Erika Supria Honisch
[feeling ambivalent about posting material to a for-profit site; will be migrating files to a non-profit platform]
Assistant Professor, State University of New York-Stony Brook (2014–)
Co-Chair (from 2020), American Musicological Society Graduate Education Committee
Co-Chair (2015–17), American Musicological Society Committee on Cultural Diversity
Assistant Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance (2012-2014)
Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto (2011-2012)
PhD, University of Chicago (2011)
Howard Mayer Brown Fellow (American Musicological Society) 2009-2010
University of Chicago Andrew Mellon Fellow 2009-2010
Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, Affiliated Fellow 2009-2010
Wesbrook Fellow, University of British Columbia 2003-2004
Supervisors: Robert Kendrick, Anne Walters Robertson, and Martha Feldman
Address: StonyBrook University
Department of Music
3304 Staller Center
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5475
Assistant Professor, State University of New York-Stony Brook (2014–)
Co-Chair (from 2020), American Musicological Society Graduate Education Committee
Co-Chair (2015–17), American Musicological Society Committee on Cultural Diversity
Assistant Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance (2012-2014)
Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto (2011-2012)
PhD, University of Chicago (2011)
Howard Mayer Brown Fellow (American Musicological Society) 2009-2010
University of Chicago Andrew Mellon Fellow 2009-2010
Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, Affiliated Fellow 2009-2010
Wesbrook Fellow, University of British Columbia 2003-2004
Supervisors: Robert Kendrick, Anne Walters Robertson, and Martha Feldman
Address: StonyBrook University
Department of Music
3304 Staller Center
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5475
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Books by Erika Supria Honisch
"DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
In 1600, Prague was the bustling capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Czechs rubbed shoulders with Italians and Germans; Catholics and Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus) lived alongside Lutherans, Jews, and religious refugees drawn to the city by the relatively tolerant policies of the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf II. My dissertation charts the creation and performance of sacred music by these groups, using music by composers such as Philippe de Monte and Jacobus Gallus as a lens through which to view the fraught relationship between rival denominations on the eve of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In doing so, it exposes the tensions between an indigenous policy of pragmatic toleration and the ideologically-motivated move, largely by foreign diplomats, towards Catholic exclusionism. While other studies of this repertory have been bounded by categories of linguistic or religious affiliation, mine discards these a priori constraints, emphasizing instead the circulation of sacred music across such lines.
The first chapter establishes Prague's sacred soundscape, while the second surveys the books and manuscripts that transmitted sacred music in Bohemia, seeing them as nodes in a vast network of composers, printers, scribes, and patrons. Chapter Three concerns music's engagement in cultural politics, arguing that music was used to lay claim to contested areas (physical or abstract) via the processes of invocation, representation, and commemoration. Chapter Four looks at Eucharistic piety, delineating music's role in increasingly belligerent Catholic efforts to reclaim Bohemia for Rome. Turning from the externalizing celebrations of Corpus Christi to internalizing meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary, the final chapter connects motets and spiritual madrigals written in
Prague to supra-regional trends in devotion.""
Articles and Chapters by Erika Supria Honisch
The 2011 discovery that the substantial collection of printed partbooks preserved in the library of Madrid’s Real Conservatorio Superior de Música originally belonged to the Central European diplomat Wolfgang Rumpf von Wielross (ca. 1536–1606), has opened up new perspectives on the formation and dispersal of private music libraries in the early modern period. Employed by Emperor Rudolf II, Rumpf was also an informant to Philip II of Spain, who rewarded him with induction into the chivalric Order of Santiago. The Order, headquartered at Uclés, received the bulk of Rumpf’s music library after his death.
This article traces the history of Rumpf’s music books, shedding light on the place of the music book in early modern material culture and, more broadly, in an expanding world of knowledge. Rumpf’s partbooks were not, in the first instance, intended for performance; they reflect instead his efforts to form a universal library, in which music books were to form an integral part. The catalogue drawn up by Imperial Librarian Hugo Blotius locates music among the languages, further illuminating its status in Renaissance Europe.
The multi-confessional cities of early modern Central Europe resounded with sacred music. People sang to express faith, to challenge the beliefs of others, and to lay claim to shared urban spaces. This study asks how such music was heard in Prague, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, during the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612). During this period, the city’s Catholics jostled for supremacy with Czech-speaking Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus) who vastly outnumbered them, and a growing population of German-speaking Lutherans. Focusing on the sonically rich Corpus Christi processions held by Prague’s Jesuits, this article asks how sounds that aggressively promoted Catholic Eucharistic doctrine were received by those who were—by chance or by design—within earshot. Viewing Catholic claims alongside non-Catholic resistance suggests that music’s power lay as much in the fact of its performance as in its deployment of specific texts and sounds.
In 1581, Mateo Flecha the Younger—chaplain to Empress Maria of Spain—oversaw the publication in Prague of vernacular polyphony by “diverse authors,” along with a few pieces of his own. He called the motley collection Las Ensaladas in a nod to its piquant mixture of poetic meters, rhetorical registers, and sacred and profane topoi. The title also captures the diverse musical styles animating the texts. The sacred-secular binary typically invoked to account for these celebrated sonic “salads” thus obscures their manifold resonances for the literati who sang them. I argue that unmarked juxtapositions and generic fluidity of Flecha's "musical salads," along with another Prague collection, Jacobus Handl's "harmonious morals (Harmoniae morales, 1589–90), were in fact essential to this music’s effectiveness as a medium for moral instruction and pious reflection in multilingual, multi-confessional Central Europe. Gastronomic specifications in the statutes for a collegium musicum formed in Prague in 1616 clarify the uses, and limits, of harmony on the eve of the Thirty Years War.
To make sense of the print’s raucous parade of drunken revelers, mythological figures, honking geese, and the Christ child, this analysis sets aside the hermetic lens typically used to account for the cultural products of the Rudolfine court and turns instead to contemporary theological tracts and writings by Augustine and Ovid that were foundational to the literary worlds of Renaissance humanists. Doing so brings into focus an ordered sequence of motets that offers some of the earliest and most vivid documentation in Central Europe of lay practices associated with the major feasts of the church year, from the bonfires on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist to the drowning of winter on Laetare Sunday. At the same time, this study shows the extent to which such “folk” traditions, parsed along national lines since the nineteenth century, had in fact long occupied common ground in the diverse territories of Habsburg Central Europe.
This paper focuses on one site of scribal emendation: the concluding Amens of early fifteenth-century Gloria and Credo settings. Frequently, otherwise concordant sources for the same piece transmit Amens that appear unrelated to each other. I propose that certain types of Amen-settings were more susceptible than others to alteration and that one type—the short, self-contained, homophonic Amen—arose through scribal emendation. In order to describe in precise terms the choices a scribe might make, I introduce a nomenclature system for Amen-settings encountered in this period. By systematically examining these instances of unstable transmission, this paper contributes to our understanding of scribal activity and the cultures of musical authorship in the fifteenth century.
Talks by Erika Supria Honisch
Carolina Symposia in Music and Culture
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
(November 9–10 2018)
Catholic University of America, Washington, DC (March 2018)
Boston University, Boston, MA (April 2018)
Longy School of Music, Bard College Boston, MA
(July 2018)
But, as religious institutions in distant Antwerp took pains to show, their city had greater claim to Norbert. Having lost him twice, they recast him as Joseph in exile and staged a procession in his absence. Multiple choirs sang music by Peter Philips and other celebrated composers, ensuring that the Antwerp “echo” sounded more forcefully than the Prague original. This paper traces the paths of these rival processions, using sound to clarify the stakes of translation at the outset of the Thirty Years War.
"DISSERTATION ABSTRACT
In 1600, Prague was the bustling capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Czechs rubbed shoulders with Italians and Germans; Catholics and Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus) lived alongside Lutherans, Jews, and religious refugees drawn to the city by the relatively tolerant policies of the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolf II. My dissertation charts the creation and performance of sacred music by these groups, using music by composers such as Philippe de Monte and Jacobus Gallus as a lens through which to view the fraught relationship between rival denominations on the eve of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). In doing so, it exposes the tensions between an indigenous policy of pragmatic toleration and the ideologically-motivated move, largely by foreign diplomats, towards Catholic exclusionism. While other studies of this repertory have been bounded by categories of linguistic or religious affiliation, mine discards these a priori constraints, emphasizing instead the circulation of sacred music across such lines.
The first chapter establishes Prague's sacred soundscape, while the second surveys the books and manuscripts that transmitted sacred music in Bohemia, seeing them as nodes in a vast network of composers, printers, scribes, and patrons. Chapter Three concerns music's engagement in cultural politics, arguing that music was used to lay claim to contested areas (physical or abstract) via the processes of invocation, representation, and commemoration. Chapter Four looks at Eucharistic piety, delineating music's role in increasingly belligerent Catholic efforts to reclaim Bohemia for Rome. Turning from the externalizing celebrations of Corpus Christi to internalizing meditations on the virtues of the Virgin Mary, the final chapter connects motets and spiritual madrigals written in
Prague to supra-regional trends in devotion.""
The 2011 discovery that the substantial collection of printed partbooks preserved in the library of Madrid’s Real Conservatorio Superior de Música originally belonged to the Central European diplomat Wolfgang Rumpf von Wielross (ca. 1536–1606), has opened up new perspectives on the formation and dispersal of private music libraries in the early modern period. Employed by Emperor Rudolf II, Rumpf was also an informant to Philip II of Spain, who rewarded him with induction into the chivalric Order of Santiago. The Order, headquartered at Uclés, received the bulk of Rumpf’s music library after his death.
This article traces the history of Rumpf’s music books, shedding light on the place of the music book in early modern material culture and, more broadly, in an expanding world of knowledge. Rumpf’s partbooks were not, in the first instance, intended for performance; they reflect instead his efforts to form a universal library, in which music books were to form an integral part. The catalogue drawn up by Imperial Librarian Hugo Blotius locates music among the languages, further illuminating its status in Renaissance Europe.
The multi-confessional cities of early modern Central Europe resounded with sacred music. People sang to express faith, to challenge the beliefs of others, and to lay claim to shared urban spaces. This study asks how such music was heard in Prague, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, during the reign of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II (1576–1612). During this period, the city’s Catholics jostled for supremacy with Czech-speaking Utraquists (followers of Jan Hus) who vastly outnumbered them, and a growing population of German-speaking Lutherans. Focusing on the sonically rich Corpus Christi processions held by Prague’s Jesuits, this article asks how sounds that aggressively promoted Catholic Eucharistic doctrine were received by those who were—by chance or by design—within earshot. Viewing Catholic claims alongside non-Catholic resistance suggests that music’s power lay as much in the fact of its performance as in its deployment of specific texts and sounds.
In 1581, Mateo Flecha the Younger—chaplain to Empress Maria of Spain—oversaw the publication in Prague of vernacular polyphony by “diverse authors,” along with a few pieces of his own. He called the motley collection Las Ensaladas in a nod to its piquant mixture of poetic meters, rhetorical registers, and sacred and profane topoi. The title also captures the diverse musical styles animating the texts. The sacred-secular binary typically invoked to account for these celebrated sonic “salads” thus obscures their manifold resonances for the literati who sang them. I argue that unmarked juxtapositions and generic fluidity of Flecha's "musical salads," along with another Prague collection, Jacobus Handl's "harmonious morals (Harmoniae morales, 1589–90), were in fact essential to this music’s effectiveness as a medium for moral instruction and pious reflection in multilingual, multi-confessional Central Europe. Gastronomic specifications in the statutes for a collegium musicum formed in Prague in 1616 clarify the uses, and limits, of harmony on the eve of the Thirty Years War.
To make sense of the print’s raucous parade of drunken revelers, mythological figures, honking geese, and the Christ child, this analysis sets aside the hermetic lens typically used to account for the cultural products of the Rudolfine court and turns instead to contemporary theological tracts and writings by Augustine and Ovid that were foundational to the literary worlds of Renaissance humanists. Doing so brings into focus an ordered sequence of motets that offers some of the earliest and most vivid documentation in Central Europe of lay practices associated with the major feasts of the church year, from the bonfires on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist to the drowning of winter on Laetare Sunday. At the same time, this study shows the extent to which such “folk” traditions, parsed along national lines since the nineteenth century, had in fact long occupied common ground in the diverse territories of Habsburg Central Europe.
This paper focuses on one site of scribal emendation: the concluding Amens of early fifteenth-century Gloria and Credo settings. Frequently, otherwise concordant sources for the same piece transmit Amens that appear unrelated to each other. I propose that certain types of Amen-settings were more susceptible than others to alteration and that one type—the short, self-contained, homophonic Amen—arose through scribal emendation. In order to describe in precise terms the choices a scribe might make, I introduce a nomenclature system for Amen-settings encountered in this period. By systematically examining these instances of unstable transmission, this paper contributes to our understanding of scribal activity and the cultures of musical authorship in the fifteenth century.
Carolina Symposia in Music and Culture
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
(November 9–10 2018)
Catholic University of America, Washington, DC (March 2018)
Boston University, Boston, MA (April 2018)
Longy School of Music, Bard College Boston, MA
(July 2018)
But, as religious institutions in distant Antwerp took pains to show, their city had greater claim to Norbert. Having lost him twice, they recast him as Joseph in exile and staged a procession in his absence. Multiple choirs sang music by Peter Philips and other celebrated composers, ensuring that the Antwerp “echo” sounded more forcefully than the Prague original. This paper traces the paths of these rival processions, using sound to clarify the stakes of translation at the outset of the Thirty Years War.
Chairs: Hana Vlhová-Wörner, Erika Honisch
Panelists: Jan Baťa, Lenka Hlávková, Bernhold Schmid Reinhard Strohm, Elzbieta Witkowska-Zaremba
The development of music and musical culture in the Czech lands during the early period is only partly compatible with generally accepted music-historical periodisations. This is a consequence both of geography—which affected the constitution of the liturgical music (both Slavonic and Latin) in the earliest period—and of the somewhat erratic political developments of the late Middle Ages. The entry for 'Czech music' in Grove Music Online locates the beginning of the first important period of Bohemia’s music history in the 9th century with the introduction of Christianity, and locates its end in 1723 with the coronation of Habsburg Emperor Charles VI (see the entry 'Czech Republic', § I. Art music, 1. Bohemia and Moravia, i. to 1723). Reflecting broader tendencies in Czech music historiography, the entry stresses the importance of vernacular song production (both monophonic and polyphonic), identifying this as the main contribution of Bohemian composers to Western musical heritage. The eight-century epoch is not divided into shorter segments, and the productive and fluid relationship of autochthonous repertories and musical practices to those in neighboring territories is left unremarked. At the same time, the mainstream of Western music historiography does not include or account for Bohemian musical sources and repertories in the medieval and early modern periods. The following reflection is directly connected to the revision of the Grove 'Czech Republic’ entry, currently being conducted by Hana Vlhová-Wörner and Erika Honisch and to the parallel revision of the analogous entry in Musik in die Geschichte und Gegenwart, conducted by Lenka Hlávková, Jan Bata and David Eben.
The standard succession of early music periods, defined by the disposition of musical institutions, by new compositional approaches, and by genre preferences, among others, can only be partly applied in the Czech context. This is due in part to the region’s unique political and religious history: music historiography hangs on a scaffolding of politically defined periods and events that are believed to have caused important shifts in a region’s musical and cultural life. In Czech narratives, music history is usually oriented around the martyrdom of Jan Hus (1415) and the ensuing Hussite Revolution, which is held to be a defining historical moment and singled out as instigating a definitive departure from the main line of European musical developments. Consequently, Czech music histories often deploy such designations as 'pre-Hussite' –'Hussite' – 'post-Hussite', which to some extent align with the 'medieval' – 'early Renaissance' – 'high Renaissance' periods elsewhere in Europe, but differ significantly in their music profile. As distinct from the development in the surrounding regions, for instance, the Hussite musical heritage is marked not by the rise of polyphony, but rather by the extensive production of monophonic devotional and socio-critical strophic songs, as well as by the introduction of vernacular language into the liturgy.
Two important surveys of Czech music history from the second half of the 20th century—the Music volume from the Czechoslovak National Studies series (Československá vlastivěda, 1971) and the multi-authored Music in Czech History (Hudba v českých dějinách, 1984, 21989)—exemplify the Czech historiographic emphasis. They introduce the 'Hussite period' as a compact historical and cultural entity, lasting roughly from 1419–1434. Each survey offers different views on the demarcation of the periods preceding and following the Hussite era. In both histories, though, the status of Hussite music is the most decisive factor in determining the duration of the epoch, the end of which is invariably defined by the Battle of White Mountain (1620) and the onset of re-Catholicization (see the sections "Era of Reformation and Humanism" in Československá vlastivěda and "From the Hussite movement to White Mountain" in Hudba v českých dějinách). Yet new research on the celebrated court of Rudolf II by scholars within and outside the Czech Republic is highlighting musical contacts between Hussites and Catholics, and suggesting a far more complicated relationship between the ruling dynasty and the diverse populations over which it ruled. Furthermore, the forms and contents of surviving sources reveal previously unknown points of resonance, even as they allow us to delineate more clearly the role music played in Bohemia’s various communities of belief.
The musicological challenges are clear: how can we integrate the unique elements of 15th- and 16th-century Czech music historical developments into the “mainstream” of music history? On the other hand, what would it look like to write a music history that centers these Central European developments? This discussion panel takes up these questions from multiple perspectives, proposing as a starting point that a reconsideration of Czech music historiography can be productively brought to bear on both Central European and pan-European music histories. Together, we identify the circulation networks for music in Medieval and Renaissance Central Europe, and delineate the relative mobility of specific repertories (e.g. Latin motets, troped chants). We direct attention to practices (e.g. troping) and sources (e.g. illuminated manuscript graduals) that persisted in Bohemia after they had fallen out of favor elsewhere in Europe, as well as to those practices long beloved in Bohemia (e.g. vernacular hymnody) that gained new significance across Europe as a consequence of sixteenth-century religious reforms. Furthermore, we call specific attention to the relationship between Bohemian musical culture and the cultures and practices in Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Silesia, and Poland. Animating the panel as a whole is the question of ideology: what motivated previous music historiographies, and—turning the mirror on ourselves—what motivates our own reworking?
Yet Tridentine Catholicism posed a problem for Pontanus. Looking out on a Kingdom where the Utraquist reformers had largely retained local liturgies, he took it upon himself to preserve what Trent threatened to sweep away. He dug through the cathedral archives, looking for artifacts of pre-Hussite practices, and he rescued manuscripts and relics from depopulated monasteries. Above all, he wrote: not only sermons, prayers, and vitae for local saints, in Latin, Czech, and German, but also motet texts for Imperial composers. In this paper I show how these texts—given potent expression in settings by the venerable chapelmaster Philippe de Monte and his younger colleague Carolus Luython—formed history. Rooted in Bohemia’s sacred past and staking a claim on its present, they made a case for renewed Catholic authority while defending the legitimacy of local religious practices.
In 1581, Mateo Flecha the Younger—chaplain to Empress Maria of Spain—oversaw the publication in Prague of vernacular polyphony by “diverse authors,” along with a few pieces of his own. He called the motley collection Las Ensaladas in a nod to its pungent mixture of poetic meters, rhetorical registers, and sacred and profane topoi. The title also captures the diverse musical styles animating the texts. The sacred-secular binary typically invoked to account for these celebrated sonic “salads” thus obscures their manifold resonances for the literati who sang them. This paper draws attention to previously overlooked intertexts for Las Ensaladas and two similar collections published in the new Imperial capital within the decade: Carolus Luython’s Popularis anni jubilus and Jacobus Gallus’s Harmoniae morales. I argue that unmarked juxtapositions and generic fluidity were in fact essential to this music’s effectiveness as a medium for moral instruction and pious reflection in multilingual, multi-confessional Central Europe.
Yet Tridentine Catholicism posed a problem for Pontanus. Looking out on a Kingdom where even Utraquist reformers had largely retained local liturgies, he embarked on a project to preserve what Trent threatened to sweep away. He dug through the cathedral archives and rescued manuscripts and relics from depopulated monasteries. Above all, he wrote: not only sermons, prayers, and vitae for local saints, in Latin, Czech, and German, but also motet texts for Imperial composers. In this paper I show how these texts—given potent expression in settings by the venerable Philippe de Monte and the ambitious young Carl Luython—formed history. Rooted in Bohemia’s sacred past and shaping its present, they made a case for renewed Catholic authority while defending the legitimacy of local religious practices.
Such motets are typically viewed as exceptional artifacts of an environment where alchemical interests trumped religious imperatives; their connections to local traditions are further obscured by the standard model for Habsburg devotional practices (pietas austriaca). Situating sanctoral motets in a rich discursive complex of hagiographic texts (e.g. vitae) and acts (e.g. pilgrimages), I argue that these sonic celebrations of sanctity were among the most powerful means by which Bohemia’s Catholics reasserted their authority in a region that had split from Rome long before the Lutheran Reformation. Led by the native-born provost of Prague’s cathedral chapter, galvanized by Jesuits, and bolstered by the Imperial presence, Catholics used sacred songs to stake a claim on Bohemia’s sanctoral past, and to undermine the assertions of Utraquists–––followers of Jan Hus (d. 1415)––about the antiquity (and authenticity) of their traditions.
Ironically, this revivalist project, emblematized by the enthusiastic excavation of saintly bodies, became one of preservation as local liturgies came under pressure from the standardizing decrees of the Council of Trent. Drawing attention to the use of sanctoral motets to achieve both political and salvific aims, this paper offers a case study in the phenomenon Ditchfield terms the “preservation of the particular” and a response to Craig Monson’s admonition (2002) that “the history of post-Tridentine sacred music is…local history.”
This course focuses on the sounds and music of conflict during the Baroque period. Together, we'll ask: What kinds of musical sounds represented conflict? What kinds of musical sounds promoted peace? How was music thought to work on its listeners? How can historically informed analysis illuminate music's intended effects? Readings will include relevant primary source excerpts (e.g. Monteverdi, Kircher, Hobbes, Louis XIV, Schütz), sonically oriented musicological texts (Fisher, Leppert), and foundational work on music, power, conflict, and trauma (Daughtry, Van Orden, Fenlon, Weaver).
Who listened to music in the seventeenth century? Why did they listen and what did they hear? What can exploring these questions tell us in terms of analysis, performance practice, and listening today? When Baroque composers composed, singers sang, and listeners listened, they did so with certain basic assumptions in mind about how hearing worked: how sonic phenomena entered the ear, were perceived, and how sound (musical or otherwise) influenced body and soul. In this course, we will familiarize ourselves with these assumptions using a combination of primary sources and scholarly literature (e.g. G. Tomlinson, A. Fisher, R. Grant). Part of our focus will be analytical, as we investigate how pitch structures worked in the repertory we cover, using both more deliberately historicist methods (B. Meier, G. Barnett, R. Freedman) and modern analytic systems (H. Powers, E. Chafe). At the same time, we will seek to understand listeners in history. Together, we will ask how what listeners heard was shaped by who they were (and vice versa). In studying music as it was heard, we can better understand the emergence of musical styles and of listening subjects in the age of the Baroque.
There will be weekly reading and listening assignments, as well as assignments in “historically informed analysis." Participants will write a research paper, a “conference” version (20 minutes long) of which will be presented in the final class session. Twice in the semester (between Weeks 5 and 14), participants will lead discussion.
This seminar is primarily intended for MA/PhD students. Though it counts as a “history” course for performers, any MM/DMA students considering enrolling must confer first with Prof. Honisch.
3 credits
Coursework includes weekly readings, 2 short in-class presentations, a modern edition of a solo or chamber work, and a final paper.
Following an opening unit in which we collaboratively draw up the central questions that we will pursue and familiarize ourselves with established methodologies, we will adopt a geographic approach. We will ground specific pieces and sounds in specific spaces and, as far as possible, connect them to specific kinds of listeners or listening communities. Readings will include relevant primary source excerpts (e.g. Bernhard, Kircher, Rameau), foundational texts in sound studies (e.g. Sterne, Corbin), studies of past sounds and spaces (e.g. Rath, Blesser and Salter, Atkinson, Smith), and recent sonically oriented musicological work (e.g. dell’Antonio, Fisher, Dillon, Tcharos).
Readings (ca. 120 pp. per week) will be in English, although I will make reference to important contributions to the literature in other languages. Participants will write a research paper, a “conference” version (20 minutes long) of which will be presented in the final class session. In addition, twice in the semester (between Weeks 5 and 14), participants will lead discussion, focusing on one article and connecting it—as far as possible—to one of the pieces of music assigned that week. There will also be short weekly written responses to the readings and listening.
In this course, we will examine the changing relationship between sound, rhetoric, and affect in a century characterized by musical “polystylism,” the rise of instrumental music, and a gradual reorientation in pitch space from modal to tonal pitch structures. Bearing in mind Cicero's dictum that the poet should aim to delight (delectare), instruct (docere), and persuade (movere), we will consider the ways in which¬¬ composers ranging from Monteverdi to Schütz to Lully manipulated rhythm, texture, and style in order to craft effective and moving compositions––what might reasonably be called “musical orations.” We will adopt socio-historical, repertorial, and analytical approaches in order to tackle these problems. We will engage with a combination of primary source readings (e.g. Burmeister, Bernhard, Raguenet) and secondary literature (e.g. Eric Chafe, Mauro Calcagno, Tim Carter, Suzanne Cusick, Andrew dell’Antonio, and Bettina Varwig), teasing out the tangled threads of scholarly debates about the ways music was heard—and felt—in the seventeenth century. In four weeks of the semester, we will focus on one specific place and cultural moment (e.g. Mantua, Venice, Dresden, and Paris/Versailles).
Readings (ca. 120 pp. per week) will be in English, although I will make reference to important contributions to the literature in other languages. Participants will write a research paper, a “conference” version (20 minutes long) of which will be presented in the final class session. In addition, twice in the semester (between Weeks 5 and 14), participants will lead discussion, focusing on one article and connecting it—as far as possible—to one of the pieces of music assigned that week. There will also be short weekly written responses to the readings and listening.
The interest in timbre, changing technologies, and acoustics that animates these projects also drives the work of practitioners and historians of electroacoustic music. Indeed, the vocabulary and methodologies developed by electroacoustic musicians to build a sonic lexicon, research the sounds of the past, and contextualise the impact of technology on sonic creativity are ideally suited to historically oriented sound studies.
The purpose of this themed issue of Organised Sound is to explore the many points of resonance between the questions raised by electroacoustic specialists and those taken up by scholars who work on the sounds of the pre-electric past. How can we build bridges between these two exciting fields? With this in mind, for the ‘New Wor(l)ds for Old Sounds’ issue, we invite contributions that experiment with the possibilities of applying the insights afforded by electroacoustic technologies, practices and vocabularies to sounds and spaces before the widespread adoption of electric sound in North America and Europe, roughly 1925. By its very etymology ‘electroacoustic’ implicates the electric; so while we could have simply proposed a crossover issue between sound studies and electroacoustic music, we have chosen instead to be deliberately provocative to encourage our authors and readers to expand their conception of the traditional scope of Organised Sound. We are interested in providing a forum for the projection of electroacoustic music studies to other pre-electric objects and, conversely, testing out methodologies as well as the relevance/applicability of historical knowledge to the current and future initiatives falling squarely within the journal’s subject domain, electroacoustic music studies.
More specifically, we wish to probe how electroacoustic language might be fruitfully used to discuss technologies, compositions, and listening practices before the advent of recording and electronically generated sound. What kinds of sounds emerge when we examine textual documents or historical musical instruments using a vocabulary of timbre informed by electroacoustic music? What do the re-creative possibilities of electroacoustic technology tell us about the obsolete or imaginary musical instruments described in music theory treatises (Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, 1650); the utopian sound-houses described by Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis,1624); the ‘invisible music’ channelled into the palace of Christian IV of Denmark (Spohr, 2012); the acoustic properties of the cavernous Salle des Machines in Berlioz’s Paris? And on the other hand, how do pre-electric practices and technologies continue to inform current electroacoustic practices? Taken together, such questions invite a rethinking of the relationship between past and present conceptions of timbre, space, and sonic ecology, and the history of sound-based listening.
Contributors might take up the following questions:
What is an electroacoustic vocabulary for the pre-electric sonic past?
What can we learn if we apply new electroacoustic methodologies to examine familiar historical objects (musical texts, musical instruments, resonant spaces)?
How are current electroacoustic practices shaped and informed by pre-electric musical technologies?
How are current electroacoustic technologies used in the study of pre-electric music?
Which electroacoustic technologies can be deployed to answer questions about the acoustic properties of colonial village greens, of Gothic cathedrals, of Baroque theatres, of the factories and mills of the Industrial Revolution?
What do we learn when electroacoustic practitioners and historians take up questions that drive sound studies research (for example, the interest on aural cultures and listening communities) to shed light on the history and priorities of electroacoustic music?
and….?
As always, submissions related to the theme are encouraged; however, those that fall outside the scope of this theme are also welcome. Articles which compare pre-electric and post-electric sound-worlds and sonic practices are encouraged but in order to be considered ‘on theme’ a substantial portion of the text must address the period before 1925.
We invite contributions from all disciplines, but particularly from electroacoustic music studies, history, sound studies, musicology and ethnomusicology, music theory, and history of science.
Sound, like history, describes a dynamic terrain. Scholars concerned with the convergence of sound and history have, in the wake of the “sensory turn” in the humanities, worked to generate clear narratives from data that resists fixity, that seems to be in constant motion. The shared aims of sound studies and history have yielded a rich body of scholarship that interrogates, for example, the noisy illuminations of medieval songbooks, acoustic control in modern architecture, sound and the moving image, accounts of deafness and synaesthesia, and the production of aural subjects through consumer technology. The practice of thinking sound historically and history sonically is driving the growth of fresh methodologies and compelling new interpretations of sources.
Periods and Waves: A Conference on Sound and History is co-organized by the Department of Music, Department of Philosophy, and the School of Health Technology & Management at Stony Brook University, with the aim of bringing together humanities scholars and humanistic scientists, particularly those working in sound studies. In addition to two plenary sessions, featuring renowned scholars speaking about their work and engaging in a Q&A, the conference features thirty-minute papers from researchers in the myriad disciplines that investigate past aural cultures, including musicology, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, medical history, art history, philosophy, religion, disability studies, acoustics, and sound studies.
If you have any questions, or would like to be added to our email list, please contact Erika Honisch (erika.honisch@stonybrook.edu) or Benjamin Tausig (benjamin.tausig@stonybrook.edu).