In her impressive new book, Sarah Eyerly examines the sonic worlds of Moravian communities in the Northeastern United States, particularly Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Eyerly positions music making—and in particular, Christian hymn singing—as a site of cultural exchange between German Moravian missionaries and Native American communities. She covers four decades of history, beginning with the first Moravian settlement in Bethlehem, founded in 1741, and ending with the massacre of Native American Moravians at Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782.

Moravian Soundscapes makes a significant contribution to the study of the history of Moravian missions and the role of music in mission communities. It is also a valuable contribution to our understanding of music making in the colonial United States. It positions itself among many important studies of music making in the colonial United States that examine the interactions between European and Native American musical traditions. This scholarship includes Eyerly's and Rachel Wheeler's work on Mohican and Moravian hymnody as well as Walter Woodward's study of Moravian hymnody in mission towns.Footnote ¹ More broadly, the relationship between colonial and Indigenous sacred music has also been explored by Glenda Goodman, Kristin Dutcher Mann, and Geoffrey Baker.Footnote ² Most of this literature was published in the last two decades, and Eyerly's detailed study of Moravian missions is an important contribution to this discourse.

An interdisciplinary approach and a creative spirit pervade Eyerly's monograph. It is anchored by archival research, which features prominently throughout the volume. The book's methodological approach intersects with the fields of sound studies and the digital humanities. Throughout her study, Eyerly considers the soundscapes within Moravian communities and the acoustic ecologies of those communities’ landscapes, treating noises like trickling brooks, cooing birds, and blowing breezes as integral to the sonic portrait of her subject. In an effort to bring those sounds to life, Eyerly worked with a team of collaborators using GIS technology to create sound maps. These maps, as well as field recordings, new recordings of hymns and spoken texts, and “soundscape compositions,” are featured on a website that accompanies the book, and they seek to bring history alive to the reader.Footnote ³ The soundscape compositions, in particular, are a deeply innovative contribution to this musicological study. These brief audio tracks, which are referenced throughout the text to make them easily accessible to the reader, offer plausible renditions of what life in eighteenth-century Moravian communities might have sounded like. Listen, for instance, to the sounds of the common area in Bethlehem during a 2-minute track combining animal sounds, the noises of a potter and blacksmith at work, and the chattering of people talking and singing.

Eyerly's venture into sound studies and digital humanities is one way in which Moravian Soundscapes utilizes historical imagination. Her prose is another. Quotations from diary entries enrich the narrative immeasurably. Moreover, as she writes about people from the past, Eyerly mimics in her own writing the authorial voice found in her subjects’ diary entries, describing settings, building a sense of atmosphere, and giving the reader a feeling for her subjects’ personalities. This last element is particularly true in Chapter 3, “Sound & Spirit,” which is written in a style more typical to popular history than to musicology. The chapter focuses on the experiences and musical worlds of two men: German missionary Johann Christoph Pyrlaeus and the Mohican spiritual leader Tassawachamen (also known as Joshua). Additionally, she frames the book with emotionally moving autobiographical segments elucidating her own connection to the history she explores, as well as that of her immediate family and ancestors. Eyerly tells tales of her eighteenth-century ancestor, Johann Jacob Eyerly Jr., in early Pennsylvania, offering memories of her childhood on a family farm in Cooper Township and recounting recent experiences including the loss of her mother, the sale of her family home, and her return to visit there, all of which occurred while she was writing this book.

Eyerly's life writing is threaded throughout the book, introducing each of the four chapters. In the outer chapters, Eyerly takes a broad geographic perspective. Chapter 1 examines the travels of early Moravian missionaries in Pennsylvania and the forced migration of Native Moravians into northern Pennsylvania and Ohio in the 1760s and 1770s. The two middle chapters make Bethlehem their focus. Their portrait of this mission community is especially vivid. Eyerly describes the settlement in detail, and the accompanying sonic maps demonstrate how the members of the community lived within an area with acoustic, as well as geographic, parameters. Music both reflected and participated in the structuring of everyday life in Bethlehem. These include hymns sung to structure the day, reflect the liturgical year, complete various activities (such as watchmen's and stablehands’ hymns), and pieces whose texts reflect the cycle of daily life—including a popular hymn from the 1740s detailing daily activities like waking up, taking a walk, and going to work. Eyerly might have offered more commentary and focus on the chorale tunes themselves, or reproductions of the chorale melodies within the text or on the website, to help readers—especially those unfamiliar with German chorales by name—to connect more meaningfully with the hymn repertoire as they read about it.

Throughout Moravian Soundscapes, Eyerly considers musical traditions that are artifacts of colonialism. Although fully acknowledging the violent and unethical history of colonialism, Eyerly wisely grants agency to the Native Americans whom she studies, arguing, “although Moravian hymn singing and the soundscapes of mission communities were a form of colonialism, on an individual and community level, people were modifying hymns and adapting them. Native Moravians were not passive actors enmeshed in colonial processes” (14). This perspective allows Eyerly to look at the ways that Native Moravians adapted the musical practices of German Moravians into indigenized forms of Christian musical and cultural practice. Examples include Native-language versions of German chorale tunes and new hymn texts in Native languages that combined Christian theology with images from Native cultures and traditions. Eyerly notes that it is difficult to be certain of performance practices of Native Moravians in the eighteenth century, and she offers informed conjectures about what their music making might have sounded like.

The use of historical imagination found in Moravian Soundscapes and in its digital contributions, as well as the book's departures from some academic norms in its form and style, forge possibilities for musicology that are, in many ways, groundbreaking. Indeed, I recommend this book to all musicologists and historians, regardless of their areas of expertise, as a model of work that comingles a personal voice with a critical one, and imaginative story telling with archival evidence.