Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918

Kirsten Gibson, ian Biddle, Kirsten Gibson, ian Biddle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317156420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia social

Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918 presents a range of historical case studies on the sounding worlds of the European past. The chapters in this volume explore ways of thinking about sound historically, and seek to understand how people have understood and negotiated their relationships with the sounding world in Europe from the Middle Ages through to the early twentieth century. They consider, in particular: sound and music in the later Middle Ages; the politics of sound in the early modern period; the history of the body and perception during the Ancien Régime; and the sounds of the city in the nineteenth century and sound and colonial rule at the fin de siècle.

The case studies also range in geographical orientation to include considerations not only of Britain and France, the countries most considered in European historical sound studies in English-language scholarship to date, but also Bosnia-Herzegovina, British Colonial India, Germany, Italy and Portugal. Out of this diverse group of case studies emerge significant themes that recur time and again, varying according to time and place: sound, power and identity; sound as a marker of power or violence; and sound, physiology and sensory perception and technologies of sound, consumption and meaning.

Section III

Urban Soundscapes of Europe

Introduction

Ian Biddle and Kirsten Gibson

The chapters in this section all focus on urban soundscapes of Europe’s past. They are, as in the previous sections, geographically and historically dispersed, ranging from the cities of Maximilian I’s empire at the turn of the sixteenth century, early modern Italian cities and late sixteenth-century London to nineteenth-century Lyon and fin-de-siècle Lisbon. While each chapter is focused on the sonorities of particular urban centres, they deploy a range of approaches and methodologies, from various disciplines – musicology, literary studies and architectural studies – to consider past experiences of, and engagements with, these soundscapes. From explorations of everyday civic musical life and religious festivities that utilized the physical and sonic fabric of particular urban spaces to studies of the aural consequences of developments in architectural design and town planning, the introduction of new technologies and new modes of sociability and leisure activity, these chapters attempt not simply to evoke these lost soundscapes, but to ask how, for people living in these urban centres – at these particular times – they were experienced aurally. The underpinning principle, as in the previous two sections, is, then, the recovery of the semantic agency of sonority for subjects past, mediated here through the changing urban environments of Europe from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

Chapter 8, by Helen Coffey, draws on civic council records and contemporaneous accounts to consider uses of music in the everyday lives of the citizens of the cities of Maximilian I’s domains. Coffey’s examination of civic music presents a complex urban soundscape in which musicians employed by the municipality – the Stadtpfeifer, pipers and drummers, trumpeters and watchmen – intermingled with the cities’ amateur musicians to varying degrees at a range of civic occasions and social gatherings. In particular, Coffey’s account draws a detailed picture not only of the types of music commonly heard and used in such towns and cities, and the various uses of music in everyday urban life, but also the ways in which music was controlled by the cities’ patricians, and was used to demarcate social and class differences amongst the citizens alongside aurally defining the urban spaces associated with differing social groups. In the towns and cities examined here, the diverse urban sounds encountered – especially those of musical performances – reflect the underlying social and political structures that determined all aspects of civic life.

In Chapter 9, Daniele V. Filippi explores the ways in which Biblical notions of ‘otherworldly’ sound – both heavenly and hellish – were echoed in the Cathedrals, churches, squares and streets of early modern Italian cities, giving their citizens a sensory, aural foretaste of the afterlife. Drawing on the writings of Luis de Granada and Jeremias Drexel, Filippi outlines the aural dimensions of early modern understandings of the afterlife, and, in particular, the status of music in the heavenly sphere. These ideals, as Filippi shows, were drawn on and evoked in earthly urban life, in both liturgical and secular art music practices, in the aural dimensions of the daily cycle of worship, in the architectural planning of sacred spaces and in the ceremonies and processions of urban feast days. Aural evocations of hellish soundscapes could also be heard in the streets of Italian towns and cities, though to a lesser extent than the heavenly, but, as Filippi observes, such evocations were to be found on the stage, playing an important role in some of the earliest operas at the beginning of the seventeenth century. That the evocation of infernal soundscapes would continue both as a source of interest and meaning for composers, librettists, performers and theatre audiences has been shown in Chapter 6, in which the Orpheus myth was adopted in eighteenth-century Paris as a significant site for both acting out, and resisting, the ‘politics of silence’.

Everard Guilpin’s 1598 satiric representation of London, Skialetheia, forms the focus of Chapter 10 by Adam Hansen. As Hansen notes, sound plays a significant role in Guilpin’s evocation of the city, both in terms of references to the sounds of the city, and the poetic devices he employs – alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, homophones – in its illustration. Drawing on scholarship on classical and early modern satire, on the satire of Juvenal and recent historical sound studies scholarship, Hansen considers the ways in which Guilpin reproduces the sounds of the city poetically – in order to capture for the reader/listener ‘the effects of immediacy’¹ – in order, at the same time, to derogate them. Yet, simultaneously, his poetic persona and the subjects he addresses are inextricably implicated in the sounds of the city, as subject to and producers of urban noise. The city and its sounds, for the poetic speaker, are represented as something to deplore and resist, as something that can seduce and as something in which the listener is always already inevitably implicated. Through his close reading of ‘Satire V’ from Guilpin’s Skialetheia Hansen asks, ultimately, ‘How did the city’s sounds constitute and compromise urban and satiric subjectivities?’

The final two chapters in this section deal with the aural implications of material changes to the urban fabric. Chapter 11, by Olivier Balaÿ, shifts the focus from poetics to the materiality of the city and its sounds. Focusing on nineteenth-century Lyon, Balaÿ examines the ways in which urban development – renovations, the widening of streets and the removal of overhangs, corbelled constructions and awnings – in the mid-nineteenth century altered the conditions under which sounds were produced and promulgated. Balaÿ’s research utilizes city maps and illustrations, urban planning reports and by-laws, alongside sonometer readings, to map out the aural consequences of changes to the fabric of the city. Drawing on ‘the sound effect concept’ currently used at Cresson (Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore et l’environnement urbain), Balaÿ is able to trace the past aural terrain of the city, and to chart the changing quality of sounds from the Lyon of the Ancien Régime to its ‘Haussmannian’ counterpart.

Chapter 12, by João Silva, similarly focuses on the aural implications of changes to the urban fabric of a city, in this case Lisbon, from the second half of the nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth century. It considers the coming of modernity to Lisbon, influenced, like many European cities, by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconfiguration of Paris, while at the same time exploring the interrelated implications for the urban soundscape of the development of sound reproduction technologies and emergent leisure markets. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Silva considers the aural porosity of Lisbon, through, firstly, an examination of how the modernization of the city – in terms of the rationalization of public and private spaces, the implementation of a modern transport infrastructure and, in particular, the development of entertainment venues across the city – changed dominant modes of sociability and altered its sonic landscape. As Silva’s study demonstrates, changes to the city’s entertainment venues had implications beyond the stage, not only as the burgeoning of theatres in the city brought new theatrical genres to the city’s audiences, but also because the music first heard on the stage frequently seeped out onto the city’s streets and into the parlours of the city’s bourgeois residents. For those living in the older neighbourhoods and on the fringes of the city sounds – the performance of fado, street cries, church bells and the music of banda ensembles – likewise permeated the public and private spheres of everyday life.

While each chapter presents a localized case study, taken together they sketch out the overarching narrative of the changing fabric – and aurality – of European urban spaces from the late fifteenth through to the early twentieth century. These chapters, therefore, bear witness to the gradual shift from the sonorities of the narrow, winding streets and official civic and religious spaces of pre- and early modern towns and cities – through the process of ‘Haussmannization’ in the nineteenth century – to the beginnings of the rationalized, sprawling modern urban centres we know today. Yet, in their varied approaches, they also tease out myriad interrelationships between the acoustic consequences of the changing materiality of urban space and other kinds of human interventions in these spaces. Changes in these various aspects of the physical and aural dimensions of urban space, of course, moved at differing rates, at different times; the longstanding ubiquity of street cries, for instance – as witnessed in the chapters by Hansen, Laurance and Silva across the collection as a whole – provides a certain kind of continuity in the sonic character of European urban centres, even as, at the same time, the acoustic make-up of the towns and cities in which distinctive street cries reverberated was altered in the processes of architectural modernization. These chapters, then, draw out the ever-shifting, interwoven narratives between the changing physicality of urban centres and changing attitudes towards particular types of sound and the ways in which it was managed in the sounding of European towns and cities from the Middle Ages to the cusp of the twentieth century.

Notes

1 Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 375.

8 City Life and Music for Secular Entertainment during the Reign of Maximilian I¹

Helen Coffey

By the end of the fifteenth century, performances by instrumentalists were an intrinsic feature of life within the many cities that were dotted across the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire.² Their music could be heard from all corners of these municipalities: from the towers that overlooked each urban space, to the specially constructed dance halls, the musicians’ balconies at the town halls and even on the rivers and streets. The importance of instrumental music to the cities is testified by the frequency and regularity of references to musicians in civic payment lists, which exist for the fourteenth century onwards.³ Other kinds of civic documents corroborate this perception of the significance of civic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction IAN BIDDLE AND KIRSTEN GIBSON
• SECTION I Historicizing Aurality: Introduction
• SECTION II Sound Politics: Introduction
• SECTION III Urban Soundscapes of Europe: Introduction
• Bibliography
• Index