Silences And Sounds

Thursday, October 2, 2025

Musicological Paper Structures 102

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OTHER APPROACHES TO CONSIDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Musicological Paper Structures 101

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

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

START: BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SCHOLARLY CONTEXT

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

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

CONTINUE: DATA SECTIONS

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

CONCLUDE: SO WHAT, SO WHAT, NOW WHAT

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

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

CASE STUDY: BEETHOVEN

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

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

WHY THIS KIND OF FORMAT / PAPER MODEL IS USEFUL

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

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

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

Happy writing, everyone!

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

Saturday, September 27, 2025

Listening in on the Nuns’ Rebellion at Kloster Goldenstein

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

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

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

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

Why bring this story here?

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

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

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

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

RESOURCES:

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

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

Kloster Goldenstein:

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

Friday, September 26, 2025

Asian Sojourn 3: Living in Sacred Space – Kathmandu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Attention filtering – the voluntary earlid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES:

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

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

The Perfect Time to Write

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

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

Sitting there fretting about writing isn’t helping.

Waiting for the right mood isn’t helping.

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

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

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

And write.

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

THE PERFECT TIME TO WRITE IS NOW.

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

Monday, September 15, 2025

An indulgence prayer for Mary of Swords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION:

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