A 3-way Venn diagram of Individual, Sound and Environment
Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece.
Every place, argues Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou (2007), has its own distinctive sound picture. That is, it had a unique identity, “not only in terms of geography or physical-temporal aspects, but also in its acoustic properties.”
In their map of understanding (Fig. 1), the individual intersects directly with sound through meaning-making and can also listen and/or emit, shaping sound as it exists. Sound likewise interacts with the environment through coloration and direct/reflected sound. Thus, the three worlds interact with sound as one of the mediators of the individual’s relationship to the broader environment. That is, the “inner reality – inner sounds, thoughts, feelings and memory,” as Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou put it, takes in environmental information through sound.
Figure 1: Sound as Meter, derived by Cynthia Cyrus from Stratoudakis and Papadimitriou (2007)
This is an interesting point, since the shape of experience AS memory is heavily dependent on sensory memory. I wrote recently about the memory of a 1614 snowball fight and of the 13th feet of snow of one terrible winter that Sister Anna Wittweilerin attests to in her Tagebuch (absorbed later in the Thalbach Convent Chronicle). (Sister Anna Wittweilerin Looks Up)
As we follow her memory (Thalbach Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625), we actually superimpose sound details without her naming them. We can imagine the “thwuck” of a snowball thrown and successfully landed on its target; we can hear in our inner soundtrack the laughter of the sisters engaging in a bout of unusually fine fun. I can hear the clucking hens, their day disturbed by the unusual activity, and perhaps a single rooster crow to establish inner territory within the hen-house while the outer world manifests these unusual games and noises. I imagine the trees whispering off to the right of the convent yard in the hillside between them and the parish church as the inevitable winter breeze rolls down the afternoon mountainside. And we know from experience that the broader landscape would be hushed, since snow deadens sound. All of these elements were present in my inner landscape as I read Wittweilerin’s passage, though she uses no sound words at all. Her nouns – snow, snowball, hen-yard – become my soundtrack through an associative linkage of my own inner memories of these things.
My projection of this past environment, in other words, DOES appear to be mediated in part by sound-memory as well as by the convent sister’s narrative. Readers bring their own experiences to the things they are reading; that includes their own experiences of sound-as-mediator.
The second big contribution that Stratoudakis & Papdimitriou make is to model one approach to considering sound. Since “soundscape is an ever-changing version of a given environment [and thus] presents great spatio-temporal variability,” they provide a model for considering changes over time. They ask that we consider sampling positions as well as recording periods. For them, sound (and its attributes), space (geographical coordinates) and time (annual and daily cycles) are the three main elements for describing a soundscape. They suggest a day divided into three hour chunks, and consider a variety of individual parameters.
They also caution that one should note “places of particular geo-morphological interest.” The gurgling stream, for instance, that is close to Thalbach’s back property in summertime, would shape the soundscape as a kind of acoustical dent (or would it be hill?), a natural feature that would deform the experience of other sounds as its summer-time omnipresence shades and colors the other sounds in its proximity.
Measures from their study that could be particular useful for other projects (like my own) are these:
Source (bird, frog, car…)
Area sampled
Timestamp
Origin: biological, geological, anthropological
Meaning: background, foreground
I gave some thought to those measures as I trod through graveyards on my research trip. Birds: check. Crickets: Also check. Stream: Yep. Fountain: noted. Bell peals: Cool, I mean, yep. Cars are, of course, historical anachronisms, but they function too as a reminder that the wagons and carts of former time should be accounted for in a historical re-imagining of the past.
To be fair, Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s ultimate interest lies in the mapping and manipulations that computer modeling allows, and it is indeed fascinating stuff. But for me, at this point, the pragmatic elements of parsing the sound-world had more ready applicability, and it is that more humanistic element of their study that I have shared here. A link to their full study is in the notes below.
TAKE-AWAY Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou offer a handy model for thinking about sound as measurable yet deeply experiential. While their research is oriented toward computational modeling and A-V replication, its implications extend beyond technical applications. Their framework provides a useful lens for humanistic inquiries, helping us parse how environments, past and present, are aurally constructed and mediated. In particular, their model of a sound-mediated understanding of environment emphasizes the importance of spatial and temporal variability in soundscapes. It also inadvertently underscores the ways in which individual memory and perception shape our understanding of sound. My own reflections on convent narratives and historical re-imaginings highlight how memory itself can function as an imagination-informed soundscape—one in which readers contribute their own inner sonic realities to narratives that seem on the surface to be silent.
In short, whether addressed to the recorded sounds of a contemporary Grecian landscape (them) or to the imagined echoes of historical spaces (me), Stratoudakis & Papadimitriou’s measures offer a method for attending more carefully to the role of sound in shaping experience.
Stratoudakis, Constantinos and Kimon Papadimitriou 2007. “A Dynamic Interface for the Audio-Visual Reconstruction of Soundscape, based on the Mapping of its Properties.” Proceedings SMC'07, 4th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 11-13 July 2007, Lefkada, Greece. Digital copy available here.
Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.
A comet and a winter scene from Bregenz, with the theme: Worry into joy
In the early 17th century, Anna Wittweilerin was a Thalbach sister when, at age 40, she found herself promoted to convent Maisterin in 1619.
She had joined the convent in 1589 at age 10, and was given holy orders in 1592 at age 13. She professed in 1595 on St Ursula’s day. Thus, she was a young and newly-professed sister – age 16 – in 1595 when the convent’s liturgical practices were reformed (Chronicle p. 31, P1360 and Gathering 6 #15, P1464). She served as convent Superior for 22 years, and died at age 62 in 1641. (See Chronicle p. 20 and Gath. 2 fol. 3r). The chronicle points out that she “endured a great deal of hardship,” (Gath 2, fol. 3r), not least of which was the 30-years war.
Wittweilerin’s personal interests add nuance and depth to the convent records, for it is thanks to her diary, much of which was incorporated verbatim or in close paraphrase into the Convent Chronicle, that we have accounts of the weather extremes and of the comet of 1619. She started the diary at age 33 in 1612 and continuing until 1641. For today’s post, we’ll concentrate on events before 1620.
We learn from Wittweilerin’s diary of the year that snow held off until Lent (1612), so that flowers were available on Christmas. The sisters used the extra-long season of greenery to make fresh wreaths for the statue of St Anna. Other years weren’t so lucky; a tree fell due to snow in 1613, and the winter of 1613 to 1614 was one for the record-books. As the Chronicle tells it, “in the fall it was cold and wetter [than normal], on the 19th of September it began to snow, and the ground never became dry until St. George's Day (April 23) in 1614.” That’s 31 weeks – 217 days – of muddy or snowy footing on the ground. The snow wound up going all the way up to the shutters of the gatehouse – and the Holunder account, drawing on her diary, says that “In front of the window in the hen garden the snow was 13 feet 7 inches high.”
An outdoors person by heart, she reports that “In Feb 1617 it was so fine and warm that people thought they should go out in the fields.” One can hear the desire to enjoy the unseasonable weather, and the joyful spirit with which she celebrates the various things of the outdoors: trees, fields, flowers. Later that same year, however, she finds the weather more oppressive, “it became so hot that people thought they would burn.” (Holunder 1934). Working in the heat can be enervating at the best of times; heat exhaustion could be a real fear.
Yet it is from Wittweilerin, too, that we have stories of fun. She tells the story of the sisters’ snowball fight (!), when the sisters went out into the still-snowy yard on the Thursday before Pentecost and pelted one another with their hand-crafted zingers (Chronicle, Gath 4 p. 86; Rapp p. 625). She tells as well of their wreath making, and of crop tallies from their work in the fields. The sisters themselves, for example, harvested the wine (that is, the grapes that would become wine).
And, we learn that they indulge in a ready bit of star-gazing:
In the month of December [1618] a comet was seen with a tail in the sky, which had appeared a short time before. We grant that the dear God may graciously turn it away from us, and have mercy on the Christian Church, which is in the greatest danger, as well as the noble house of Austria. [On the pamphlet-wars that this comet inspired, see: Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).]
To her, as to so many of her peers, the stars are still portents; she sees the “rod” – the comet tail – as a potential for God’s punishment. Through prayer and God’s grace, however, this pointed threat can be averted. By her account, the prayers worked, since the next year’s harvest was especially fine, though the political scene did not fare nearly as well. “We praised God that we may proclaim [our wine] with health and enjoy it in peace with one another since things are going very badly in the war. May the lord strengthen Christianity! It is well needed!” (Holunder 1934).
Sister Anna Wittweilerin’s diary and its close parallels in the Convent Chronicle offer a rare and intimate glimpse into the daily rhythms of convent life, framed by the larger forces of nature, faith, and war. Her observations remind us that even within a monastic environment, the world outside remained ever-present—whether through the creeping cold of a relentless winter, the heady promise of an early spring, or the celestial warnings streaking across the sky. She looked up, not only to track the stars but also in hope, finding solace in shared labor, seasonal celebrations, and the enduring rituals of convent life. Though she lived in a time of uncertainty (to which we’ll return in a future post), she answers her own worries with joy. To her, the snow becomes an occasion for play, and the comet an occasion to celebrate the peace of community, in hopes that such peace might ripple ever outwards. To Anna Wittweilerin, looking up is looking into the promise of a world touched by the divine.
WORKS CITED:
“Das alte Frauenkloster zu Thalbach (3. Fortsetzung),” Holunder: Wochen-Beilage für Volkstum, Bildung und Unterhaltung zur Vorarlberger Landes-Zeitung No. 38 (28 Sept 1934), from the series, Nos. 36-43 (8 weekly entries, 8. Sept to 27. Okt 1934). Quotes heavily from Wittweilerin’s diary. https://texte.volare.vorarlberg.at/viewer/fullscreen/Holunder1934/154/
Stillman Drake and C.D.O'Malley, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618:Galileo Galilei, Horatio Grassi, Mario Guiducci, Johann Kepler (U Penn Press 1960).
Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters 1336–1629.
A NOTE ON NAMING:
I typically use the "-in" suffix that designates females in surnames, following the conventions the sisters themselves used. Thus, her father was Herr Wittweiler, but she is Anna Wittweilerin.
A snippet of the Thalbach Chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9) and the logo/motto from Transkribus: "Unlock the past with Transkribus"
I’m not a modern-day marvel; digital humanities *seems* cool, but it’s not my training and not my natural modality. I live on a farm, with all the attendant joys of rural internet. (Failed the ping test recently? Us too!) I have read a number of DH articles with interest, and adopted some of the intellectual practices that volume assessment allows for. But at last, the moment has come: it’s time to learn a new tool in order to make my regular work go faster.
There’s this monastic chronicle (Bregenz VLA Thalbach Hs 9), you see, and it’s unedited. That there is, in fact, data from within “my” convent is a wonderful thing, and I’m thrilled to have access. There are two big problems, however. First, it has not been digitized. And second, I don’t read (well, I didn’t read) 18th-century Kurrentschrift. So, here’s what I did.
STEP ONE: GET PHOTOS. With the permission of the archive, I was able to photograph the chronicle. My system relies on the step-basis auto-numbering of photos, and is woefully “brute force” for the more sophisticated user. It is also (I confess it now!) simply a set of photos on my cell phone. No fancy lighting, no high-tech imaging for the ages; these are functional photos for use as a musicologist, not reflecting the book-history elements (which may be interesting but are not my raison d’etre). Before I start, I prepare a written description of the object, with special note of handwriting changes, format changes (from 18 to 24 lines, for example), and so on.
To organize my photos, I start by taking a picture of the description of the MS that I prepared in advance, and of its gathering structure that I prepared on-site. Then I take pictures of the outsides of the MS and of the visually interesting bits that caught my early attention. (These pictures are for slidedecks for any talk I might give – they’re the visual capture of the “coolness” of the item.)
Then, I take a picture of the gathering description for the first gathering, prepared in pencil in the archive. For more complicated gatherings, that includes a gathering structure diagram, but it’s often just a few lines of text. That becomes my photographic “label” for the section. Then, I take sequential pictures of the pages in the gathering. Occasionally I repeat a page if I want to be sure that I captured some particular detail, but mostly I move from first page to last page in the gathering. When I’m done with the gathering, I take a picture of the wooden table as a marker. Why? Because that’s going to leap out at me when I’m looking at all these photos of handwritten pages on my phone!
Now, onto the next gathering, and the next, and the next after that. Each starts with a header photo; each is sequential; each ends with a picture of the wooden table. At the very end, I go back and take pictures of details – with a label card or paper-pad notation first telling what gathering and folio it’s from, and why I thought it important (“detail of the insertion in the right-hand margin showing a different hand”).
Lastly, I go home and back everything up into a file folder. At this point, the sophisticate would probably rename all the photos, but I let the assigned image number stand for the page. YMMV. [That’s the increasingly old-fashioned phrase “Your Mileage May Vary,” if we happen to live in different acronym worlds.]
ORGANIZING IMAGES ON MY HARD DRIVE
With a couple hundred images, managing the inventory can seem daunting, but I’ve developed some habits over the years. I’m a spreadsheet person; spreadsheets make my heart sing. I love me some useful spreadsheets. So, for each of the important manuscripts in my life, I have a translation table: Photo Image number, gathering, folio or page, content, commentary, and then columns of whatever I’m interested in (concordances or chapter number or dates or places or whatever – that’s for the assessment phase).
So with the Chronicle, I now had a mass of mostly indecipherable eighteenth-century text entries carefully organized into a folder and managed via spreadsheet. Now it was time to start reading. Except, I don’t (yet) read Kurrentschrift, so I’ve got a whole mess of gobblety-gook. Enter the wonderful world of technology! I know AI has its issues – not least of which is its ecological impact – but there are tasks for which it is exceptionally well-situated, and it turns out that teaching the novice how to read new scripts is, for me, one of those true talents.
TRANSKRIBUS
I’ve heard of Transkribus (at https://www.transkribus.org/) for years; the idea of an app that can decode various historical scripts is an attractive short-cut for handwriting styles I don’t know, particularly since my focus is the content more than its presentation. I’m an extractivist: I want to know what the chronicle actually says and add those data-points to the story I’m telling. Also, I’m not keen to prepare editions – a chronicle is a side-witness to the music for me, not a central focus of my work. Many of my decisions reflect that perspective. I didn’t seek out a colleague for collaboration, for one thing, nor go to a paleographic institute. Hooray for brute force, right?
I searched out the Transkribus website and read all the (very helpful) guides that were prepared. I even watched two of the introductory videos, though I had to go to town for them to download at playable speeds. And, they have a capacity to try a few sample pages lower down on the page (scroll down to “try it out”). I chose a representative image and uploaded it to see what it did. Magic! From the loops and lines of Kurrentschrift emerged words that were, for the most part, German dialect, and familiar in style and spellings from other texts from the area. Success! I admit that I scooped up the sample reading and dumped it into a document file; I wanted to be sure that whatever I had, I saved.
The next step of learning was a several day project. One of the best things about the Transkribus tool is that it has a lot of subsets that use certain sets of documents as training tools. These models are available to apply to your document(s), and some of them work better than others. I literally made a list of ALL of the models that covered German Kurrentschrift of the 18th century and tested them with two different pages from my chronicle. For each, I did A/B testing: was this model better than that one? I kept notes on which ones did well, and went back to a couple of the models three or four times until I settled in on the one that seemed the most accurate on a first pass. I know that I could train the model for MY project, but I wasn’t interested in that this first time through, in part because I was a complete script-reading newbie, and didn’t want to mis-train the AI.
Once I had a model in hand – and had taken careful notes on its model number and name for scholarly purposes – it was time to start the transcription project. So, I created a free account (which currently gives you 100 pages of transcription free per month), and priced out the subscription model I’d use once we’re in the new fiscal year at my University.
As I planned my project, I realized that organizing the materials is an important consideration. There are “collections” in Transkribus, and “documents” within the collections. As a reminder to the reader: I’m not aiming at edition prep; I’m working toward extracting my data. So I created a hodge-podge organization that made sense to me. Instead of a collection that was the entire chronicle – something that I believe would probably be best practice – I broke out my chronicle into its gatherings, so I can navigate to-and-fro easily.
And then, I uploaded subsections of the gatherings as documents, rather than the entire gathering at a go or (at the other end of the spectrum) the individual leaves of the chronicle. This is being created for my convenience, after all, and this first go-round I wasn’t certain how things worked. I have between 4 and 16 pages in each “document.” I did learn that the windows folder bugaboo, randomization, occasionally impacted my uploads, which is one of the reasons that I kept my “documents” short. I also decided to retain document naming based on image number; for me, my spreadsheet is the controlling document. Renaming is both time-intensive and an area in which error can enter. As a result, my documents are named such compelling things as “IMG_1421-1427.” It works for me. (On the other hand, my naming for the gatherings is a bit more obvious to the outsider: “ChronikGath3” works here, and continuously typing in “ThalbachChronikGath3” just seemed like more work than needful since I’m not contemplating doing this with other chronicles, at least not in the next three years.)
Finally, after uploading the first document in the first collection, it was time to drive. I selected my pages, hit the “Recognize” button, and was taken to the interface. I added the “public model” that I had selected through testing, then took a deep breath, and hit “recognize.” The job runs in the background, and eventually the selected pages will have header colors that turn orange, to signal that the draft text is ready to review.
USING AI TEXT RECOGNITION TO CREATE A SEAT-OF-THE-PANTS EDITION
Here’s the part where things get wonderful. The AI model I chose is actually pretty decent with my text. As a new reader of Kurrentschrift, it took me a while to get a hang of it, but I used the process to teach myself the reading skills which will be necessary to me for this document and a couple of others upcoming. (I’m a 14th-15th century scholar; our handwriting is MUCH more legible, thank you very much!) For those who are in my boat, here are a few things I did that made learning to read the script go quickly.
First, I pull the transcribed text into a document file so that it’s on my local machine. (Remember, I’m that “rural internet” guru; failure to reach the world as a whole is as regular an experience as is going grocery shopping.) Alas, I haven’t been using the export function, though it’s there; instead, I cut-and-paste. It’s a rube’s approach, I know, but it’s fast, and it puts everything in a space I can edit with my own tools and habits. (I’m on LibreOffice these days; again, YMMV. But it’s free, and it doesn’t keep trying to put everything in OneDrive. Which is out in cyberspace. And often unavailable here at the farm. I’m glaring at you, Microsoft.)
To manage these texts, I insert headers for each individual page in all caps (to stand out from the transcribed text). For my purposes, the image number and the MS gathering and folio numbers suffice – along the lines of “PHOTO 1363 CHRONICLE GATH3 p. 34”. Also, like the AI transcription, I honor the line breaks of the original, so that toggling from transcription to image and back is easy. (Also, I insert my cut-and-paste as unformatted text; others might want the line numbers, but there were enough errors in line identification that I found it easier to do without.) This was a good cross-check to that randomizing ordering that windows puts on file transfer; by checking each image against its image number and page or folio number, I was able to ensure that the order of my text was in fact the order of the chronicle (except that the chronicle gatherings are actually out of order, but that’s a fault in the manuscript, not the editor nor the technology!).
Second, I got myself a couple of tables of cursive letterforms compared to Fraktur letter forms, so that the basic shapes were something I could puzzle through. I admit that my first pass awareness-level was so low that on the first four pages I read, the only word I could decode independently was “septuagesima.” However, once I learned that those really precise looking “n’s” were actually the letter “e,” I started to see the handwriting emerge from the page.
Third, it is my practice to work through systematically, allowing “bad readings” in order to get from zero to literate. I mangled my way through the first four pages, by which time the d’ as “der” and the dß as “das” was pretty clear. I go line by line, and I’ve learned to highlight the relevant information in different highlighter as I go. (For me, yellow is people, green is liturgy, blue is date or place, red is music, sweet music.) My goal is extraction, not perfection. It’s embarrassing to note that neither the AI nor I at first recognized the swoop at the end of words as an “-n.” Likewise, it took a while before I was confident enough to simply obliterate the AI’s suggestions for my own reading of a word. That said, it’s truly a case of learn-by-doing; as I hit page 20, I was starting to read each word instead of decoding it letter by letter.
Fourth, as a matter of process, I’m comfortable leaving in uncertainties. This work isn’t directly for publication, so if I wasn’t sure of a word, I would simply accept it or type in my best guess, then put in square brackets another possible reading, and frame things with question marks. For instance: “unser lieben Erbar [? frawen?] officii” – even as a newbie reader, the word “erbar” makes no sense here, but rather than worry about it at length, I put in my contextual reading and then moved on. I can search those up and revisit them after I’ve plowed through the first time.
Finally, as I indicated before, I reward myself with the “ping” of a data finding by using those highlighter buttons liberally. As I look back now over less than a month of intermittent work, I’ve got a long roster of people and events to code into my other note-taking systems. I haven’t harvested them yet, but they’ll be easy to identify as I finish up the process. Having those rewards in sight makes the days of “ugh, I can’t DO this” more bearable. And each time I return to the document, more and more of it looks like German instead of just “ink scrawls.”
MY TAKEAWAYS: THE MAGIC OF TECHNOLOGY
The reality is, the technology is remarkably impressive. Even without training it on my manuscript, it’s getting 75 to 80% of the text down properly. (It confuses Q for G, though: Quardian is not a word. Maybe next time I’ll try training the model.) That’s amazing!
It’s working from manuscript, and that’s an imperfect environment. Every so often, particularly when the scribe’s lines have a waver to them or when the page was curved in the photo, it mangles lines and mixes up word order – the manual corrective is absolutely necessary.
The benefit is that as a scholar, I’m a factor of ten times more competent with the script now than I was at the end of the first week. Having learned to read a cursive 16th-century hand without AI assistance, I can testify to the massive jump-start that having a plausible transcript makes, as long as I’m working systematically, letter by letter and word by word.
It’s just like practicing. If you work on the details and the techniques, there comes that moment where all of a sudden your perspective shifts from notes on the page to the sounds of the past. And that, my friends, is magical.
Image of the Annunciation as a Thalbach monastic seal (from the hand of Euphrosina Vöglin)
The women’s tertiary monastery of Thalbach in Bregenz
benefited from a series of long-serving and devoted leaders. A peek into the
short narrative descriptions of their convent efforts provides a glimpse into
the varied emphases these convent administrators placed on spiritual life,
governance, and the material well-being of the community. Some prioritized the
stability of the convent’s finances, others focused on the education of the
sisters, while still others devoted their attention to the aesthetics and
soundscape of worship. In her thirty years of convent service, Maria Euphrosina
Vöglin (r. 1683–1713; d. 1716) had a chance to embody all three. She shaped the
convent through her personal devotional practices, her canny skills on the
administrative front, and a marked sensitivity to the role of music and ritual
in the convent’s spiritual life.
Diligently Devoted
At the end of the seventeenth century, Sister Maria
Euphrosina Vöglin was elected Maisterin at Thalbach by the sisters and
duly endorsed by the appropriate male clerics, including the Order’s
Provincial. Euphrosina was a particular devotee of the Virgin Mary, for the
Chroniclist tells us that she prayed her office fervently on a daily basis.
Since, in a post-Tridentine environment, the Little Office of the Virgin – her
presumed prayer focus – was normally assigned only to Saturdays and special
feast days, we learn from this introduction that she was enacting a
more-is-better faith practice, for she performed privately what was done more
publicly in the convent’s regular cycle of prayer. In other words, the first
thing we learn about Euphrosina is her exemplary faith; as convent leader she
serves as a model to the other sisters, who should prioritize prayer even if it
should fall outside of the bounds of performed liturgy.
Not only was she a faithful Catholic; according to the
convent’s Chronicle, she served “laudably and well” as Maisterin for 30
years. Given her length of service, she developed skills as an able
administrator. Some of her attention was architectural. It was during her reign
that the monastery building refurbishment was completed, for instance, and she
also expanded the choir; this may be the time when the interior window was
added. Ludwig Rapp reports that she drafted a letter to the Mayor and Council
of inner Bregenzerwald, in which she begs them for a “generous” contribution
for her monastery. She points out that their need was great both
architecturally and spiritually: “so that it does not fall into disrepair and
the divine service and holy order's discipline do not disappear” (Euphrosina
Vöglin petition, as quoted in Rapp 634).
She also focused on the nuances of the divine service “because
of the music and the chorale,” as the Chronicle tells us. This I take to mean
that she oversaw both the instrumentalists and the sisters’ own performances in
services. The chroniclist confirms that “She also paid diligent attention to
the fact that the divine service was held properly.” She was, in other words, a
stickler for the forms and orders of the church, and also for the richness of
their living and resonant sounds. She must have appreciated the multimedia
appeal of the services. She also evidently recognized beauty itself as an
element of spiritual life, for she also “had many beautiful vestments,
antipendia and other things made for the church,” as we learn near the end of
the Chronicle chapter.
I stress the distributed nature of the Chroniclist’s
account, focused early on prayer placement and sound, and only later on visual
splendor, since that suggests to me an element of hierarchy in the description
of Euphrosina’s devotions. The assessment offered emphasizes what I suspect was
the more unusual capacities that she brought – the aural and devotional – and
left more stereotypical contributions of feminine handwork for the close of the
entry. This also could reflect a gradual shift of Euphrosina’s physical efforts
over time. Her active engagement with liturgy and prayer coincides in the
account with her emphasis on bricks-and-mortar projects, a spiritual match to
the physical enhancements of the cloister. The feminine handwork, in contrast,
coincides with text focused on hercharitable work and her resignation of office at age 74.
In addition to her advocacy for prayer and worship,
Euphrosina also led the sisters in more educational endeavors, for we know from
Leroy Shaw’s theatrical research that she produced at least one Latin play (“De
Theophila a mundi voluptatibus abstracta”) during her years in service. She
also acquired Gallia vindicata
(1594/r.1702) by Paolo Sfondrati, a defense of the Catholic Church’s position
against the political and religious turmoil in late 16th-century France,
demonstrating her interest in the broader landscape of Catholic
counter-reformation polemics (Fechter). (She is not, however, the same
Euphrosina Vöglin responsible for the book of prayers published in Augsburg in
1682; that Euphrosina was a widow, a Lutheran, and of the previous generation,
dying the year before our Euphrosina ascends to the role as head of
convent.)
Managing in Times of Hardship
Given the historical circumstances, Maria Euphrosina was
required to guide the convent through hard economic times. The cost of grain
skyrocketed, and a series of war taxes were imposed, so that the coffers ran
thin. In response, she did two things. She appealed the taxes, which were
bitterly high, and would have confiscated 1/3 of the convent’s lands (Thalbach
Chronicle Gathering 2 fol. 6; Rapp, p. 633-4). As she wrote to a convent
advocate in Constance, “we (the nuns) have no foundation, nothing superfluous,
but we, 24 professed nuns, are barely able to provide the necessary maintenance
of our order and poorly managed cloister, and we have no daily mass and no
dedicated confessor." (As quoted in Rapp 631). We learn from other
documents that some relief was awarded, perhaps because the sisters were able
to demonstrate that they had to help with the farming by bringing in their own
crops (!) (Rapp, p. 633), but ultimately they had to pay 40 fl. in war
contributions in 1686, and pay the Turkish tax again in 1708 (Fussenegger, 123).
Euphrosina also indulged in some creative fundraising, and
her own mother donated to the convent to help stabilize their finances. Well,
sort of. Technically, her mom repurposed her brother’s funds for Euphrosina’s
own use, and Euphrosina gave them outright to the convent (Thalbach Chronicle,
gathering 2, fol. 6r). We have no evidence that her brother was happy with this
outcome, but he didn’t try to retrieve the funds, either.
During these years of hardship, Euphrosina proved flexible:
she might be a taskmaster in the context of the order of services, but
demonstrated more compassion in the lives of the sisters. She arranged that
during the 40-day fast of Lent when the convent was subsisting largely on fungi
and herbs, they would have roasted meat on Sunday night (in contravention of
the regular rules) in order to keep them hale (Thalbach Chronicle Gathering 2,
fol. 6r). This practice seems to have been surprisingly common. The sisters of
Kirchheim unter Teck similarly broke their fast when roasted meat was “all that
was available” (Kirchheim Chronicle). Practical constraints meant that the
choice of health with a few bent rules triumphed over near starvation in both
contexts. Since many individuals paid their debts in the form of foods – a half
a lamb, a basket of eggs, and so on –pragmatism in a context of hardship might mean that the food available
was the food consumed.
This pragmatism and empathetic management was rewarded by an
increase in convent recruitment, particularly among the monied class. Large
dowries were paid to the convent and material goods such as religious garments,
bedclothes, breviaries, silver spoons and silver jugs were provided to the
entering daughters, as mentioned in the dowry documents that Euphrosina so
frequently signed in her role as Meisterin. (Bregenz KA 15 Schachtel 225A, Mitgleider).
Generous to traveling clerics and to the city’s poor, she
was seen by the Chroniclist and convent alike as “a true child of the order”
(ein getreyen ordnuß kind). After her death, the convent pledged to say a Pater
noster and an Ave Maria for her every Sunday without exception, both a signal
of their dedication to keeping her name in Convent memory and a curious
observation about the ways in which conflicting demands could otherwise
interfere with memorial practice (Chronicle Gathering 2, fol. 6r).
Life Context
Bregenz-born, Euphrosina had arrived at the convent in 1652
at age 13 under the birth name of Maria Franziska Vöglin. She lived there until
her death in 1716. Curiously, these details (found in the Chronicle’s gathering
5) are separate from the discussion of her administrative service.Her family was evidently poised for religious
service, for her brother Anton Vogel was Abbot of Mehrerau (1681–1711) (see
MehrerauKl, 2639)
What’s at Stake
Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s long tenure at Thalbach
demonstrates how convent leadership in the early modern period was far more
than a matter of spiritual devotion—it required financial acumen, political
navigational skills, and an understanding of the sensory and aesthetic
dimensions of worship. Her case challenges simplistic views of female monastic
life as passive or cloistered away from the world; instead, she emerges as an
active agent shaping not only her convent’s inner life but also their
relationships to the civic and religious landscape of Bregenz.
By paying close attention to figures like Euphrosina, we
gain insight into the lived realities of post-Tridentine monasticism, where
prayer, administration, and survival strategies were deeply entwined. Her
legacy, preserved in archival traces, folded in as an illustrative story in the
house chronicle, and reiterated through convent memoria “without exception,”
raises broader questions about the role of women in shaping institutional
histories—who gets remembered, and how?
Primary Sources
Appointment of Antonius Vogel as abbot: Bregenz,
Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Mehrerau Kloster, Charter 2639 (6. März 1681).
Kirchheim unter Teck Chronicle: edited in Christian
Friderich Sattler, “Wie diβ loblich closter zu Sant Johannes bapten zu Kirchen
under deck prediger-ordens reformiert worden und durch wölich personen,” in
Idem, Geschichte des herzogthums Wurtenberg unter der regierung der herzogen,
5 vols (Tübingen, 1779–1783), vol. 4, Beilagen, Num. 42, S. 173–280. Note:
Sattler 280 is also numbered 296.
Maria Euphrosina Vöglin’s seal (e.g. from a document of
1686)
Thalbach Chronicle (consulted from manuscript): Bregenz,
Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Kloster Thalbach Hs 9, Chronik des Klosters
1336–1629.
Thalbach membership documents: Bregenz, Vorarlberger
Landesarchiv, Klosterakten Schachtel 15, 225A–225C, Kloster Thalbach,
Konventmitglieder, Aufnahmen und Abrechnungen, Erbschaften.
Secondary Literature
Fechter, Werner. “Inkunabeln aus Thalbacher
Besitz.” Biblos 25 (1976): 233–42.
Fussenegger, Gerold. “Bregenz: Terziarinnenkloster
Thalbach.” In: Alemania Franciscana Antiqua 9 (1963): 93-140.
Jenisch, Georg Paulus. Davidischer Seelen [Funerary
memoria for Fr. Euphrosina Vöglin]. Augspurg: Johann Jacob Schonigk, 1682. This
book of prayers is dedicated to a different individual, one who had been
married, lived in Augsburg, and died shortly before our Euphrosina took
over as Thalbach’s Maisterin.
Image of Fader Moviz playing the viol with text bubble, "Movitz, your Consumption, it pulls you into the grave..."
While
those of you in New York City might be lucky enough to attend the
book-launch for John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis
(Mar 18, 2025), the
rest of us are hanging around with “old TB” – its readings, its
meanings, and its character.
Musically
speaking, there’s a lot of literature on tubercular heroines
(Violetta in La Traviata; Mimi in La Boheme; Antonia in Tales of
Hoffmann)
Hutcheon,
Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. “Famous last breaths: The tubercular
heroine in Opera.” Parallax, 2:1 (1996): 1-22, DOI:
10.1080/13534649609362002
Morens,
David M. “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” Emerging
Infectious Diseases
8:11 (Nov. 2002):1353-8.
If
we follow artistic assertions, to be consumptive is evidently to be a
soprano, since so many of the roles are in the Leading Lady idiom.
And, of course, these narratives blend into those of the cautionary
tale, where the fallen woman and the consumptive prove to be one and
the same. That latter theme remains common, with an added whiff of
poverty – just think of Fantine from Les Mis, or Satine from
Moulin Rouge, not to mention
Violetta herself.
TB / Consumption accounted for up to one in six deaths in France
by the early twentieth century.
The
prevalence of the disease made the it and its social consequences
quite topical, of course. Though weirdly, not for men, at least not
as artistic representation. There are hosts of deaths of artistic men
from consumption – Boccherini, Chopin, Keats, George Orwell… But
women feature in much of the music, both before and after the
baccilus’s discovery in 1882.
Take,
for example, this abbreviated list of tubercular characters.
Lots of women, and our passionate consumptive Chopin.
Fader
Movitz (Freman’s
Epistles by Carl
Michael Bellman, 1790)
Chopin
dies of consumption, 1849
Violetta
Valery (La Traviata,
Giuseppe Verdi, 1853)
1865
Jean-Antoine Villemin: proved TB was contagious (not heritable)
Antonia
(Les Contes
d'Hoffmann, Jacques
Offenbach, 1881)
1882:
Robert Koch announces discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Mimi
(La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini,1896)
Lady
Madeline (La Chute
de la Maison Usher,
Claude Debussy, [incomplete] 1918)
Sister
Benedict (Bells of
St Mary's, 1945)
Fantine
(Les Misérables,
1980)
Satine
(Moulin Rouge, 2001)
“In
the 18th century in Western Europe, TB had become epidemic with a
mortality rate as high as 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per
year, more elevated among young people. For this reason, TB was also
called ‘the robber of youth.’”
-- Barberis et al (2017)
On the list, the odd man out –
the odd MAN – is that 18th century character, Fader
Movitz. He, and his illness, features in Epistle no.
30: “Till fader Movitz, under dess sjukdom, lungsoten. Elegi” [To
Father
Movitz, during his illness, consumption. An elegy].
Fader Movitz might not be young, but he is definitely
characterized as one of the 900 consumptives per year; we learn
various of his symptoms, and know from early on inn stanza 1 that he
is terminally ill, though in TB’s typical slow motion fashion.
Unlike the ethereal soprano heroines of later operatic tradition,
however, Fader Movitz is neither young nor transfiguring; instead,
his illness is woven into a bawdy, bittersweet world of drinking
songs and resignation.
The composer of the work, Carl
Michael Bellman (1740-1795), was a Swedish composer, musician,
and lyricist. His song collection, Fredman’s Epistles,
contains 82 songs. “To Father Movitz” is relatively typical of
the song types; they mix themes of drinking with character sketches
and scenes ranging from the pastoral to the poignant to the saucy.
Movitz appears in 28 of the settings, so this isn’t his only
appearance! He is a composer with a famous Concerto, we learn from
the book’s character list.
Coming
in the middle of the pack, “To Father Movitz” is clearly a song
about his consumption (“Lungsot”). Death is coming, but there may
be some time (line 4) – after all, TB is a slow-moving disease.
Nevertheless, it is an active disease, one that “pulls you into the
grave” (line 5). In fact, it’s so effective at drawing you toward
death that the first part of the next line belongs not to the singer
but solely to the instrumentalists. There’s a bit of a musical pun
on the striking of the octave, and then we move upwards (finally) to
sing about the fond memories one had.
Drink from your glass, see Death waiting for you, Sharpen his sword, and stand at your doorstep. Do not be alarmed, he only glares at the grave door, Beats it again, maybe even in a year. Movitz, your Consumption*, it pulls you into the grave. - - - Strike now the Octave; Tune your strings, sing about the Spring of life. : |||
(stanza 3): Heavens! you die, your cough scares me; Emptiness and sound, the entrails make a sound; The tongue is white, the saving heart hatches; Soft as a fungus are late marrow and skin. Breathe. - Fie a thousand times! what fumes are your ashes. - - - Lend me your bottle. Movitz, Gutår! Bowl! Sing about the God of wine. : |||
The
song is strophic, but sets its mood effectively; all those descending
lines, the minor mood, the simple harmonic language, the largely
syllabic setting – we aren’t singing of triumph but instead of
the inevitable outcome in the local cemetery. And the active agency
of consumption is signaled musically by the shift from the
predominantly step-wise treatment to the more dramatic leaping, as
the illness personified pulls poor Movitz toward the grave.
The
third strophe gets into even more graphic details: the cough, the
disruption to the guts, the gradual falling apart of health into
pallid skin and grotesque forms of mucus-coated tongue. Ick. But,
think back on happier times, and toast the God of wine. The
inevitable is, well, inevitable.
“About
10 million people around the world do fall ill with the disease. And
even though it is preventable and curable, about 1.5 million people
die. So it is known as the world's top infectious killer according to
the WHO.” -- AMA report, 2/5/25
In
this current moment, TB has taken on special poignancy. We know that
TB is still “the world’s top infectious killer” under normal
circumstances. It doesn’t need to be; there are treatment courses
that take 4 to 12 months, depending on drug and dosage. If it isn’t
one of those (scary) resistant strains, it’s treatable. And yet
people continue to die.
With the Kansas City
outbreak doing its best to set records, we should remember that an
illness like TB is both PREVENTABLE and TREATABLE.
Don’t be “that”
character in song or story; redemptive endings and transfigured souls
are all very well in fiction. But in real life, we’d rather spend
our time like Fader Movitz, focused on wine and happy memories.
In 1609, it was time to raise the walls on the Thalbach convent church in Bregenz. Much labor went into the church, including that of the Tertiaries themselves, for the sisters helped haul stone, cleaned up the worksite, and generally contributed their own proverbial sweat of the brow to the project.
But supplies don’t come cheap, and the sisters turned to fundraising to meet their needs. Their reach was remarkably large, for contributions came from more than the local village and represented donors ranging from the princely to the servant. This suggests the importance of the Catholic network of the day, one which extended across social classes and geographical boundaries to connect the community of the faithful.
The Thalbach Chronicle records the gifts of 75 people, places, institutions, and families who supported the building enterprise. In the middle of the pack in terms of openness of purse fall the administrative gifts. The Lords of Bregenz-and-Hohenegg had their representatives pay for screens so that the sisters could be in seclusion in the church, and the representative of Duke Albrecht of Bavaria gave cash.
At first glance, the Chroniclist’s donor list appears fragmented, but a closer examination reveals patterns in the record. Most donors are identified by place, but 28 people are identified without geographical markers, including all of the donors who gave in Hellers rather than in florins. That probably reflects the convent’s (or at least the chroniclist’s) bookkeeping habits, since she clusters her entries by type of payment: florins, in kind, women’s donations (!), hellers. Some of the inconsistencies of identifying details simply reflect different decisions made at different times for the separate chapters that list donors.
A different situation holds, I think, for the women donors, who are separated into a chapter of their own (as if their cash were somehow different from their male peers). About half of the women donors lack geographical placemarkers, and are identified instead by marital status (wife, widow) and/or natal identity. This decision seems more gendered; marital affiliation “names” the woman, whereas for men, their community serves as part of their defining characteristics. This is perhaps confirmed by the fact that the unmarried women -- “noble and virtuous maidens” in the language of the chronicle – are tied to place. It seems an X+Y kind of equation: as a person one needs a name and either a place or a social connection – to be sure that the reader knows whose gift is being recorded.
For the remaining two-thirds of the gift-related entries, geography is part of this identity equation. Some donations might be predicted. Two former Thalbach sisters, now serving as leaders of convents elsewhere, sent contributions, as did the prioress of Hirschthal and a canonness from Lindau Abbey. Similarly, collective gifts came from several churches/monasteries and the city of Feldkirch, from whence many of the sisters came.
Yet the donor pool extended far beyond the expected circles of monastic and clerical supporters. Of the 38 individual donors with geographical markers, nine are from Bregenz and five from Wolfurt – the “local citizenry” contributing their piece to the sisters whose prayers were said on their behalf. Two donations come from Hohenegg, which, though farther away, sent multiple sisters to Thalbach. But beyond these strongholds, the chroniclist records gifts from a whopping 22 other locations, one-off contributions from a mix of secular and sacred donors – the local parish priest, a member of the lesser nobility, a particular family, the mayor, an abbot. Many donations come from Vorarlberg or the Allgäu, but others came in from places as far afield as Schwartzenburg, Zweifalten, and St Moritz in Augsburg.
What this pattern of support shows is the strength of the Catholic network, not just amongst clerical folk, but also, and especially, amongst the laity in the early seventeenth century. True, five individual parish priests donated to the building of the church. But so did widows, and tax collectors, and even a servant. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but evidently, it takes a whole Catholic community to raise a church.
Leprosy (now more properly designated Hansen’s Disease) is a
disease of almost overwhelming stigma. It can cause disfigurement and
is associated with poverty, all the more so now that treatment is
readily available. It is a disease that also causes us to attend to
our social response, highlighting the tension between charity and
revulsion, inclusion and fear.
The work that goes
on around the globe on World Leprosy Day seeks to create social
change – to reduce stigma, emphasize treatment and inclusion in
community, and break the inter-generational cycle in which leprosy
leads to isolation leads to reduced education and livelihood
opportunities leads to poverty which leads again to leprosy.
While it’s early yet to see what will be issued for THIS year’s
world leprosy day, I’d like to take up three examples of the
campaign from previous years which provide a glimpse into the
power that music has in these socio-medical campaigns. It is, in
other words, an example of music as public health, and one that I
like to talk about with students in my Music, Pandemics, and History
class.
EXAMPLE 1: A Leprosy Awareness song
“Gandhi’s dream: India should be Leprosy Free”
The
song conveys straightforward yet impactful messages.
One theme is that of
awareness. “It does not spread by touching”; treat early;
it’s eradicable. Also, finish your course of treatment, “medicine
has to be given till the end.”
A second is working toward a
more inclusive society: “We should get a little more, we
should get all the rights, we should get a sense of belonging in the
heart, the society should accept us from the heart, leprosy has to be
eradicated from the body, mind and thought also.” Likewise,
eliminate discrimination and avoid stigma by adopting a
caring attitude -- “Avoid grudges or bad mouthing”; “Keep the
patient happy with a loving face.”
A
final message is the fact that we are all implicated in this
work: “Through a joint effort we can all make India free from
leprosy.”
The music reinforces this
vision in several ways. It adopts traditional Indian idioms and
instrumentation. The musical style is approachable, trending toward
pop. The presence of a lilting, danceable percussive backbeat, for
instance, gives the performance energy. There’s a good deal of
musical and verbal repetition, and sections are marked with dramatic
gestures such as a rising swoop in the strings. There is a chorus
that comes in to add richness to the texture. Put together, these
choices are signaling that theme of collective effort together; just
as this is “our music,” so is its challenge “our problem.”
EXAMPLE 2: Sparsh Awareness Campaign (A governmental educational program)
Theme: United for dignity
This initiative was a government-sponsored campaign to use a festival model to facilitate education and awareness of the disease. The performances include skits, dance, and song, in between giving speeches about the disease. The (edited) example here comes from Vellore district, and condenses the cultural offerings to focus in on the speeches that convey this 2022 message:
“The disease will not spread through treated persons. Hence all cured leprosy persons should not be neglected or disliked. The WHO Theme for SPARSH Leprosy Awareness Campaign 2022 is "UNITED FOR DIGNITY". Therefore, let us strive to uphold the honour and dignity of leprosy cured persons.” (Excerpt of the YouTube description)
At the beginning of the clip, we again get singing, this time by a woman singing in the traditional Indian style, celebrating the local region, Tamil Nadu. The song depicts the importance of local culture and the importance of state initiatives. This is followed by a traditional circle dance to sung accompaniment which visibly expands to include the community gathered in an outdoor venue.
This
initial set-up emphasizing music and dance creates
a bridge between cultural pride and public health awareness
messaging that follows. There is the familiar sound of local musical
practice. The performances, though polished, are not unduly
professional; they seem to stem from within the community. This is
reinforced in the dance, where the circle of women visually segues
into the circle of the listening audience, many of whom bob and sway
to the sounds they are hearing. We have been brought from the joys of
cultural expression into community, “United for Dignity,” which
shares its appreciation for such beauty. The implication is that they
will share as well in the understanding from the day’s educational
program.
There’s a bit of slippage
here: enjoyment of song, and enjoyment of message are portrayed as
somehow equivalent. This is an important public health messaging
strategy that we see on a variety of fronts (see AIDS awareness in
Uganda, for instance). Music, dance, and other cultural expression
draws in the crowd, garnering attention and preparing them for the
harder-hitting messaging about disease safety, treatment, and the
need for change.
Here in the Vellore
video,
that stratey is made
explicit. After
these initial song and dance excerpts, we cut
to a series of speakers each
of whom speaks from a seat in
front of a poster about leprosy awareness. The
poster behind the series
of speakers is busy
delivering text. It mentions symptoms (“loss of feeling”) but
also seeks to normalize the disease; we should “treat it like TB.”
Lastly, it makes the point that clinics will provide evidence-based
care, there is “no experimentation” (!) in delivering treatment
for the disease. As a
backdrop, the poster is a bit overwhelming; the amount of text and
the array of type-faces and colors seem to function more like a flag
backdrop than a conveyance of information. Tired eyes might prefer
instead to focus on the speaker, and maybe that’s part of its
purpose. It is “official” without being “interesting.”
Reading is work; listening is easier.
Indeed, what IS interesting,
in contrast to the poster, are the series testimonials
from individuals who have had the disease. These
testimonials make up the
central portion of this “Leprosy awareness day.” The first [in a
google translation based on a notta.ai transcript], reads:
My
name is Shafuddin. I am speaking from Vellore. My body has been
damaged since 2001, so I went to the hospital. They said it is
leprosy. In the hospital they said it will be cured by treating it. I
took similar medicine for two years. The body recovered to some
extent. Hands and feet are very nerve affected, there is a lot of
pain, so they said that by doing an operation the hands will be
cured. After doing the operation it got cured. I do my work myself. I
can eat. I do all the work myself. There is no problem. Feeling good.
Leprosy is not a bad disease. If you take the right medicine you will
be cured.
This shared personal
experience helps the audience understand the multiple treatment
options. There were the meds, and then afterwards a surgical
intervention. The success of his treatment and his subsequent
independence would be important to anyone who fears that they
themselves might be suffering. Moreover,
his story demonstrates personal resilience and also the societal
support needed to uphold dignity for those affected by leprosy.
Shafuddin’s journey from diagnosis to recovery directly embodies
the campaign’s call to honor the dignity of those affected by
leprosy. Likewise, his ability to regain independence challenges
stigmatizing narratives. His message, as I see it, reinforces the
hope embedded in the festival's music and dance.
Later in the video (1.59)
there is a masked and
costumed dancer and supporting chamber ensemble; the elaborate
costume and intricate steps contrast with the packed-earth dance
circle and the backdrop of cow and crops. A second and then third
character come in to enliven the skit. This cultural
offering too is followed
by impassioned speakers.
Alternation of entertainment
and education keeps the audience engaged. Such alternations also
subtly suggests that there is a “whole-life” experience in
illness treatment. Just as we (here the we of the community audience
and its internet echo) enjoy the singing and dramatic action, we –
the united “we” of community – should enjoy our support for
these companions who have suffered with the disease, and for their
invisible compadres.
The
video ends with a medical overview of symptoms and treatments, and an
emphasis that treatment is free. The government is working to support
eradication, and anyone who has the disease should be treated.
Here,
we see music as an attention-getter,
valuable for its entertainment value, and providing a forum in which
other socially-critical messages can be sent. We
also see music as a community-building
element, identifying the “united we” of the messaging campaign.
The visual placement –
an outdoor festival setting, with birds and other nature sounds –
create an ironically “homey” atmosphere, in which you are hearing
from neighbors and compatriots about what is possible. And
throughout, the upbeat
music goes along with the upbeat message: Leprosy can be cured. That
message is worth celebrating.
In short, I think this
approach – blending
traditional cultural expressions with modern health messaging
– creates
a shared space for education, empathy, and celebration of civic
progress in a
significant public
health initiative. Like
“Gandhi’s Dream,” the message here is simple: just as we
collectively respond to the music, we should collectively respond to
the disease itself. Through its blend of traditional cultural forms
and modern health education, the Sparsh Awareness Campaign
demonstrates the potential of music and other performative arts to
transform public health initiatives into inclusive, community-driven
movements.
EXAMPLE 3 An Award-winning leprosy awareness short (from 2003)
Dungarpur Films' 2003 award-winning short, recipient of the Indian Documentary Producers’ Association (IDPA) Gold for the best public service film for leprosy awareness, delivers a powerful yet simple message:
One intervention can make a difference.
The film follows a woman and her son as they navigate the stigma surrounding leprosy and move toward the hopefulness of seeking treatment. It begins with the village headman’s stark declaration: “There’s no place in the village for leprosy patients.” This sets the stage for conflict, as the family’s diagnosis has sparked fear among the villagers, who seek to exile him and his mother so that the disease stigma doesn’t pass to the broader community.
Yet,
one woman raises her hand and calls to the mother and son. She speaks
out against exclusion, commanding them not to leave the village, but
rather to go straight to the health center. She reinforces this
message by publicly inviting the mother’s touch, hand to head. Her
intervention shifts the focus from judgment to action and the
narrative from vague crowd mutterings to crucial public health
information: “A disease-free body… Leprosy is completely cured
with MDT [Multi-Drug Therapy]. And this MDT is available completely
free at every government health center.”
The film ends with a
resolution—the mother and son are welcomed at the clinic, where
they receive treatment. The final frame features the National Leprosy
Eradication Programme (NLEP) symbol: four connected stick-figure
hands alongside the message, “Join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
This visual reinforces the short’s central theme of connection and
collective responsibility.
At its core, the film frames stigma as a more pervasive and
damaging issue than the disease itself. We initially sit with the
discomfort of an unhappy village; we are grounded in the reality that
the ill one might be ostracized. The disease is contagious, but
attitudes are even more contagious. The woman’s intervention not
only counters this stigma but also demonstrates the courage and
compassion needed to enact change. By touching and interacting with
the family, she visibly defies the rumor and shunning which had
seemed increasingly normative. Her actions embody the film’s call
for inclusion and understanding.
This act of bravery is pivotal. It transforms a moment of
potential exclusion and banishment into one of connection and hope.
The journey to the clinic becomes a metaphor for the broader societal
journey—from ignorance and fear to knowledge and action. The
message is clear: intervention, grounded in education and empathy,
can dismantle stigma and pave the way for healing.
Her intervention is successful; we follow these characters as they
move toward the clinic, receiving crucial public health information.
Leprosy is completely curable. Treatment is free at all government
health centers. There is a solution. We end with an arm around the
shoulder in support – connection, not stigma, will solve the
disease.
The film’s music underscores this narrative journey, amplifying
the emotional stakes and reinforcing the thematic arc. At the start,
the suspenseful score reflects the villagers’ tension and
hostility. There’s a traditional voice, and threatening
intermittent and unpredictable drum. We hear discussion and crowd
noise. This is the acoustical chaos of bad things happening.
Yet, after a woman intervenes, we move toward acceptance and a
resultant shift of musical idiom. A more hopeful lyrical voice
emerges, as well as more instruments playing in a coordinated and
more predictable way. We have a reiterated drone pitch to provide a
harmonic reference point, making the point that stability comes from
seeking treatment. So does optimism, for a series of arched phrases
accompany images of the journey to the clinic – the boat, a bike
and walk into the clinic. The highest of these vocal phrases is
delivered as our patient receives her packet of medicine, not only a
climax, but a happy one. Throughout this section, there is also more
complexity in the drum rhythms, accompanied with the tinkle of high
bells – a brighter timbre, with more interesting patterns. This is
music that we want to listen to. It is music as “accompaniment to
action.”
The music of this 90-second
short, in other words, tells us that inclusion and intervention are
the right choices, the ones that will lead to a positive, major-key
kind of place. We have, in the final frame, the joy of treatment with
the final high arched phrase. Layered over that is the visual cut-in
– the NLEP symbol, and four connected stick-type figures, with the
words of the final message: “join hands: eradicate leprosy.”
Dungarpur Films’ offering blends narrative, music, and
public health messaging together in order to inspire change. By addressing stigma
through a compelling story of intervention – by illustrating the
transformative power of knowledge and empathy – the film leaves
viewers with a clear and actionable message: inclusion and education
can eradicate both the disease and its associated stigma.
The
music, serving as both a narrative driver and an emotional guide,
amplifies the film’s impact. From the acoustical chaos of exclusion
to the lyrical harmony of hope, the soundtrack underscores the
journey from fear to acceptance. Storytelling and music here foster understanding and community-building. The film's call to “join
hands” remains as resonant today as it was in 2003: just as we
collectively respond to music, we must collectively respond to
disease and its societal implications.
TAKE-AWAYS
As we have seen in these
three examples of leprosy intervention, music plays a vital role in
public health. It bridges the gap between complex medical messaging
and community engagement. Its ability to evoke emotion, foster
community, and reflect local cultural values makes it a powerful tool
for reducing stigma, promoting awareness, and encouraging positive
collective action.
Whether through traditional
idioms, modern compositions, or community-driven performances, music
transforms abstract health messages into relatable, memorable
experiences. By integrating music into campaigns, public health
initiatives transcend mere information dissemination; they build
empathy, solidarity, and hope, empowering communities to confront
challenges together. Music, in essence, resonates not just in sound,
but in its capacity to inspire societal change.
I would like to thank Avagail Hulbert, whose seminar contributions
on India’s leprosy eradication programs introduced me to these
and other compelling examples of music in public health. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend Gregory
Barz, whose work on medical ethnomusicology was my first introduction
to the topic. Lastly, I’d like to thank all those many people –
musicians, film-makers, dancers, educators – whose capacity for
empathy and commitment to optimistic service is the active force for
good that makes real change happen in the world.
