In the winter of 1772–1773, Joseph Johnson (Mohegan/Brothertown) copied musical notation into eight books for Christian Native Americans in Farmington, Connecticut, a town established by English settler colonists on the land known as Tunxis Sepus. Johnson did so because, as he wrote in his diary, “The indians are all desireous of haveing Gamuts.” Johnson's “gamuts” have not survived, but their erstwhile existence reveals hymnody's important role within the Native community in Farmington as well as cross-culturally with the English settler colonists. In order to reconstruct the missing music books and assess their sociocultural significance, this article proposes a surrogate bibliography, gathering a constellation of sources among which Johnson's books would have circulated and gained meaning for Native American Christians and English colonists (including other printed and manuscript music, wampum, and legal documents pertaining to land transfer). By bringing together this multi-modal network of materials, this essay seeks to redress the material and epistemological effects of a colonialist archive. On one level, this is a case study that focuses on a short period of time in order to document the impact on sacred music of conversion, literacy, shifting intercultural relations, and a drive to preserve sovereignty. On another, this article presents a methodological intervention for dealing with lost materials and colonialist archives without recourse to discourses of recovery or discovery, the latter of which is considered through the framework of what I term “archival orientalism.”

This article examines early pedagogical experiments in opera on television that were meant to attract new audiences in the 1950s. The aesthetics of early television have often been thought to run contrary to opera, particularly in its grander iterations, but I argue that television producers capitalized upon the traits of early television to personalize opera, both on and off screen. Comparing two NBC pedagogical initiatives—a 1958 Omnibus program starring Leonard Bernstein and the 1956–57 visits of the NBC Opera Company to Saint Mary's College (South Bend, Indiana)—I explore how these efforts were meant to approximate the opera fan's experience as well as prepare audience members to enter the opera house. Ultimately, although opera on television failed to secure a strong foothold in the 1950s, it helped to re-envision the ways in which American audiences could relate to the art form and set the terms for the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD broadcasts today.

In this article, I explore the ways territorial authority or sovereignty emerges from within a particular mode of Indigenous creativity—the creation and performance of Hopi taatawi (traditional songs)—despite the appropriation of Hopi traditional lands by the American settler-state. Hopi territories within Öngtupqa (Grand Canyon) are just a sample of the many places where Indigenous authority, as expressed through sound-based performances, continues to resonate despite the imposition of settler-colonial structures that have either silenced Indigenous performances of authority or severed these places from Indigenous territories. Drawing on the work of Hopi composers and intellectuals, I explore how Hopi musical composition and performance are deeply intertwined with Hopi political philosophy and governance, resulting in a form of sovereignty that is inherently sonic rather than strictly literary or textual in nature. Recognizing that this interconnection between territorial authority and sound production is common across many Indigenous communities, I propose listening to contemporary Indigenous creativity not just as an aesthetic form but as a source of sonic sovereignty.