In quest of the period ear

Burstyn, Shai

doi:10.1093/earlyj/xxv.4.692

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Like jazz, it is never completely notated, so it proceeds more through improvisation and inspiration than through formal logic. This means that, more than any other musical genre (with the possible exceptions of jazz and rap), early music shifts attention away from musical scores öaway from the authority of texts written down by composersöand towards music in performance (Burstyn, 1997;Lawrence-King, 1997).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing the (Sound)World

Smith

2000

Environ Plan D

143

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The significance of sound`F or twenty-five centuries Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.'' Attali (1985, page 3) Sight is the sense that has driven most thinking, theorising, and empirical research in the social sciences. The consequences of this are enormous, and this is not the place to list them. What cannot be denied, however, is how very comfortable we are with using the visual as a route to knowledge and as a medium for experiencing the world. Questions are`looked at' in a particular way, pilot studies are completed`with a view' to developing a larger project, things are kept`perspective', events are`seen' in one way or another, futures are`envisaged', empirical research`sheds light' on theoretical concerns,`insights' are gained, problems are`looked into'. The list is endless; the language of everyday life is peppered with visual allusions and metaphors. What I want to do in this paper is to imagine a world where the eye is less central. I want to take up Attali's (1985) concerns, and think about what it would be like to engage with sound as readily as we engage with sight.``What we lack'' comments B Smith (1999)``is not contact with the sounded world, but a sensitivity to sound, a curiosity about how it operates, how it affects us'' (page 22). What would happen if we thought about space in terms of its acoustical properties rather than in terms of its transparency or its topology? What would happen to the way we think, to the things we know, to the relationships we enter, to our experience of time and space, if we fully took on board the idea that the world is for hearing rather than beholding, for listening to, rather than for looking at? If sonic knowledges were the same as visual knowledges, the answer would bè nothing'öthere would be no need to engage with those tricky terrains beyond the visible world. But Attali's suggestion, and my contention, is that what can be known through sound may not be accessible from the visible world. The challenge, then, is to

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confidence: 99%

Performing the (Sound)World

Smith

2000

Environ Plan D

143

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“…Moreover, as musicologists have been showing since the 1990s, reconstituting the material objects that produced certain historical sounds still leaves us grappling with our profoundly ahistorical ears, which are accustomed to making sense of our own, twenty-fi rst-century environment. 25 The "period ear," as musicologists have termed it, cannot be simply (re)constructed, it must be painstakingly imagined, pieced together from a variety of sources to modestly begin to understand what historical actors may have heard. 26 Studies of musical and theatrical "period ears" offer the fi rst hints toward a solution, for historians, to the problem of the voice's immateriality and transience.…”

Section: The Problem Of Missing Documentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voices that Matter?

Hoegaerts

2021

Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques

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How do we thoroughly historicize the voice, or integrate it into our historical research, and how do we account for the mundane daily practices of voice . . . the constant talking, humming, murmuring, whispering, and mumbling that went on off stage, in living rooms, debating clubs, business meetings, and on the streets? Work across the humanities has provided us with approaches to deal with aspects of voices, vocality, and their sounds. This article considers how we can mobilize and adapt such interdisciplinary methods for the study of history. It charts out a practical approach to attend to the history of voices—including unmusical ones—before recording, drawing on insights from the fields of sound studies, musicology, and performativity. It suggests ways to “listen anew” to familiar sources as well as less conventional source material. And it insists on a combination of analytical approaches focusing on vocabulary, bodily practice, and the questionable particularity of sound.

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“…'D espite equivalent advances in technologies of musical reproduction, the "period ear" and its cultural formation has only recently emerged as an explicit object of academic attention (Burstyn 1997), Whether aural technologies have as much power as visual technologies to alter physical and mental states, including the capacity to create § new way of listening and thinking, is not yet recognized as a pressing m historical question (Wegman 1998), However, I am confident that early modernists will become accustomed to using musical examples to help them think about changing soundscapes and aurality, just as they now use paintings and other images to think about landscapes § and visuality. 'D espite equivalent advances in technologies of musical reproduction, the "period ear" and its cultural formation has only recently emerged as an explicit object of academic attention (Burstyn 1997), Whether aural technologies have as much power as visual technologies to alter physical and mental states, including the capacity to create § new way of listening and thinking, is not yet recognized as a pressing m historical question (Wegman 1998), However, I am confident that early modernists will become accustomed to using musical examples to help them think about changing soundscapes and aurality, just as they now use paintings and other images to think about landscapes § and visuality.…”

Section: Early Modern Sound Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Search of Sound: Authenticity, Healing and Redemption in the Early Modern State

Gouk¹

2007

The Senses and Society

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In quest of the period ear

Cited by 12 publications

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Performing the (Sound)World

Performing the (Sound)World

Voices that Matter?

In Search of Sound: Authenticity, Healing and Redemption in the Early Modern State

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