Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Sarah Finley (review)

Sarah Finley’s Hearing Voices: Aurality and New Spanish Sound Culture in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz makes a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the various ways in which sound is manifest in the works of Mexico’s celebrated seventeenth-century nun poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Finley’s exploration of Sor Juana’s aurality goes beyond interpretation of music metaphor and beyond explication of the poet’s engagement with the music culture of her time to include considerations of nonmusical sound disciplines such as the musical-rhetorical doctrine of musica poetica—which draws analogies between the composition of music and the composition of oratory or poetry—and the alignment of music, painting, and poetry in Sor Juana’s literary output. In Finley’s own words, her approach “draws out previously marginalized components of Sor Juana’s acoustical inheritance and results in new interpretations that attend to sonority’s intersections with significant themes in [Sor Juana’s] writing, including gender, agency, and authority” (p. 2).

The first chapter, “Harmony,” examines representations of political order in Sor Juana’s occasional works and shows how in works such as loa 374 (1689; a loa is a form of allegorical play), the poet relies heavily upon the prevailing early modern understanding of the ancient philosophical concept of the music or harmony of the spheres. Finley affirms the importance of what she calls “Sor Juana’s Pythagoreanism”—that is, Sor Juana’s apparent adherence to the philosophical idea that the same mathematical ratios that are produced by musical intervals also govern the movement of the celestial bodies—in her compelling analysis of loa 384 (1692) (p. 43). Chapter two, “Resonance,” confirms Sor Juana’s familiarity with the writings of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, convincingly demonstrating that his Musurgia universalis (1650; Universal musical art) and Phonurgia nova (1673; New mode of sound production) “were fundamental to Sor Juana’s acousticopoetic imagination” (p. 61). Finley’s reading of redondilla 87 (1689) highlights the ways in which the poem “exploits a lexicon shared by music and poetry to describe a painting” by means of a polysemic appeal to the senses of both sight and hearing (p. 74).

The subsequent chapters, “Sound,” “Echo,” and “Silence,” assess ways in which such diverse Sorjuanian works as the villancicos for the Feast of the Assumption (1677) and El divino Narcisco (1690; Divine narcissus), an allegorical auto sacramental (a kind of religious theater specific to Spain), constitute defenses of female intellect and agency. A discussion of the representation of literal music-making in Sor Juana’s villancicos—for example, the references to military bands in the fourth villancico from the Assumption cycle—will be of particular interest to musicologist readers. The book’s penultimate chapter, “Silence,” offers new insights into the meanings of soundlessness by considering the absence of sound in Sor Juana’s writings through the lens of the Baroque concept of horror vacui (fear of empty space). Finley argues persuasively that in works like Primero sueño (1692; First dream) and Respuesta a sor Filotea (written 1691, published 1700; Reply to Sor Philotea), Sor Juana reimagines the mechanisms of silencing and censoring “as alternative modes that challenged masculine dominance” (p. 183). Finally, the book’s “Coda” reveals “sound’s importance for conceptualizing and reimagining knowledge, power, and the (female) self’s place in the world” in the auditory imagery of Primer sueño (p. 186).

To write in the field of sound studies is to undertake an interdisciplinary enterprise that brings with it the challenge of possessing expertise in multiple fields. This book rises admirably to the task on multiple counts; however, the musicologist reader may note an occasional lack of familiarity with certain terminology or an apparent unawareness of some aspects of music history. For example, the...