Political Scientist Sean Gray’s typology of political silences (10/13/24)

 I read Sean Gray’s article on silence in the political sphere with interest, both in the middle of a busy US election season and as a prompt to think about silence and community in the context of the monastic sisters in the Early Modern period. This post is both a summary of Gray’s ideas and a first-pass response to them.

 

CJC's visual representation of Gray's typology (compares Disempowered and Communicative silences)

CITATION: 

Gray, Sean W. “Towards a Democratic Theory of Silence.” Political Studies, 71 (2023): 815-834. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211043433

 

GRAY'S ARGUMENT:

“The opposite of voice is silence,” asserts Sean Gray in the context of democratic theory. The large-scale self-muting of members of the community has historically been read as “civic disengagement and disempowerment” – of stepping away from participatory democracy. Gray, on the other hand, thinks that silence can be a net positive, a form of political expression. Silence, he argues, is a form of political communication.

(As someone who tends to keep my politics to myself, Gray’s evocation of self-censorship resonates. For me, that can be bound up with questions of intimacy and trust; I may not choose to trust pollsters with my beliefs, but I will vote the heck out of them!)

Gray identifies the “the communicative dimension of silence,” but reads silence as “not voting,” whereas those of us in a world of social-media cesspits tend to think of silence as “avoiding trolls.” He does ask the important question, however, of “how silence can communicate across a whole range of cases.”

He posits different kinds of silence:

• disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access; being silenced, and/or being unheard.
  

• communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration

  • silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)

  • affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.

  • compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries

  • facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation

Gray believes that “By definition, to be silent is to hold back—or be held back—from speech or utterance.” In this context, silence should be understood as “a social artifact.” It’s not the natural world’s silence in the pre-dawn world of silent birds and sleeping community, but instead an absence of expected (or even demanded) engagement. Failure to respond to polls? Silence… This is silence as a failure to comply with external demands.

Disempowered silences occur because of direct silencing (infrastructure access and its many, many costs) or the indirect silencing of not being heard (think: woman offering opinion in a board meeting: this is [too often] identity-based; a lack of being heard more than an absence of expression).

The idea of communicative silence is perhaps more powerful. Our voice should neither be coerced nor compelled. “You have the right to remain silent” is an adjudicated right within US culture.

Silent resistance: consider the blank paper protest. Chinese Covid protests in 2022 and Russian protests of the Ukraine invasion (also 2022) both sought to message through the absence of a message. But, Gray argues, speech-acts (throwing a tomato, burning a flag, carrying a blank piece of paper) have more content than the silence itself:

Silence doesn’t give us a vocabulary to make political claims or to provide reasons for them. Silence on its own (and unlike language) cannot be used to reference ideas, to test assertions, to debate, to deliberate, or to explain and justify collective decisions and actions, and revise them as necessary

Silence, in other words, is still a failure to comply with external demands, a refusal to (publicly) “play the game.”

Importantly, though, Gray offers a shift of perspective to the question of the audience’s perception of silence. He does point out that politicians routinely misconstrue the silence of constituents in ways at odds with actual political beliefs, and tries to provide a framework in which such misreadings might be minimized.

My biggest concern is that not voting and not speaking up publicly are actually different things, and carry different moral valences. To me, I see a duty to vote, but a right to keep silent on issues for any of a variety of personal reasons. But the effort to understand the meanings of these two acts of silence is certainly not without merit.

APPLYING GRAY’S MODEL TO EARLY MODERN MONASTICS:

To my eye, Gray's typology of silence also resonates (pardon the pun) beyond the political sphere. For early modern monastics, silence—whether as a form of compliance or resistance—played a crucial role in shaping religious and communal life. I decided to play a bit with his ideas and see how (and whether) they applied to my data. It seems like a pretty good fit:

• disempowered silence – a barrier-driven silence; the silence of lack of (perceived) access

  • This might be the silence of the sisters in the face of rules imposed through Visitation; there are internal signals of resistance to particularly momentous changes (the adoption of the Roman Breviary in Thalbach in 1594) but the demand is expected to result in a “Yes Sir, How High?” kind of response.

• communicative silence – e.g. choosing to disengage out of frustration

  • silent resistance – perhaps a subclass of communicative silence; a significant effort to withhold verbal support or recognition. This can be read as demonstrative silence and the audience may infer the silent party’s opinion (rightly or wrongly)

    • A silence of “forgetting” to impose a change or a duty; or the silence of Thalbach sisters omitting the identities of your peers at St Anna’s in your prayer-list since you’d really rather they didn’t exist at all. In any way, shape, or form. Those nasty gits.

  • affective silence – the silence out of fear of the cost of speaking; Gray observes that this kind of silence can push an agenda of shame since the resistance asks for a change in the behavior of its audience.

    • This is harder. Perhaps taking prayers private? And in Bregenz overall post-Reformation, the silence about beliefs that might be at odds with the heightened Catholic narrative of town. Moving away – as several reformed families did, rather than stay in Catholic Bregenz -- could be a larger form of affective silence.

  • compliative silence – a rule-following silence; going along with norms; the silence of libraries

    • An easy one! The silence within the cloister during set hours; the silence of church preparing for prayer; these are silences of CHOICE.

  • facilitative communicative silence – which can focus on listening or civility – turn-taking in conversation

    • The silence of waiting -- for the correspondent to write back, for the Chapter to make decisions, perhaps even the silence of contemplation, as one waits for the spark of divine wisdom to arrive.

IN CONCLUSION... SILENCE AS A TOOL:

Gray’s exploration of silence reminds us that what we don’t say can carry as much weight as what we do. Whether in modern political contexts or early modern monastic communities, silence takes many forms—sometimes disempowering, sometimes resistant, and sometimes entirely intentional. (These are rather different kinds of silence than those of Rossetti’s poems, which are more personal silences; I shall have to think more on that topic later). For Gray, silence can come as a reflection of external forces or as a personal choice, can be read as a way to quietly dissent or to cultivate thoughtfulness.

In our current political climate, where loud, shouty voices often dominate the discourse, understanding silence as more than disengagement seems to me crucial (and rather missing from the conversation). Silence can be a tool of agency, whether one is acting to protect oneself, to resist “the thing,” or to create a space for listening and thereby create connection and community. By recognizing the complexities of silence, we challenge the assumption that only vocal participation matters in civic life.

Gray’s framework, in other words, offers a vital reminder that silence is not neutral. It carries meaning, whether in political arenas or in historical settings, and invites us to question not just what is said, but what is left unsaid and why (Trouillot’s Silencing the Past comes to mind). For communities, both those of the past and our many disparate communities of the present day, silence may communicate as effectively as words—and sometimes, perhaps, even more so.

Some Further Silences of Christina Rossetti (10/12/24)

A table of Rossetti's silences -- green for positive emotions; blue for  negative

Silence is often seen as passive—a withdrawal from the world. But as Christina Rossetti reveals through her poetry, silence can also be active, chosen, and imbued with deep emotional and spiritual meaning. Whether it symbolizes fortitude, yearning, or martyrdom, Rossetti’s silences offer a window into the human heart. Here are a few of the “types of silence” she invokes.

 

SILENCE IN THE FACE OF SUFFERING

“A long stern silence” in the face of a storm, while others “clung together… and some wept.” The silence Rossetti evokes in Repining is the silence of fortitude, of not speaking in the face of fear and suffering; of enduring and hoping without requiring of others a kind of sharing. Silence can be an act of strength—a refusal to express emotion or reveal one’s inner life. Through silence, one can hoard interiority. Silence can be a badge of pride, a signal of the sufficiency of self.

Of course, the sufferer can endure in silence for too long, turning fortitude into a virtue taken to the point of weakness. After all, barring others’ insights is isolating. Take the case of the princess of “The Prince’s Progress,” whose “heart sat silent through the noise / And concourse of the street” through all the years as the prince dallied. His deferral of their potential joy was suffered in silence until it was “Too late for live, too late for joy, / Too late, too late!” The silent heart “was starving all this while.” The Prince’s Progress might lead us to view silence as folly. Unprotesting endurance can backfire. Silence can be deadly. And yet Rossetti also sees this silence as a signal of the princess’s purity; her willingness to endure for the sake of love is read more as a virtue than a vice.

 

SILENCE OF YEARNING

As we saw in a previous post, Rossetti has a yen for the silences of loss and longing. She explores both as an attribute of age in the final sonnet of Monna Innominata. Once youth and beauty are both gone, she asks, what remains for the agèd? Naught but

The longing of a heart pent up forlorn

A silent heart whose silence loves and longs;

The silence of a heart which sang its songs

While youth and beauty made a summer morn,

Silence of love that cannot sing again.

(14^th sonnet, Monna Innominata)

The singing is now over, irrevocably cast in the past tense. Only the remembrances of former times remain to the narrator. Loss and longing are intertwined. This is not so much the enduring or long-suffering heart of The Prince’s Progress as it is a heart silent through the practices of inner stillness. With this silence, the poet suggests, love can invoked, its memory stirring a kind of aching wistfulness which can be treasured and tallied, counting up the successes of the past. Simultaneously, however, this silence is the silencing of the voice; the externalities of voiced love are no longer available to the speaker. Of the outer and inner worlds, only the inner remains to the speaker.

 

SILENCE AND SOUND

Sound and silence can intermingle, as they do in natural settings. Rossetti’s narrator goes on an emotive journey in An Old-World Thicket, but not until the stillness of the woods does rage change to despair, then self-pity, then weariness, then yearning, as the excesses of emotion gradually fall away. Only then do the sounds of nature penetrate the narrator’s attention:

Without, within me, music seemed to be;

Something not music, yet most musical,

Silence and sound in heavenly harmony.

The silence of nature is restorative, it brings sunsets and beauty, a return of visual awareness of the splendors of the world. The silence of nature is, in some ways, found inside its sounds; the eco-acoustical landscape heals, where the human self-obsessions of the regular world had merely “piled care upon my care.” Silence can be the answer to what ails us; silence can be found, unironically, in the witterings of nature. Eric Kagge would agree: “The silence around us may contain a lot, but the most interesting kind of silence is the one that lies within.”

Sound, even human sound, can also create (temporary) silence. The men of Maiden-Song are silenced by the music that they hear, as was the “herdsman from the vale,” enchanted with the merry songs of Meggan, who drew him in as she “piped a merry note,” and then “sang the heart out of his breast.” So too the result of May’s singing, that “labyrinth of throbs, / Pauses, cadence; / Clear-noted as a dropping brook, / Soft-noted like the bees.” He was transformed; “He hung breathless on her breath; / Speechless, who listened well; / Could not speak or think or wish / Till silence broke the spell.” Not until the end of the song, HER silence, does HIS muted state change. Her song controls his voice, pushing him (temporarily) into voicelessness. And the third maiden, Margaret, used her singing as a force for power:

So Margaret sang her sisters home

In their marriage mirth;

Sang free birds out of the sky,

Beasts along the earth,

Sang up fishes of the deep—

All breathing things that move –

Sang from far and sang from near

To her lovely love;

Sang together friend and foe;

Sang a golden-bearded king

Straightway to her feet,

Sang him silent where he knelt

In eager anguish sweet.

(C. Rossetti, Maiden-Song)

The challenge, of course, is that the power of song is only powerful in the moment; power reverts to the powerful once the song is ended: “But when the clear voice died away, / When the longest echoes died, / He stood up like a royal man / And claimed her for his bride.” Song may ensorcell in its magical moment, making silent the powerful and moving them into a profound space of awe, once the magic itself has faded into silence, the world goes on with its habitual practices. (Maiden-Song)

 

THE SILENCE OF PURITY

Martyrs may be silent in Rossetti’s world; in I Have Fought the Good Fight she contrasts the roaring crowd’s “Crying out for vengeance, crying out for blood” with the silence of the sainted; even when confronted with betrayal and the horrors of the lion’s gaping maw, the interlocutor has the silence of inner peace: He hears the crowd’s shouting “in silence, and was not afraid / While for the mad people silently I prayed.” His silence is virtue, an opposition to the mob, and a signal of a divinely-inspired faith.

Silence, she points out in “Then shall ye shout” (from Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims), can also be anticipatory. As with music, it is not always our turn; “Keep silence with a good hear / While silence fits our part”; we must, she says “Keep silence, counting time / To strike in at the chime.” Attention is not always our to own; silence can be a gift to the communal realm.

 

DISCOMFORTING SILENCES

Silence is not always positive; it is part of envy and of shame. “…her words reproved / A silent envy nursed within, / A selfish, souring discontent, Pride-born, the devil’s sin.” (The Lowest Room) It can also be the silence of overweening grief, a refusal of comfort “…I would not look or speak / Would not cheer up at all. / My tears were like to fall,” and, feigning sleep “no one knew I wept.” The secret kept, no one can provide comfort to those who wield silence like a shield. Not until the narrator yields to sound, that “something in her voice” that reaches past the silence into expressive sorrow, can comfort come (The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children). Silence also belongs to the haughty (Sonnet From the Psalms); the refusal to ask for “man’s help, nor kneel that he may bless” is a refusal of community, a choice of isolation.

Silence is also the language of despair; the narrator in Mirage who hangs his “harp upon a tree… wrung and snapt,” all for the sake of a dream-image. The broken heart is silent, and “Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed / For a dream’s sake.” A misunderstanding can lead, in other words, to hopelessness. The broken harp strings are shattered hopes; happiness was only ever imagined. Silence can also be the language of rejection, as with the maid of Under Willows. She merely “stood silent and still,” though it was a sunny June day, and her suitor “passed by and whistled a tune.” That silent rejection, however, will be answered by a lonely death: “Though she live to be old, so old, / She shall die at last.”

Similarly, in The Dying Man to His Betrothed, the silence of the betrothed at her fiancé’s deathbed is one of a presentiment of grief; her silence goes with her weeping and her paleness as signals of her overwrought state. And yet, while her silence is rejected by the dying man -- “One word – tis all I ask of thee… Speak out, that I may know thy will” – it is, at the end of the poem, he who rejects her comforts in favor of religious transformation. Her silence becomes the silence of memory; he sees mercy for himself while leaving her the silence of her loss. Silence here is a discomforting gift – both hers to him, as she tries to control her emotions and not burden him, and his to her, as he leaves her with the silence of an absent and erased future together.

In an age of constant communication, Rossetti’s exploration of silence feels indulgent, even nostalgic. Her poems remind modern readers that silence, whether chosen or imposed, can be a powerful response to suffering, love, and loss. And in such silences, we may find strength—or risk of isolation—or find ourselves immersed in the eco-acoustical quiet where contemplation best resides. Silences, in other words, have contexts as well as meanings.

 

Poetic texts from (and assessments based on) The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC

Summer’s Soundscape Research--by the Numbers (10/6/24)

Sampling of frescoes, St Nikolaus, Ludesch, Vorarlberg, Austria

My summer’s research was focused on Thalbach, a women’s convent of “devoted sisters” founded in 1336 in Bregenz, Vorarlberg, Austria. I was working on the women’s soundscapes, for the sisters were involved in town ceremonies and had lively -- and acoustically active lives inside their convent as well. I was in Austria, mostly, though with side trips to a number of countries. 

Research included frescoes and artworks, along with the standard array of manuscripts and incunabula (early prints), documents (so many documents) and a certain amount of standing around in cemeteries waiting for bells to ring. No, really. 

I drafted up my “account” of “summer successes” as a bit of a joke (yay, count all the things!) and then, unjokingly, fell silent as I went through a month (ugh!) of viral bronchitis. 

Here, rather belatedly, is my assessment of a summer of delightful research on soundscapes in Vorarlberg, Austria. 

1.1 million steps. That’s actually only an average of 7.3 miles a day. But it's still a lot.

16,677 photos. Mostly of documents, manuscripts, and books, but also some absolutely stunning scenery. Best hike: the Rappenlochschlucht outside of Dornbirn, Vorarlberg– a moss-bedecked gorge hike, noted for its wooden walkways hooked into the canyon sides. Waterfalls, a natural bridge, forest, and serenity: it was a great way to start a day! 

The Rappenlochschlucht, Dornbirn, Austria--zigging and zagging back through the gorge...

125 “Akten” – archival folders – across 21 boxes. Kind of like going through your great-aunt’s attic; the box may be labeled but you’re never quite sure what you’re going to find. Best find of the summer: a book-list from a local farmer who paid his taxes with books rather than with cash. The sisters were so happy with his books that they waived the third round of taxes that year! 

108 manuscripts and early prints.This was the core of my research. These materials are undigitized, and a number of the books had readers’ marks so you could see what the nuns had found interesting. My favorites were of two types. In one, books were bound by recycling old unwanted manuscripts – this means I could see physical evidence of 14th and 15th century liturgical practices in Thalbach, exactly what I had hoped to find! And the other type were the ones with illustrations; I admit that opening a book and discovering it had pictures – some of them colored! -- was one of the great joys of the trip.

Museum Exhibitions I have loved, Summer 2024 version

25 museums in 6 countries. Altarpieces, artwork, and three fantastic special exhibits. “Wir, Schwestern” (We, sisters) was on nuns and the book arts, and another was on the scriptorium at Reichenau, and a third was on Hans Holbein the Elder, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Dürer. 12 abbeys and monasteries In addition to Thalbach itself, this included the Swiss monasteries of Grimmenstein and Wonnenstein, both of which were interconnected with the Bregenz monasteries in reform practices. 

8 churches with 15th c. frescoes. This was the special treat of my trip. These churches had full or partial programs of illustrations with sacred content – saints; judgment day; the life of Jesus; the life of Mary; and various builders’ marks and early modern graffiti. There were a number of visual parallels to illustrations in the Sisters’ books. And there’s nothing like standing in a church listening to the church bells and looking at the visual reminders of religious practices of the past to make the content of one’s research come to life. 

Random and planned events. And yes, I accidentally attended the inauguration ceremonies in Bratislava, Slovenia; talked church politics with a nonagenarian Swiss school-teacher outside the Bischofszell city hall; shared travel advice with a Czech pilgrim who is walking the long version of the Camino de Santiago; and had breakfast with Blair alumni in Vienna. Plus, there were the innumerable coffees and conversations with librarians and archivists, historians, curators, musicologists, composers, performers, and friends. 

TL/DR: Summer research success for me boils down to the “four P’s”: paper, parchment, pictures, and people.

Christina Rossetti and the contemplation of silence (10/5/24)

 

Portrait of Christina Rossetti from The Poetical Works (1904)

I’m preparing to teach a medievalisms class, and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) came back across my attention-field. Among her various offerings is this:

“Echo” (by Christina Rossetti)*

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

        (18 December 1854)

Here Rossetti’s silence is that of the “speaking silence” of a dreamed-of love, a memory of one who has passed through “that slow door” of death. She acknowledges the bliss of a paradisiacal state – where others’ love will greet the newly entered soul – but asks the beloved instead to haunt her dreams, enlivened through an energizing memory. Pulse (hers) for pulse (the lover’s) and breath for breath, her dream self will recreate a simulacrum of the lover. And the payoff? The silence of night and parallel silence of a dream state together allow her to imagine the whispered confidence of the past as still present in her life.

Loss and longing are intertwined with the hush of night, with the quiet togetherness of lovers, and with the superimposition of past and present in a world beyond wakefulness. The poet emphasizes the remoteness of the memory, the “finished years” and the doubly-emphasized long-ago nature of their time together.

From the perspective of silences, it is the silence of night – not just the absence of daytime conversations and engaged world of the waking self, but also the silence of solitude – that allows the speaker’s remembering dream state to evoke memory and pastness. Indeed, we are invited to consider whether wakefulness is antithetical to memory, since it is only the narrator’s dream state that can re-imagine the embodied other. Wakefulness is distracting; the dream state and the silence that go with it allow for introspection. While the speaker imagines the utterances from long ago, it is silence that allows her to do so. Moreover, she may imagine that spoken voice from the past, but she continues to exist in a world of silence and nighttime. No words are spoken in her here and now in spite of her repeated command to the beloved to “come” to her.

Likewise, that re-imagined other is known to be “cold,” their corporeal body – corpse – no longer reflecting the wished-for sparkle of eye like a dappled brook. Instead, the once seeing eye becomes the silent tear, first of the speaker herself and then, perhaps, in stanza 2, the brimfull nature of the beloved’s community, their eyes too lingering on the spot of transition from life to death, from this place to that one, a transition still ongoing, and yet one that happened “long ago.”

It is the silence, the absence of active hearing, that allows this recreation of the visual sense, along with the implicit story of how the narrator and beloved once rejoiced in each other, making palpable and poignant the loss that is still ongoing these many years later. Cold body vs warm memories, silent nighttime vs thoughts of whispered confidences, the presence and poignant absence of the beloved—the invocation of silence compels the reader to “come” with the speaker on a journey into profound yearning.

* Image and poetic text from The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti, Macmillan and Co, 1904, https://books.google.com/books?id=C_k_VgeqssMC

Why Silence (10/4/24)

This post continues my meditation on the phenomena that fuel both my scholarly and personal curiosity these days. As I settled on writing a blog, I knew that sound is important, but that silence too has its own profound meaning. It signifies more to us than just the absence of sound. This post is a “reminder to self” that I need to keep querying and exploring that significance.

Tennessee – Stages of Sunrise, 23 Aug 2024

Photo: Cynthia J. Cyrus. CC By-NC-SA

Why Silence?

Silence comes in many flavors, each of which is heard differently by its audience. Musical, spiritual, and natural forms of silence have engaged my recent attention. I sometimes wonder if the same word is suited to cover all three areas, since they manifest so differently in my thinking.

Silence is the anticipation more often than the absence; it is the unexpected, leaping to our attention through the “pop” of negative pressure. Where we predicted sound, we have its inverse. That’s silence.

Silence is a mystic space, a centeredness outside of (or inside of) the active conversational chatter of the mind. It is interlinked with zen, with mystic contemplation, with communion with the soul, with imbeddedness in nature. It is the non-self of the self, unencumbered by the doubts and worries, pressures and overhyped-up coalescence of modern human existence.

It is stillness and quiet, respite from quotidian concerns.

As a practice fitted into a monastic day, silence serves as a recurring part of the spiritual cycle of devotions.

Vows of silence mark a path apart, a decision to cast of the ordinary in favor of an aspirational stance – a quest, a longing for difference, a departure from the mundane.

Silence can also be the standing apart, the non-crowd following, the identification of a disconnect in stance, attitude, or action.

Silence is the syncopation and dance of musical convention. It is where music starts and ends, but also the formidable marker of musical experience; not the cadence but the re-framing that follows the cadence; not the climax but its consummation. It is the breath, the phrase end, the agogic lift-and-pause, a momentary hiatus that ineluctably shapes our experience of the musical moment.

Silence is the cicadas when they stop.

Silence is leaving your phone in a different space, tether undone.

Silence is fractal; we chase silence across layers and levels as we listen ever more deeply.

Silence is found in the hush of the forest, the wind in its leaves, the thrum of the pulse in the ears, the almost inaudible swish of the blinking eye. It is the visible effort of a rabbit to be as still as a rock in the landscape. It is the peace and contentment of the sunny rock after a long climb. It is the space of feeling, not word.

Silence is not the absence of noise so much as the substitution of the world of nature over and above the human-generated whines and squeals of machinery and the coursing race of competing voices in a human-focal landscape.

Sound and silence, presence and absence, what is heard and what is felt in the quiet spaces in between: these drive my curiosity – and I hope yours as well. 

 

If you choose, share a memory of a silent moment and what it meant to you.

Why Sound? (9/30/24)

While my current book project on Thalbach nuns centers on the question of sound and ceremony, my fascination with sound and soundscapes also helped to get me through the duties of my administrative years. As I pondered systematizing my thoughts, I toyed with several strategies (and blog titles, for that matter), and settled on Silences and Sounds as an overarching theme for the topics I want to engage with over the next long while. Today’s post explores sound as a critical element in my way of being in the world.

Why wallow in sound?

• Because I’m a musicologist; sound is my operational focus
  
• Because making sense of senses is a fundamental human activity 
• For the resolutions of jangling discords into bliss, like in this Corelli example from Op. 3 No. 1

Corelli, Op 3 No. 1...

• (If the clip won't launch, you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrg3uPORvV8, 1:09-1:31)

Other reasons I'm interested in sound:

• Because … noise, and beauty, and the serenity made manifest in an adagio
• Because I get unutterably curious about representing one sense in another medium. I write ekphrastic poetry, for instance, turning image or melody into the flow of words.

 

On one side, a photo of a gull; on the other, an imagistic poem about gulls feeding after a storm

• Because the outdoors has its own array of noises: crickets, early morning birds, wind through the trees
• Because there is a seasonality to sound, one that I’d like to ponder on some more

An ear and a cupped hand to capture sound

• Because back in the day after a particularly nasty virus, I transmogrified from having super-acute hearing to subpar acoustical detection skills. Surgery helped, but I still sometimes ache for that loss. As a result I think a lot about how one relates to the presence and absence of such stimuli and about the way sound impacts how we perceive the world.

• Because Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt testament touches my soul even though the writing is raw and the human deeply flawed 
• (IYKYK. If you don’t know, here’s a translation [CW suicidal ideation]:https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heiligenstadt_Testament) 
  
• Because sound persists in memory, shaping and governing the stories we tell ourselves about being our truest selves. 

What are the critically important elements of sound in your life?

Introduction (9/29/24)

 

Buch der Kunst, dadurch der weltlich Mensch mag geistlich werden (Augsburg : Johann Bämler, 1491.08.23), München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, 4 Inc.c.a. 827, https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb00013341?page=42%2C43 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

As a monastic historian of the late Middle Ages and early modern eras, I have a natural interest in sound. I come from musicology and am researching historical soundscapes – the world of song and instrument, but also the world of noise and of aural/oral symbols. I ask how that acoustical and symbolic realm shaped people’s lives. 

Wordsworth captures something important, I think when he describes “beauty born of murmuring sound,”* and beauty is part of what I seek to understand. Music making and music enjoyment drew me into questions about the past. I may be a lapsed french horn player, but I can still enjoy a good Mahler horn lick, or the sweet-sounding cornetti in a Monteverdi production, or the singing of chant in a deeply resonant cloister hall.

But fascinating too is the press of activities with their less-ordered noises. We can ask with Shakespeare, “What stir is this? What tumult’s in the heavens? / Whence cometh this alarum and the noise?”** and think on the arrival of Joan of Arc in the context of Henry VI Pt 1. Shakespeare here treats sound as a marker of beginnings and endings (and sections and segments, for that matter). Other forces too announce themselves through the audible: the complexities of the bustling marketplace, the thunk of a closing door, or the tolling of bells.

Eco-acoustical experiences also hold meaning – sometimes external, sometimes self-generated. I’ve often considered the huffing outrage of a disturbed deer on my pre-dawn walk, or indulged myself with the soothing amorphousness of the sound-cloud (shhhhhhHhhhhHhhh) associated with waterfalls, or the dramatic crack and hiss of summer storms. Sound shapes our experiences, both indoors and outdoors. I’m curious about how people tried to organize and understand that sensory experience in the context of both their daily and their ritual lives. Silence too has its place in this realm, suggesting the quiet peace of a morning walk or the sudden absence of sound in a cleverly syncopated passage in a Haydn symphony, or the conscious decision to let words drift away in favor of some inner insight.

The question of sound and ceremony drives my current book project, which is centered on the women’s convent of Thalbach in Bregenz on the shore of Lake Constance. Thalbach was founded in 1346 as a household of “devoted sisters” (like nuns but without formal vows), and in the very late 16^th century became Franciscan Tertiaries when the bishop demanded it. I’m investigating their active involvement in civic ceremonies. For instance, they are often called on to sing at families’ gravesides and to “walk over the graves” in procession. Thus, they make a nice case study for looking at the three-way intersection of music and sound, identity, and social context. After all, women performing collectively in the 15^th century, supported by their fellow townsfolk. How cool is that?

I live on a hobby farm (Fish! Chickens! 12-foot weeds!) with my husband Tom. We have successfully homeschooled our three children through to their college days and now delight in their post-collegiate adventures and identities. I’m a lark, which does help with getting writing done. So does the coffee, which is one of the delights of life. I read, as much and as often as I can, and occasionally more than that. I’m hoping to use this blog to motivate my own focused reading (and writing) practice as I get ready for more sustained writing of chapters, conference papers, and books.

Given the blog’s function as an expansion-of-perspective tool, what do YOU think I should be reading – on sound, on silence, on monastic life, on life’s meaning?

* Wordsworth, “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45559/three-years-she-grew

** The arrival of Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Henry VI part 1, I.4 https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-vi-part-1/read/1/4/