This is the second of two posts about some of the papers I managed to catch up on after the Soundscapes in the Early Modern World Conference. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to listen to everything and I only managed to listen to two of the Keynotes. One was by Rosa Salzberg (Warwick) on ‘The sounds of the city: listening to an early modern migropolis’. Among her interesting points were a few that really stuck out for me. For example, Venice had a different soundscape to other places because of the narrow streets combined with waterways. Also, it was also continuously visited by short- and long-term migrants. These people tend to disappear from standard histories because they are transient, unlike the settled population who are the main focus of most work. She stressed that there was a big difference between the sound of rural places and the sounds of the city, and many of the people who came to the city were migrants from rural areas. But it would also have been a place where you herd many languages. At times, efforts were made to segregate the population but voices and sounds were difficult to contain.

I was also fascinated by some of the introductory remarks made by Alexander Fisher (UBC) in his Keynote ‘Of Virgins, Hosts, and Heavenly Sirens: Hearing the Sonic Imaginary of German Catholicism, 1580-1650’. He raised interesting questions around how to understand the sonic affordances of our records, noting that early printed music printers were forced to address the widest possible audience. He stressed the importance of paratextual information and the fact that print doesn’t tell us much about performance, as so much about stress, tempo, texture, timbre and volume and such is left to the performance. Often all we get from textual records such as diaries are vague generalisations rather than details. But all of the printed musical records testify to particular understandings of the soundscape.

He pointed out that the boundary between a potential and an actual soundscape is quite blurred. Truax’s definition of soundscape is based on a phenomenological approach which is not subject to ‘objective definition outside of the sphere of perception’ (Fisher). Perception is crucial to the understanding of a soundscape because all our records are the product of someone’s sensory perception of the soundscape interacting with memory and imagination. Musical sources encode the sonic intentions not just of composers but also of printers, performers and dedicatees. They should not be divorced from their paratexts which give us a sense of their horizons. They can be descriptive or prescriptive, but they are part of a performative culture.

But for me, the most interesting panel of the ones I heard was Politics of Voice in Early Modern Switzerland. Sara Steffen (Basel) talked about ‘“Under the foot”: policing vocal media in the sixteenth-century Swiss Confederation’. She described how, in 1538, the Basel authorities attempted to deal with the sale of a political ballad. They thought giving the culprit a talking to would be enough. Sara suggested that the question was how to deal properly with the song, which recounted the events after the Bernese reformation that had nearly led to armed conflict between Protestant and Catholic cantons, because the vocal actualisation of the unwanted contents of the printed ballad was central to the problem. The Bernese authorities claimed to have taken all the copies and burned them, then said it had been printed in Frankfurt not Bern.  Most of the Diet were satisfied, but not all – Unterwalden complained that Bern hadn’t punished the book seller appropriately, nor mentioned the author, and hadn’t denied that it had been composed in the city, just that it hadn’t been printed there.  They also brought up the singing of the song – apparently it had been sung openly for weeks without the Bernese authorties taking any action.  By not doing so, they believed that the Bernese authorities showed that they supported the song.  This shows that Unterwalden thought that the dissemination of the song, either through selling or singing, was highly important.  The Bernese official defended their lax treatment of the issue by saying that even if they destroyed the printed material, the memories remained, and it could anyway be expressed vocally without the print, if something triggered it.  Moreover, by dealing with it, it would encourage people to talk about it more. 

Markus Bardenheuer (Basel), then spoke on ‘The silent life. negotiating the soundscape of rural Zurich in the Long Reformation’ before Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (Basel) concluded the panel with ‘The greatest hits of 1712. Singing civil war in early modern Switzerland’. He noted how material such as ballads and pasquils shared a common political impetus to comment on the progress of the Toggenburg War of 1712 and attack the elites . It was a media campaign which threatened to jeopardise the peace negotiations. Vocal media and songs in particular played a particularly strong role. One song, ‘The New Tell’, described how William Tell was summoned back from the dead to lead the Swiss peasants against the heretic domination.  It drew on a tradition of associating the Tell stories with liberation and revolt.  As a song, ‘The New Tell’ relied on the audience’s knowledge of a ‘standard’ Tell tune – probably Muheim’s Tell song from 1613 which went through many reprints up until the 19^th century and had already been used for several Tell contrafacta. But Muheim’s Tell was already a contrafactum itself which recalled a song linked to the Dutch Revolt. 

The authorities wanted to control the flow of this material and were particularly concerned with the process of transmission.  It wasn’t really about the peasants singing in rural taverns, but about a serious political threat that went back generations.  They needed, therefore, to engage with all the methods of transmission – some of those interrogated described hearing the song read aloud, some hearing it sung, and others not being able to read it because it wasn’t all printed in capitals.  Jan-Friedrich described this as a ‘nexus of doings, printings and singings’, although I think he attributed this phrase to someone whose name I didn’t quite catch.  They publicly burned the pamphlets they had seized, but the possession of suspicious printed material was more serious than the knowledge of it obtained by hearing and remembering.  Thus witnesses claimed to have aural knowledge of the songs and emphasised the act of public reading.  But this is interesting – the interrogation records never mention ‘singing’ as a separate category from ‘reading’, even though ‘The New Tell’ was clearly identified as a song. So reading in this sense referred to vocal performance in general, musical or not.

Later in 1712 a reply ballad, ‘Unmasked Tell-Ghost’, was published, criticising the rebels. It complained about the viciousness of ‘The New Tell’ on the grounds that it contained an ‘unrhymed appendix’ which set out political claims and offered a prayer for the rebels.  So ‘Unmasked Tell-Ghost’ expects its audience to be familiar not just with the song ‘The New Tell’, but also with the print object – thus backing up the authorities’ efforts to locate the printed objects as well as the process of oral transmission. He concluded that these printed pamphlets were intermedial in that they invited several ways of interacting with them.  ‘Unmasked Tell-Ghost’ could only be fully enjoyed if you knew ‘The New Tell’, not just as a song but in its material form.

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