Stanford Humanities Center
Sensing the Sacred: An Interview with Bissera Pentcheva
Republics of Letters features an occasional series of interviews with scholars who have recently been in conversation with the medieval and early modern community at Stanford University. These interviews seek to capture ideas in motion: how current and recent work came to be conceived, how projects develop and change, and how new knowledge emerges into public view. In keeping with the journal’s aim of reflecting on the present moment in our disciplines, these dialogues invite self-awareness, retrospection, and analysis of the relevant fields.
In this interview, Bissera Pentcheva (Professor of Art and Art History, Stanford University) discusses her new research in a medieval monastery at Conques in Southern France with Jisha Menon (Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University). Both were Fellows at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2023–24. “EnChanted Images,” a multimodal, collaborative project that has emerged out of this research, explores the visions of Sainte Foy through art, music, poetry, and dance. The interview touches upon a range of themes including medieval art, religious subjectivity, multi-sensorial explorations, and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Jisha Menon: I enjoyed hearing you present your work and then reading an early draft of your introduction. What struck me was your holistic approach and dexterity in bringing together discrete fields into a layered and unified study. Your work serves as a reminder that modern epistemological systems of discrete disciplinary methods are not always adequate to our ways of organizing knowledge and cognizing premodern worlds. And you share your research via multidimensional formats that are truly creative and inspiring. Could you tell us more about the new project that you are working on?
Bissera Pentcheva: The project is both concrete and infinite. Concrete because it focuses on a site in Southern France, Sainte Foy, a monastery dedicated to the saint at Conques. Sancta Fides (in Latin) and Sainte Foy (in French) means “holy faith.” The monastery was established in the ninth century, and it has survived to this day (image 1). It has preserved its medieval architecture of the eleventh century (image 2), which houses the earliest extant three-dimensional statue in the Latin West: the golden image of Sainte Foy (image 3). The statue dates to the late ninth century and holds in a cavity in its back a piece of the cranium of the fourth-century Sainte Foy.
image 1 View of the Monastery of Sainte Foy at Conques. Photo: Emeline and Nicolas Delsaut for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
image 2 Interior of the Church of Sainte Foy at Conques, eleventh century. Photo: Stephen Murray. Image courtesy of the Mapping Gothic Project Media Center for Art History © The Trustees of Columbia University
image 3 Statue of Sainte Foy at Conques, second half of the ninth with additions and changes until the sixteenth century; 85 cm height; 36 × 24 cm height and depth of the throne. Photo: Miguel Novelo for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
I am interested in the multimedia art of the liturgy practiced at Conques and disseminated through its networks of power. Also, as an art historian, I have shaped a new direction of research, showing how we cannot study the visual arts in isolation. The images and the architectural space were designed to be perceived through the simultaneous envelope of sound (prayer, song, recitation). The music and poetry deeply affected and changed how one experienced the images and the architectural interior. If we want to recuperate this multimodal perception, our own methodology should incorporate musicology, sound studies, liturgy, literature, and theology. I advocate for approaching medieval art through the model of film studies. Today it is unthinkable to analyze film just by focusing on the image. Sound adds value and shifts the way we see the moving picture. My approach to medieval art has been to restore its sonic envelope. I also validate the importance of embodied knowledge, transforming the medieval archive into a repertoire.
Art and music were Conques’s soft power, utilized by the monastery to expand its influence and possessions. The monastery rose to prominence in the course of the eleventh century. It attracted local pilgrimages that eventually expanded to the international elite. Conques aligned itself with the Gregorian reform papacy and the heads of state in northern Iberia and profited from the various colonization efforts. The monastery participated in the early decades of the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain and benefited from it. It also sent monks to disseminate the Gregorian liturgy in the kingdom of Navarra and Aragon, and thereby it assisted the obliteration of the local Mozarabic rite. Conques also sent artists whose relief images still grace the facades of Santiago de Compostela.
In addition to its architecture and golden image, the monastery of Sainte Foy fostered the production of many texts in the eleventh century, like the Book of Miracles of Sancta Fides; a vernacular song, La Canso de Sancta Fides, that is the earliest extant troubadour poetry; and a complete liturgy for the feast of the patron saint that was composed by the monks (image 4). Many of the original manuscripts transmitting this repertoire survive, some of them now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Conques is a rare example of a complete package where we have everything: from the extant space to the ritual and the music that were meant to be performed in it. One could aspire for similar realms of evidence, but they don’t exist at other sites. Most often you get one or two of these elements, but you never have this comprehensive medieval archive. In this respect, mine is a very concrete and finite project. It becomes infinite when one gets involved in the immense interaction among the different media. This is where the project is both shaping and discovering a direction that I call the infinite.
image 4 Office of Sainte Foy (1037–1065), Paris, BnF MS Nouv. Acq. Lat. 443, fol. 1. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France
JM: That’s fascinating. One of the amazing things about the project is that you have given it so many numerous lives and dimensions. In addition to the scholarly monograph, you’ve been curating an exhibition, bringing in live performances, and you have a website. Can you tell us a bit about the multimedia format of showcasing this material?
BP: It all started with Stanford’s Changing Human Experience grant in 2021, which gave me the financial resources to branch into other media such as film, exhibition, and concert. I have established and am directing the interdisciplinary project at Stanford, “EnChanted Images” The project engages the extant but overlooked medieval archive and treats it as a repertoire. The “EnChanted Images” has produced a concert, an exhibition, an exhibition catalog, and a documentary film, giving the temporal, embodied dimension of the song, poetry, and images at Conques. I have collaborated with the composer Laura Steenberge (DMA ’16, Stanford). As part of the “EnChanted Images” team, Steenberge has transcribed the medieval music of the Office of Sainte Foy. We worked with the singer Argenta Walther to record auralized segments of the Office (that is, a recording imprinted with the acoustics of the church at Conques). For the past couple of years I have been analyzing this medieval liturgy. What is special about my research and the new book I am writing this year as a fellow at the Humanities Center is the capacity to work across media in architecture, art, music, and literature.
In addition to financial support, the 2021 grant enabled me to work in a community, a process which I enjoyed very much. As a teaching and research institution, Stanford is so rich in people with incredible talents. Working with both graduate students and undergraduates for several years in a row brought some wonderful collaborations. With these people and their different skills, I was able to visualize the hidden structures of the texts, images, and music. For instance, a song that repeats a refrain six times in performance bends the perception of linear time and appears perceptually as a revolving structure. I was able to communicate these ideas by commissioning images that bend the lines of medieval music notation and showing how this chant becomes a metaphor for the revolving stars and the spiraling Milky Way (image 5). While my research and analysis uncover the medieval meaning, I collaborate with artists and scholars in order to make this content more accessible to contemporary audiences. Almost all of the digital images were done by Jessica Lee (BA ’23). Emma Bowers (BA ’22, MA ’23) designed the website. Miguel Novelo (MFA ’22) created the digital model of the golden statue and prepared it for projection on a scrim. Hassan Estakhrian (DMA ’23) gathered the acoustic data, and Jonathan Abel, consulting professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), analyzed it and prepared the auralizations. Susana Barrón (MFA ’23) did the photography and video recording of the exhibition and concert. Together we are now finishing the documentary film of the concert. Oleg Savunov (MFA ’23) printed the photography for the exhibition. Lora Webb (PhD ’22, Art History), Danny Smith (PhD ’22, Art History), and Maria Terss (current PhD student, Art History), were involved with exhibition preparation, design, and publicity. Daniel Koplitz and Christina Kim (current PhD students, Music) sang and recorded several medieval chants for the exhibition opening. Showing the imbrication of image and music became possible through the amazing skills that our students have here, and it also allowed me to break away from the solitude of academic work (although right now I am very happy to go back to the solitary mode as I write the monograph).
image 5 Visualization of the vespers responsory “Emissiones tue” (Your aromas) in the revolving form in which it is performed with multiple repetitions of the refrain. The notes here appear as stars drawing an association between the resurrected bodies and their astral manifestation in the night sky. Digital Image: Jessica Chen Lee
I brought to the Conques project a decade of experience in working interdisciplinarily. My earlier collaboration, “Icons of Sound” (2008–present), is with Jonathan Abel (CCRMA). Our focus is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul/Constantinople. Ours is the first project to explore the entwining of reverberant acoustics with image, architecture, and liturgy and to successfully implement live auralizations. We did the imprinting of the acoustics of targeted space on live performance already in 2013. “Icons of Sound” has garnered many accolades and public exposure, including a National Public Radio interview and a New York Times article.
Turning back to Conques, each segment of the “EnChanted Images” project had different challenges. The documentary film “Seeing through Chant” uses the medium of time to visualize the choreography of image and chant that emerges in performance, something very difficult to express in speaking and writing about this art. I worked with the filmmaker Duygu Eruçman (MFA ’16). The exhibition gave a spatial dimension to these ideas (images 6, 7). The concert enveloped a contemporary audience in the auralized sound of this music, imprinted with the room acoustics of the church at Conques. Jonathan Abel at CCRMA did the auralization. During the concert, the attention of the audience was fixed on the floating ghost image of the golden statue, projected on a scrim (image 8). The concert allowed the audience to spend a lot of time looking at the image in a way they would never do, even if they’re in front of the original at Conques, because we tend to impose our modern impatience on medieval art. We never give it the time it needs. It thrives on the sustained gaze.
image 6 The Exhibition “AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte Foy at Conques” at the Stanford Art Gallery, January 24–March 17, 2023. Photo: Susana Barrón for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
image 7 The Exhibition “AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte Foy at Conques” at the Stanford Art Gallery, January 24–March 17, 2023. Interior showing the golden statue of Sainte Foy projected on a scrim and a copy of the wooden core of the effigy surrounded by photographs of the statue, the relic, and the music. Photo: Susana Barrón for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
image 8 The concert “Auralizing the Medieval Image: Sainte Foy at Conques” at Stanford Live, Bing Concert Hall, February 10, 2023. Photo: Susana Barrón for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
Last but not least, I was deeply involved in the design of the exhibition catalogue. This was transformational for me because it was a way to translate the exhibition, something that has a spatial dimension, into the two-dimensionality of the book (image 9). The catalogue AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte Foy at Conques is distributed by Stanford University Press. The catalogue allowed me to seek creative solutions in representing the interaction of the two media: music and art. There was no model to follow. I worked with the designer Dina Clark and we color-coded the layout to explain melodic forms and to show the interrelation between music and image. The exhibition and the catalogue show the art of translation. Interdisciplinary work is about mastering translation, because one is constantly translating the content into different media, and in the process of contemplating the translation, one actually arrives at a new understanding of this content.
image 9 The cover of the exhibition catalogue, AudioVision in the Middle Ages: Sainte Foy at Conques, Bissera Pentcheva, distributed by Stanford University Press, 2023. Image Design: Dina Clark for Stanford’s “EnChanted Images” Project
JM: One of the things that your work reveals so powerfully is how we might reimagine the organization of these different disciplines, and you allow a much fuller and more sensuous approach by combining the fields of art history with musicology. Could you speak about your approach, which is much richer and integrates these different fields? How does it allow us to think about some of the epistemological questions at the heart of these fields?
BP: The eleventh-century art created at Conques — music, image, architecture, poetry — seduces one into thinking across disciplines. The medieval work is rich and diverse; it was meant to be experienced in its multimedia dimensions. It has slowly enticed me as a scholar to venture outside the field I was trained in. As an art historian, one of the challenges I had approaching the golden statue of Sainte Foy early on in the project was that so much had already been written about it, and I was struggling to find what new material I could bring forth beyond the synthesis of an enormous amount of literature on the subject. It was only in the engagement with music that I realized there is actually a new angle of thinking about Sainte Foy. In that respect, I was deeply influenced by the theoretical concept of audio-vision that Michel Chion introduced in film studies. He basically destroyed the topos that the film sound repeats what the image does. He argues instead that, in fact, there is a very complex interaction between the two media, and most of the time they don’t repeat the same thing. And because they differ, they reshape what one sees when one simultaneously hears, and what one hears when one sees. To me, that insight was very important because it led to my sharpening of attention to the moments in which the image is in dissonance with the music — that’s the moment when the most interesting things actually happen.
I will give one example. Sonic brightness associated with the apex in the melodic composition in the Office (the liturgy for the feast day) at Conques often coincides with words for the head, face, and mind of Sainte Foy, thus drawing attention to the relic hidden inside the statue. So, the music makes this sacred presence sensorial in the sound, while the actual object — the cranium — remains beyond the visible, locked inside the golden imago. Similarly, the absolute apex of the liturgy coincides with the word amputatio, the cutting off the head of the saint. If I were just to approach the art at Conques through the methodologies of the field, I would never have recognized this subtle play between the visible and the invisible but audible. The example of Conques shows the operation of a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). The structural coordination of a variety of media allows the saint to be experienced phenomenologically in the sensuality and temporality of performed song, image, and scent. Knowledge of God becomes tied to phenomenology of perception and experience. So much of our scholarship is determined by the nineteenth-century division of disciplines. At the same time, these divisions are frequently inadequate to account for the intersections between music, art, poetry, architecture, and acoustics. My project pushes against these artificially imposed limits and argues for a holistic engagement with the medieval work.
In terms of the larger divisions within academia, I would say engagement with the premodern material clearly shows how these disciplinary boundaries very often hinder our engagement with the material rather than support it. It is hard to go outside one’s comfort zone, yet the process pushes one to learn new things. The strange is always a challenging thing to approach. In my case, I benefited a lot from discussing musicology with Laura Steenberge and learning about music from her. She’s a composer, and, as I mentioned earlier, she transcribed the music from the medieval manuscripts. We started working on “EnChanted Images” in the fall of 2019. Then COVID-19 happened, and the closure allowed us to engage more deeply with the music. Laura taught me how to read the manuscripts and, more specifically, the Aquitanian music notation. These moments of connecting to specialists in other fields have been very important for me. They have allowed me to grow and transform my thinking.
JM: In addition to music and vision, you also evoke smell, fragrance, smoke, fog. All of this contributes to that sense of the dissolution of the bounded, contoured subject, the all-knowing subject. I’m wondering if you can say a bit about the cosmographic spatial awareness that you’re trying to create through this environment that’s very coextensive of the self in ways that exceed the bounded and contoured subject. How do these environments allow listeners and believers to dissolve that sense of separation and exceed the narrowness of the self?
BP: This is a very perceptive reading of my work. I have been interested for many years in how visual traditions in the Mediterranean East, both Christian and Islamic, frequently challenge an art history dominated by the bounded figure and its privileging of anthropomorphic figuration. Sound, I think, has been a way to escape these boundaries and recognize that within the construction of the sacred a very important aspect was played by the invisible voice, what in film studies is called an acousmêtre (bodiless voice); again, it is film studies and the work of Chion that brought this concept forward. Sonic energy exhaled in song or recitation in reverberant interiors continues to linger long after the initial signal is switched off. Some of it is consumed by the bodies and draperies of the participants present in the space; they all become inspirited. The acousmêtre foregrounds the role of breath as a vehicle of this interdigitation of the body with world; breath interpenetrates interior and exterior. Breath also draws attention to the void in the architectural space. Art history has tended to look only at the material surfaces, the shell of the architecture. By contrast, my work, especially my book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press, 2017, recipient of the 2017 American Academy of Religion Award in historical studies), has shown how important it is to engage with what the architecture affords: it gathers light and sound. The human voice activates this luminous and resonant void. In Hagia Sophia the reverberation is over ten seconds, making human speech an emanation, no longer focused on transmitting meaning, but enveloping the participants in prosody. Acoustics has played a very important role in guiding me to a new understanding of the “image of God,” not as a concrete, anthropomorphic figuration, but as invisible but enveloping sound.
I think this unconventional approach to art history has also led me to consider how total environments are created. At Conques, the sacred was anchored both in the golden statue and in the very ambience: air, the smoke, the fragrance, the melisma — transient and immaterial. The church is on the slopes of a valley that has a river. A lot of water condensation builds up. Very frequently there are moments of fog. This brume (“light fog” in French) becomes the trace of the saint’s presence in the sensorial (image 1). The medieval Book of Miracles written in the eleventh century for Sainte Foy also perceives Sancta Fides as moving through the upper air. This allows her to be a distributed subject, to be at once here and in many other places at the same time. I think it is these ephemeral and intangible, but also sensorial, phenomena that have become the most attractive subjects for me as a scholar, especially here at Conques since the saint carries the name of Holy Faith, and fides (faith) is defined as the belief in things unseen (Hebrews 11:1). I’m interested in showing that there’s so much more to the medieval Christian aesthetic experience than our engagement with the concrete objects and the human figure.
My project focuses on these aspects of medieval artistic production connected with the imagination, poetry, and the chant. Music for the medieval liturgy is my entry into this invisible yet sensorial domain. Sainte Foy paradoxically sustains two manifestations at Conques: a figural and a nonfigural one (images 1, 3). She is present both in her golden statue and in the wisps of fog gently drifting through the air. It is this sharp contrast between the glittering materiality of the golden imago and the opalescent immateriality of the brume that shapes the visitor’s sensorial encounter with the metaphysical at Conques. Art history has always gravitated to material images. By contrast, the structuring of the medieval sacred space exacts equal attention to the paradoxical combination of the ephemeral, the immaterial, and the embodied scent of fragrance or the energy of sound, through which the divine becomes sensorially experienced.
JM: On that note, the other observations I had about your work are how you write about bodily practices, how they get entwined with religious subjectivity, and your discussion of rarefaction and martyrdom, how you draw attention to glimpses of martyrdom and practices of burning incense, such as when you discuss how suffering and sacrifice can be seen as processes of waning and attenuation. You write, “The dissolution of matter propels the soul to rise to the celestial domain. This process is compared to the smoke of incense, which rises straight into the air when undisturbed by drafts.” Could you draw out this intersection of sensuous aesthetics, bodily practices, and conceptions of the divine?
BP: I have been interested in the multi-sensorial phenomenon, the so-called saturated phenomenon, produced by sacred space for decades. I feel that with time I’m learning more about the process and I could speak less in generic terms about the saturated phenomenon and show how it is a system that is very carefully composed. All the elements — space, music, image — are activated in a coordinated way to target maximum effect. The incense is one example. There is a concentration of burning incense at the vesper service at sunset. As the sunlight disappears from the space, the sacred environment is filled with fragrance and smoke and these fleeting phenomena become the trace of something that is invisible yet sensorial in the space. It so happens that the chants that are specifically written for the vesper service at Conques, for the special liturgy of Sainte Foy, are filled with words for smell. Those words also aggregate all the melodic ornament, which means that those who were in the know and were composing the rite, the poetry and the music, knew how to manipulate those aspects that the audience was already prepared to receive. The congregation was already expecting, in a sense, to see something transcendent happening with the smell, and the Office wove in the poetry and music. The song (responsory) creates the possibility to experience the smell in sound. The melismas set on words such as cinnamon, aromas, and spirit obfuscate the meaning of these words because they extend the duration of these words with many notes. The melismas create spaces of contemplation within the rite, in which time stops because this long melisma needs its time to be completed. It’s sometimes not just the melisma. The melisma will be framed within another structure which is called a chiasm, a kind of a mirroring structure used in poetry, art, and music. It creates a center and frames it in a mirroring frame where beginning and end carry the same content. Here is an example of chiasm in Psalm 8; the center is the human being, the frame is the divine:
1 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth / who hast set thy
glory above the heavens.2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength
because of thine enemies / that thou mightest destroy the enemy and the avenger.3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers / the moon
and the stars which thy hast ordained.4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? / and the son
of man, that thou visitest him?5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the
angels / and has crowned him with glory and honor.6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy
hands / thou hast put all things under his feet:7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through
the paths of the seas.9 O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth![1]
Chiasm is present in the vesper responsory at Conques; it is set on the word cinnamon. The melodic elements produce this mirroring structure. Chiasm in poetry and music also has a visual corollary: the cross (with four equal arms) is the simplest and best example, symmetrical across all its axes. Chiasm in Christianity marks the moment when Spirit enters matter; this is the reason the cross set in a circle shapes the medieval Eucharist bread. Coming back to the vesper responsory at Conques, where the melodic chiasm is set on cinnamon, it conveys the understanding that the Spirit descends and becomes sensorial in smell and sound. You might ask: How many people would be able to detect the chiasm in the melody? Probably very few, yet the majority will experience the fragrance released in the air.
As a scholar, I see it as my responsibility to uncover the structure in which content is poured. I unpack this total order comprised in the design process; this is the creative intent. How this Gesamtkunstwerk was then perceived and how much of its intricate structure was originally received by the layperson is another set of questions for which I have no archival evidence. Yet, it is clear that the development of a multi-sensorial mode in the medieval liturgy allowed for many different ways to engage participants; some might have been affected by the visual, others by the sonic or the olfactory. The very variety of sensorial channels activated in the rite makes the medieval artistic performance inclusive.
One last thing I would say on this topic is that we think of ornament as something extraneous and unnecessary, that you can understand the structure without the ornament. But in medieval artistic religious production, ornament is the structure. Cinnamon is an example. The melodic chiasm set on this word and its accompaniment with the release of perfume from burning incense made the invisible divine become sensorial in the hearing and smell, without reducing the metaphysical to an anthropomorphic figuration.
JM: Another thing that I appreciate is how your insights and scholarship enrich my field of performance studies, especially your notion of bending linear time — the attention you draw to the circular and cyclical moves that trouble linear or textualist accounts of what we would think of as the original and how that feeds into a copy or a script that then leads to a performance. You invite us to think in much richer ways about the live body itself as a kind of performing device in a way that complicates these binaries of liveness and mediatization. This is something that Rebecca Schneider’s work encourages us to think about. Could you speak about the concept of the body as this kind of recording device? You write about children who are sent as offerings to the monastery, where they’re trained in a repertoire of chants, they acquire a deep embodied memory of them, and essentially become recording devices. Could you talk about dissolving that binary between the archive and repertoire, which is a concept by the performance studies theorist Diana Taylor?
BP: I learned a lot and was inspired by your suggestion to read Taylor. These insights from performance studies sparked by our conversations here at the Humanities Center have been very inspirational for the way I have begun to frame my research. You drew my attention to the way the medieval performers, who are trained from a very young age to learn very large and demanding repertoires of music, were in effect recording devices. I have never thought about the medieval singers in such terms! Your comment was so insightful. What we have at Conques and all throughout medieval monasteries is a population of monks sustained by receiving children at a very early age, no older than probably six, and training them in the first couple of years to learn a large body of texts and melodies so that they could perform them from memory for the rest of their lives. These children become so deeply invested in the rite. They’re both a living archive and a performing repertoire at the same time. This whole system shows it is extremely humanistic. It is a belief in the human being who interacts and connects with the cosmos. Here are some examples: the medieval music scales were read on the palm of one’s left hand (image 10); human chant was perceived to mirror the perfect, ceaseless rotation of the stars and planets. The children-oblates (offerings) adopted at a young age in the monastery learned the chant repertoires, performing them for the rest of their lives, while at the same time they understood that their singing reflects something that is inaudible to human ears: the celestial music of the revolving stars (image 5). Their performance on earth is aspirational, longing for this inaudible celestial sound of which they have become conduits.
image 10 Liber enchiriadis de musica (A handbook on music), including Cassiodorus (ca. 490–585) and Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 991–1033). A hand showing the pitches as letters arranged on the knuckles. The green spiral, added to this medieval miniature, visualizes for a modern viewer how the scales rise in a spiral. Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France; Digital Design: Jessica Chen Lee
Having said that, I wanted to bring out one other aspect of the music at Conques. The eleventh-century Office of Sainte Foy is a new creation. This special liturgy needs to be adopted at other sites in order to survive the passage of time. This process relies on smaller-format manuscripts, called libelli (little books) that are easy to transport. The Conques compositions have survived in two libelli.
JM: Perhaps in closing you could comment on the relationship between religious and aesthetic experiences. One of the things that you’ve shown us is how suffused these religious aesthetic experiences are with sensuousness. More recently, we’ve seen how magic, festive, folk dimensions have been purged from religious practices as we’ve come into the modern era and religion has taken a rationalist turn. What is the relationship you see between sensuousness and sacrality?
BP: I desire to experience this art in ways that transcend the museum’s white box, electric light, and the use of microphones — features that actually separate us from the world instead of embedding us in the world. Whenever it is possible, I strive to offer embodied knowledge by allowing the medieval work of art to regain its temporal aspect in contemporary performance. Despite the fact that we have a limited knowledge about certain aspects of modes of singing, rhythm, tempo, aspects of chant for which we have no surviving record as to how they were meant to be performed, I still believe that there is an enormous amount of new information that comes from giving the temporal dimension to song.
JM: Your research brings so many different disciplines together and offers us a much more supple way of thinking about this very sensuous phenomenology of medieval sacred space. The way you connect sight, sound, smell, light, energy, and atmosphere really brings the whole sacral sensorium alive. It makes me think about how much we miss when we limit ourselves to a narrow disciplinary focus on art history or theater or musicology. Your work is extraordinary. When it’s completed I look forward to reading it, viewing it, and experiencing it.
BP: Thank you very much for your insights and for the way in which you grasp the essence of the material and translate it to our contemporary world.
endnotes
English translation from KJV Bible. ↩
