Soundscapes of Salvation

Author:

Münz-Manor Ophir1,Arentzen Thomas2

Affiliation:

1. Associate Professor of Rabbinic Culture, Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies, The Open University of Israel

2. Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo and Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks

Abstract

We do not know how hymns in Late Antiquity sounded. We do know that refrains became an important aspect of hymnody in the period, not only among Christians in the capital accustomed to acclamations, but also among Hebrew-speaking Jews and Syriac-speaking Christians further east. This article investigates ways that the refrains contributed to shaping soundscapes or sonic space. The article constitutes a study of three of the era's most outstanding liturgical poets: Yose ben Yose and Yannai who wrote piyyutim in Hebrew and Romanos the Melodist who wrote kontakia in Greek. Refrains should ring loudly, and all three poets show a distinct awareness of the refrain's ability to shape the performative space. Throughout the song, the refrain would return repeatedly as an echo and saturate the room with loud voices. The hymnographers used this feature semantically, to dye the soundscapes with highly charged or pregnant notions, so that eventually the singing of the songs themselves gave way to the experience of community and deliverance. Conducted by poets, voices gathered to create soundscapes of salvation.

Publisher

University of California Press

Subject

History,Classics

Reference75 articles.

1. Gregory of Nyssa, On Easter, Homily 4 (PG 46:681). Translation from A. Hamman, The Paschal Mystery: Ancient Liturgies and Patristic Texts (Staten Island, NJ: Alba House, 1969), 96. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite similarly speaks of hymns as "the sound of many waters," possibly alluding to Ps 93 (92)

2. pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy 7.4. Translation is from pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. C. Luibhéid and P. Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 165.

3. Alexander Lingas, “From Earth to Heaven: The Changing Musical Soundscape of Byzantine Liturgy,” in Experiencing Byzantium, ed. C. Nesbitt and M. Jackson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 311–58 at 313.

4. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (new ed., Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 274.

5. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). The term “acoustic communities” comes from Schafer, The Soundscape, esp. 214–22.

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