Sept. 25, 2015:
Conference (P)review

Guest Speakers
Stephanie Bonaroti
PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ilana Schroeder
PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison

(Location: Humanities 2441)

Playing With Gender: Luise Hensel’s Liederspiel and the 19th Century German Salon 
 
The 19th Century German salon was the primary venue for female musical performance and is recognized as a sphere of considerable gender exploration for women. Despite this apparent freedom, the precise means by which Salonmusik performances enabled women to play with new notions of gender is far from obvious. Jennifer Ronyak has completed recent scholarship on this issue in examining the Stägemann salon and the group's accompanying Liederspiel, mostly in regard to the social implications of the Liederspiel text.  In conversation with Ronyak’s discussion, this essay suggests a performative framework in which the Stägemann songs' musical potential for sociability is considered. Through formal music analysis of “Am Bach” from Ludwig Berger's collection based on the Liederspiel, Bonaroti posits that salon compositions only served in illustrating the prevailing conceptions of heterosexuality and male dominance. Looking at Luise Hensel's potential performance of "Am Bach," on the other hand, this essay concludes that the conditions of performance within the salon enabled women's exploration of”masculine” and “feminine” constructions. While performance is manifested in existing social practices, performative events also generate a temporal reality that stands apart from the performer’s ordinary sphere. Through performance as the gardener, Hensel might have been able to embody maleness, reinterpret femaleness, and re-signify what it meant to be male or female within her own social world. Luise Hensel's performance, then, suggests that the Salon may have facilitated women's gender exploration because it uniquely straddled the boundary between the normative gender framework of reality and the imaginary worlds of art song.

 
Mechtild of Hackeborn and the Liturgy as Embodied lectio divina


The mystical visions of the thirteenth-century nun Mechtild of Hackeborn have long been recognized as some of the most sensually explicit meditations on the Divine. Filled with vivid imagery, aural and olfactory sensations, Mechtild conveys an ecstatic monastic experience intended as both communal and didactic. As head chantrix of the Helfta monastery, Mechtild's role as instructor was familiar to the women of her community; however, as a woman and nun she also understood her place as student and servant. This dual mantle, sometimes difficult to negotiate, placed Mechtild in a liminal space, hovering between teacher and student, magistra et discipula.
            Perhaps it is no surprise then that the first book of her Liber specialis gratiae employs the ritual of the liturgy, another space of liminality, as a structural mechanism. To date, scholars interested in Mechtild, such as Carolyn Walker Bynum and Mary Finnegan, have focused on how, following the cycle of the liturgical calendar, Mechtild cites specific texts from the Mass and Office to locate particular mystical experiences. Despite the musical context of these events, discussion of music have been sidelined, limited to brief acknowledgements of musical instruments and choirs of celestial beings present in the visions themselves. In this paper, I reconsider the significance of musical performance in the formation of Mechtild's mystical narrative. Not only are the visions themselves sensually evocative, but the moments in which they occur also demonstrate intense physicality: the sounds of the various pitches, the feel of the breath entering and exiting through the mouth, nose and lungs, the movement of the diaphragm. A sort of Augustinian ecstasy creates an environment ideal for meditation on specific texts and communion with the Divine. I argue that Mechtild illustrates through her own example how each sister participating in the liturgy might experience an embodied form of lectio divina.
            The narrative of Mechtild's Liber specialis gratiae presents an ideal forum for investigating the intersection of female mysticism, liturgical ritual and music. Such an investigation supplements the "what" of medieval women's piety, the focus of many earlier discussions of female monasticism, with the "how." For the women of Helfta, the physicality of the liturgy, of their lives, provided the impetus for their religious experiences, an impetus which still resonates with audiences today.