Conference Agenda

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the Jesuit order established a mission to the Prison of the Gran Corte della Vicaria, the central criminal court for the city and wider Kingdom of Naples. Located in the cellars of the Castel Capuano, like other pre-modern European prisons the Vicaria provided a temporary housing site for individuals awaiting trial and sentencing. Conditions were notoriously unsanitary, overcrowded, and violent: one Jesuit report describes a “teeming mass of over a thousand prisoners, the dregs of every sort of nation, more or less hardened by crime and far from God-fearing.” The Jesuits fostered lay congregations that attempted to separate prisoners by social status, gender, and religious-ethnic background, implementing a daily regimen that included musical activities such as the celebration of Mass, the recitation of catechism, and the singing of litanies to the Madonna.

This paper examines the vital role music played in the Jesuits’ efforts to reform nominally Christian prisoners, as well as to attract converts among the numerous Muslims (both enslaved and free) also present in the Vicaria. The supervision of musical life granted Jesuit fathers complex paternalistic and mediatory forms of power over the incarcerated under their care. At the same time, I argue that prisoners cultivated musical practices that exceeded the confines of Jesuit reforms as well as the boundaries of the institution, testifying to the porosity of early modern carceral space. Drawing from Jesuit chronicles, preaching manuals, and archival documents, I demonstrate contingent sonic encounters between Jesuits and the incarcerated in Naples that provide crucial insight for the carceral musicology of early modernity.

The dissolution of the monasteries in sixteenth-century England profoundly impacted the infrastructure of charity. As monasteries closed, a nationalized effort emerged to sequester the poor, infirm, and orphaned in new hospitals founded under civic jurisdiction. These new Protestant institutions were pressed to demonstrate that their governance could replace and even surpass the charitable work of the pre-Reformation Church. Amid this reconfigured landscape, a long-standing event, the Easter Spital Sermons, underwent a consequential transformation: organizers began distributing broadsheets that paired newly composed spiritual songs they called “psalms” with demographic accounts of the activities of London’s hospitals. I argue that these broadsides functioned as multimedia of civic proof, fusing quantified charity with vocal performance. By building on auditory studies of the St Mary Spital space (Suman 2015) and the event’s performance of piety through singing (Winkler 2020), this paper demonstrates that this music and its performers were instrumentalized for the financial welfare of London’s hospitals.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the children of Christ’s Hospital, themselves beneficiaries of this event, performed spiritual songs at the Spital Sermons before the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and other benefactors to inspire generosity. The printed sheets placed texts and melodies alongside annual tallies of children maintained and apprenticed, patients cared for, and vagrants housed, employed, or expelled from the city. The juxtaposition of songs and statistics was deliberate. The children’s musical performance asserted their status as deserving poor. Even Bridewell’s criminalized inmates, typically classed as undeserving, were rhetorically enfolded into this sonic framework of reform and utility. Together, music and numerical data authenticated Protestant civic governance, aligning affective persuasion with emerging practices of demographic accounting.

The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) recognizes the right to work, and equal remuneration for that work, as key to disabled people’s dignity and autonomy. Yet so-called “sheltered workshops,” organizations and institutions that employ disabled people, can be places of marginalization and economic exploitation for disabled people. Sheltered workshops emerged out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutions for the blind and deaf in Europe, which tended to prioritize vocational training for manual labor. In this paper, I examine music-making as another form of employment in one of the earliest sheltered workshops, the Institute for Blind Adults in Vienna.

The Institute was founded by Johann Wilhelm Klein in 1826, after he realized that even the most accomplished graduates of his Institute for Blind Youth (established in 1808) were having difficulty “assimilating” into life outside the school. Just as musical training and performances had been central to the establishment and curriculum of the Institute for Blind Youth, the Institute for Blind Adults also gave concerts by blind residents with musical training. This constituted a major source of revenue for the institution, and notably, the performers themselves were allowed to keep about half of their earnings, like other worker-residents. By the 1840s, however, Klein admitted fundamental flaws in the institutional approach to special education, acknowledging that access to communal, inclusive education took place at the cost of estranging blind students from their families and home communities. My examination of the Institute for Blind Adults and its concerts thus raises larger questions about the ethics of institutionalization, the labor rights of blind musicians, and music as a means of cultivating disability solidarity.