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/