Introduction

Abstract

Aural culture and poetics in the early modern Hispanic world: sound, rhythm and music

Notes

1 A few among many recent reflections on this age-old topic include: Jonathan Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, the introductory essay to his edited volume, The Sound Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1–17 (pp. 9–10); Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull & Les Back (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2016 [1^st ed. 2003]), 23–35; David Howes, ‘Introduction: Empires of the Senses’, in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 1–21; Michael Bull, ‘Sounding out the City: An Auditory Epistemology of Urban Experience’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bull & Back, 73–86.

2 This expression is borrowed from Howes, ‘Introduction: Empires of the Senses’, 7.

3 Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, 23.

4 Michael Bull & Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound … Once More with Feeling’, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Bull & Back, 1–20 (p. 3).

5 Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, 28.

6 Quoted in Sterne, ‘Sonic Imaginations’, 3.

7 Quoted in Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, in his Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska & Stephen Rudy, with an intro. by Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1987), 62–94 (p. 81).

8 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Rhythm?’, in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, ed. Ben Glaser & Jonathan Culler (New York: Fordham U. P., 2019), 21–39 (p. 36). See also Natalie Gerber, ‘Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 223–46 (p. 223).

9 Marjorie Perloff, ‘Introduction’, in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–9 (p. 7).

10 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, in Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly & Keith Moxey (Williamstown: Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 231–50 (pp. 236–37). Mitchell delves into this enigmatic last question, ‘what do they want?’ in his playfully serious essay ‘What Do Pictures Really Want?’, October, 77 (1996), 71–82.

11 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing’, 244.

12 The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, ed. Alex Ayres (New York: Meridian, 1989), 158.

13 Examples would include: Emilie L. Bergmann, ‘Dancing to the Dactyls, Listening to Sor Juana’, Aztlan. A Journal of Chicano Studies, 44:2 (2019), 187–94; and Sarah Finley, Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2019). More broadly, all contributors to this volume have published original studies delving into any or several of the aspects of the sensorium, or of the temporal arts, or the aurality of poetry or music, or emotion, simultaneous processes, rhythm and so on.

14 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993), 5.

15 Schafer, The Soundscape, 7.

16 Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 59.

17 Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 206.

18 Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 207.

19 Niall Atkinson, The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (University Park: Penn State U. P., 2016), 13.

20 Reinhard Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); see Chapter 1 ‘Townscape—Soundscape', 1–9.

21 Strohm, Music in Late Medieval Bruges, 8.

22 See Música y cultura urbana en la edad moderna, ed. Andrea Bombi, Juan José Carerras & Miguel A. Marín (València: Univ. de València, 2005); and Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tess Knighton & Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018).

23 Tess Knighton, ‘Forward’, in Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, ed. Knighton & Mazuela-Anguita, ‘Forward', Knighton, 7–15 (p. 7).

24 Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2008), 8.

25 Helen Hills, ‘Veiling the Voice of Architecture’, in Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, ed. Knighton & Mazuela-Anguita, 117–31 (p. 118).

26 Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan & Paul Hegarty, ‘Introduction’, in Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, ed. Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan & Paul Hegarty (London/New York: Continuum, 2012), 1–12 (p. 2).

27 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson & afterword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985 [1^st French ed. 1977]), 5; emphasis in the original.

28 Tim Carter, ‘Listening to Music in Early Modern Italy: Some Problems for the Urban Musicologist’, in Hearing the City in Early Modern Europe, ed. Knighton & Mazuela-Anguita, 25–49 (pp. 32–33).

29 Veit Erlmann, ‘But What of the Ethnographic Ear? Anthropology, Sound, and the Senses’, in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2005), 1–20 (p. 4).

30 Such studies and anthologies include: Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans., with an intro., by Stephen Heath (New York: Fontana Press, 1977); The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound, ed. Perloff & Dworkin; Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler; and Louise K. Stein, Songs of Mortals, Dialogues of the Gods: Music and Theatre in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2011), as well as numerous others.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.