Conference Agenda

Narratives about the auditory environments of Renaissance churches often emphasize the solemn chanting of priests and the angelic voices of skilled singers performing polyphony; meanwhile, a devout congregation listens attentively to the liturgical function kneeling in the nave and bowing their heads in reverence. Such images reflect surviving descriptions of sacred ceremonies and artistic objects that originated in elitist court environments and at prestigious religious institutions of the time. But the question arises: how realistic are these depictions?

Examining the early sixteenth-century Cronica Milanese, compiled by the Milanese citizen Giovan Marco Burigozzo, my paper invites us to complicate the received picture. Rather than project the sort of reverence and piety we have come to expect, Burigozzo reports conduct in Milan’s cathedral that can only be described as unruly. On multiple occasions, he tells us, the Milanese worshippers, rather than remaining silent or reciting prayers quietly, raised their voices to the point of loudly insulting the celebrants and obstructing the performance of the religious services. These episodes offer uncommon insight into the role of commoners’ voices in the auditory dimension of Milan’s most prominent sacred venue, thereby challenging prevailing scholarly narratives about the nature—and volume—of worship in Renaissance cathedrals.

Skateparks are facilities where skateboarders often silence their immediate soundscape using portable music-listening devices. Listening to music through headphones can impose a rhythm onto practitioners’ skating as well as offer a private, euphoric experience of their surroundings (Pereira and Azevedo 2019). I conceive skateparks, then, as constituting a “sound(e)scape,” a space where practitioners employ MP3 devices to escape an otherwise cacophonous environment. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at skateparks across the United States, England, and Germany, I argue that sound(e)scaping facilitates a sense of individualism fundamental to skatepark culture. My paper reveals how portable music-listening devices individuate skaters’ experience in two crucial ways. First, riders select music and craft playlists to alter their skating style and trick selections, opting for faster and louder music selections when attempting riskier and more physically demanding tricks. Second, the sight of headphones and their wires signals to other skatepark users a desire for solitude. Sounds emanating from speakers are often perceived as “mood killers” disruptive to skaters’ performances and, thus, telling riders to silence their Bluetooth devices is common. This sonic policing and self-imposed isolation facilitate concentration when performing tricks and an entitlement to control public space.

Sound(e)scaping, however, is more prevalent at public skateparks. Private skateparks, on the other hand, are equipped with sound systems playing music throughout the day. This shared music listening reflects a focus on community building, for private skateparks are controlled businesses requiring membership and annual fees and hosting afterschool programs to provide youth a safe space to spend time and practice with others. Still, skaters’ shared sense of entitlement over their external soundscape persists at private skateparks, as some riders express their embarrassment skating to unsolicited popular music. While previous musicological and sound studies literature explores how portable MP3 technologies enable users to individualize their surroundings and silence others (Hosokawa 1984; Bull 2005, 2012; Sterne 2013), most studies cast these devices as autonomous and separate from humans. By introducing the verb “sound(e)scaping,” this paper reframes headphone listening as a conscious and embodied human act to tame disorderly surroundings and facilitate physical performance (e.g., skateboarding).

In festivals, where time and space are experienced in ways that exceed everyday temporal and geographical boundaries (Costa 2002, Santino 2017), the border is not simply a two-dimensional dividing line cordoning off locals from the rest of the world. Through their aesthetic and performative modes, festivals straddle the normative borders that frame everyday life to produce a celebratory heterotopia (Foucault 1967), one predicated on an ordered sequence of disorder (Turner 1969). In the case of the Falles Festival, of València, Spain, such a timespace (Schatzki 2010) emerges through the interweaving of three musical threads. The first depends on Valencian adaptations of familiar instrument types—the dolçaina, a double-reed soprano aerophone, and tabalet, a double-membrane cylindrical drum—which, given their centrality to traditional Valencian music, inscribe a regional soundmark (Schafer 1977) onto official festival acts. Following in the legacy of Spanish military bands, the second thread features wind bands that accompany both formal parades and raucous street concerts. Once the sun sets, a third musical style takes over as pounding EDM beats reverberate from the casals (Falles headquarters) that populate the city streets. The musical repertoires that mark the Falles Festival reconcile the regional, national, and cosmopolitan as they sound out a range of temporalities and geographies rarely heard in tandem. This juxtaposition establishes generative dialogues across these bordered realms, pointing to the festival’s capacity to cultivate new conceptions of musical timespace. In this paper, I draw on Diana Taylor’s concepts of the archive and the repertoire to understand how this rebordering of timespace influences life outside of Falles through a semi-structured reconfiguration of the ‘everyday.’ I dwell in the tensions Taylor identifies between “supposedly enduring materials” (archive) and ephemeral “embodied practice/knowledge” (repertoire) (2003, 19). By doing so, I imagine the ways that festivals can mobilize musical repertoire toward the transformation of the archive of feelings, beliefs, and behaviors that inform the festival’s performance as a cultural event. By obscuring, manipulating, and challenging the borders that intersect within the festival site, the musical timespace of Falles allows festivalgoers to negotiate the bordered conceptions of Valencian social life.