Immaculate Sounds

Abstract

Abstract The musical lives of nuns in early modern New Spain encompassed a complex network of sonified practices that exceeded music performance. This book argues for a sonically inclined understanding of cloistered nuns’ embodied and spiritual engagement with Catholic doctrines on the nature of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Immaculate sounds were idealized vocalizations by nuns as well as the expression of doctrinal rhetoric that relied on musical metaphors. Starting from a sonification of virginity and the Virgin Mary that was fundamental to promoting the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, this book explores the pivotal role of immaculate sounds in mediating between New Spanish nuns’ lives and the expectations placed upon them to save the secular world with their vocalized prayers. The circumstances surrounding the performance of music within convents reveal a highly regulated realm of female sounds that echoed the rules of obedience, institutional hierarchy, colonial racialization, and enclosure. Besides the sonification of discipline, this book shows that immaculate sounds also enhanced the nuns’ engagement with religious practices such as the rite of communion and music performed for Eucharistic devotion. Music also had a central position in facilitating imitation processes that encouraged the brides of Christ to take on the role of widows, martyrs, and sorrowing mothers in the devotions to the Virgin of Sorrows and Christ’s Passion. The musical lives of New Spanish nuns reached beyond singing and playing instruments within the walls of the convents. They were also imbricated with their identities through immaculate sounds.