This is the fourth 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.

Day 2 started with Panel 5: The Sound of Manuscript and Print in which I was speaking with Katherine Butler (Northumbria University) and Alexander Fisher (University of British Columbia). Katherine  started us off with her paper ‘Godly Rounds and Moralised Catches c.1550-1650’ on songs that don’t need notation and are very simple, and where they sit in the narrative of ballads, psalms and popular polyphonic music. Many sources talk non-specifically about catches and rounds but not about how they are sung. She noted that it would be odd if people didn’t try to provide moralised versions of rounds and catches as they did with bawdy ballads, and proceeded to demonstrate that in fact, the godly round did exist. I then gave a version of the providence paper I gave last year at the EBBA conference which I called ‘The ‘Heavie Hande of Heaven’: Singing about Providence in Early Modern News Ballads’. The final paper of the three was Alex’s ‘Jesuit Catechism, Processional Culture, and the Mobilisation of Singing Children in Counter-Reformation Germany’. He talked about Jesuit attempts to inculcate Catholic culture with sung catechisms, especially amongst children, sometimes as part of processions and plays. The power of music to convert was well known, and teaching children through song allowed the children to convert or teach adults. He identified several trends in the creation and use of children’s catechisms during the counter-Reformation. The virtue of German children was commented on in verse in the songbooks that were published in the period, while children’s catechisms become more prominent in song books. There are also more and more references to children taking part in processions, singing in the process. There are several descriptions of these sorts of processions which describe the use of music and sound, often commenting on the children’s participation. They tended to avoid outright polemic, but declaimed the virtue of the place and its people, or their closeness to God for example. His main example was a play from the catechism class of St Kunibert in 1643, in which there is no real dramatic action but the repetition reinforces the pedagogical aims of the play. He argued that the mobilisation of singing children by Jesuits was done by other religious groups too to shape the religious environment

The concurrent panel was The Power and Performance of Speech and Sound (Emma Rhatigan (University of Sheffield): Prosopopoeia in the Pulpit; Stephanie Shirilan (Syracuse University): Sounding Jewish, Hearing Jewish; Clare Wright (University of Kent): Noise, Silence and the Inward Turn in the York Corpus Christi Play).

After the break I was unable to go to Panel 8: Hearing Cultural and Confessional Difference (Janie Cole (Yale University): Sounding Faith: Jesuit Missionaries and Afro-Eurasian Sonic Encounters in 17^th-Century Ethiopia (Online); Sarah Finley (Christopher Newport University): ‘The Sounds of Afro-Diasporic Sacred Ritual in Colonial Mexico (Online); Jaap Geraerts (Leibniz-Institute for European History, Mainz): Sensing the Schism of Utrecht: Sonic Encounters of Intra-Catholic Religious Differences in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic) because I was chairing a panel on Music, Power and Discipline.

The first speaker was Elizabeth C. Natour (Johannes-Gutenberg-University Mainz) who gave a paper on ‘King David bridging the gap? Musical heroes in seventeenth-century England, France and Spain’.  She began by acknowledging the difficulty of producing a truly comparative approach in the early stages of a project, and explained that she would concentrate on England for the paper, before bringing in some examples from France and Spain. David combined so many virtues that many kings wanted to present themselves as the Old Testament king – all three of the kings of Spain, France and England in the mid-sixteenth century were hailed as new David. Images of David were closely bound up with ideas of providence This led her to wonder whether he was equally or more important in the seventeenth century. The beautification of churches in the 1630s relied on ideas introduced by James I, especially the refurbishment of organs, but they don’t really get heard until Charles’s reign as it takes a while to bed in, when they were building on the legacy of music of Elizabeth I and James I. The Sternhold and Hopkins psalter printing almost doubled under Charles. Bibles and psalters were given as gifts of honour. Davidic imagery is referred to throughout. These organs were silenced during the iconoclasm of the Interregnum. She briefly compared the French king’s music which figures him as David, but there are no written or visual sources that do so like the ones that are so prevalent in England; and the Spanish king, where so much court music was lost, where the musical instruments are more central than their player or composer. She concluded that the Davids were all different.

Oscar Patton’s paper was on ‘Cross-confessional diplomacy and the post-Reformation English Chapel Royal’. He opened by describing a scene at the Chapel Royal Epiphany Service in 1601, at which two foreign ambassadors were in attendance. Diplomacy caused complications in post-Reformation confessional courts. The space of places like the Chapel Royal was closely regulated, but it was known that if you might be invited to attend to the king in their closets. For Catholics, attending Protestant service was forbidden as it was heretical, but they found ways around it: some listened from outside, some were given dispensations. Silence was used to draw attention to specific events such as the arrival of a monarch. The music was all in English, but people were sometimes asked to translate music for visitors. He discussed the use and reception of Elizabeth I’s silver cross on the altar of the Chapel Royal, and pointed out that it was less removed by royal order than royal compliance with others’ frustrations. He concluded by arguing that the space of the Chapel Royal was carefully used to make political claims and negotiate diplomatic interaction.

The final paper, Vocal Control: Disciplining Early Modern Religious Singing by Children in European and Colonial Settings, was given by Richard Wistreich (Royal College of Music). He considered the starting point of a book on training young voices, which is described in the prefaratory materials. These claim that it was well known that voices could be trained and in doing so, you could prevent them becoming ‘boorish’ but instead become ‘sweet and lively’. Both Protestants and Catholics employed communal singing, especially of children in school curricula, to teach and convert souls. Most primary-aged children would learn the rudiments of singing which they would put into practice at services, processions, burials, civic occasions and even executions. The Jesuits adopted catchy tunes to encourage regular singing of, for example, the Lord’s Prayer and catechisms, and these were used on missions. The songs were taught by rote and in turn passed them on to their parents. 

Likewise, songs were used to assimilate Mexico. The slaughter of the Aztecs that overthrew Moctezuma took place in the middle of a ceremony and the drummer was the first to die. By 1527 a school was indoctrinating Aztec noble boys in Catholic doctrine in order to promulgate Spanish rule. The boys learned chants and polyphony. Despite the attention to what they learned, there is little on how the boys adapted their voices towards Spanish song and how they learned to sing in pre-conquest times, apart from a short section in the Florentine Codex. 

His final example was of Cook’s encounter with the Maori in New Zealand, in which they heard a song (a waiata) sung in parts that sounded to the British like a psalm tune, although it was of course misrepresented. Forty-five years later there were similar descriptions of Maori song. He concluded by noting that all three used the same strategies of indoctrination through music which allowed the settlers to subjugate indigenous peoples through the assimilation of existing customs of communal song.

After lunch, I missed Panel 10: Sound, Faith and Silence (Iain Fenlon (University of Cambridge): Music and the Catholicisation of Andalusia; Matthew Laube (Baylor University): The Acoustics of Peace: Singing, Confessional Coexistence, and the Twelve Years’ Truce in Seventeenth-Century Mechelen; Kat Hill (Birkbeck, University of London): Sound, silence and song amongst Vistula Delta Mennonites). Instead I went to Panel 9: Re-sounding, Hearing, and Sensing the Past which opened with Katie McKeogh (King’s College London): ‘Where does the unuttered music go?’ Hearing the Past in the Sixteenth-Century English Private Library. She explored what happened to English Catholic missals after the Protestant reformation to challenge the belief that Catholic materials were only of interest to Catholics to show that they were totems for religious belief and appealed across the confessional divide. She described the effects of Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s reforms on Catholic books. She also pointed out the changes brought about by Elizabeth, who didn’t undertake a programme of iconoclasm in the same way, but liturgical books were destroyed. The defacement and destruction were somewhat haphazard and putting them to profane uses undermined their former importance. Missals were used for all sorts of things – Katie gave examples of writing recipes in them, noting the dates of children’s birth, giving it a dual identity which included family records as well as a liturgical function. 

Second came one of my many former supervisors, Ros Oates (Manchester Metropolitan University) who talked on ‘He Who Has An Ear, Let Him Hear’: Deafness, Sound and Speech in the Reformation. She started with the story of a pre-lingually deaf blacksmith, Thomas Speller, from Essex who wished to marry. Thomas’s mother objected to the marriage complaining that he was unable to signal his consent and that the woman was a gold digger who was only after his money. The Chancellor of the Bishop of London got involved, and both Thomas and his future wife travelled to London to show the Chancellor that they were indeed in love, and Thomas both here and in the service used sign language to signal his consent. It’s interesting as a story because it demonstrates that speech and hearing are fundamental to faith and understanding. At the heart of it is the question of whether Thomas was capable of understanding and demonstrating such understanding.  She argued that the church led the way in using signs in place of speech, and that two of the big changes were related to marriage. There is, however, continued unease about what the signs being used mean and whether they demonstrated understanding and faith, especially over the Eucharist. She finished by thinking about what it really meant to be deaf in the period, regardless of what the contemporary theories said, outlining the challenges faced by one individual in making others understand his signs.

The last paper in the panel was a pre-recorded one by Anna Lewton-Brain (Dawson College) on ‘“When the soul unto the lines accords”: Towards An Historically Informed Performance Studies Approach to George Herbert’s Musical Verse’. She described the drastic and gnostic features of George Herbert’s poetry, as well as including historically informed performance practice. Herbert himself outlined some modes of performance for his poetry, showing that he expected them to be sung, read or read aloud and that all are acceptable. She talked about the performative aspects of singing early modern song, drawing on her performance experience, and finishing with a video recording of a polyphonic Herbert song.