Earlids of the early 1900s (11/21/2024)

Earlids of the early 1900s (with image of an ear)

The question of earlids being on my mind, and the airport being boring so boring, I decided to troll around the historical corpus of writings and see what earlids meant to the world before R Murray Schafer brought them to our habits of modern thought. I have five examples for today’s post, each doing something different.

EDISON – EARLIDS AS CONCENTRATION
The first is an anecdote about Thomas Edison. Many of us remember that he had been made partially deaf by maltreatment – a box to the ears from which he never fully recovered.

In our “earlid” anecdote, the interviewer asks Edison about his deafness, and he (like my exam-taking sister of my earlier earlid post) finds the concentration that partial deafness affords to be a strength. He’s asked if he plans to take the surgery which medical wisdom of the day thought would provide a “cure.” His response? “What! And give up the great advantage I have over the rest of you fellows!”

The interviewer then opines: there is a strong need, he thinks, for earlids as well as eyelids in this world.

In this world, then, earlids provide a form of concentration. They’re akin to headphones, filtering out the irrelevant so one can think one’s thoughts in peace.

TELEPHONE – EARLIDS AS SHUTTERS
Another take comes from the same journal, responding to the new technology:

This telephone business brings out strongly another of those little defects in the design of the human body which are becoming apparent nowadays. The ear is an exceedingly intricate and generally satisfactory piece of apparatus, but it was its limitations. Occasion has been taken before to speak of the regrettable absence of earlids for the shutting out of unpleasant sounds. The man at the telephone to whom some one else is trying to speak at the same time suddenly discovers that although he has two ears they will not work separately. It looks like a waste of natural material for a man to have two ears and to be obliged to listen with both at once. How much better it would be if he could listen to the telephone with one and take in conversations in his immediate neighborhood with the other!

So, if earlids could shut out unwanted sounds, we could use them to mute the external world while we communed on the telephone. Of course, here a century later, that’s such a habit that it’s now practically invisible. The anonymous observer of the earlier 20th century had a better outcome in mind, though: wouldn’t it be better if we could listen to two conversations at once? (I suspect that our Gen-Z colleagues would think that under-ambitious! So much swiping! So many intersecting worlds! So many simultaneous windows open!)

GOSSIP – EARLIDS AS A MORAL TOOL
Medical doctor and essayist George Abbott, on the other hand, is thinking about earlids as a doctor’s tool – to handle preventative moral intervention. In a column devoted primarily to the glass dropper method of cleansing the ear with enzymol, he tells a story about earlids that he suggests be shared with the child patient. Two college co-eds were talking, and one asked the other, “would it not be fine if there were earlids as well as eyelids? Then when anyone said anything against one, they could shut their earlids.” Her interlocutor is having none of it: “yes, but who’d shut them?” We’re nosy, in other words, we want to know.  

Ah, Abbott encourages us, the skillful doctor could then use this story to reinforce the important moral lesson: the pus he’s cleaning out with the enzymol is not as poisonous as vile stories, and the caring doctor should thus tell the child: stay clean and pure; close your earlids against gossip. To him, pretending you have earlids is the moral choice. He wants his colleagues to share both story and lesson, because a doctor is like a godfather to the child. He’s bowing to Ovid’s discussion of rumor (Metamorphoses, Bk XII), of course, and for him, earlids (Ovid’s closed doors on the threshold) are about ignoring “vile stories” and tending only to good and moral thoughts.

BABIES AND THE ABSENCE OF EARLIDS (Saleeby’s theory of 1905) – EARLIDS AND URBAN NOISE, EARLIDS AND EVOLUTION
A surprisingly influential observation about the human absence of earlids was made by eugenicist and physician Caleb W. Saleeby. Two years before he helped to launch the Eugenics Education Society (yeah, ick), he had already developed a popular presence in the press with his medical opinings. One of them, that received quite a few follow-ups, was an essay that investigated (and I use that term loosely) why it is that humans lack earlids:

For sleep it is desirable to exclude light and sound: but whilst we have eyelids, no apparatus for closing the ears is known save, I believe, in certain animals which inhabit the sea, and whose ears are of small auditory importance. In these days, when barrel organs assail us with the “Ave Maria,” playing Bach’s accompaniment in G and Gounod’s air in somewhat more than G, and when the motor car makes night hideous, one sighs for earlids.

And I have even wondered why natural selection has not so endowed us: for it might seem an advantage to be able at will to protect one’s nervous system from sound as from light.But it occurred to me that I had not appreciated the significance of the “infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry” – crying, however, not for the light but for its food. It would be a sorry business if a child had to rely for its nocturnal refreshment upon the willingness and ability of its mother to keep awake, or to waken spontaneously when wanted. This, perhaps, may partially explain our deprivation of earlids.

Crocodilian researchers would protest at the characterization of their field as “small auditory importance” since, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the excellence of hearing, its tracking ability which has proven to include directional hearing via pressure differential in the middle ear cavities – which is cool! A single alligator ear can tell direction! Wow! (Bierman et al. 2014).

But also, Saleeby gives us context. We want earlids because of urban noise, and that noise is defined in part in musical terms – the oppression of an out-of-tune barrel organ playing a too-popular hit – and then in technological ones, with the nighttime noise of that newfangled automobile a contributor to what we moderns might call noise rot – the ugly deterioration of a once pristine soundscape.

And why don’t we have them? Because mothers need to tend to crying babies. It’s an adaptive trait, he’s claiming, to not be able to shut out noise at night.

Of course, people pushed back on his claims of sleep; his notion that humans only indulged in surface sleep is easily debunked, and his gendering of the nighttime-listening claims are equally fraught. But one didn’t need evidence to be influential, and that influence even made its way across the channel into France.

PARIS 1907: EARLIDS, URBAN NOISE,  AND THE LUDDITE PERSPECTIVE
In a short column for The Musical Courier, an anonymous essayist picks up Saleeby’s complaints about urban noise. In doing so, he evokes “the agitation over here [Paris] on the noises of cities,” and claims that concern about these intruding noises “has reached a point of insisting upon official investigation.” We’re in crisis because, he points out, “The automobile and the motor-bus are not respecters of the public ear.” Once upon a time, the horse car ran with “a minimum of noise,” but now all those modern inventions are a hazard, “both as to dust and to noise.” The essayist notes that there’s been scientific investigation of the sanitary aspects of noise, and calls (sensibly) for tires that will minimize noise in the landscape, but he’s also quick to jump to the “nervous ailment” that is the result of all that newfangled stuff. Our health is at risk from all these infernal machines.

The author cites Saleeby by name (and preaches his brand of evolutionary thinking), but is perhaps a bit more nuanced (or more aware of others’ critiques about sleep) than was Saleeby himself. The Musical Courier correspondent reminds the reader that the noise “of the ‘bus, of the elevated, of the milk cart, of the rumbling coal cart, can be dismissed by the mother and will not affect her sleep, but only a movement, a change in the rhythm of the breath of the baby, and she is awake.”  We can tune out the systematic background noise, but the unexpected or the worrisome sound will intrude and poke us awake by way of our sense of hearing.

What the author does do that is important (and approved by OSHA, I’m sure!) is to consider the way in which urban noise might impact the musician. The delicacy of the musical ear, he claims, and especially its need to differentiate “infinitesimal tonal allusions,” is at risk by all this landscape noise. Even talking loudly can lead to the “corruption” of the listening faculty. How much more dangerous is that “havoc” from the technological noises descending “into the streets and roads every day.” This is at heart a Luddite perspective; the new technology is bad and damaging, and we should do what we can to shut it down. The early call in the essay for better tires (that would make less noise) gives way for an imagined future of air travel, the “only relief” that the writer can imagine.

(He’d clearly never yet heard an airplane’s roar! On the early development of flight in Europe, see https://applications.icao.int/postalhistory/aviation_history_early_developments_in_europe.htm. The air is imagined more as a hot-air balloon kind of space than one with motors and engines to clutter up the soundwaves. Oh, the irony of thinking about this in an airport context! Sooooo much noise!)

I spend time on the Musical Courier essay because it does raise the issue of soundscape in the context of the earlid theme that’s got my attention at the moment. This author positions the earlid as a kind of Luddite tool, one that could have blocked technological noises specifically, not just urban ones. He isn’t interested in blocking out “unwanted” noise, but rather the damaging noises that come from these newly invented tools that are overrunning the landscape. Motors cause noise and dust. The practical solution is to investigate and regulate them; the fantastical solution is to invent our way out of the damaging sound-moment in history. This isn’t pure Luddite --there’s perhaps a salvic capacity in technology of the far future – but it’s at the least a technology-resistant perspective. Motors here are all noise and no benefit, and their appeal is invisible. We are left to their noisy consequences.

CONCLUSION
These five glimpses of earlids from the first decade of the twentieth century are interesting to me for several reasons. 

First, the conceptual notion of the earlid is clearly in the early twentieth-century conversation; it’s coming up in engineering, in medicine, and in music. That cross-disciplinarity suggests the power of metaphor as meme, spreading and shaping thinking of the period. (Thank you Peter Bailey 1996 -- important legwork on how to think about such things in history!) 

Second, the multivalency of earlids is important too, for they are at once moral filters and anti-technology assessments, a screening tool or a focusing one. They – in their absence -- are even read as an evolutionary tool. The earlid as a point of reference shows the crossover of various strains of thought in a time of intellectual ferment. 

Third, these imagined earlids reflect early 20th-century anxieties about controlling soundscapes and are in a way a precursor to today’s focus on noise-canceling technologies. We have headphones and those little foam dispensaries in libraries and at construction sites; we practice mindfulness and build apps that let us move away mentally from noise and chaos to at least an inner stillness. They had words, and complaint processes, and regulations, and essays. But what is clear to me from the earlid discussions then and now is that we all share a concern about the soundscapes we inhabit.

A BRIEF EARLID BIBLIOGRAPHY

1900s literature on Earlids, a sampling:

•  [Anon.] “Reflections: On Paris, London, Nordica and Mahler.” The Musical Courier No. 1424 (July 10, 1907): 5.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on Edison].” Electrical Review 38 No. 17 (April 27, 1901): 520.
•  [Anon.] “Views, News and Interviews [on the telephone].” Electrical Review 38 No. 26 (May 18, 1901): 626.
•  Abbott, George E. “The Doctor and the Child.” The Southern California Practitioner 22 (1907): 15.
•  Saleeby, C.W. “Helpless Infancy.” The Academy (28 Jan 1905): 87.

Soundscape Readings on Earlids:

•  Bailey, Peter. "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise," Body & Society, 2(2) (1996): 49-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X96002002003
•  McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (1967/r2001) – on earlids, see p. 111
•  Myers, David G. A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss (2000)
•  Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape (1977/r1994) – see p. 11 on earlids.

Crocodylians and their Earlids, a small sampling:

• Bierman, H. S., Thornton, J. L., Jones, H. G., Koka, K., Young, B. A., Brandt, C., Christensen-Dalsgaard, J., Carr, C. E., & Tollin, D. J. “Biophysics of directional hearing in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” The Journal of Experimental Biology, 217.7 (2014): 1094. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.092866.
• Montefeltro, F. C., Andrade, D. V., & E. Larsson, H. C. “The evolution of the meatal chamber in crocodyliforms.” Journal of Anatomy, 228.5 (2016): 838-863. https://doi.org/10.1111/joa.12439
• Wever, E. G. “Hearing in crocodilia.” Protocols of the National Academy of Science, 68.7, (1971): 1498–1500.

19th Century poetic earlids and the Ovid rumor-mill:

• Henry, James. “It is just in Heaven to favor so the eyes.” [Poem written while walking from Revere to Verona, July 22 and 23, and in Dresden, Oct. 22, 1865]. Menippea. Dresden: C.C. Meinhold & Sons, 1866, p. 213-14. https://books.google.com/books?id=4G1MAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA213
• Ovid Metamorphoses, vol. 2, transl. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library  (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926): vol. 2, pp. 184-185.

 

Manipulations of reality’s sounds: Drever on Soundscape Composition (11/6/24)

A Venn diagram of soundscape and ethnography with interpretation & soundscape compositions in the middle

Drever, John Levack. “Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music.” Organised Sound, 7 ((2002): 21-27. doi:10.1017/S1355771802001048 

Thinking about nature films and their scores and sounds reminded me of the Drever article from 2002, where he makes the case that ethnography and soundscape composition for a kind of Venn diagram. Okay, okay, that’s reductive, but memory latches on to simple solutions. 

Soundscape composition, in brief, uses noises from nature as a significant element in the compositional palette, manipulating recorded sounds or their electronically-generated equivalents to evoke a sense of place – in situ (as with sound-sculpture or sound installation) or as a re-creation or reminder of a place, real or imagined. (Hildegard Westerkamp’s "Kits Beach Soundwalk" (1989) interlays natural sounds with an interpretive text, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk). 

Drever wants us to think about Soundscape composition as more than just sonic tourism. Since he believes that a significant element of soundscape is “the way it is perceived and understood by an individual or by a society,” he’s interested in drawing out that sense of meaning. 

As a result, to qualify as “good” (my label) soundscape music, soundscape must be the driver at both the deep and the surface level of the composition. That is, it’s not enough to signal the twittering of birds, but there needs to be a form-based intentionality to how the environment intersects with its musical response. Best, he says, is when the work enhances our understanding of the world. 

The composer must interpret and represent sounds in ways that respect the original environment--and also (he suggests) the original listeners' experiences. Drawing on Steven Feld’s 1994 study of Papau New Guinea and that society’s vocal mimicry of bird song as communication, he argues that since both ethnography and soundscape thinking approach their environment from the inside, a compositional response might be a useful representation of an ethnographer’s understanding of sound in a culture. Privileging that original meaning means that interpretation needs as much attention as aesthetics in the finished work. 

Drever’s argument has been widely cited, but I was surprised on this reading that it didn’t help me much with my own thinking. Perhaps the arguments from 20 years ago have simply become commonplace. Of course I respect and want to understand the meanings the nuns of Thalbach (in Bregenz) assigned to the sounds that they heard. The chronicle account (in Ch 28) of the windstorm that trapped sister Margretha Schmidin as she was crossing the bridge on a wagon, and her three-fold recitation of the rosary as thanksgiving for her rescue when the wagon tipped draws attention both to nature and to prayer as ambient experiences. The noise and bluster, the confrontation with the cart-driving farmer and his wife, the articulated plea before the crossing and the thanksgiving prayers afterwards: each bead in her story (as told by the Chroniclist) is situated in a multisensory world. But I am not drawn to reconstruction in a compositionally creative sense; I’m not sure how that work would advance my understanding in any meaningful way. I suppose that’s because I carry the sounds of a storm, or a plea, or a prayer in my head, and create that internal soundtrack in the imagined recreation as I read (and then remember). I can open a YouTube tab and sample such things if I need; and my readers can too. 

So my take-away is: I think we may have moved beyond that moment as our soundworld has shifted so strongly to that digitally archived space, and I think I might have more luck with sound and memory than sound and composition. But I suspect that we had to read cases like Drever’s for thinking interpretively about soundscapes before we could get to a place where they are perhaps a given of our discussion.

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

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/