Because I was administering the Social History Society Conference a couple of weeks ago, I largely missed two other conferences at which I was actually speaking! I’m glad to say that both were recorded, so I’ve been able to catch up on them later, although to be honest, I simply haven’t had the time to listen to everything that I might have liked to… I’m going to start by talking about the second of the two, Soundscapes in the Early Modern World.

The first session of interest was Roundtable 1: Recreating Soundscapes, chaired by Mariana Lopez (York). First, each participant outlined their interest in researching and recreating soundscapes. Peter Falconer (Southampton) described his work with the Early Modern Soundscapes network to create a soundscape for Speke Hall in Liverpool. The residents of the Hall were Catholic and the property has eavesdrops and a priest hole. Andy Popperwell (LSBU) worked for many years as a studio manager for the BBC World Service but is now working on recreating the soundscape of a Georgian mansion in Essex. He noted the problem of recording on location in the reverberant spaces of the unfurnished house with the noise of the M25, and raised an interesting question: do 21^st century sparrows sound like 18^th century ones, who knows, and does it matter? Abigail Wincott (Falmouth) is a journalist who makes a podcast about ‘Past Sounds’ in which every episode she interviews a different person about how they know about the past, as well as what they want to know. Her challenges were around recreating the sounds that people mentioned in their interviews to create a podcast which included sound as well as just talking about it.  Laura Wright (Oxford) is writing a book about sound effects on the seventeenth-century stage and how they were created in the moment.  Because of the pandemic, much of her practice-based research ended up taking place online, so raised issues about how you recreate those sounds – can we, for example, be scared by the same things?  How do we trace affect across the centuries and whether violent sounds can be replicated today, especially when we are online.

Marina posed the question of why we think the soundscapes that we study are important.  Abigail suggested that it was partly about wanting to share the experiences in order to understand how people felt.  Andy added that it helps people to understand the past – by recreating the voices and sounds – for heritage visitor experiences.  Laura pointed out that everything we work on is recreated sound – every performance of Shakespeare or Jonson is recreated from the text.  Andy added that many heritage venues are artificial, in that they are not furnished with original objects, in order to enhance visitor experiences.  Peter pointed out that even if we could recreate a sound identically (which we can’t), we would still here it differently because we are in a different context.

The discussions raised some interesting questions about authenticity and expectation. For example there were problems around things being too ‘fun’ to be real or be scholarly, even when they are well-researched. Moreover, people sometimes don’t believe things that don’t meet their expectations even when recreations are historically informed.

Finally, the panel discussed what constitutes a scholarly approach to public history, and how practice led research has changed the field.  Things don’t have to be dumbed down to reach a public audience, nor does it necessarily lose rigour and accuracy simply because of the field in which it is presented. If we can’t communicate what we are doing, what is the point.  Andy suggested that the fundamental point is that we must speak to an intelligent but uninformed listener who will try to understand, while Abigail pointed out that visitors are going for an experience, and we should always explain why stuff matters, not just provide an empty experience.  Commercial interests mean that the public are consumers of history, and we need to think about what they would like to consume, be happy to consume or ought to consume.  As a lot of our knowledge comes from experiences, so we need to make sure those experiences are well-researched.

I was also interested in the two panels on ‘Authority, Royalty and Noise’. During the first session, Katelyn Clark (UBC), described the difficulties she faced when trying to recreate the soundscape of the Sans-Souci Palace soundscape, due for example to the differences in acoustic details in the rooms; and Catriona Cooper (RHUL), John Cooper (York) and Damian Murphy (York), talked about their project ‘Listening to the Commons’ in ‘The soundscapes of Parliament in early modern England’.

In the second, Oscar Patton (Oxford), gave a fascinating paper on ‘Royal authority and religious identity in the Elizabethan Chapel Royal (1558-1603)’. The Chapel Royal was an institution made up of priests and singing men called Gentlemen of the Chapel, not a building. It was under no episcopal jurisdiction because it was a royal peculiar. Most of the gentlemen came from cathedrals.  The music of the Chapel Royal was intended to glorify Queen Elizabeth as well God, stressing the queen’s Protestantism, while the spaces could be sumptuous. It seems likely that Latin was not sung in the Chapel Royal, while references to singing in English made it clear that this was the norm.  Therefore Patton argued that the Chapel Royal’s music was a political expression of Elizabeth’s Protestant faith for the ambassadors who would be expected to attend, reinforced by the decoration of the physical surroundings.  But he also suggested that Elizabeth, and her Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, were rather out of step with the generally Calvinist views of many of her Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal. Likewise, sermons at court were calculated to mount a defence of the queen, as well as counsel and criticism of the queen. And prayers were heard to which reminded people of their civic duty to their queen.

Elisabeth Natour (Regensburg), then spoke on ‘The politics of the soundscape and the politics of music. Tracing the idea of musical rulership in early modern Europe’. She tackled the relationship between the sounds of rulership and music of rulership. She described how the harmony of the spheres contributed to rulership by invoking harmony. Creating musical harmony on earth was an image of godly rule, shaping discordant voices into harmony and the opposite of chaos and disorder.  Processions represented both heirarchy, in the participants’ closeness to the monarch, and order and disorder.  She used the court of Charles I of England as a case study, beginning by describing the masque Britannia Triumphans which moves from noisy disorder in the antimasque and to the angelic sound of those close to the king in the masque, then she looked at the way Charles staged his authority at Durham Cathedral in 1633.  She also pointed out that different soundscapes are equally importnt, but it isn’t a single audience.