Brown University

Graduate Student, History

Thesis Title: Song and Subjectivity During the Carolingian Reforms

About

I'm interested in the sensory--even corporal--experiences of the European Middle Ages.  How did the tongue experience its sensations?  The ear?  How did textures brush the skin, how did fragrances sweeten the nostrils, how did temperatures bloom on the flesh?  And, most importantly, how can the historian come to terms with such experiences, existing, as they do, outside of his usual quarry, the text?  How can the historian allow for the dangerous possibility that his own body can come to empathize and resonate with the bodies of the dead?

In investigating such questions, as well as related questions dealing with sexuality, gender, and other bodily performances and experiences, I take a decidedly post- or transdisciplinary approach.  In my practice, historical research, theoretical exploration, and artistic experimentation can never be divorced.

My dissertation looks at sound, listening, and aural religious cultures.  Beginning with the best-selling album "Chant" in the 1990s, the modern (often nonreligious) consumer has been obsessed with liturgical song.  Touting its beauty and its supreme ability to relax and uplift, the modern listener puts it on as background muzak, believing that the sounds of chant—sans verbal content—are themselves spiritual experiences, themselves spaces for contemplation in our ‘post-secular’ age.

I have found that this tension between and conflation of the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the psycho-somatic in musical experience did not arise with modernity.  During the fourth century, the Christian liturgy succumbed to the red-hot craze for psalmody that flooded the Empire.  Over the next five centuries, the liturgy grew ever more musical, until sound eclipsed words as the supreme method of experiencing the divine.

This transformation is understandable;  after all, as the societies of Rome gave way to the societies of the early Middle Ages, traditional training in rhetoric and the ability to understand the limpid Latin of the liturgy fell by the wayside.  If the faithful could no longer be assumed to benefit from the intricate homilies of eloquent preachers or the exquisite poetry of the best hymnographers, the mouths of singers would have to deliver them their religion. 

In my dissertation, I follow sacred sound in Gaul, from the beginning of Charlemagne’s rule to the middle of the ninth century.  Here, the liquid sound of liturgical song became a way of connecting singer, listener, and God in a sonic ménage a trois that was as aesthetic as it was spiritual.  The pleasurable experience of sacred song, which Carolingian thinkers called "sweet," was an experience of intensity, viscerality, and vulnerability, an acoustic sublime, perhaps.  It was a ripping open to the inflowing power of the transcendent.  In a Christianizing society preoccupied with social and ecclesiastical reform, the acoustic sublime served to construe a Christian subjectivity, attached bodily and sensually to the narratives of Christian salvation.