The Worlds of Samuel Felsted: Music and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica
The Anglo-Jamaican organist Samuel Felsted (1743-1802) is the only eighteenth-century composer from Jamaica whose sheet music has survived. Previous scholarship on Felsted has focussed on the rediscovery of his oratorio *Jonah*, and the list of subscribers that was published alongside it in 1775. Some biographical details about Felsted, his family, and the white elite Jamaicans surrounding him have also been discovered, but information about the contributions and experiences of his black contemporaries has been almost entirely overlooked. This thesis writes Felsted’s musical activities into a broader version of Jamaican music history by exploring the place of music in the lives of Kingston’s inhabitants whether of European, African or mixed-racial descent. To that end, it aims both to centre and de-centre Felsted as a figure integral to the history of music in late eighteenth-century Jamaica. It draws on known and unfamiliar sources while foregrounding a variety of methodological strategies for averting colonial bias. The first chapter uses the interrogation of space and sound as a way to re-examine some of the musical performances that took place in late eighteenth-century Kingston. It considers who witnessed the performances (whether deliberately or unintentionally), and some of the social ramifications of such musical contexts. The second and third chapters turn to Felsted directly, fleshing out his biography and resetting his social and commercial outputs within the broader context of his connections to people of African and non-elite backgrounds. Chapter Four then explores how Africanness was depicted in literary sources mentioning performances of Afro-Jamaican music, which were published or prepared for publication in Britain. Ultimately, this thesis seeks to show how the reinterpretation of sources is vital to the reversal of the erasure of black experience in colonial Jamaican music history. It also demonstrates more generally how historical materials can be used to explore, complicate and de-centre received perspectives on colonial-era musical activity.
Black History, British Empire, colonialism, Handel, Jamaica, music, oratorio, race, slavery and enslavement
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