Hearing History: A Reader (review)

"In these books, is wonderfully preserved, the spirit of each warrior." So goes satirist Jonathan Swift's mock-epic engagement between the ancients and the moderns in The Battle of the Books. Like Swift's combatants, the contributors to Smith's engaging, provocative, and almost convincing didactic collection contest for the primacy of the ear in sensory history. Smith's introduction to this collection sounds the call to arms for an aural history: "Quite clearly, . . . historians are listening to the past with an intensity, frequency, keenness, and acuity unprecedented in scope and magnitude" (ix). The battle is not yet won, Smith admits, particularly against the ocular foe (the "visually oriented discipline of history" still babbles on about "perspective" and "focus"), but the forces of the ear are gathering strength. Smith's collection is not only a tour of the scenes of great aural victories (oops—more oculism), but promises "to identify future topics for research" and "help readers hear the beginnings of a dialogue among scholars of historical aurality (ix, xx)."

Doing aural history is not easy; sounds are like writing on water. They cannot be duplicated in their original context. As Douglas Kahn wisely cautions in his essay, "as a historical object, sound cannot furnish a good story or consistent cast of characters" (37), to which Bruce R. Smith, at the end of the book (a "coda") adds, the history of sound must be "a triumph of mind over matter" (390). Smith (whose shadow hovers over the entire book and whose voice is heard at its beginning and its end) has the last word, however: "If hearing were demonstrably important to people in the past, and if they left evidence to that effect, then the topic demands and deserves our attention" (402). But the problem of finding evidence of past sounds, as opposed to their importance at the time, is not so easily elided.

The first set of essays (Part I) deals with the theoretical possibilities and (by implication) the theoretical obstacles to aural history. R. Murray Schafter argues that "the general acoustic environment of a society can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it" (6). Jacques Attali warns that "our sight has dimmed; it no longer sees our future . . . Now we must learn to judge a society more by its sounds. . . . By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us" (10). Peter Bailey reminds that in the metaphors of our literature as in life itself, "noise is a common compound signifier" and "the changing function of hearing and sound within the combinations and hierarchies that pattern sensory perception as a whole" define identity as well as express it (27). Although some sounds have not had "a good press," historians must pay more than "lip service" to the role of sound in history (33, 34). Steven Connor has done just that—connecting aurality and modernity, "the self and the ear" (55). Hillel Schwartz agrees: "Historical research" can reveal past "soundscapes" (52), in particular how and why they changed over time. In effect, aural history can be highly and effectively depictive, something that historical novelists (a breed of aural historian not represented in the collection) have long assumed.

Part II reprints some of the classics of European sensory history, starting with Charles Burnett's piece on sound, noise, silence, and other epistemologies of medieval thought: a selection from Bruce R. Smith's delightful and incisive re-rendering of the sounds of rural and urban sound in early modern England (though the selection hardly does the book justice); D. R. Woolf's essay on the Elizabethan valuation of "eye and ear" (115); and James H. Johnson and Alain Corbin's comments on music and bells, respectively, among other contributions.

Part III, "Sounds American...