Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics.
Morgan, David
Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music,
Acoustics. By Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti. New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2010. xv + 368 pp. $55.00 cloth.
It is in the nature of an academic discipline to focus on one kind
of evidence and a single methodology for studying it. This tendency is
defensible insofar as it hones the skills of analysis and directs the
training students within the literatures and interpretive techniques of
a discipline. But such singularity of thinking comes at the price of
inclining practitioners to ignore new evidence and alternative
interpretive treatments of it. Interdisciplinary study solves that
problem by teaching scholars to interrogate the same evidence
differently or by making available new forms of evidence. Traditional
disciplines like architectural history and musicology, long practiced
and deeply rooted in the study of their respective objects, are very
good at treating the formal properties of buildings and musical sound,
but remarkably myopic when it comes to expanding their registers of
evidence and interpretation. They are very good at defining and
scrutinizing the typology of buildings, in the first instance, and the
study of musical compositions and their rendition in performance, in the
second. Both disciplines practice a methodological formalism with
extreme subtlety, and the best practitioners are virtuosos at its
application.
But practitioners of these two disciplinary practices are commonly
given to narrow specialization and often stolidly uninterested in making
the study of buildings or music relevant to the study of the sort of
thing that scholars of religion find important such as the ritual uses
of spaces and the social life of sound. Formalism argues that meaning
inheres in the form or structure of an artifact. Define what that
meaning is, and the work of the analyst is essentially complete.
Circulation, reception, use, even the intention of the maker are at best
secondary. Religious Studies tends to be very interdisciplinary,
sometimes so much so that it is difficult to speak meaningfully about a
center, or even several centers. But where the study of religion works
very well, at least to my mind, is where two or three disciplines engage
in serious conversation and collaboration to study religion as a lived
practice. This is happening in a great deal of work today, some of it
ethnographic, some sociological, some archival-historical in nature. A
very engaging example of an interdisciplinary study of the space and
sound of religion is the volume under review, a careful, resourceful
examination of the relationship between church design, acoustics, and
musical composition in Renaissance Venice. The authors are architectural
historians at work in a traditionally well-defined domain:
sixteenth-century Italian ecclesiastical architecture. Yet they avail
themselves of diverse forms of evidence and work compellingly at the
cusp of two domains--space and sound.
Authors Howard and Moretti examine twelve particular churches that
comprise five different categories of religious buildings: a private
chapel, monastic churches, mendicant friaries, parish churches, and
churches in hospitals--all in use during the sixteenth-century in
Venice, though some had been built much earlier. Their primary questions
involve important conventional queries like the acoustic implications of
architectural features such as domes, vaults, and apses, and the effect
of materials on musical sound. But they are also interested in a much
less traditional question: "how do listeners in various locations
perceive the same performance?" (10). But how can such information
be generated when historical data regarding reception are lacking?
Howard and Moretti conducted a critical analysis of the response of a
modern audience--academic listeners whom they assembled as part of
conferences devoted to the study of space and sound. The audience
members--architectural historians, musicologists, and acousticians, but
also singers--experienced a variety of choral performances in
plainchant, polyphony, and the spoken voice, as well as instrumental
performance of organs. All music consisted of period pieces selected by
the authors in consultation with musicologists who are experts in the
field. Questionnaires developed by professional acousticians were
distributed among the audience to assess acoustic qualities in the
twelve spaces studied and were designed to help the researchers register
the perception of sonic characteristics of the space and sound (volume,
clarity, reverberance, envelopment, intimacy, warmth, brilliance, echo,
timbre, and background noise). In the case of one of their spaces, which
was demolished in the nineteenth century, the authors reconstructed the
space using computer-aided design (CAD). Drawing on plans and section
drawings of the structure, and eighteenth-century engravings of the
interior, they were able to simulate the building's sonic
properties. Howard and Moretti also conducted scientific measurements of
the acoustic parameters of each space such as sound pressure levels,
early decay time, a variety of reverberation rates, and other features,
each of which could be compared productively to the human reception of
sound qualities gathered in the questionnaires. Finally, the authors
studied archival documents and other historical sources to inform their
study of the uses of the space in liturgical performance and other
ritual settings. An extensive apparatus of appendices compiles their
methods and resulting data.
The book is a beautifully produced volume, well illustrated with
135 black-and-white illustrations and color plates. The text is clearly
written prose with a great deal of careful historical discussion of
architects, musicians, composers, ritual occasions, contemporary
acoustical theory, architectural designs, and historical contexts.
Rather than restrict themselves to one form of evidence or one
disciplinary protocol, Howard and Moretti have demonstrated how a
collaborative, interdisciplinary approach can respond far more robustly
to the performance of religion as an intersensory event, and how the
study of the interaction of two media--sound and space---captures very
productively how religion happens in the ritual setting of time and
place. This study is a solidly conceived and executed piece of research
that may serve as a model for scholars interested not only in sound and
space but also in such combinations as vision and movement, sound and
sight, smell and space, or taste and sight.
doi: 10.1017/S0009640710001241
David Morgan
Duke University
