UCLA

In this dissertation, I present a social and material microhistory of sound and music in early modern Catholicism. Based on musical analysis of the genre of the laude, and supported by original research into the institutional records of the Oratory of Filippo Neri, including descriptions and accounts of meetings, various devotions, poetry and music, I investigate processes of spiritual production after Trent which occurred at the boundaries of the divine, the corporeal body, and intimate practices of sound. In each investigation sound figures prominently on a material spectrum to include vocality, conversation, composed music, mental and vocal forms of prayer, and silence. I begin by drawing on the Oratorians’ private institutional records ca. 1550 when the group was a small, burgeoning reform order in Rome, moving to the 1580s when the order was at the height of their growth and musical pastoral work in Rome. The final analyses then culminate around 1600 when Neri’s Oratory became a formalized institution whose core membership relied as much on the precious quality of silence as they did sound amid the most urbanized regions of Rome. In contradistinction to the neighboring Society of Jesuits, who used catechism singing for pastoral indoctrination purposes, my research shows the ways in which the Oratorians used music and prayer to invite freer forms of listening among Romans precisely at a point in the Counter-Reformation years when the Church exercised increased formal power over civic and parish life. Understanding this pivotal episode of Oratorian activity also unsettles extant scholarship that emphasizes hearing primarily as a means of social control in the post-Tridentine period through recte sentire, or correct hearing. Moreover, the musical style and lyrical poetic content of the Oratorians’ laude, or three and four voice polyphonic songs featuring spiritual and semi-secular themes, has been characterized as simple music in scholarly literature. However, the present study invites historians to reconsider these laude as an overlooked but rich archive of public spiritual listening. I contend the laude gave rise to sophisticated modalities of the spiritual, in part by attracting non-expert listeners and encouraging them to embrace the human body as a powerful expression of piety. Drawing on music and poetic analysis, close readings of period source texts, theories of social value, and insights from the material study of religion, Reforming Sound and Silence explores how the Oratorians at the end of the 16th century used sound and listening specifically to foster religious creativity and, possibly, to promote freedom against ecclesiastical ideology.