The Tufts University Department of Music’s first Granoff Music Center Colloquium of the spring semester will feature Yale University research scholar  Janie Cole on the topic, “Sacred Sound, Space, and Afro-Eurasian Encounters in the Christian Kingdom of 17th-century Ethiopia.” The Jesuit mission to the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia (1557-1632) was one of its earliest and arguably most challenging projects in the early modern period. New ambitious architectural projects were undertaken as symbols of religious renewal and state supremacy, and music was also central to Jesuit conversion practices. Drawing on 16th-­ and 17th-­century travelers’ accounts, new Jesuit archival documentation and indigenous sources, this talk explores the role of music and ritual sounds in relation to the sacred spaces of new churches erected on the Ethiopian highlands and examines the musical art of conversion developed by European Jesuit missionaries hailing from Portuguese India placed in the wider context of a vibrant indigenous royal Ethiopian court culture, local material economies of patronage that shaped these cultural dynamics, and the influences of foreign designs on both music and architecture.

Dr. Janie Cole is a research scholar at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, a visiting professor in Yale’s Department of Music, and an affiliate of the Yale Council on African Studies.