The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris. By Nicholas Hammond. Perspectives on Sensory History. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2019. [ix, 203 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-08471-8.]

Reviewed by John Romey*

1.1 Scholars of seventeenth-century French music have long focused attention on musical cultures that flourished in two influential spheres: the royal court and the Parisian Opéra. More recently, in concerted efforts to decenter our understanding of the myriad social and political aspects of musicking during the ancien régime, musicologists have explored literary salons, noble amateur performances, Jesuit schools, the other Parisian theaters, and convents as important centers of musical activity that either gently subverted or at least functioned with some degree of autonomy from the gravitational pull of Louis XIV’s court.^[1] While the discipline of musicology has been attentive to certain types of sound, or at least to the study of material traces of sound as preserved in historical texts, other areas of humanistic inquiry have lagged behind, for example, by continuing to analyze song texts as fixed objects rather than as preserved artifacts of audible past performances. Part of a welcome trend toward reversing this neglect of the auditory past across the humanities, Nicholas Hammond’s The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris reimagines Louis XIV’s Paris by focusing on sonic events as they unfolded in particular soundscapes. By resurrecting sounds that occurred in specific acoustical spaces—and at times by analyzing the ways in which certain sounds traversed spaces—Hammond offers profound insights into issues of social rank, politics, sexuality, and the complex processes through which information circulated. Hammond’s book, which examines a wide array of acoustic experiences and representations, is a valuable contribution to a recent trend in French studies that is attentive to the sonic, the oral, and the performative.

1.2 The book, divided into an introduction and six chapters, elegantly begins and ends with a case study based on a quatrain of poetry set in 1661 to the vaudeville “Réveillez-vous, belle endormie” (Figure 1 with Audio Example 1). The pithy verse, preserved in the “Chansonnier Maurepas,” communicates the injustice in the fates of two men, Jacques Chausson and Guillaume de Guitaut, both accused of having indulged in the “vice” of same-sex proclivities. The disparity between the treatment of men of different social rank—Chausson was sentenced to death by burning and Guitaut was appointed to the esteemed Ordre du Saint-Esprit, both in December of 1661—structures the remainder of the book, which Hammond divides into two parts. The song functions as a stable sonic reference point from which Hammond builds outward by studying a wide variety of interlocking acoustical experiences and voices.

1.3 The first part, entitled “The Power of Sound,” contains three chapters painted with broad brushstrokes. Chapter 1, “The Sounds of Paris,” explores representations of sound in Paris as invasive, dissonant, and dangerous, particularly in the sound world of the Pont-Neuf. In Chapter 2, entitled “Singers and Listeners,” Hammond moves from the soundscape of the Pont-Neuf to the singing and listening fleshly bodies that moved on the bridge. This approach allows him to highlight different types of listeners who intermingled in this shared public space, from impoverished street singers like Philippot Le Savoyard to cultivated aristocratic listeners like the marquise de Sévigné. Chapter 3, “Informé de tout: Sound and Power, 1661–1662,” considers other types of sonic events, namely Lenten sermons preached at the Louvre, the entertainments staged by Nicolas Fouquet at Vaux-le-Vicomte in August 1661, and the subsequent arrest and trial of Fouquet.

1.4 The second part of the book revolves around “Chausson’s Song,” the vaudeville that Hammond first discussed in the Introduction (given above). Chapter 4, “The Death and Afterlife of Jacques Chausson,” examines trial and interrogation transcripts, manuals for confessors, street songs, and poems that together serve for the reconstruction of the soundscape of Chausson’s trial and execution for the criminal act of sodomy. This chapter weaves together diverse types of sources to demonstrate how one cultural event can trigger a multifarious public conversation that crosses the artificial boundaries of social rank. Chapter 5, “Guitaut, Condé, and the Cordon bleu,” maps the life of the other man mentioned in the vaudeville, Guillaume de Comminges-Pechpeyrou, comte de Guitaut. In this chapter and in the song, Guitaut serves as a counterpoint to Chausson because while both men participated in same-sex relationships, Guitaut was protected from Chausson’s fate of burning at the stake by a system of patronage and by inhabiting the privileged space of the circle of male favorites associated with Louis, le Grand Condé. In juxtaposing the fate of these two men, Hammond is able to probe deep into issues such as rank, status, and patronage. The sixth and final chapter, entitled “Different Worlds,” contrasts the interconnected yet distinct worlds inhabited by these two contemporaries and demonstrates how societal power structures beyond their control could yield radically different repercussions.

1.5 Hammond at times would have benefited from the insights and tools of musicologists and ethnomusicologists. In the Introduction, for example, he states:

The seeming irrecoverability of such sounds might explain why, until relatively recently, scholars in the arts and humanities have tended to ignore or neglect the auditory past and have concentrated instead on the easily salvageable—printed books, paintings, prints, sculptures, monuments, buildings—or only on those aspects of music for which printed scores are readily available. (p. 2)

While the veracity of this statement in indisputable, musicologists and most performing musicians have long recognized that even the most detailed musical scores present the scholar or performer with many textual gaps. These gaps at best invite varied creative interpretations and at worst present unrecoverable lacunae in our knowledge of past musical cultures and performance practices. Musical notation from the period, not only in printed editions but also in manuscripts, was created for a variety of purposes and cannot be assumed to crystallize past performances. Furthermore, in a book focused on the oral performance of songs, such as those performed at literary salons or in the streets, Hammond occasionally omits the tune names of songs. Likewise, the melodies are never presented in musical notation. While this omission might have been a decision of the publisher or an attempt by the author to emphasize the orality of the song cultures under consideration, a book in a series called “Perspectives on Sensory History” would seem to warrant inviting the reader to experience the sensations of song performance. As the material is presented, the reader, with the exception of the few specialists who have internalized these tunes, is unable to render audible the sonic experiences of past soundscapes. Perhaps in the future Hammond could add a section to his website (https://www.parisiansoundscapes.org) featuring recordings of all of the vaudevilles discussed in his book.

1.6 By focusing on one vaudeville but also drawing from diverse types of written sources that intersected with oral seventeenth-century Parisian social activities, Hammond is able to contribute new insights about how oral culture and sonic events shaped discourse in and between diverse groups. The book’s most enlightening contribution centers on untangling the ways in which the circulation of information and cultural artifacts (the tunes often serve as little more than shared vehicles for transmitting information) traversed soundscapes and social groups. Histories of Louis XIV’s France often depict a strictly hierarchical society based on intensely fought-over concepts of rank, status, and proximity to royal favor. Studies like Hammond’s begin to break down these boundaries by demonstrating that despite the existence of highly regimented social structures, information and ideas circulated freely as individuals from all ranks intermingled in public and private spaces. His goal to “give voice to people who would otherwise have remained silent” (p. 164) should suggest an exciting mode of inquiry for music scholars. Hammond demonstrates that we can, at least partially, recover some of the sounds experienced by some early modern urban dwellers. By focusing on how historical documents allow us to reconstruct past sonic events, Hammond invites us to read existing sources in new ways and to better understand the interlocking historical soundscapes that together expose the diversity of sounds—and the historical bodies who created and consumed those sounds—throughout early modern Paris.