This is the second in a series of short posts about the Sound Faith: Religion and the Acoustic World 1400-1800 conference at the University of York from 12-14 June 2024.

On the official first day, I was up early editing blog posts (I did say I was treating the trip in part as a writing retreat!). I walked across the allotments from Kilburn Street to the University campus, which is really attractive with its lakes and willows despite me getting hissed at by an angry goose, and found the Berrick Saul Building where we had coffee, tea, pastries & registration in the foyer.

Emilie then welcomed everyone to the conference before the first keynote from Lucía Martínez Valdivia (Reed College): Of Sounds This Is the Strain: Literary Audiation and Early Modern English Poetic Devotion. The aim was to introduce audiation as a concept and investigate how it might help us to hear what can be heard in texts. She began by discussing the only known work by Elizabeth Hincks, a pamphlet in verse dialogue called The Poor Widow’s Mite, in which italics are used for the responder to the poet. The ventriloquist objector complains that silence allows the inner voice of conscience or God to break through because it is no longer drowned out by audition (hearing) – the ears are no longer distracted. Of course, for Hincks as a Quaker, this voice is something to be turned towards, therefore silence is good for the very same reason, and this is what the answer says. The multiple meanings of certain words add a lot to the text. 

She then turned to introduce the concept of audiation, arguing that sound studies has been taken over by voice, whereas she wants to think about what triggers us to hear sound in our head –  a mental encounter with sound. Mimesis relies on reproducing sounds already heard, but a sound image describes sound in terms of visual. Audiation is a word from music teaching, and involves, for example, the individual silent reading of scores either to orchestrate or practice a melody.  It is the bringing together of disparate sounds that you have never heard together in order to create something you have never heard. I found the examples in this lecture much easier to understand than trying to understand it from the scholarship I had read on it.  Audiation applies to voice, vocalization, subvocalization, non-vocal word sounds, onomatopoeia, sound description, rhythm and meter.

From here she moved on to talk about poetry, for example, thinking about how the mind might activate the dialogue form of Hincks’ poetry. As we discussed in the masterclass, she talked about the way that the layout of the first verse in quatrain lines (a hymn or psalm form) sets up the reader to read the longer fourteeners in the same way (they are cheaper for printers because they waste less space on the page). The psalm meter is a little odd for a Quaker, who rejected communal singing. While Quakers did not have institutional singing, if you were personally inspired to sing that was fine. She also points out that you can read the same in prose, but actually, the poetry isn’t particularly strongly rhythmic so reads more like to prose. Likewise, she claims that the form doesn’t matter as long as the end – bringing the reader to God – is met.

Her other example was Wyatt’s settings of the seven penitential psalms. The original manuscript appears in a single voice and does not differentiate in terms of who sings or speaks each part of David and the responder. A printed edition appeared a few years after his death which does clearly differentiate between the narrator (the author, Wyatt) and David. This has a different effect. There are sounds that appear in the text (such as sighs) which are not written down. How, after all, does one write a sigh? She pointed out that the narrative voice allows us to hear David’s feelings in his heart before they are expressed in words.

She quickly touched on further examples from John Milton, George Herbert’s antiphonal songs (including ‘Let all the world in every corner sing’) from his play The Temple and Henry Vaughan, concluding that audiation allows us to investigate text from a different perspective.

After a short break, it was time to choose which session to go to for Parallel Session 1. I considered going to ‘Listening to Images and Religious Conversion in Reformation Italy c.1530-1640’ (made up of Gwladys Le Cuff (EHESS, Cehta/Université de Lille-IRHiS): From temporalia to aeterna : the multi-sensorial Assumption of the schola cantorum in the duomo of Verona (1534); Celia Zuber (UNIGE/EHESS, Cehta): Pictures, Books, and Voices: Rethinking the ‘Book of the Illiterates’ in the Salviati’s Chapel at San Gregorio al Celio; Marta Battisti (LARHRA/ I-Tatti): ‘Paintings for the Ears’: The Universal Language of Images in Reformation Italy), but instead opted for Panel 2: ‘Listening to Early Modern British Travel Writing,’ First, Alana Mailes (University of Cambridge) spoke on ‘All kiend of Musicke: and Instriments of Warr’: British Travel Writers on Sacred Music in Seicento Venice. She described how travel writers all agreed that Italians had a knack for making good music. Even Venice itself was described as being lute-shaped.  There was a flurry of English commercial activity in Venice in the seventeenth century and the beginnings of. the grand tour, which allowed the interchange of cultural activity. More men came into contact with Venetian music and therefore wrote about the many forms of music they experienced in texts aimed at both didactic and leisure reading, for both public and private audiences. They remarked on its importance to civic ritual, were awed by its pageantry and also by the musical technological advances. Lassels, for example, thought that the Venetians used music to stabilise an unstable society through the control of the humors. They also experienced the music of Catholic rituals, albeit with some trepidation given that the English were Protestant. They noted the way it had a strong spiritual effect on listeners. 

Alana then concentrated on a single example which took place on the Doge’s barge, the Bucentauro, which was used for a ceremony each year on Ascension Day. Almost all the writers noted the gilded statues on board the galley which held up the canopy and the 40 rowers who rowed in time with the music on board. The rowers were likely slaves, and the writers assumed that they were – so the sights and sounds of the Bucentauro were bound up with slavery. Authors were all impressed with the might of the sounds they heard which demonstrated the power of the Venetian navy. 

She argued that the representation of Venetian music contributed the mercantile, commercial and cultural interaction, and that intelligence agents paid attention to musical events, especially those of the church. Likewise, she suggested that these travel writers also influenced music and pageantry in London.

Then it was time for the conference organiser, the wonderful Emilie K. M. Murphy (University of York) to discuss Listening to Travel Writing: Sounding, Bodies and Purchas His Pilgrimes. It was, at the time it was written, the largest volume ever to go through the English press and provided an account of many travels.  Henry David Thoreau wrote about his audiation of this text in 1852. Purchis had never himself travelled more than 200 miles, but he had already acknowledged in Microcosmos that his writing was designed to engage the ear as well as the eye. He believed that faith came from hearing and was therefore more important than the eye. 

Emile argued that audiation was intrinsic to reading travel writing, and that this is central to her forthcoming Cambridge Element on the subject.  She introduced the outline plan of her Element, which will first discuss Earwitnessing and the Authentication of Experience. She noted that travel writers fashioned themselves as earwitnesses in order to support their truth claims. They might listen to everything their guides said, but they questioned what they heard and explained that to their readers, for example discrediting Catholic guides and other unreliable witnesses through the use of their own experience or the authority of scripture. 

The next two sections will look at Embodied Travellers and Embodied Readers. Purchas is really useful for the last section because we know he read all the travel writings of others and digested them for himself. So the final section of the talk looked at Purchas’s translation of a particular foreign travel writer, Jean de Léry’s writing about his life in Brazil.. He includes several sections but leaves out more, because he said it was too long.  It is worth remembering that his readers would have had no idea what the landscape he was writing about was like, so he described the sound of what the Frenchman encountered. He also leaves out the positive description of Tupi life and translates things in a negative way, even where the original French is more even-handed. Purchas’s marginal comments undermine any positive descriptions in the text. 

After lunch, I went to Panel 4: Sensing Sound. The first paper was given by Katie Bank (University of Birmingham) on ‘Image and Audiation: Susanna and the Elders’. Obviously this immediately sparked my interest because one of the really popular early modern ballads is The Ballad of Constant Susannah, based on the same biblical story. She described how, for example, a sociable activity can give a space meaning. Musical images abounded in early modern England. She talked about some of the places where music is obviously referenced in visual culture, such as the Eglantine Table at Hardwick Hall, or representations of Orpheus. Some, however, are less obviously musical, such as the story of Susannah and the elders, which has no overt references to music and yet appears across material culture in images that often pick on a single scene from the story, although some tell several aspects. She also discussed various songs of the story were made by Lassus, Farnaby, Ferrabosco, Dowland, and Byrd, which were very popular. Many settings were made of the Lassus melody which were reharmonised and set in new rhythms, while the ballad had a different tune.  She wondered if encounters with the visual caused spectators to audiate the opening of the Lassus melody. 

Next up was Daniel Johnson (University of Leicester) on ‘A Song with Sweet Accord’: the Sound of Isaac Watts in Early American Evangelicalism. Isaac Watts is best known for his hymns, author of hymns based on the psalms such as ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘Jesus Shall Reign Where Ere the Sun’. The tunes are generally not considered but his point was that hymns are not poems because they are intended to be sung in an outpouring of praise. He was particularly concerned with performance and the fact that singing was given by God to express the feelings of the heart and soul. He was bothered by the fact that people singing psalms looked really bored and that this gets in the way of the comprehension of the subject, but understanding the words means that people can imbue the words and music with passion. Generally it has been assumed that the tunes for Watts’ hymns were just whatever fitted, and that gradually over time some became established. Daniel wanted to try to find the tune by transcribing the incipit and searching for them on the hymn tunes website. He has found some examples and played some recordings.

Jakub Koryl (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) gave the third paper on Sounds, Visuals and all that Jazz. Or soundscapes, scensecapes and the rise of Lutheran carnal hermeneutics. Jakub considered the multivalency of  ‘sense’, which can relate to the meaning, orientation, and sensation. The intermedial nature of knowledge was explicitly understood and articulated by Luther. This came from a neo-platonic understanding the creative process. He quoted Lyndal Roper’s work on Luther’s sensory language – the language of the senses brings out self-imposed sensory priorities. It helped to inaugurate a period of aural attention. He argued that there is no semantics without sensation. Luther once said ‘one must read, sing, preach, write, and compose. And if it would help matters along, I would have all the bells pealing. and all the organs playing, and have everything ring that can made a sound’.  he was keen to pay attention to the way music was, as he put it, the greatest of the arts because its notes bring the text to life’ and he saw speech as a sense of music. HE also challenged the idea of the soundscape as being one-sided and drew on DAvid Howes’ Sensation in Cultural Context (2005) which suggests instead the use of the word ‘sensescape’ as ‘the experience of the environment, and of the other persons and things which inhabit that environment’.  This is, of course, as he pointed out, not only produced by the sounds but all the senses and more: 

• reconstruction of perceptual habits (theological ,moral and aesthetic setting)
• shaping perceptual activity
• making sense of sensory experience
• evaluation of sensory stimuli
• governing perceptual preferences.

For the last paper in the panel, Jessica Rutherford (Central Connecticut State University) presented online on ‘Transcultural Soundscapes in Sixteenth-Century Brazil: Jesuit Missionary Interventions’. Jesuits used many means to try to heal illness, as did indigenous healers. The wailing rituals appear frequently in archival sources. She talked about Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire which presents the theory of transculturalisation which allows us to go beyond the archive to identify assimilation and rejection of culture. She described how the Jesuits worked in Brazil which was based in one area to infiltrate a wider area. It overlapped with a significant outbreak of smallpox. Jesuits translated music into native languages so that ceremonies could take place and transmit Christian belief in simple terms. It created social cohesion and a sense of identity. 

Of course, this meant that I missed Panel 3: Reconstructing Soundscapes (Chantal Berry (University of York): Soundscapes of morality according to a country parson: Earls Colne in the 17^th Century, made up of Tin Cugelj (University of Bern): Auditory Environment, Religion, and Politics: Revisiting the Polyphonic Mass in Early Modern Dubrovnik; Salih Demirtas (Istanbul Technical University): Sonic Rituals of Communal Faith in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul; and Laurie Stras (University of Southampton): Music and Daily Life at the Florentine Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, but of course, one can’t do everything when there are parallel sessions.