theoretical paradigms used by the author as a foundation for analysis to be problematic. Engagement with contemporary critical theory is a matter of personal preference, but in the case of this text, the theoretical discussion is so concentrated within the introductory chapter that readers who wish to avoid it can reasonably begin reading with the second chapter and still be rewarded by the text.