A European note

As an Australian who has worked in classical music, I have long been fascinated with the intersections of indigenous cultures with the European tradition. The meeting of German and Arrernte cultures at Hermannsburg in Central Australia is a case in point.

In North Carolina, I have been intrigued by Old Salem, just south of the Winston-Salem CBD in the Piedmont area.

The town was founded in the mid-1700s on land granted to followers of Jan Hus, who, several decades before Martin Luther tacked his petition to the door of a church, was burnt at the stake for rebelling against the Roman Catholic church. His followers, Moravians, had originally been offered sanctuary in Germany by a Count Zinzendorf. Hence, the people who turned up in America to take up land offered to them by Lord Granville, were German speakers. But what struck me as a familiar concordance was meeting the guy there at the Moravian Music Centre who has just finished co-editing the third volume (there will be four) of Records of the Moravians among the Cherokees. I dare say the Moravian missionaries could speak Cherokee, just as the German Lutheran missionaries at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) spoke Arrernte. As I say, this conjunction has a familiar ring to someone who has studied the history of Central Australia.


Even to this day, Old Salem, has a strong German flavour. The Moravians still own many of the buildings; there are plaques all over the place marking where people like Schober, Shultz, and Winkler once lived. (Very Meistersinger-ish, even the architecture in places).

Of course, I am always also in awe of people such as the Lutherans and Moravians who could live in remote places like this in those days. The green woods of North Carolina are seen as scenic and beautiful in these comfy air-conditioned and wi-fi days, but they would have been fearful wilderness then and Old Salem a cultivated patch hacked out of a new and alien world. I guess I must have a fascination with Europe off-centered.