Choir Stalls Research Articles

Topologies of the Virtual. Spaces, Images, and Bodies in Early Modern Choir Stalls

Early Modern choir stalls are spaces within spaces, they separate spheres such as public and restricted, profane and holy, as well as open and closed. Members of the convents perform their daily devotions here and are assigned to respective seats. They are installed, according to the name of the place “stalla”. The inlaid decoration on each seat reiterates the specific spatial and religious formation. This article wants to explore how choir stalls immerse their users and viewers in pictorial and religious environments.

Notes for the study of the choir stalls of the secular clergy of Jerez de la Frontera

La colegiata y el resto de parroquias de Jerez de la Frontera contaban con sus respectivos coros para la asistencia del clero a la misa y el oficio. De estos recintos, compuestos de rejas, cerramientos, órganos, facistoles, y pequeños altares, las sillerías de escaños suponían su origen y explicaban su existencia. Lamentablemente desaparecidas o desmembradas, en el presente estudio se compilan las noticias conocidas, pero hasta ahora dispersas, con nuevos datos inéditos y el estudio de los restos materiales conservados. Se conforma de este modo una primera aproximación de conjunto a estas piezas singulares del mobiliario eclesiástico jerezano.

Taking a Different Path: From Voice Teacher to Speech-Language Pathologist

Taking a Different Path: From Voice Teacher to Speech-Language Pathologist Brian Manternach (bio), Elizabeth Lanza (bio), and Megan Lee (bio) THE INDEPENDENT TEACHER INTRODUCTION In a 2019 Journal of Singing article, D. Brian Lee outlines the many advantages voice teachers may enjoy when they take on "non-voicerelated jobs."1 He highlights how they can provide financial stability, an outlet for creative pursuits outside of music, and the freedom to take on students and performance opportunities out of desire rather than necessity. Besides non-voice-related jobs, many voice teachers also find themselves drawn to music adjacent careers, where the skills they have developed as singers and educators are even more directly applicable. One of these fields is speech-language pathology. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), speech-language pathologists (also called SLPs) are experts in communication who work with people of all ages to treat many types of communication and swallowing problems.2 They have a variety of areas of focus, including addressing problems with speech sounds (how we create sounds and put sounds together into words), language (how well we understand what we hear or read and how we use words to tell others what we are thinking), and voice (how our voices sound).3 SLPs work in a variety of settings, including private practices, physicians' offices, hospitals, schools, colleges and universities, rehabilitation centers, and long-term and residential health care facilities.4 This column will provide profiles of two voice teacher-singers who have shifted to speech-language pathology (one working professional and one current graduate student). We will explore their backgrounds and experiences, the elements that led them to shift careers, and how their work as voice teachers informs their work in speech-language pathology. MUSICAL BEGINNINGS Elizabeth Lanza claims she was in love with musical theatre from day one. She means this quite literally, since the soundtrack to Guys and Dolls was playing in the background when she was born. Her parents—both theatre aficionados—provided a steady stream of classic Golden Age musicals like Oklahoma, Camelot, My Fair Lady, and Fiddler on the Roof in their house during her formative years. The season tickets her family held at their local Equity theatre also allowed for many opportunities to see live, professional [End Page 383] theatre up close. Lanza specifically remembers watching the actors on stage and thinking, "I could do that!" In fact, she did "do that," albeit on a much smaller stage, as she and her cousin would regularly mount their own living room productions of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Even at that early age, Lanza appreciated music as a vehicle for storytelling, which only grew throughout middle school and high school. She credits her high school choir director and "an incredibly supportive voice teacher" for playing significant roles in her decision to major in music in college and to pursue it as a career. Megan Lee similarly developed a love of singing that began in early childhood. Instead of the footlights of the theatrical stage, however, she found her passion in the choir stalls of a cathedral. When she was 10 years old, Lee began attending the renowned Madeleine Choir School in Salt Lake City, where—instead of Oklahoma and Camelot—she sang everything from Gregorian chant to Poulenc. Lee never considered herself a "natural" when it came to singing. Although she developed strong musicianship, sight-reading skills, and choral singing abilities throughout her schooling, she felt that singing always presented challenges to overcome. When she first started taking voice lessons, it was primarily because of her goal to get into one of the top choirs at her school. However, she soon became fascinated with vocal technique, the mind-body connection, and the functioning of the vocal mechanism. Studying voice in college seemed a logical next step, given how her background had placed her on that path. But she also viewed pursuing voice at the next level as a personal challenge. Knowing how hard she had worked on her singing during her teen years, she saw college vocal studies as a tremendous opportunity for self-exploration. COLLEGE AND EARLY CAREER When...

Notas para un glosario sobre sillerías de oro. Las fuentes documentales leonesas

This article has been made in order to establish a Castilian terminology about choir stalls, not existing nowadays, using the same words that appear in the original documents.

Meubles: The Ever Mobile Middle Ages

Medieval furnishings preserved in aristocratic estates and ecclesiastical institutions took on new life in the nineteenth century as the turmoil of the French Revolution reactivated their use value, transforming them into collectibles, fuel, or raw materials for new building projects. This essay relies on the taxonomies of reuse proposed by archaeologist Michael Schiffer to evaluate the preservation, recycling, and repurposing of objects such as medieval choir stalls, chests, and beds by conservators, architects, artists, and collectors Alexandre Du Sommerard, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Albert Jacquemart, Victor Hugo, Pierre Loti, and Frédéric Spitzer. These prominent figures' repurposing of antique furniture mirrors nineteenth-century constructions of the medieval period itself.

EXILED TO HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, SUTTON COLDFIELD, WARWICKSHIRE: THE REFUGEE MARIAN CHOIR STALLS FROM WORCESTER CATHEDRAL

The reign of Mary i (24 July 1553–17 November 1558) is widely seen as a disaster for both the woman herself and her devout faith. It can be argued that she did more than anyone to make England a Protestant nation. When we seek to find any trace of her patronage of the arts or of major building projects, we find that little survives. Eamon Duffy called such traces the ‘disjecta membra’. Yet each piece, each surprising survival, demonstrates an awareness of the latest fashions, embracing a forward-looking form of Renaissance arts rather than a backward-looking, conservative Gothic. To discover and emphatically assign a major new piece of work to this catalogue of relics is justifiably a cause of celebration. In 2011, Charles Tracy FSA re-assessed the Marian choir stalls now in Holy Trinity church, Sutton Coldfield (in Warwickshire), rightly calling them the ‘refugee choir stalls from Worcester’, for it was from Worcester cathedral that this magnificent suite was evicted in a fit of Victorian vandalism. In this article, the author demonstrates that these choir stalls were created through the patronage of Mary i, and their makers evoked in their creation ideas and fashions that emanated from Hans Holbein and Sebastiano Serlio, to create what is a unique set of work.

La sillería de la catedral de Segovia en la evolución de los conjuntos corales hispanos

Dentro del amplio y significativo grupo de sillerías de coro de la Castilla tardogótica, la de la catedral de Segovia constituye una de los más interesantes. Esta singularidad se debe a que se trata de uno de los conjuntos corales más antiguos conservados en el reino y porque además se configura como un eslabón fundamental en la evolución de las sillerías anicónicas posteriores, entre las que podríamos considerarla un claro ejemplo de madurez a pesar de su temprana fecha. La documentación conservada sobre su construcción, inédita hasta el momento, nos permite reproducir su proceso constructivo y acercarnos a la complejidad de uno de los pocos conjuntos conservados de mediados del siglo XV, momento clave en la evolución estructural e iconográfica de este tipo de obras, en el que esta sillería jugó un papel fundamental.

Variantes del cabalgado en la sillería coral de Zamora (y otras representaciones)

El motivo llamado ‘Aristóteles y Filis’ se talló en sillerías góticas de templos europeos muy distantes. Pero esta sólo es una de las soluciones iconográficas que varían el mismo ‘tema de encuadre’ en las representaciones. Tras hacer un repaso por algunos problemas de la investigación que trata con estas esculturas, atendemos a dos misericordias de la sillería de Zamora que versionan el tema del cabalgado: aquella que representa a unos peculiares Aristóteles y Filis, y otra que representa un castigo escolar. Para considerar el sentido expresado a través de las formas que relacionan entre sí ambas escenas en coro, acudimos a otras representaciones que modulan el mismo discurso y comparten mecanismos figurativos.

The organisation of liturgical space and its furnishing at the Franciscan Friars’ in late Middle Ages illustrated by an example of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s church in Toruń

At the turn of 14th and in early 15th century the sacred space of the Franciscan St Mary’s church in Toruń was fully developed and adjusted to the mission and ministry of the Order of Friars Minor, equipped with altars, most important furniture and numerous paintings used in pastoral ministry and in encouraging lay piety. It was completed in the late 15th cent., especially with woodwork (stalls, balustrades, crucifix). Décor and furnishing of ecclesiae fratrum (main altar, murals, choir stalls, as well as rood screen and its altars) are from today’s perspective much less palpable. Ecclesialaicorum is in that respect much better preserved (wall paintings, sculptures, baptismal font) or known against written sources (organ, cancel, grave plates) in spite of structural alterations and transformations resulting from denominational and functional changes. The analysed artefacts – though not so numerous, as the material sources significantly complement a skimpy archival base related with functioning of one of the most significant Prussian convents in Middle Ages.

Program ikonograficzny wystroju wnętrza kościoła pw. Wniebowzięcia Najświętszej Maryi Panny i św. Augustyna w Kraśniku (wiek XVII i XVIII)

Modern furnishings of the church dedicated to the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Augustine in Kraśnik were created over three hundred years. However, the oldest trace of the decor from the 16th century is scant. In the first half of the 17th century they were exchanged, and it was at the time when the monastery in Kraśnik joined the Cracow Congregation. The 1630s were particularly important in the creation of the new decor of the church as the following things were founded: choir stalls, including collator ones, paintings by Dolabella as well as the high altar and brotherhood’s one. The above-mentioned elements of the interior were means of conveying the most important themes: canonic (Ordo apostolicus, the patrons of the Cracow Congregation), Passion, Eucharistic, Marian (including SalvatorMundi and MaterMisericordiae) as well as patronal. It cannot be ruled out that intensive artistic investment was connected with the plan to convene the General Chapter in Kraśnik in 1635. In the following decades, especially in the mid-eighteenth centuries, the interior was supplemented and developed, within the aforementioned themes, through the foundations of new altars, a pulpit and paintings in the chancel. Comparing the themes of the church decoration in Krasnik with other churches of the Canons Regular of the Cracow Congregation, it should be noted that they are typical. They referred to monastic life, including the spirituality of the canons and the "primacy" of the congregation, as well as the pastoral ministry being developed on the basis of Passion, Eucharistic and Marian themes. They were presented in the context of the changes taking place in the life of the Church after the Council of Trent, the trend which was also adopted by the Cracow Congregation of Corpus Christi, which co-created a new model of the sacred art in the Republic of Poland.

Study on the effects of the harmonic choir stalls in the Church of the Certosa di San Martino in Naples

The Church of the Certosa of San Martino was built in the 14th century and is characterized by the presence of an elliptical harmonic box built under the floor of the choir stalls, with which it communicates through openings in the floor. The harmonic box was made to remedy sound defects that appeared in the Church after the opening of several windows in the upper part of choir stalls and nave. The opinion of the monks was that these acoustic flaws caused their chants vibrations to be weakened and even lost. This work verifies whether the elliptical volume constructed below the choir stalls has any acoustic purposes. Acoustic measurements were carried out in its current state and then closing the connecting openings between the choir stalls and the cavity below, so as to assess any changes in the acoustic characteristics. The acoustic measurements were carried out by placing a sound source both in the choir stalls and on the altar, along with microphones in the choir stalls and the nave. At the end of tak...

An intensive tree-ring experience: Connecting education and research during the 25th European Dendroecological Fieldweek (Asturias, Spain)

The European Dendroecologial Fieldweek (EDF) provides an intensive learning experience in tree-ring research that challenges any participant to explore new multidisciplinary dendro-sciences approaches within the context of field and laboratory settings. Here we present the 25th EDF, held in Asturias, NW Spain, in summer 2014. The course, with 33 participants and 10 instructors from 18 countries included advanced training in dendrochronology skills, an overview of tree-ring broad fields and methodological basics to deal with specific research questions as well as applied advanced micro-projects in dendroarchaeology (DAR), dendroclimatology (DCL), dendrogeomorphology (DGM), forest dynamic (FD) and plant anatomy (PA). The results demonstrated the potential of tree-ring research in the Asturias region. The DAR group researched archaeological samples from different contexts (Oviedo cathedral choir stalls, Segovia cathedral roof timbers, Ribadeo shipwreck ship timbers and Bronze Age site charcoal) and explored the supply of wood in different periods. The DCL group established that the Quercus robur and Castanea sativa ring-width measurements show weak climate-growth correlations, where for many trees this is likely caused by management. The strength of the climatic signal could be enhanced using undisturbed settings. The DGM group found that Corylus avellana and Salix spp. are challenging species for dendrogeomorphological studies. Debris-flow events were detected by the presence of tension wood, growth reduction and scars, and their incidences were also supported by local meteorological data. The FD group found that tree growth decreases with increasing competition, a pattern more pronounced in C. sativa than in Pinus sylvestris forest plantations. The results indicate that wood production could be increased by applying thinning treatments on C. sativa. The PA group showed that xylem conduits and phloem area are organized according to the common needs for water supply to leaves and obtain photosynthetic products, regardless site growing conditions for P. sylvestris and Tusilago farfara. In conclusion, this EDF has been a model for interdisciplinary research and international collaboration that has demonstrated that high-quality research and education can be conducted within one week. The EDFs provide an important service to the dendrochronological community and demonstrate the usefulness of this educational-scientific and multi-cultural experience.

Prilog poznavanju djelovanja Mateja Andrijina Moronzona*

Matteo Moronzon, a member of the Venetian family of woodcarvers, was mentioned for the first time in 1407 according to the present known archival documents. Probably after being trained in his father's workshop in Venice, he moved to Zadar with his family – his wife Francisca and sons Pietro and Francesco. In 1418 he undertook the commission of furnishing carved choir stalls for the cathedral of St. Anastasia in Zadar. Various archival documents testify that Matteo lived and worked in Zadar for many years. Therefore it can be assumed that he probably founded his own workshop in Zadar where his son Francesco was trained too. Apart from the attempt to reconstruct Matteo's life and career, the aim of this paper is to interpret one important woodcarving work of art preserved in situ: choir stalls in the former cathedral of Rab, today the arch parish church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Rab. Without doubt Matteo was the master carver in the production of the choir stalls in Zadar. Since he lived in Zadar it was not unusual that he had the main role in carving the stalls. In Zadar the selection of motives is more balanced and there are no significant differences in the modelling of decorative elements. However, the question whether Matteo carved absolutely everything or he had assistants arises. Considering the amount of work that had to be done it must be assumed that he had assistants who participated in work and helped him to shape the stalls. However, in literature Matteo was considered the only and undisputed author of the choir stalls in Zadar, mostly because of the preserved document. The analysis of the choir stalls in Rab by Ivo Petricioli as well as their evident formal and stylistic similarities with the stalls from the cathedral in Zadar have led to the general acceptance of the hypothesis that they were carved at the workshop of Matteo Moronzon. However, a comprehensive comparative analysis that could confirm that hypothesis was still missing. The analysis of the details and the whole led to the overall conclusion that there were a huge number of similarities between the choir stalls in Rab and Zadar. Therefore it was concluded that Matteo was the principal designer of the choir stalls in Rab who also carved the best parts in Rab, while others, less successful parts, were made by his apprentices and assistants who at the time lived on the island of Rab. In this respect, if Matteo was accepted as the author of the choir stalls of the cathedral in Zadar he must also be accepted as the author of the choir stalls from the excathedral in Rab.

Intercessions Of The Cloth

Intercessions Of The Cloth Rebecca Kylie Law (bio) How do you explainthe dissolution of despairthat instant it goes as rain to a mist. As being in a cathedralsearching the altar for your kindred and giving up, despondent his late rising from the choir stalls,his shepherding of the host,his lowered head in prayer, as the stained glass windownear the exit, like a kaleidoscope large, high and well-shook. [End Page 123] Rebecca Kylie Law Rebecca Kylie Law is an Australian poet, essayist and reviewer, currently completing her PhD at the University of Western Sydney. Her poetry publications include Offset, Lilies and Stars and The Arrow & The Lyre (Picaro Press, 2014), together with a forthcoming volume, In My Days and In My Sleep (Interactive Press, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in The Euroscientist Exine, The Afternoon Journal, The Lake, Poetry Pacific and The Australian. rbcclaw@gmail.com Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Water: Mother of Many Names

Water: Mother of Many Names Julia Spicher Kasdorf In Zurich, across the Limmat river and the street that runs along it, behind a low arcade of shops, up a flight of stone steps, stands the Grossmünster, an enormous Romanesque church with round‐topped Gothic spires. Beneath it stretches a cobblestone square named for Ulrich Zwingli, the pastor who trashed the place in 1524. With the blessing of city council, Zwingli and two other priests supervised workers and tradesmen who removed sacred objects that were suddenly considered idols: paintings, altar decorations, votive lamps, carved choir stalls, and the organ. They also oversaw the scraping of frescoes from the great church's interior walls. At the top of those steps, on the edge of that square, I paused, having just made my way up from the train station. Before that, I had walked through the sleek, silent, cement‐walled air terminal at Zurich, and before that I had endured an overnight flight in economy class that originated in the loud, chaotic airport at Philadelphia, a flight for which I had not dressed warmly enough, and during which I'd slept little. I blinked in the July morning light. A few tourists milled around the entrance of the church, posing in front of its great bronze doors, snapping pictures. Nothing stirred the silence but a few tourists and some pigeons. Could this really be it? For two years I had wondered whether the sight inside this mother church of the Swiss Reformation would strike me as powerfully as it had the first time I saw it. Often I had returned to this place in my mind, describing my first visit to friends like a rehearsal for this return. Here, something surprised me to tears. After a long, difficult marriage—you make your bed, you lie in it!—after a final separation in 2005, after two moves in two years, in the dead center of my life, I had arrived at this place, more weary than I realized, a mother with a small child on another continent, and wept. A raw nerve is one way to enter history. I have searched for words to describe what I felt then. I have read histories of this place to help me make sense of the moment when I first encountered the effaced Madonna and Child in a niche built to hold holy water during Catholic times. Unable to explain those feelings to myself, I have instead formed a question: How do people resist spiritual ruin in a world of so many ruined things? Compelled to return to this place, I have wondered about the moral consequences of memory. I claim feeling as both motivation and method in this quest: feelings, not emotions. Consider emotions to be the raw, biological functions of the human nervous system, such as terror or sexual attraction that race through the body, and that neurobiologists now track with scientific instruments. Feelings involve emotions but are more complicated because they also draw on memory, experience, and cognition. Feelings produce highly personal forms of intelligence that involve self‐consciousness and thought in addition to the bodily instincts of the organism. Maybe scientists are just now finding ways to describe what Shakespeare wrote in King Lear more than 400 years ago: Gloucester, physically blind, nonetheless sees people and circumstances more clearly than the King. When Lear asks the source of his insight, Gloucester replies, “I see feelingly.” All I could see that July morning in 2009, as my eyes burned in the sunlight, was the most immediate way to enter history: through the ruins that remain. Construction of the Grossmünster began around 1,100 on this spot. Near this site in 286, according to legend, Felix and his sister Regula were beheaded for refusing to offer sacrifice to Roman Emperor Maximian. As Christians, they could honor none but the one true God. It is said that the martyrs picked up their heads and walked a short distance from the river's edge to a spot where they stopped to pray; then, they stretched out there for burial. According to the story, quite a few others carried their heads up from the river also...

La sillería del coro del desaparecido convento de Santo Tomás de Aquino (Madrid): un trabajo germinal y olvidado de José Benito Churriguera

This article presents a juvenile work by Jose Benito Churriguera (1665-1725): the choir stalls of the now-disappeared convent of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Order of Preachers) in Madrid, carved in 1688-1691 and apparently destroyed in 1872. The reference was published in Vida, virtudes y exercicios del Illmo. y Revmo. Sr. D. F. Thomas Reluz, obispo de Oviedo (Life, virtues and exercises of His Grace Thomas Reluz, bishop of Oviedo), by Friar Manuel Jose de Medrano, a rare edition published in Oviedo in 1718. During this research the relationship of the Churrigueras with the Dominicans and Bishop Reluz has been examined, allowing for the clarification of the circumstances of the involvement of Jose Benito and his sons in the architectural works of this convent, which traditionally has been attributed to them.

Giovanni Bellini's Baptism of Christ in its visual and devotional context: transforming sacred space in Santa Corona in Vicenza

The Dominican church of Santa Corona in Vicenza owed its status and nomenclature to its prestigious relic from the crown of thorns. In the early fifteenth century, the reliquary and its procession were enhanced; the community appeared to increase in number and was taken over by a reform movement. From the late 1470s, an ambitious spatial transformation involved removing the prominent choir precinct from the upper nave; constructing an extended high altar chapel to house new choir stalls; and the creation of a crypt in which the precious relic would be displayed. In 1500, textile merchant Battista Graziani was granted a side chapel location in the newly liberated space of the upper nave. Giovanni Bellini's Baptism of Christ altarpiece, with its unique use of light and composition, focused attention on the figure of Christ and, as suggested by an interpretation of a Dominican text, made reference to the crowning of thorns. Graziani's altar was also subtly related to the high altar, possibly intended to house an image of the crowning of thorns above the projected new site for the relic below.

Visions, Mental Images, Real Pictures. The Mystical Experience and the Artistic Patronage of Sister Battista da Varano

The aim of this article is to analyze, from a historical-anthropological point of view, the relationship between women’s mystique experience, “inner visualization” and artistic production, through the study of the visions and the artistic patronage of Sister Battista da Varano (1458-1524), one of the greatest female Franciscan writers of the Italian Renaissance. In her works, the nun often describes her visions, in which her familiarity with the devotional images present in her city emerges. Going beyond this codified iconography, Sister Battista, during her mystical experience, also shapes symbols within her mind. These symbols are presented as signs of her privileged dialogue with Jesus. Thanks to the wealth of her family, Sister Battista also manages to commission works of art. In the choir stalls of her monastery, executed by Domenico Indivini in 1489, the nun asks the artist to transform her mental images, received during the ecstasy, in real images. Not adequately explicable as manifestations of women’s discomfort, the visions of Sister Battista can be interpreted as the result of a mind educated in the use of images and skillful in “inner visualization”. Through these “techniques of the body” (Marcel Mauss), learned in the monastery and shared by the society in which she lived, Sister Battista can successfully achieve her most desired goal: to see Christ and to communicate with him.

Cuando Ícaro voló sobre Plasencia. El comentario a la Eneida de Fray Juan Luis de la Cerda y las reelaboraciones de un mito medieval

I analyse the continuous reworking of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus in the context of the city of Plasencia, from medieval times until the nineteenth century. In particular, I reflect on the commentary to the Æneid made by fray Juan Luis de la Cerda (1560-1643) and the subsequent assimilation of this invented story by Rodrigo Alemán, sculptor of the Choir stalls of the cathedral. Finally, I study new documents in which it is possible to see the reinterpretation of this myth from classical antiquity within the international scientific press of modern Europe.

Carthusian Choir Stalls and the Misericord in Italy

The majority of choir stalls in Italy lack misericords. Their unusual presence in Piedmont and the Valle d'Aosta most probably reflects their proximity to, and the influence of, northern Europe. This paper reveals that the rare instances of misericords elsewhere in Italy are connected to the Carthusian order. Rather than performing an artistic role, their presence is derived from the specific rubrics of Carthusian liturgy, which legislated in detail on the correct use of misericords. The Cistercians also regulated their use, but a similar correlation cannot be assessed because of the lack of surviving furniture. The Carthusian connection, meanwhile, suggests a purely liturgical function for the carved rests, expanding the study of misericords beyond stylistic and iconographic analyses.