Event

Lily Kass abstract:

"A Sound that Shall Deeply Pierce the Soul": The Sonic Landscape of
Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, 1830-1850

The Eastern State Penitentiary, located less than two miles away from
TempleUniversity, was opened for use as a prison in 1829 and closed in
1971. As the world's first true penitentiary, the institution has been
studied from a variety of angles. In this paper, I propose to examine the
Eastern State Penitentiary in its earliest decades from a unique
perspective: its sound. Listening to the Eastern State Penitentiary brings
into perspective previously overlooked aspects of the prisoners' experience
at the institution and demonstrates new alignments between the goals of the
penitentiary and its day-to-day functioning.

The penitentiary's early practice of placing all inmates in solitary
confinement has often misleadingly been referred to as the "Silent System."
This paper uncovers the sounds heard in the prison: sounds that were
carefully controlled and channeled towards the primary goal of the
institution, i.e. forcing the prisoners to experience true penitence. In
this paper, I expose various sound sources in the penitentiary that were
audible to inmates - looms clattering inside cells as inmates wove cloth,
alarm bells ringing from the central tower, the gate clanging shut. Despite
the strict regulations surrounding communication between inmates, human
voices were also heard in the penitentiary, raised in preaching, hushed in
conversation and even lifted up in song. My paper then turns to the
internal soundscapes of the inmates, shaped by silent reading practices and
lack of proper sensory stimulation, as I propose that these psychological
spaces were just as tightly moderated as the external spaces by the penal
institution.

Daniel Villegas abstract:

Mimesis and the affective ground of baroque representation

Taking as their point of departure Benjamin's essay "On The Mimetic
Faculty," authors from Adorno and Horkheimer to Michael Taussig and Anna
Gibbs have interpreted mimesis as an affective base for communication,
presenting it, among others, as "a contagious process that [connects]
heterogeneous networks of media and conversation, statements and images,
bodies and things" (Gibbs, 2010). Understood in affective terms, mimesis
recasts the opposition between immediacy and representation (an opposition
that has gained prominence in contemporary affect theory) as contagion and
production, operating before, with, and after language and meaning.

In music studies mimesis remains largely unaddressed, being associated with
seventeenth and eighteenth-century theories thought to be superseded by the
discourse of absolute music. By analyzing some instances of baroque
theories of musical representation from an affective perspective, this
paper offers a reconsideration of mimesis in the terms exposed above that
can, on the one hand, contribute to an understanding of seventeenth-century
Affektenlehre and, on the other, displace the notion of representation from
its epistemic delimitation. This reading of mimesis thus offers new modes
of approaching the history of musical aesthetics by attending to the
historically changing relations proposed by Benjamin and Taussig through
the "primitive," the baroque, and the modern world. In this way, "the
affective turn" can be located as part of the the historical folding and
refolding of mimesis and affect that has also produced musical aesthetics,
representation and alterity.