The Taylor Swifting of Chant Performance

If we believe that Hildegard von Bingen’s chant is monophonic, why introduce a drone? Why add orchestration, those evocative instrumental roulades that spin seductively around the modal home pitch as intro and as formal “breaks” from the plainness of plainchant – but lack any evidentiary basis in score, or word, or notated tradition? What is chant to us here in this post-2015 environment that it cannot be simple, or vocal, or unaccompanied?

Harpa Dei Choir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNiRNiqzRsc)

St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCRQcgbWtA)

I ask not because it’s wrong – in fact, I find performances like those of the Harpa Dei Choir and that of the St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir (Helena Fojkar Zupančič, director) to be beautiful and compelling. Not authentic – not striving for some kind of Hildegard-informed sense of how the music should go – but nevertheless a compelling reading of the tune with its vocally surging lines where any “up” (often arrived at by leap) gets a counterbalancing descent, or at least some smaller response in a lower register. Hildegard’s play with ambitus and tessitura is well-displayed.

Yet part of me feels suckered by these performances. For the Harpa Dei performance, the gendered vocal shifts, the oooooo wooooo drones, the rubato; there’s a richness that almost calls for a palette cleanser afterwards. And for the lovely and compelling St Stanislav performance, yes, but… But so much twang on the drone; so many instrumental moments of disruption; the recorder as ethereal marker, but also as intrusion on the beauty of the singing. It would be easy to pick either of these performances out of a line-up. And yet they are in many ways typical of the examples I’ve been sampling as I looked for musical illustrations for class.

Why “all the everything”? Why is chant gussied up and ornamented here in our 21^st century world?

Maybe part of the answer lies in what our ears have come to crave. We live in a musical world where production is part of the storytelling, where even a single voice is rarely left alone. Taylor Swift’s vocal is never just Taylor Swift’s vocal. No, it’s reverberant, multi-tracked, shimmering with harmonic overtones and studio polish that make intimacy sound bigger. Our ears have become attuned to layers, to sonic depth as a marker of emotional authenticity. In that context, an unadorned chant feels exposed, almost too naked to believe in. So we orchestrate it. We wrap it in drones and strings and those warm and comforting ambient pads to make it “speak” in the language we’ve been taught to find moving. But in doing so, we reveal something about ourselves as listeners: that we can no longer trust simplicity, that we need resonance – literal and metaphorical – to feel that something is real.

By literal resonance, I mean those add-ins, some performed, some generated in production, that make a chant track “pop” when it comes up on your playlist. When chant is accompanied by a drone, by strings, or by an ambient pad (or a mix of all three, heaven forefend), it physically resonates in a richer, more complex way. We like that; it gives us “stuff to listen for.” We’ve got something to munch on. The music feels fuller, more present, more “real” – it fits our presumtive expectations.

In a world trained on layered, produced music, a single, unadorned line might feel too stark, too abstract to carry the weight of feeling or significance we expect. Adding accompaniment or sonic “padding” gives the chant a kind of interpretive or emotional amplification. In so doing, it resonates with our expectations, our memories, and our cultural conditioning. A pluffed-up performance mirrors the fullness we’ve learned to hear as emotionally convincing.

We seem, in this day and age of Swifties, less comfortable with the more period-informed performances of the Early Music tradition. The unadorned chant still lives in performances by the Oxford Camerata or the ever-popular Sequentia performance by Barbara Thornton.

Oxford Camerata (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hp6vSX-BQ4)

Barbara Thornton, Sequentia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iHMdmrZ_ec)

Voices alone, and textures exploring the nuance of one voice against many voices instead of one against a different kind of thing – a drone, or an instrumental timbre: these are delicate, demanding performances that invite us to dwell in a slower, more contemplative space to tease out nuances (that word again) of gesture and meaning.

So our reality is that there are options available. We can choose how we listen. We can decide what we prefer.

And being an informed and cultured society...

We prefer Taylor Swift. At least, we do numerically. Here are the YouTube stats:

• Oxford Camerata: 4.1K

• Sequential: 27K

• Harpa Dei: 2.8M

• St Stanislav: 584,979

Simple, vocal, and attention-requiring performances are getting good listening numbers. Hey, if I had that many readers, I’d be thrilled! But the bigger, richer, layered performances, those are evidently the listening draw. By orders of magnitude. For every one listener drawn to the “pure” chant, nearly 700 are drawn to the modernized, multi-layered performance. We're talking a couple of good-sized concert halls (yay, early music fans!) compared to 40 football-stadiums' worth of listeners (yay, broad public!).

As I said before, it’s not wrong. We like what we like, and I’m for anything that puts Hildegard on more people’s radar. It’s just important to recognize that when we drape an ambient pad across her vocal line, we aren’t just changing the music – we’re revealing our own ears, our own habits, our own desires for sound. Listening isn’t neutral; it’s a product of training, memory, culture, and expectation. We’ve been trained in ways that call on a soundscape that includes Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift, Delicate: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCXGJQYZ9JA)

With Taylor in our ears, we have work to do if we want to be ready to hear chant on its own terms. We have to practice what I think of as a kind of auditory humility. We can try to focus on our single line of melody. We have to resist the urge to thicken it, to sweeten it, to make it “pop.” If we’re attentive, we can notice how our own ears sometimes strain for harmonic cues that aren’t there, how our imaginations fill in the gaps with memories of orchestral swells or pop hooks. 

That tension – the tug between expectation and what actually sounds – is exactly where reflective listening begins. It’s in that space that we can start to hear Hildegard not as a Taylor Swift vocal needing polish, but as a voice moving through space, time, and ritual, and hear ourselves responding along the way.

In the end, of course, our ears can carry both Hildegard and Taylor. The challenge – and the reward – is learning to hear each on its own terms.

Of Space Aliens and Their Tentacles

The brain is a wonderful interpreter. It can make meaning out of almost-random bits of evidence and postulate an explanation that makes sense in its own context.

Take space aliens. The 1980s were full of them. Between E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and all those late-night “documentaries” about UFO sightings in cornfields, the world seemed brimming with cosmic visitors. If you were a teen back then, you probably half-expected to see a glowing spaceship land in your backyard, or at least some suspicious lights over the local water tower. Those stories gave shape to something deep in us: the need to explain what we can’t otherwise understand. When faced with odd lights in the sky or strange coincidences, the mind goes searching for narrative explanations.

More recently, however, space aliens are on the wane, at least in the circles in which I run. (Medievalists don’t have a lot of time for space aliens; we are more interested in the fabrication of data and plagiaristic activity that came out over Christmas vacation a couple of years ago. Best holiday ever, scandal unfolding in real-time!!!)

But me, I generated space aliens all my own in a dreamscape this weekend. Cold. Clammy. Tentacles everywhere. Space ships flying low over the civic stairs that we were climbing. (Funny how one never descends the steps in a dreamland).

And then I woke up.

And found this guy.

My little tree-frog had gotten into the camper and was bee-bopping around looking for the door.

Eventually, we captured him and put him back outside in the colder and wetter world to which he belonged.

But my tree frog story is not, in fact, quite as pointless as it might initially sound. As a story of how our brain works, it’s a reminder that sense-making is built in. My dreaming mind took a few sensory impressions – something cold and damp brushing my arm, a flicker of shadow against the window as the window-shades clanked – and built an entire alien narrative out of them. 

So take that pause with your data. Acknowledge that your brain might be overwriting the blurrier boundaries of historical truth. Go back and triple check those changes you thought you saw in the patterns. Are they there, or are they an artifact of a ghost frog telling your waking self a story that’s actually three parts unexpected nighttime encounter?

If the data support that insight, you’re golden. Please publish; your insights are marvelous.

If they don’t, accept that sometimes the brain sees patterns in clouds. But those cloud-pictures – dragons, faces, ships with sails – come from inside us. They don’t inhere in the cloud itself.

Being aware of what is “pattern” and what is “artifact” is one of the reasons I keep going back, and going back again to my primary sources. What word was used? Does an object list of this kind of thing or that kind of thing reinforce this change I think I see? Could there be another explanation? (That kind of meticulous cross-checking work is important, and not just an avoidance of the vacuum cleaner as my household sometimes maintains!)

Mondays seem a good day to check the stories you tell yourself. 

And it can be quite wonderful when historical stories come true.

Space aliens? Not quite so much.

May you – may WE ALL – have historical storytelling luck this week.

And may we all stick to sources we’ve consulted directly!

Now to go re-count the things...

---

REFERENCE:

• Peter Kidd, "Nobody cares about your blog!" Medieval Manuscripts Provenance [Blog], December 2022: https://mssprovenance.blogspot.com/2022/12/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html

• Charlotte Gauthier, “#ReceptioGate and the (absolute) state of academia,” The Critic, 4 Jan 2023, https://thecritic.co.uk/receptiogate-and-the-absolute-state-of-academia/

• Or perhaps you’d like to dabble in a different perspective on the matter: “Receptiogate” (“the official documentation site”): https://www.receptiogate.org/

 

The Silent Office Hour

Administration wants to encourage faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom, so they require the faculty to spend two hours on drop-in office hours a week.

Bwahaha.

Ask any faculty member, and I’ll bet you’ll find they agree with me. Office hours are the perfect time to submit travel receipts, catch up on paperwork, and take care of email. They’re just a terrible time to expect to see students.

Because students almost never come. Too far. Wrong time. Too nervous. No identified questions.

After all, who has questions before lunchtime? Questions are a nighttime activity. You know, after the faculty have already left campus.

If administration wanted to support genuine interaction between faculty and students, they would require things like:

1) Mandatory concert atttendance – and the wonderful chit-chat afterwards when we’ve all been moved to laughter or chills by the music in all its performative glory

2) Mandatory shared setup time. Before class even starts, when the projector’s misbehaving and I’m untangling cables, students drift in and talk about what they’re listening to, what’s happening in the world of campus and beyond, or whatever else is on their mind. No grade pressure, no formalities – just human contact with a purpose dangling from a HDMI cord.

3) Mandatory packing-up time. There’s nothing like unplugging the laptop from its station to bring on a host of quick one-off questions from students. (Some days I cynically wonder if more productive learning happens when I’m packing up than actually happened during discussion – there’s a lot of “aha” in those quick exchanges)

4) Mandatory text capacity. No, I don’t give out my phone number to students – but I do have students use a walkie-talkie app. They can leave voice or text messages; I can respond asynchronously, again, by voice or by text. This for me takes about 2 or 3 hours a week, since these can become extended conversational exchanges. (Please please please don’t tell me about the messaging app in your LMS. I live on a farm, with all the absent internet that comes with that. The walkie-talkie app takes two pennies; the LMS feed takes two dollars. Let’s stick with ‘Can I receive and respond?’ as our measure of tech success.)

5) Mandatory coffee fetching. When I’m in my office, I can feel lonely. Head out to get a cup of coffee from the lounge, and I inevitably bump into one or more students, and those conversations can be rich, deep, and meaningful. Those usually aren’t about course content – they’re about the discipline, life experiences, and our place in the world. You know, the stuff that carries forward in a forever kind of way.

6) Mandatory “big deadlines.” There’s nothing like a deadline to clarify what could use some support. And the problem with office hours is it is not only the wrong time for interactions, but it’s the wrong space, too. Better solutions come in the library, or in the hallway outside the restrooms (we’re just being honest here), or on the sidewalk between one space and another.

See, the problem with office hours is the office. It’s not that setting aside time for 1:1 with students is a bad idea – in fact, it’s one of the most valuable aspects of a college education. And it’s not that students don’t prize their access and the support it affords. They genuinely do respond to faculty who care.

It’s the whole idea that you can take all the ideals of academia, and put them in a box (the office) and on the clock (at a reasonable time of day). Real learning isn’t like that. Ideating and interaction both happen at their best on the spontaneous edges of other kinds of activities.

And spontaneity can’t be mandated.

But it can be invited to appear.

True Confessions: Here’s my shout-out to the real and impactful student moments—the ones that happen in the dining hall, the hallway after class, or occasionally (miracle of miracles) in my office. They're real. I just wish the last kind happened more often. And I’m not alone.

Smells and bells? Just bells!

So, I’m working through my memoria documents – charitable endowments for commemorative services – for a paper I’m writing. These are two sets of Charters from Bregenz, one cluster from the early 15^th century, and another from a century later, right at the start of the 16^th century.

I’ll save the big observations for the paper itself, but thought it interesting that the documents are very clear, abundantly clear, about many things. The donor wants this service and that one, done in this order, with this personel. That’s the what and the who. They want their services done in this place and that one, by these personnel. That’s the where and the who. (“Who” matters twice because payment depends on it).

In these documents, we also know the why and the how.The why has been well-studied; memoria are services of remembrance for the donor and his ancestors and descendents. The prayers given at the service help all these people toward salvation, and so engage with a different “who” than the question of who performs. The people being prayed for are often named family, and include marital family as well as natal. Sometimes, they include aunts and uncles, cousins (particularly those in orders), and even second spouses. They include the dead and the living, a point which has always struck me as a bit odd. What does it mean to be praying in remembrance of someone who might themselves be standing at graveside?

And the how is clear. With crosses and processions. At graveside. With singing and speaking and reading. With standing and sitting and bowing heads, and all the other choreography of ritual. Or, as Ursula Speckerin (1405) puts it in her own Alemannic dialect,

with worship and beginning with proclamation, with singing and with reading, with standing and with prayers, and with all other things in the way previously prescribed. [mit libtind (?) und begiengingt mit verkundung mit singet und mit lesent mit stende und mit genbent und mit allen andren dingen in der wiscz als vorgesteben stat.]

To this, we add the gifts to the sacristan for the provisions for service. There’s bread, and more specifically bread for the poor. There’s wine for the service. There are lights – candles – not just for the vigil, but for both masses as well. And there are bells, bells for the vigil, bells to be rung at mass, bells to announce the service.

All these things are mentioned, for all these things have costs.

And so we can run through the multisensory modalities of these memoria services:

• Sight: procession, cross, lights, people

• Sound: singing, reading, reciting, saying, bells

• Taste: bread, wine, “Tisch” or food at table (improved over their normal fare, in Ursula’s provisions)

• Feel: bowing, standing, sitting: all the embodied shifts of orientation of an active quasi-choreographed worship

• Smell: ???

The documents I’ve looked at, I realized, are completely tacet on the sense of smell. No mentions of incense or flowers or herbs or smoke or any other proxy for smell. The closest we get is the bread and the wine, placed on the altar and distributed to the poor, but the memoria endowments, for all their sometimes surprising specificity, don’t think to cover the sense of smell. And yet smell is typically a key part of liturgy. Its absence is striking.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. One plausible answer is because your incense for the censor is budgetted separately, and that in paying the sacristan you have already covered “the goods” necessary for the service.

But it is an interesting omission, and speaks to the question of what goes without saying and what must be specified when you’re seeking control of events-of-remembrance for after your demise.

Smell, it seems, was so woven into the fabric of ritual life that it didn’t need to be written down.

---

RESOURCES:

Bregenz, Stadtarchiv Urk. 19. (Ursula Speckerin, 1405). Consulted via monasterium.net. (A list of other relevant charters is available from the author.)

For more on movement during prayer, see:

Cyrus, Cynthia J. 2025. "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10: 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277

Two standard works on memoria are:

Geuenich, Dieter, and Otto Gerhard Oexle. 1994. Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, Bd. 111. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium. Princeton: Princeton UP.

From Draft to Done

Many writers talk about the "ugly draft." I'm here with images to confirm that drafts can, indeed, be ugly! Three months ago, this was the article, in its summative glory (?):

As you can see, I was working (as per usual) in a bound book. Not that I didn't have about 17 different computer files going. And a kindle with highlights. And a handwritten table a few pages before. And about 20 pages of hand-written notes on the articles I'd read. And a couple of other brainstorms.

But when push came to shove, this was the set of pages that I'd keep coming back to:

In orange on the left is the lit review. Well, not its formal version, but the ideas and the people I wanted to engage with, and, numerically, the order I decided to take them. Yeah, some midstream figure-it-out happened: 1.7 became 1.7a and 1.7b, and to be honest, 1.1 to 1.3 are on the previous page in the notebook. But the bulk of the content and the ordering got worked out, first by throwing stuff on the page, and then working with what order and what flow of ideas needed to happen.

Down at the bottom on the right is the outline of the method. That was the work that reminded me what I was covering and why. This section is the part that didn't really make it into the final paper, but it drove its direction. For me, the emphasis on close reading and the content of the prayers in question was something I reviewed iteratively -- first (A), about these prayers, first as sensorial compilations, then (A1) as their place in the space to which women had access, and finally (A2) in dialogue with the literature on performative reading. By having the method written out in front of me, I held myself accountable to the themes I was engaging.

The last bit, in yellow on the top right, is the part I originally thought this notebook opening was going to cover: it was my list of "emo words," the emotional and affective vocabulary that leapt out from my readings of these poems. This became a table in the article. Doing that word-count was the moment at which I knew where the article was headed. 

In my own head, this article follows a format similar to the one I teach my students:

It starts with the question of scholarly conversation, moves through several types of evidence, including a nerd table in section three, and concludes with an engagement with the question of what this all means. I've spoken to these kinds of formulas here and here, so this is my contribution on "how it applies in real life."

There were, as always, important edits that came between the bare-bones outline and submitted draft, and even more edits with the assistance of the anonymous readers (thank you, kind souls -- and thanks too for the speed of turn-around!). Edits and page proofs all went smoothly; this was a project that found its groove and kept to it. 

And so, here it is, the published article! 

From idea to delivery, this project was the fastest I have ever worked. But the cribs and habits that I've developed facilitated the careful integration into the literature, the original and -- perhaps quirky? -- assessment of what's going on in these prayers, and the big takeaway that is the whole point of writing such things.

This morning, I've written my "thank-you's." a part of my process that I require of myself before moving an article to the done and delivered stack. I *always* thank the library, and this time had several scholars whose "big ideas" informed my own; acknowledging those debts is a citation practice, but it also makes a nice email exchange. Plus, I shared the citation to professional colleagues -- and to family, of course. 

And then I closed out the files, took the "AA" header off the front of the file folder name that kept it at the top of the search stack, moved the line from the works-in-progress sheet to the one of projects that are done. And then I wandered through my kitchen, singing "done, done done done DONE!"

The citation to the finished project: 

Cyrus, Cynthia J. 2025. "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10: 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277

RELATED POSTS

• Musicological Paper Structures 101: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/10/musicological-paper-structures-101.html
• Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/managing-bibliography-through.html
• How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-to-jump-start-scholarly-article-plan.html
• The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-silence-of-not-writing-and-what-to.html
• Starting from a place of blah: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/12/starting-from-place-of-blah.html

 

The silence of the woods is full of noise

The woods are many things: peaceful, calming, multi-hued, and (in my memory) often silent. But that mental shorthand is a mistake. That forested silence only addresses the pleasurable absence of the sound-detritus of modern life. There are no car horns, no rumble of heating or cooling systems, no yakety yakety yak yak of too many people in too close proximity, no clacking keys, inspired or otherwise. In other words, the woods create the illusion of silence by taking away irritants.

Truth to tell, the thing my brain likes to encode as “silence” is anything but. There is, in the woods, a continuous burble of a stream. The crickets offer up a track of chirping, that sawing stridulation that calls to mates and forms the backdrop of dreamland.

Other night-noises abound as well. There’s the scream and then hoot of an owl noting its territory; the rustle of a mammalian something-or-other searching for a snack amidst the leaf-litter of the forest floor; the wit wit wit of a first bird at morning light. I listen to these noises, and translate them from the unexpected “what?” into the identified “oh, that.” These sounds bring the satisfaction of discovery, and yet they are quiet, ever so quiet, and in their quiet regularity they soothe.

What we (or at least I) think of as forest silence, then, is the absence of urban noise. It is also bound up in anticipatory listening. Was that the rumbling croak of frogs? The intermittent drops of dew from the treetops? The tap tap tap of water dribbling over an end-of-season waterfall?

Silence here is a coded word, speaking to peace as measured in slowed breathing -- the rise and fall of the backpacker at ease, sleeping perhaps more deeply than home bed and familiar surroundings allow. It is a word reflective of paced regularity, of less-familiar noises often repeated, assessed, and held in the translated understanding of thing-as-sound. By grappling with what a noise represents, we become comfortable with it, often to the point that it no longer registers.

What I recall, in my fecklessness, as silence, is instead the susuration of leaves, the murmers of small animals, the steady quiet systematic vamp-til-ready steady state of forest hum. It is, in other words, a low-level background that caresses and comforts my ears, accustomed as they are to the more penetrating sounds of urban existence.

Silence as golden? Not exactly. But forest as restorative, a living quiet that listens back? Absolutely!

Musicological Paper Structures 102

In Musicological Paper Structures 101, I introduced the idea of a paper template that I find helpful for my undergraduates. The first model could be summarized as the three-types-of-evidence model, with one section per evidence type.

There are several other approaches to writing with a template which can be useful, depending on topic. Most frequently, students respond to the problem driven outline, where defining the problem and resolving it is the story arc for the paper as a whole.

In this kind of paper, the intro sets out the problem and its significance, leading up to the presentation of the thesis. That’s a format that fits with a lot of pre-college writing instruction, and students seem comforted by its familiarity.

Next comes the lit review section. This, as I’ve said before, needs to demonstrate actual familiarity with what’s been done. In this context, I stress to students that they need to beware the temptation to rely over-much on the kind of wikipedia-like info dump in neutral voice. I’m looking for what threads they found compelling and which were troubling, provocative, or a complete snore.

I encourage judgment as they go: this article is radically over-reading the evidence; this is so boring that I could hardly keep my eyes open; that just never needs to see the light of day ever again. One doesn’t SAY that, at least not directly, but those underpinnings inform a lively assessment. “Scholar X argues that … Basing the entire premise on a short snippet from the documentary literature, however, distorts and and oversimplifies the broader interpretive context for…” Students love digging into what is great writing and what is just a pitiful excuse for ink. I’ve seen some truly lovely 19th-century style slams on the scholarship over the years of reading drafts.

In the problem-based paper, I find the recurring drumbeat model of writing to be helpful. Each paragraph (or at least every two) needs to tie explicitly back to the working premise. As I tell them, hand-hold the reader through your argument. Over-explain. We can always soften the argument if it’s overdone, but chances are, your quick-and-dirty reader will be grateful for the interpretive apparatus being so transparent!

If a student is interested, developing a counterargument and addressing it in the late stages of the paper can be helpful. “Some would argue… the evidence, however, suggests…” can be a nice way of tying a bow on the package, pinning down the validity of the thesis and bringing the argument into closure.

And then the conclusion, as I said last time, can address the so what, so what, now what of the argument. The so what underscores why the thesis/argument matters in its immediate context. The second so what situates the claim in a wider scholarly or cultural frame, showing its implications beyond the narrow case. The now what invites the reader to apply those insights elsewhere, whether by reconsidering related evidence, rethinking assumptions, or extending the method to a different repertoire or cultural context.

OTHER APPROACHES TO CONSIDER

If the thesis-driven structure appeals to students because of its familiarity, they may also be interested in other familiar but less-frequently prescribed approaches to their paper-writing. I have some examples which we sometimes riff on in class, what I can the rhetorical tricks of organization:

CAUSATIVE STORY: cause – manifestation – consequence
Lay out what sets things in motion, show how it appears in practice, then track the consequences that follow. This can be particularly effective for biographical or musical-analytical papers.

HISTORICAL STORY: origins – crisis – outcome
Start at the beginning, follow the disruption that shakes things up, and trace the resolution or transformation that results. This one, I find, is more risky. It’s tempting to default to assumptions of unproblematic linearity, where the author is invisible. Great for wikipedia; bad for situating oneself in the context of the scholarship. Still, carefully used, it has reader appeal.

ANALYTICAL STORY: structure – agency – interaction – result
Explain the framework (the how), identify the players (the who), analyze how they interact, and spell out what emerges. I like the way this invites the writer’s assessment of the material; it moves away from a temporal organization of first this, then that, then the next thing, and toward one that capitalizes on the author’s own interest in the material.

PARADIGM SHIFT: we thought – but now – that shows…
Highlight what everyone assumed, present the evidence that unsettles it, and show how the new perspective changes the conversation. Love these when they come together. It can be some of the hardest pre-writing work to do, but is often the simplest to turn into prose. This is inspired writing at its finest.

I INVENTED A THING:
Unveil your new model, show how it fits the data, and point to the fresh insights it unlocks. This has some overlap with the “paradigm shift” approach, in that the sense of ownership can be deeply satisfying.

CONCLUSION

There are, of course, plenty of other writing templates, but the idea of sharing these out loud is that each one acts like a container into which the writer can pour their writing. The goal is to provide a structure that fits the evidence and insights that come from personal (but research-informed) reflection, and to steer everyone, EVERYONE, away from the step-by-step account so familiar from Wikipedia. A template like those mentioned above isn’t meant to box the writer in. Instead, the framework actually gives creativity room in which to flourish.

In the end, paper structure is about helping prose flow out smoothly for the writer, unfolding is steady stages rather than one mad writing rush. At the same time, and equally importantly, such structures allow the story to land clearly for the reader, letting them follow an argument and discover what about it matters most.

RELATED POSTS

• Musicological Paper Structures 101: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/10/musicological-paper-structures-101.html
• Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/managing-bibliography-through.html
• How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-to-jump-start-scholarly-article-plan.html
• The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-silence-of-not-writing-and-what-to.html
• Starting from a place of blah: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/12/starting-from-place-of-blah.html

 

Musicological Paper Structures 101

In a discipline that recognizes that sonata form and all its nuances was a real and useful framework for composers, the need for teaching students how one can structure a paper should be obvious. It wasn’t part of my training, but working out an approach that lets me get the job done has been helpful, and I like to pass it along.

Is such a structure required? No, but it helps the writer to frame an argument, and the reader to digest it. My students have fared well with the template (I’ve had students take a writing prize each of the last five years), and I share the model here in hopes it is useful.

START: BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SCHOLARLY CONTEXT

The big question at the start of any paper is: who am I in conversation with? In my classroom, that driver amounts to having undergraduates – yes, undergraduates – check out about 25 to 30 sources. Do they read them all? Heavens no! But they assess them using AIC reading, focusing on abstract, introduction, and conclusion. I always give them an option of managing by spreadsheet, which is what I often do with my own bibliography. About half of them take me up on it, and they tell me they find the practice useful.

At any rate, using their bibliographic overview of the field, the intro sets up the backdrop to why the work is important, and how it fits into the broader scholarly context.

CONTINUE: DATA SECTIONS

Then there are the data sections. Sometimes students use a couple of different methods; other times, there is one batch of information but it’s explored at length, adding nuance as the paper progresses. A story might help illustrate the point, or not. The student might want to pick up a counterargument. Or not. In other words, the framing is flexible, and fields can be reordered (as the arrows suggest), but it takes the reader from what’s been said (in the field), to some new ways (plural) to think about it, to a conclusion that helps us understand “what it all means,” as my students like to say.

CONCLUDE: SO WHAT, SO WHAT, NOW WHAT

There are many ways to wrap up a paper, of course. One is to talk about who should care. Another is to review the skeleton and then "hang some flesh" on it in terms of its broader implications. One of the easiest strategies for concluding is often the "so what, so what, now what" conclusion. So what did all of this mean? So what does that tell us? Now what should we do/think/say differently? In other words, go to what the implications are, or where the conversation could and should go next, or how the insights might be applied in a different context. It doesn’t have to be big or world-shaking, but it helps the reader walk away with a sense of why the paper was worth reading and where their curiosity might lead them next.

Start of the first of Beethoven's Razumovsky Quartets, Op 59 No 1

 CASE STUDY: BEETHOVEN

Think, for example, about Beethoven and deafness. There’s a lot of info out there, but a student who’s been trained in hearing-inclusive techniques could do a lot with the topic. (Drawing on personal/professional expertise is a useful way to find something new to say!). The student could talk about the contrasts of 18th/19th c ideas of deafness with present day practice (data set one). They might then move to the specific detail of, say, the Rasumovsky quartets in a hearing environment, comparing then and now (nuance to the argument).

For section 3 of the paper they could, for instance, turn to their own insights to discuss how players negotiate hearing-inclusive demands (balance, visual cues, tactile feedback). Or, section 3 could look at how narratives about Beethoven’s deafness shape interpretation of the Razumovsky quartets in liner notes, and how those narratives draw in medicalized or heroic tropes. Or… well, there are lots of directions to go.

WHY THIS KIND OF FORMAT / PAPER MODEL IS USEFUL 

The point is that this kind of structured writing helps a student to mentally break out their work into sections. It is hard – nigh on impossible! -- to “write a paper,” but to write a paragraph or a section is in the doable realm. Don't write the whole sonata, start with the first theme.

As I’ve said many a time before, little by little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done.

I’ll post on other paper strategies in another few days, but for now, I should go tend to my own writing practice and get at least “a little” of that done before dinner.

Happy writing, everyone!

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RELATED POSTS

• Managing Bibliography By Spreadsheet: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/04/managing-bibliography-through.html
• How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-to-jump-start-scholarly-article-plan.html
• The Silence of Not-Writing – and What To Do About It: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-silence-of-not-writing-and-what-to.html
• Starting from a place of blah: https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/12/starting-from-place-of-blah.html

Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein

Bells, chants, prayers, the scrape of chairs at table, the hum of a vacuum, the splash of a sink being plunged: the soundscape of Goldenstein Cloister is equal parts liturgy and daily life. Layer onto that the laughter of eighty-something sisters sharing coffee, the creak of a chairlift, the slap of running shoes from Sister Rita’s daily 5K after prayer, and you begin to hear what’s at stake in Austria right now.

The Augustinian choir women of Goldenstein had spent their lives in this convent—decades of vows that they believed bound the Church as much as themselves. And then, dissolution. Closure. The doors shut on their home, the place where they had lived out obedience, prayer, and community. Their leader called it a “necessary act of care.” But care for whom? Care, in this telling, seems less about human dignity and more about ease of management. (There may be a plausible “other side” to the story, but when your church leader argues that orthopedic shoes are a violation of the vow of poverty, somebody hasn’t thought about how decisions about elders read in the broader universe.)

What these sisters assert is simple and radical: their vows were two-way. The Church has responsibilities here. And the sisters and their supporters are claiming them.The three Augustinian sisters—Rita, Bernadette, and Regina—repossessed their cloister earlier this month. That sparked a cascade of attention: a podcast episode, a BBC story, Guardian coverage, and a flourishing Instagram feed that pairs black-and-white habits with splashes of bright flowers and cheerful captions in German and English.

What I hear in all this isn’t only the sound of bells or the chant of the office. It’s the sound of determination, of voices raised in defense of their rights, of a community that has chosen to rally around them. On-site helpers showed up with brooms and mops to scrub the convent back into habitability. Supporters—English and German alike—comment on their posts, write emails, show up at Mass. And even when there is no priest to say Mass, the sisters sing the rosary together, because prayer continues regardless of who is willing to stand at the altar.

Why bring this story here?

First: because it’s a rare window into monastic life today, with all its joy, grit, and creativity.

Second: because some of you may want to follow them online or even donate. They’re @nonnen_goldenstein on Instagram, and their captions read like tiny table-prayers, interspersed with photos of a community refusing to fade quietly away.

Third: because it’s a living parable of resistance. For those of us who study monastic history, it’s not every day that we get a real-life #NunsOnTheRun story unfolding in our time. These sisters have claimed their right to remain, to pray, to belong. The least we can do is listen, and perhaps add our voices in support.

Their own social media team has a bouquet of hashtags: #nunsontherun #goldenstein #augustinerchorfrauen #churchfluencer #nonnen #klosterleben #elsbethen #fyp #gästebuch #guestbook #willkommen #youarewelcome. Give them a follow. Raise up your voice for the dignity and self-determination of those who have faithfully served. Support their renewed convent soundscape. After all, the soundscape of Goldenstein is not just liturgy or rebellion—it’s the sound of life insisted upon, carried forward, and sung into being.

RESOURCES: 

Bethany Bell, “Defiant nuns flee care home for their abandoned convent in the Alps,” BBC, 12 September 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y8r2gk0vyo

Kate Connelly, “‘We were obedient our entire lives’: the nuns who broke back into their convent,” The Guardian, 26 Sept 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/26/we-were-obedient-our-entire-lives-the-nuns-who-broke-back-into-their-convent

Kloster Goldenstein: 

• Instagram Account: @nonnen_goldenstein, https://www.instagram.com/nonnen_goldenstein/
• Their gofundme is at https://gofund.me/6f2f1838c 
• A taste of their community worship: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPGUpStCADw/
• Convent website: https://goldenstein.cc/

Asian Sojourn 3: Living in Sacred Space – Kathmandu

My morning walks in Kathmandu (taken back in June 2025) had me thinking a lot about the ways in which spaces become sacred. Every fifth building seemed to be a temple or a stupa, and as I said before, my hotel window opened out onto the Atko Narayan Temple, and there was a ceremony there on Wednesday of my visit.

As a first-time visitor to Kathmandu, I would get up many a morning (yay, jetlag?) and walk around the Durbar Square complex, enjoying the sleepy pigeons and ringing of bells, or wander through the streets enjoying the mix of architecture, the bustle of cleaning and setting up for the day, and the visible and audible practice of faith. I peered through at many a Bahal courtyard, those monastic courtyards with small shrines, and went into a few if they weren’t a center of activity. I tried to remain unobtrusive, but also was drawn to the beauty and to the demonstrated care for this overlap of public space and private belief.

Offerings of flowers and food, the ringing of bells, the tidying of shrines, the singing in group or alone: all these activities seemed integrated into a day, suggesting a much more physically engaged religion than the more staid practices of my Christian Science grandparents or my Lutheran inlaws. Likewise, the intermixture of regular housing, active business, and spots inviting active devotion is compressed relative to urban landscapes I regularly inhabit. That meant that cooking and commerce rubbed elbows with sacred practices, reminding me how thin the boundary might be between ordinary routine and spiritual gesture. I wonder if medieval practices of faith, before the emergence of confessional concerns, might have been just as colorful, as sound-based, and as kinetic as what I experienced in Kathmandu. Was Bregenz like this, a mix of street cleaning, setting up stalls with vegetables from the farms uphill, bells and clatter and clamour all mixing in with the chants of the hours and the calls of hopeful merchants? It would have been lively, if so!

The infrastructure of Kathmandu also strikes a notable contrast with the more familiar streets of Nashville. Transport is, as the tourist guidebooks remind us, often done in human-powered vehicles, whether that’s of people or of packages. Overloaded bikes like the one below impressed the stuffing out of me; I’m hard put to bike myself up a hill let alone contemplate carrying a bunch of packages. Not shown is the time we saw two people on a bike, the one in front balancing what was clearly a flat screen TV in its box. Holy moly! And then there’s the wiring. Yes, we did experience power outages. With that wiring spaghetti, it’s a wonder that there was power at all! 

But one cannot subsist on the sacred alone, and I’d like to give a shout-out to Kathmandu’s food scene.

I mentioned the Ginger Cafe, but I also got my share of street food and momos. I never did find my way back to the best shop, but everywhere I stopped, I always found the food fresh and the stall-owners friendly, forgiving of my linguistic inabilities. Momos are the easiest food the first time out (not only my first meal but my most frequent!), but the fried breakfast breads – and especially the Jeri Swari – were a special treat. Jeri Swari is cool: the “Jeri” is a deep-fried, sugar-coated flour batter which is shaped into intricate loops or coils and fried until crispy, then soaked in saffron-infused syrup. The “Swari” part is a flatbread which is both a wrapper and the justification: “I’m an adult eating a real breakfast and not just chowing down on a honey-delivery system.”

Watching your food being made is a delicious way to start any day. It’s also a reminder that in Kathmandu, even everyday meals are carefully crafted. The generosity and care of the cooks are as much a part of the experience as are the flavors themselves.

Attention filtering – the voluntary earlid

An auditory distraction — a crying baby, a ringing phone — hits like a punch to the gut, instantly demanding our attention. But recent studies by Mandal and colleagues (2024) suggest that our minds may be better shielded than we think.

They introduce the idea of an “attentional earlid.” Just as eyelids can open and shut to regulate what reaches our eyes, our attention seems to have a mental earlid that blocks irrelevant sounds from interfering with other tasks.

To test this, Mandal’s team asked participants to do visual puzzles while irrelevant sounds — simple, pure sine-wave beeps — popped up in the background. These weren’t meaningful noises like a person’s name or an odd sound that stood out in context; they were deliberately boring. Surprisingly, the beeps didn’t slow people down or cause mistakes. In the face of noise, the earlid held.

But there was a catch. When the task included listening — for example, counting the number of time a particular sound occurred — the earlid opened, and the irrelevant beeps slipped in, pulling at attention. In other words, if your ears are already opened, stray noises evidently sneak through on the same pathway.

This fits with broader psychological findings: our brain has limited channels of processing, a bit like trying to carry too many grocery bags. Perceptual load theory (Lavie 1995 is the classic work) says we only have so much capacity. Mandal’s earlid idea adds another layer: when sound isn’t part of the job, our brains can shut the door on irrelevant auditory clutter altogether.

That has real consequences for musicological me. Much of my work relies on listening-as-study, but the background noise in our in-town property hovers around 70 dB. Out on the farm, on the other hand, it drops to the 30s or 40s (unless the turkeys are quarreling). Thus, in town, my earlids have to contend with a flood of competing input. At home, the quiet of the countryside acts like a protective layer, letting my attention settle on the music.

So here’s my observation: if the earlid is about shutting a door and closing off the sound entirely, then quiet spaces might work more like sound-glasses: they cut the glare of unwanted noise so my ears can adjust to what matters most. That may explain why listening at home, in relative silence, always seems to lead to better prep for the deeper analysis and meaning-making than the work I do later on campus. (Huh. I’d always just chalked it up to the distractions of a peopled landscape once I got to my office.)

I’ll have to think about this more; I’ve mentioned in other earlid posts that in my own musical-listening practice, I see a linkage of left-brain intellectual processing and right-brain beauty-finding as a strong sound filtering mechanism. The rest of the world can fall away when I’m working in my musico-analytical space, and even Mandal’s content disruption – my name – can miss my attention on-ramp. (Sorry, kids!) I’m not yet sure whether I think that’s an “attentional earlid” or a “sound-glasses” type phenomenon – or a third thing altogether.

At any rate, today’s browsing in the literature was a bit dismaying to my prejudices. Maybe, just maybe, those noise-canceling headphones y’all carry around are actually important as tools to help manage both attention earlids and sound-glasses. If so, they could be essential, if unstylish, accessories for those thinking tasks that occupy my days.

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REFERENCES:

• Cyrus, Cynthia. “I am (not) a crocodile: Earlids and the thinking person” [Blog post]. Silences and Sounds, 15 Nov 2024, https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2024/11/i-am-not-crocodile-earlids-and-thinking.html.
• Lavie, N. 1995: Lavie, Nilli. “Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21/3 (1995): 451–468. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.21.3.451
• Mandal 2024a: Mandal, A., Liesefeld, A. M., & Liesefeld, H. R. “The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 50/1 (2024): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001168
• Mandal 2024b: Mandal, Ananya, Jan Philipp Röer, and Heinrich R. Liesefeld. “Auditory Distractors Are Processed but Do Not Interfere with Visual Search of Any Difficulty When Sound Is Irrelevant.” Visual Cognition 32/9–10 (2024): 1067–83. doi:10.1080/13506285.2024.2397825.

  
  

The Perfect Time to Write

Are you caught in the trap of waiting for the perfect time to write? If so, I have bad news. The perfect time to write is now. Really. Just open up your document (or grab your notebook) and commit words.

Curiously, the words you commit don’t actually have to be on your project. The thing you need to do is break the impasse.

Sitting there fretting about writing isn’t helping.

Waiting for the right mood isn’t helping.

Cleaning your kitchen isn’t helping either, though that, at least, has some long-term benefit.

What WILL help is actually breaking into prose-generating phase. Get some words down. They can even be words on a side project.

And then, once you have words going, flip to that thing that you thought you were going to spend your morning on.

And write.

That’s what I’m going to do… because as I already told you,

THE PERFECT TIME TO WRITE IS NOW.

 

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For other suggestions on jump-starting your writing, see:

• The Silence of Not Writing
• Starting from a Place of Blah
• How to Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan

An indulgence prayer for Mary of Swords

The Thalbach Prayerbook is not a tidy manuscript. It isn’t richly illuminated, and its pages don’t draw they eye with color and beauty the way we’ve come to expect from early modern devotional books. Instead, it is a deeply personal collection: copied mostly by a single female scribe in the late sixteenth century, filled with vernacular prayers and translated services, and clearly designed to sustain the “poor sinner” (sündarin) who gathered them together. Its very roughness makes it valuable, because it gives us a glimpse into the lived devotional practices of Bregenz during the Counter-Reformation.

One of the striking texts is the prayer to Mary as the "Schmertzensmutter"—the Mother of Sorrows (fols. 90–92). The opening strophe lingers on Simeon’s prophecy in Luke 2:25–35, where the aged prophet meets the infant Jesus in the temple. He declares that the child will be “a sign from God, but many will oppose him,” and warns Mary that “a sword will pierce your very soul.” The text imagines Mary’s dread at hearing this prediction,and repeatedly asks Mary to help the devotee share in the pain of various stages of her story of loss.

This prayer is, to my eye, particularly important in the context of the prayerbook as a whole because it echoes the woodcut chosen as paste-down at the very front of the volume: Mary’s heart being pierced by multiple swords, a visual shorthand for the Seven Sorrows. Its placement is also telling—it appears as a single but extended prayer between two Marian services, following the Advent offices and preceding the standard weekday prayers to the Virgin. In other words, we encounter it within a systematized framework of devotion. That element of ritual repetition is reinforced internally by its structure: every strophe ends with the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria.

From there, the prayer walks through key moments of Mary’s suffering: losing the child Jesus in the temple, seeing him bound and beaten, watching him hoisted on the cross, and cradling him in death. The language is tender and anguished, but it is also functional. The prayer-giver suggests in strophe 3, for instance, that just as Mary sorrowed over Jesus’s captivity as he was beaten, she can help “protect me from the wickedness and vice of the evil spirit” (behalt mich vor der boßhait und läster der bößen gaist). Because Mary’s sorrows mirror the devotee’s struggles, empathy itself becomes salvific – a way to transform suffering into protection against evil.

What’s especially interesting to me in this context is the prayer’s ending. The penultimate strophe focuses on the individual, asking Mary to intercede for my most earnest soul and to help in “all my pain”, but the final petitions widen out to the collective: “release us from all our afflictions.”

du behaltest mynaller ermeste sel / … yn alem mynen schmerzen... // ... von aller unser trübsäl erlöß uns

This shift from “me” to “us” happens frequently in the Thalbach collection—by my impression, in about a third of the prayers. It suggests to me a devotional rhythm where private petition blends into communal concern, aligning the voice of an individual sinner with her monastic responsibilities to the wider prayer community. She’s praying for herself, in other words, but that prayer also addresses the needs of her peersbe they fellow monastics, fellow residents of Bregenz, or, as sometimes specified, “all believing souls.”

This prayer reinforces that shift from the personal to the communal intervention, for it is capped by a Collect that places Mary firmly in her intercessory role. The collect appeals to her “eingebornen Sohn”—her only-begotten Son—for mercy. In this way, the swords that pierce Mary’s heart do double duty: they are emblems of her individual grief, but also reminders that suffering binds a community together. The Thalbach Prayerbook, however humble in appearance, is saturated with this kind of imagery. Mary of Sorrows emerges as both intimate companion in suffering and powerful advocate before Christ, her pierced heart a channel through which the afflictions of “me” and “us” alike might be transformed.

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:

I follow the (highly) idiosyncratic spellings of the source, but supply punctuation in my translations.

RESOURCES:

• Indulgence Prayer ...von dem schwert des scharffen todes dines kind criste [INC: ge[g]rütz sÿestu ain müter Jesu crist EXPL: so befiechen mir uns verschmäch nit unser gebett yn unser nottürfigkait aber von aller unser trübsäll erlöß uns du gesegnet Junckfrow maria amen.], from the Thalbach Prayerbook, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek Hs 17, fol. 90-92.
• For a review of another prayer from the Thalbach Prayerbook, see https://silencesandsounds.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-verbal-vocative-change-ringing.html

Among the many studies of the Seven Sorrows, see:

• Cynthia J. Cyrus, “Printed Images in a Thalbach Manuscript Prayer-book of the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the Early Book Society 23 (2020): 173–82.

• Dagmar Eichberger, “Visualizing the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Early Woodcuts and Engravings in the Context of Netherlandish Confraternities,” in The Seven Sorrows Confraternity of Brussels: Drama, Ceremony, and Art Patronage (16th–17th Centuries), ed. Emily Thelen, Studies in European Urban History 37 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), 113–143.

• Christiane Möller, Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen und Doen Pietersz: Studien zur Zusammenarbeit zwischen Holzschneider und Drucker im Amsterdam des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Niederlande-Studien 34 (New York: Waxmann Verlag, 2005).

• Carol M. Schuler, “The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin: Popular Culture and Cultic Imagery in Pre-Reformation Europe,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 21 (1992):5–28.

• Carol M. Schuler, “The Sword of Compassion: Images of the Sorrowing Virgin in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art,” PhD diss, Columbia University, 1987.