The seminar will be followed by tea and refreshments in the Theatre Bar. All welcome.
Abstract:
Pilgrim galleys sailing from Venice to Jerusalem left no musical scores, no surviving instruments, and no space built for music. They nevertheless produced some of the most densely documented sonic environments of the early modern Mediterranean, experienced and recorded by travellers such as Felix Fabri, Hans Tucher, and anonymous de Vergoncey. Crowded, contested, and audible from end to end, the ship obliged its passengers to hear one another: the calls that coordinated rowing and manoeuvre, the offices sung in improvised shipboard chapels, the several languages of a company that frequently could not understand itself, and the weather and timber against which all of these sounds had to compete.
This talk will show how to write a history of sound that survives only in description: working from pilgrimage narratives, travel diaries, shipboard contracts and ordinances, and nautical writing, it will set out a procedure for reading texts for sonic evidence, i.e., an acoustemological reading. With a special focus on music and musicking aboard, it will revise musicological concepts of form and repertory, and demonstrate what such listening recovers of a musical life that left nothing behind but words.
Biography:
Dr Tin Cugelj is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he leads SOUNDSHIP, a project on the sound and music of sacred sea travel between Venice and Jerusalem, c. 1450-1650. He completed his doctorate at the University of Bern with a dissertation on the auditory experience of the Mass in early modern Dubrovnik, and holds master's degrees in historical trombone from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and in trombone performance from the University of Ljubljana. He is a co-founder and a co-chair of the International Musicological Society Study Group Auditory History, has published on aspects of sound history including the sound of the sea, and is completing a monograph on sacred sound and sonic restraint in the early modern Republic of Dubrovnik (Indiana University Press). He continues to perform on historical trombones across Europe and North America.