Networks of Song
Sarah Eyerly
Networks of Song uses network analysis methods and data visualization to create a variety of digitally-enhanced network diagrams that shed light on the complex web of relationships that facilitated the composition of Mohican language hymns at Moravian mission sites in the eighteenth century.
Overview
Context
Network analysis and data visualization programs such as Gephi and Palladio help scholars to foreground the contributions of various Native and European individuals involved in the creation of Native-language hymnody. My research centers on the composition of a Mohican hymnal in the fall of 1745 by German missionary Johann Christoph Pyrlaeus and Mohican leader Tassawachamen, given the name Joshua in baptism. Inspired by recent work in Native American and Indigenous Studies, including scholars such as Philip Deloria, Lisa Brooks and Christine DeLucia, I study the collaborative work of Joshua and Johann as hymn writers by placing them within larger networks—familial, political, racial, and religious—across the Atlantic and throughout the Northeast. It was these intersecting and overlapping networks of people, living within contexts of colonialism, that led to the creation of a new body of hymnody which generated new complex networks traceable through the archival sources, and resonant today for contemporary descendant communities, such as the Stockbridge Mohicans of Wisconsin. I believe that this study of the networks behind Mohican hymnody helps bring to light previously neglected complex personal, geographic, and ethnic relationships that led to the creation of many repertories of early American music.