As both a musician and someone who studies sound, I have the odd habit of clapping once sharply or speaking in a loud staccato voice or humming to no one in particular when I enter what appears to be an acoustically interesting space. I was glad, then, that the Birmingham meeting of the Society of Friends was just about to start their worship when I asked to go into the old hexagonal-shaped schoolroom: I was given permission to go alone. The room responded to my claps and vocal probes with a “live” sound because the ceilings are made of hard plaster and shaped in such a way that sounds bounce immediately back with little in the way of complex echoes typically produced by the high, steep, two-sided ceiling in a gothic chapel. Today, shape-note singers, with their emphasis on the participation of all and their accentuation of the mid-range timbres of the voice, value these old Quaker halls for their participatory acoustics. Later users of the room, annoyed by the same acoustics, installed hooks in the ceiling from which to hang thick, sound-absorbing drapes to muffle the reverberation. The “live” sound of the undraped room was akin to the slap-back echo popularized on old rockabilly and rhythm and blues records from the late 1950s, but when I was there it sounded the same as it and other hexagonal Quaker schoolhouses and meetinghouses had sounded for centuries. The acoustics amplified everyone’s voice, with no echoes building up anywhere because the shallow-ceiling, obtuse-angled rooms had, according to one folk explanation, “no corner for the devil to hide.”
This chapter considers what eighteenth-century encyclopedists called “catacoustics,” the study of how sound was instrumentally projected, reflected, dissipated, and otherwise manipulated once it had been produced.[1] By manipulating reflected sounds, early Americans added layers of meaning that enriched and reinforced deeply held beliefs. They carefully attended to the audible world when they created and shaped public — and in some cases, not so public — spaces. Acoustical spaces reflected the beliefs underlying social order as well as vocal and instrumental sounds. Thinking about acoustics, we can still hear the echoes of those social orders and begin to notice how people created and maintained ranked points of contact within their communities and nations, across divides of ethnicity, race, gender, and class, and (perhaps most important) between visible and invisible worlds.
Acoustic spaces and the quality of the sounds made therein are remarkably durable even though the particular sounds are ephemeral. Anyone who has ever tested the reverberation in an old high-ceilinged church knows the power and durability of acoustic design and the shape of the sounds made within it. Our everyday acoustics are now filtered through electronic amplifiers and speakers, giving us soft voices at loud volumes and problems of distortion, feedback, and tone unfathomable in the seventeenth century. And in many ways, it is difficult for people today to imagine a world where sounds with no visible source were necessarily other-worldly: our radio, television, and film voice-overs, as well as music recordings, routinely fragment sounds to the point that disembodiment is mundane. Yet the gap between our worlds and theirs can — at least in part — be breached, as a study of church acoustics makes clear.
European Church Acoustics
In order to understand Anglo-American acoustical soundways, we must begin with a baseline of European church acoustics. While the two traditions are parallel in many respects, we need to pay attention to the fact that colonists did not have to face the preexisting institutions and acoustic spaces with which Europeans contended during the Reformation.
Older church designs emphasized high ceilings made of hard, sound-reflecting materials. The priest stood within a semi-enclosed wing of the church, the chancel, facing the altar, his back to the chancel screen separating the altar from the rest of the churchgoers in the nave. The priest was nearly invisible to his auditors. He spoke and chanted in Latin, indecipherable to most from the outset. Language, however, formed only the last barrier to comprehension. Facing away from the congregation, the priest’s voice never carried directly to listeners in the nave. It began its trip toward them as an echo, reflected several more times before reaching any ears.
Fig. 3.1 Acoustics of a medieval chancel. Drawing by author.
While the medieval chancel is often negatively construed as an impediment to vision and acoustic clarity separating priest from congregants, it can also be considered a beautifully executed, very large musical instrument, somewhat like the body of a lute. The priest’s voice provided the initial signal, like the plucked string of the lute. Unlike a lute string, however, the priest’s voice was located inside the body of the instrument rather than outside, and it was carefully directed toward the back of the instrument, the concave eastern wall of the chancel, rather than being a diffuse signal such as that from a lute string. The chancel walls collected and directed the sound forward to the listeners like the back of the lute’s body. En route, the signal encountered a set of vertical barriers. On the floor was the chancel-screen, topped with a crucifix or rood. The chancel screen was often carved so that people in the nave could partly see through it. While it made the priest’s actions vaguely visible, the chancel screen’s open tracery or perforations acted as an acoustic baffle, muffling and deflecting the floor-level sound waves emanating from the chancel. This would make the sound that did escape seem to come more from above than across. Directly above the chancel screen was an opening occupied by the rood, through which sounds passed more freely, something like the sound holes of the lute. Above that, hanging down from the ceiling, was the tympanum, named after a drum head or the eardrum. In effect, the tympanum acted like the sounding board of our hypothetical lute, vibrating when struck by the signal but also bouncing sounds back into the chancel until they were directed out of the opening where the rood was situated. Taken together, the chancel and its parts constituted a sort of reverberant sound amplifier. Because the signal was already reverberating before it left the chancel and because a chancel is much larger than a guitar, the sound emitting from it at any moment was a compendium of echoes, the sources of which overlapped in time much more so than those coming from a lute.[2]
Once this complex signal reached the nave, where the congregants were seated, the crosslike construction of medieval churches bounced it around more, creating cascades of echoes. The high, acoustically reflective ceilings added sonic power to the priest’s voice, reverberating and reinforcing it, while at the same time further muddying it with the echoes that constituted the nave’s reverberation. The steep incline of the high ceilings increased the reverberation time. Long after the first echoes faded, the last ones would still be escaping from the cavernous ceilings of a typical church. Sounds bounced around echo upon echo upon echo rather than reaching the listener’s ears all at once. This created a powerfully moving effect, one that amplified the voice and enriched the tone, but at the cost of clarity. Acoustician Hope Bagenal somewhat derisively describes the emphasis on reverberant sound found in Catholic churches as the “acoustics of the cave,” comparing it with the acoustics of the open air exemplified by Greek amphitheaters and, implicitly, Protestantism.[3]
The Reformation changed the acoustics of existing churches. Graven sounds as well as graven images had to be removed. Clarity of voice rather than fullness became the goal. The Book of Common Prayer instructed Anglican ministers to speak from the place where they would be heard most clearly. The foremost late-seventeenth-century British church architect, James Wren, took as his guiding design principle the creation of buildings where the minister could be seen and heard clearly by all. Martin Bucer had mapped out this position a century before, and it was adopted in the second edition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1552, so Wren’s conservative position was hardly an innovation.[4] The pulpit and reading desk directed the sanctioned voices of authority emanating from the reader and the minister directly across the room to the ears of the congregation, amplifying the signal in the process. The first and loudest sound was the original, unreflected signal. The reflecting surfaces of the pulpit were so close to the speaker that the reflected sounds were perceived as part of the original signal, slightly “fattening” it and giving the impression of amplification rather than gothic reverberation [5].
The flow of this direct signal was nonreciprocal, from the pulpit to the congregation. Testers did little to amplify the sounds coming from the congregation, which made whispering and murmuring — particularly in the farthest reaches, where the lowest status people sat — a dangerous, even seditious activity. Whisperers stole the minister’s rightful audience. The congregants literally absorbed most of the direct signal with their bodies. High and steep ceilings were permissible, however, and whatever part of the signal was not absorbed would reverberate slightly as it faded off, a tone that would be perceived as a sharp ring to loud or staccato utterances.
Fig. 3.2 Interior of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Courtesy of AKG London.
The Thomaskirche in Leipzig illustrates the typical process of reforming a church’s acoustics well. In the pre-Reformation church, the priest’s voice would take a full eight seconds to fade away. Sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, the Thomaskirche was refitted for Lutheran services. The high ceilings were draped over to muffle reverberation. Galleries were added that further dampened resonance. The center of aural focus was moved away from the narrow side where the old altar can still be seen; it moved forward in the chancel and was stripped of its images and statues. Instead, a capsule-like pulpit was placed at the center of the widest side. The minister’s voice was directly projected over the shorter distance to the congregants below and to those in the galleries rather than beginning as a reflected sound. The sounding board or “tester” above the minister’s head and the wooden board immediately behind him served to amplify his voice and direct it onto the congregation. Longer echoes were muffled by the bodies of the audience and the drapes on the ceiling. Reverberation time was one-fifth that of the pre-Reformation church, taking only about 1.6 seconds to fade away. These “reformed” acoustics made it possible for one of the church’s eighteenth-century cantors, Johann Sebastian Bach, to write intricate organ and voice music full of nuances that would have been lost in the old church. They also made it possible for congregants to comprehend the sermons and readings of the minister.[6]
Fig. 3.3 Globe Playhouse, London. Courtesy of Guildhall Library Corporation of London.
Reformed church acoustics also resembled those of open theaters, where again clarity of voice was more important than fullness. Compare the Thomaskirche to the old Globe Playhouse in London, for example. Both sought clarity by stacking up as many seats as possible at the closest distance from the aural center. Draping the ceilings of the church served the same purpose as the open air above the Globe: sound went up but never came back down as an echo. Bruce Smith calls the wooden stage a sounding board for the actors, making the comparison with the pulpit furnishings explicit. But Reformation churches differed from London theaters in ignoring vision, placing a number of benches facing away from the pulpit, though still within good auditory range.[7]
North American Houses of Worship
The acoustics of meetinghouses and churches reflected early American methods of constructing and maintaining social order both within a society and between the heavens and that society. Chesapeake churches, hewn closest to the Church of England, became the most hierarchical. Quaker meetinghouses began as the most egalitarian, but the years led inexorably to acoustic hierarchies, though Friends maintained a reciprocity that others lacked. Puritan meetinghouses also began with egalitarian acoustics, but in ordering their interior acoustic spaces they, like Chesapeake Anglicans, became more hierarchic and unidirectional, with sound and the authority to make it flowing from heaven through the pulpit and onto the audience. For it to flow back in any but sanctioned forms was a transgression and a threat to social order in both the Chesapeake and New England.
All the early houses of worship shared certain characteristics as a result of their common origin as well as circumstance. Unlike Roman Catholicism, worship was in English, so all three denominations sought a degree of acoustic clarity, although how much and for whom differed in important ways. Seventeenth-century churches and meetinghouses were usually of the “auditory” or “hall” type rather than the larger, cross-shaped, and more reverberant basilicas that tended to be the pre-Reformation urban norm in old England.[8] Communities began small and so it was with their churches and meetinghouses. They all started from scratch so Reformation acoustics could be built in rather than added on. Despite their commonalities, the differences show us much about the pluralistic construction of social order and semi-public space in seventeenth-century British North America.
Chesapeake Churches and Chapels
Jamestown’s settlers carefully constructed the soundscape within the chapel that marked the center of their day-to-day existence. They were particularly proud of their cedar pulpit. While no mention is made of a canopy or tester, the pulpit was probably raised somewhat and placed near a reflective wall in the 1610 chapel.
By the early eighteenth century, American Anglican pulpits generally raised the minister above the audience to make him easier to hear. A sounding board or tester was usually part of the pulpit, particularly in larger churches. It would be either carved out of the same block as the pulpit or suspended overhead. It concentrated and reflected the minister’s voice, amplifying it to make him seem louder than an untreated voice. At the bottom of the pulpit would be the “reading desk” from which the bulk of the service would be read out. At the ground level was another desk from which psalms and hymns were “lined out” from a book. From the reading desk the voice would reflect from the walls of the pulpit, giving the reader an acoustic position almost as prominent as when the minister spoke.[9]
Fig. 3.4 Second Bruton Parish Church, 1681-83, Middle Plantation (now Williamsburg), showing the high-ceilinged, narrow layout typical of seventeenth-century Chesapeake churches. Brick churches did not become the norm until the last quarter of the century. Others built in this style include the old brick church at Jamestown, traditionally said to be built sometime between 1639 and 1647 but which Upton places in the 1680s, and the Newport Parish church, built about 1685. The drawing was made in 1702 by Franz Ludwig Michel, a Swiss traveler. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New York and Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 39. Photograph held by Colonial Williamsburg Society. Courtesy of Burger-bibliothek, Bern.
Like their brethren across the Atlantic, Chesapeake Anglicans focused the sounds that came from positions of authority. The Jamestown chapel itself was two and a half times longer than wide, and the pulpit and communion table were most likely situated at the eastern end, particularly if there was a chancel screen. The chancel, at the east end of the chapel, was in the building rather than attached to it, which leads Dell Upton to think that the chapel was of the auditory type.[10] Sounds were projected along the length rather than the breadth of the chapel. Where one was seated was an indicator of social standing.[11] Those in the front heard more of the direct signal. Those in the back heard less of it, and thus more reverberation. This may have reinforced social assumptions. The people seated in the back from lower social standings were assumed more likely to be taken in by the power of the sounds rather than the articulated words. Although we know little about the height of the earliest Jamestown chapels, the brick church built there in the late seventeenth century had high, steep, reverberant ceilings.[12]
Fig. 3.5 An Anglican chapel from the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake, built about 1771 (Christ Church in Broad Creek Hundred, near Laurel, Delaware). Although built late, it shows some of the design principles that were operating even in humbler Anglican churches of the early eighteenth century. Note, for example, the reflective wooden walls, the pulpit and tester, and the box pews. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The congregation’s job was to listen rather than see. As early as 1610, the Jamestown chapel may have attenuated the visual with a cedar chancel screen that blocked the view of the communion table. Chancel screens were the norm in later Chesapeake Anglican churches.[13] The primacy of listening over seeing was also reflected in seating. Rude benches probably gave way to box pews for many elite churchgoers sometime in the seventeenth century. Box pews had high walls to keep out drafts. Seating was on three or four sides of the box so that many auditors were facing away from the pulpit and reading desk or unable to see because of the walls. Poorer folk and, later, slaves found seats in single pews in the back or in the rear galleries. The box pews partially obstructed the views of those in back at ground level.
The congregants were supposed to make a “joyful noise unto the Lord” at the appropriately sanctioned times. The emphasis on noise rather than sound meant that articulation was not as important as volume. God knew the words; it was the sincerity and affect of the response that was important. Here the high ceilings played an important role. They strengthened the congregation’s joyful noise, which, unlike the minister’s voice, was not directed away from the ceiling by the sounding board or pulpit and would thus reverberate more, but at the expense of clarity. The vigorous ritual sounding of the congregation’s set responses placed the community in its proper relation to itself and the heavens. The reader and the minister had to be clear because the congregation — unlike God and the speakers — could not be assumed to know all of what was being spoken from the desk and the pulpit. The congregation was supposed to be loud and powerful, and the high ceilings helped.
Chesapeake church acoustics shifted toward the end of the seventeenth century. Brick churches began to replace the smaller wooden chapels, though the dimensions remained the same. These in turn gave way to larger, more familiar churches of the eighteenth century.[14] The later churches were no longer at the center of Chesapeake daily life, replaced by the peculiar rhythms of the plantation. Less care was given to the placement of the pulpit for good hearing in plantation-era Chesapeake churches. Rather than placing the pulpit against a wall, it would be on a corner of the chancel with open air behind it. The testers themselves became more decorative and less functional, with fancier ones having no acoustically reflective surfaces at all..[15] Eighteenth-century Anglican ministers often read their sermons in a nearly inaudible mumble to avoid being associated with their more evangelical brethren. High ceilings and the lengthwise orientation of the church remained. Cross-shaped churches, usually with chancel screens, began to be built again. All these tendencies reinforced a loss of interest in acoustic clarity, as the importance of the Chesapeake’s visible world waxed in the eighteenth century .
New England Meetinghouses
In seventeenth-century New England meetinghouses, acoustic qualities weighed heavily against visual factors. There were no statues, altars, images, or paintings — all of which would have been considered graven. The eye would be immediately drawn to the pulpit, a large centrally located elevated capsule, usually supported against one of the long walls if the building were rectangular. This was the place where ministers expounded and explicated the word, the Bible. Like bells, an inordinate effort went into the procuring of properly constructed pulpits in seventeenth-century New England. Some were transported from other areas at considerable expense, and if the work of a particularly valued craftsman could not be had, his style might be carefully copied. Although the pulpit would be the visual center of the room, this factor was subordinate to the consideration of acoustic properties in selecting one, particularly the sounding board carefully angled over it.[16]
New England meetinghouses, like the chapel in Jamestown, were at the auditory center of the town. Unlike the Chesapeake, however, meetinghouses remained at the center of New England town soundscapes throughout the seventeenth century. This was explicitly stated in the Massachusetts Colony Records, where one order from 1635 stated that “noe dwelling house shall be builte above half a myle from the meeting house” without express permission from the colonial court. Towns were laid out in six-mile squares and meetinghouses were supposed to be at the center. Dwellings were not evenly scattered through the remaining area. They were clustered nearer the center with a complicated system of lots on the outside perimeter, where no more than a crude day shelter was supposed to exist. Thus, every home was expected to be within a mile or so of the meetinghouse.[17] This was well within earshot of a small bell, a drummer, or conch shell.
Table 3.1. Average Dimensions of Seventeenth-Century New England Meetinghouses
Shape
Avg. Dimensions (feet)
Ratio
Avg. Area
Avg. Vol
Square
Rect.
Unk.
L
W
H
L/W
sq. ft.
Cu. Ft.
1631-42
3
2
31
37.2
35.0
12.0
1.1
1,302.0
15,624.0
1643-60
5
11
27
36.0
30.0
11.9
1.2
1,080.0
12,892.5
1661-80
5
22
34
40.0
33.0
15.6
1.2
1,321.5
20,648.4
1681-1700
9
26
24
42.1
35.9
17.3
1.2
1,510.3
26,190.1
Total
22
61
116
38.8
33.5
14.2
1.2
1,299.8
18,490.7
Source: Data compiled from Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 121-30.
Seventeenth-century Puritan meetinghouses in New England were proportionally wider than their Chesapeake Anglican counterparts. While the typical ratio for an Anglican church during this time was about two and a half times long as wide, New England meetinghouses were often square or nearly so, with very little change in the layout of floor space until the eighteenth century. As populations grew, meetinghouses grew larger vertically. Many of the later-seventeenth-century meetinghouses added on a gallery . In this way, the principles of the auditory church could be stretched to fit the greatest number of listeners at the least distance from the pulpit. Basically, meetinghouses grew larger in the seventeenth century by stacking people up in two levels surrounding the raised pulpit. Only in the eighteenth century did Congregationalist meetings adopt longer, narrower church layouts.
None of the earliest meetinghouses survive. Descriptions of repairs, additions, and remodeling point toward a squarish shape as the norm. Rectangular buildings tended to be not much longer than wide, with the pulpit usually set up on one of the long walls. Galleries were often added a few years later rather than at the time of building.
Until the 1680s the information about meetinghouses is too sketchy to make more than conjectural attempts at reconstruction. Three seventeenth-century New England meetinghouses have left enough information for a discussion of their acoustics, however. These three buildings — Hingham’s “Old Ship,” Plymouth’s second meetinghouse, and Deerfield’s third meetinghouse — were, with exceptions noted, fairly representative of New England patterns in the seventeenth century.
Fig. 3.6 “Old Ship,” Hingham’s second meetinghouse, as it is conjectured to have appeared in 1681. Drawing by Marian C. Donnelly, in Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 76. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press.
“Old Ship,” the meetinghouse built in Hingham in 1681, is the only surviving New England meetinghouse from the seventeenth century. At seventy-three feet long and fifty-five feet wide today, it is quite a bit bigger than when first built. Nonetheless, records of its upkeep and remodeling are thorough enough that we can get a fair picture of its inside and outside in the late seventeenth century. In 1681, it measured fifty-five feet in length and forty-five feet across.
Fig. 3.7 Plan of galleries and pulpit, “Old Ship,” 1681. Drawing by Marian C. Donnelly, in Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 78. Courtesy of Wesleyan University Press.
“Old Ship’s” full volume needs to be taken into account in order to understand its acoustics. It had a high vaulted ceiling said to look like the inverted hull of a ship from the inside. Three of the galleries were built into the original plan, running the length on one side and along the width of both sides. The two-story pulpit rose up halfway between the floor and the galleries against the wall of the other long side. The tester atop the pulpit was positioned a little above the galleries, directing the minister’s voice across to them and also downward to the floor-level pews. The tester prevented the minister’s voice from being lost in the vaults of the high, open ceiling. The pulpit was less than twenty feet from the furthest front edge of the long wall gallery, and as near as six feet to the short wall galleries.
Fig. 3.8 Cross-section of Old Ship meetinghouse, 1681. Note the height of the pulpit and tester, as well as the large ceiling area. Adapted by author from drawing by Murray P. Corse in Corse, “The Old Ship Meeting House in Hingham, Mass.,” Old Time New England 21, no. 1 (1930). Used by permission of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
The meetinghouse’s acoustics need to be considered while full of people and without amplification introducing distortions. Sound coming from the pulpit would be absorbed in much the same way that the audience at the Globe Playhouse absorbed sound from the stage. The resemblance to a theater was more than chance. The Protestant theologian Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1684) proposed an ideal house of worship to be situated at the center of town and built in a way that “the ears of all may be equally distant on all sides from the voice of the speaker.” The imaginary building was also meant to be used for religious drama, and in the words of Marian Donnelly, arguing for the influence of Andreae’s design on New England architecture, “a relation to theater design seems clear.”[18]
Only the sharpest of the minister’s utterances would give the long reverberant ringing from the high ceiling. Why then build such a huge vault? The congregants’ response would carry up to the ceiling and reverberate extensively, creating the perception of a clearly articulate minister’s voice joined by a less clear but sonically fortified response. “Old Ship” was a specialized acoustic instrument, one designed to be heard from the inside and to clearly define the relationship of congregants to minister and all worshipers to the heavens, with the heavens conceived not as a visual space above, but as the invisible, present world within, a world that could be bridged by the auditory .
FIG. 3.9 Plymouth Meeting House. The sketch in the top right corner probably depicts the 1683 meetinghouse. The main sketch is the same building with two of its cross gables removed and the length extended. Courtesy of the Pilgrim Society, Plymouth, Mass.
An intriguing diagram of the Plymouth meetinghouse of 1683 points toward a long rectangular building rather than a square one. From town records, however, it is clear that the rectangular building was created by taking two of the four gables down from the original, squarer building and then adding on to the building on each side. When finished, the building had a much more symmetrical facade with two gables rather than four, prefiguring Georgian lines that would come to dominate the housing patterns of the elite in the eighteenth century.[19]
Enlargements of meetinghouses did not always go from square to rectangular. The first meetinghouse at Framingham began as a rectangle but was enlarged to square it off in 1715.[20] In no instance was a seventeenth-century meetinghouse made more than twice as long as its width, the norm for the Chesapeake. This allowed Congregationalists to maintain the auditory style hall as a viable type well into the first half of the eighteenth century.
FIG. 3.10 Deerfield’s third meeting house, c. 1694. Dudley Woodbridge Diary, October 1-10, 1798, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
A sketch of the third meetinghouse, in Deerfield, portrays a tall, hipped-roof building . It had a belfry on top. The square shape and the two-story structure mark it as New England’s variant of the “auditory” meetinghouse, equipped with galleries and a tall pulpit with a tester. The high ceiling acted acoustically as the vault in “Old Ship” did. A tester on the pulpit kept the minister’s voice clear and loud, while the vault above would reverberate the congregation’s collective voice, reinforcing their ties with the invisible world.
Acoustics influenced the seating of the congregation, too. Robert J. Dinkin has mapped out how Puritans enacted their social orders in meetinghouse seating arrangements, arguing that they were seated in ways that visually reinforced differences in status and wealth within the community. This system of deferential seating, he says, was not challenged until after the Revolution except by those who felt they were not seated well enough. In order to smooth over tensions in this regard, some seats which did not appear to be visually well located were “dignified” as high-status seats. Dinkin does not offer a reason why such status-conscious people would accept such an arbitrary solution.[21]
If the acoustics of deference is considered, two things become apparent. First, deference operated in different ways in the audible world and in the visible; and second, the “dignifying” of seats was not arbitrary. The visible status of Puritans individually and collectively was unsettled and contested throughout the seventeenth century. Collectively they thought of themselves as a “city on a hill” at first, but then later as a “saving remnant” somehow lost on their errand into the wilderness. Individually, the question of just who was among the elect, the “visible saints,” nearly divided the movement in New England in the 1660s. Acoustic order was much clearer, and perhaps in some ways a cohesive unifying force, not because of some inherent properties of “orality” but simply because it was already worked out and agreed upon in the seventeenth century. In the meetinghouse, the minister articulated the voice of God for the congregants, whose auditory task was first and foremost to hear clearly and respond in a set way, loudly and with their hearts. Transgressions were seditious. Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, those accused of witchcraft both at Salem and before: these were disorderly speakers, and in the words of Hutchinson’s accusers, their “voluble tongues” were a good part of what made them threatening.[22]
The acoustic environment of the meetinghouse was expected to provide all the godly and even the sinners with the ability to hear the minister clearly. When four members of Haverhill’s congregation complained about their seats, they petitioned on the basis of audibility rather than visibility, saying they were “obliged to sit squeezed on the stairs where we cannot hear the minister and so get little good from his preaching, though we endeavor to ever so much.”[23] One congregant proposed that sinners ought to get the best seats because they were most in need of hearing. Dinkin calls the seats that were dignified “less desirable” and says that it was a somewhat arbitrary ruling to make certain seats “equal in dignity to the better seats nearest the pulpit.” He then discusses the “dignifying of seats” in Marlborough, noting that the front seats in the gallery were next in dignity to the second seats below and that the front seats of the side gallery were next in dignity to the third seats.[24] If the “dignity” of a seat is thought of as both the visible location and the auditory location of the seats, the decisions become clear. The third seat on the floor may have been farther from the pulpit than the front of the side gallery. And the front row of the front gallery, while out of visible range from many of the congregants below, was in an excellent auditory location, being directly in front of the tester. Obviously visibility was a status marker for the seated, but audibility may have been on the minds of the seating committee and the minister. This way of thinking was undergoing change at the end of the seventeenth century, and perhaps it is best to take the most egalitarian of early Anglo-Americans, the Quakers, to see how.
Quaker Meetinghouses
FIG. 3.11 Burlington’s first Quaker meetinghouse, 1683. Note the hexagonal shape, and the cupola, which may have housed a bell or a drummer. Original oil painting, Quaker Collection, Haverford College. Used by permission.
Many early Quaker meetinghouses were square or nearly so, hexagonal or octagonal. The earliest meetinghouse for which we have evidence was hexagonal, with a hexagonal roof. This was the first Burlington meetinghouse, built in 1683. It hosted the yearly meeting for East and West Jersey and Philadelphia every other year from 1683 to the mid-eighteenth century.
FIG. 3.12 Birmingham, Pennsylvania, Quaker school house. Photograph by author.
The Burlington meetinghouse’s shape acoustically instituted Quaker notions of egalitarianism. From the inside of the building, the ceiling panels acted as a set of six sounding boards, equally amplifying voices originating anywhere in the room. While the Burlington Meeting house is gone, other octagonal and hexagonal buildings are still extant. From one of these, the octagonal Quaker schoolhouse in Birmingham, Pennsylvania, we can reconstruct the acoustics of an earlier time. The acoustics are very crisp. The decay time for reverberation is quick, much less than a second, because of the relatively shallow pitch of the roof. The walls and roof echo the voice directly back into the audience rather than reverberating like a steeper roof. Because the delay time of the echo is so short, the echo is experienced as a fullness to the voice that does not impede clarity. A round room or a dome might seem even more equitable, and in fact earlier Protestant architectural reformers thought it to be the best shape, but acoustically a round room or a dome would direct sound too narrowly, conveying a voice from one point to another without diffusing it. This would create “listening spots” rather than making voices clear and audible to all. The flat surfaces of square, hexagonal, or octagonal buildings would be just uneven enough to refract the voice rather than concentrating it, so these shapes were preferred over circular walls and ceilings.
FIG. 3.13 Birmingham Quaker school house, interior. Photograph by author.
The efficacy of these rooms in conveying the voice is attested in two ways. The Birmingham schoolhouse has hooks in the ceiling for draperies in order to dampen sound. Apparently, the combined voices of a roomful of children were amplified so well that they had to be countered to make the room more conducive to learning. Also, shape-note singers today often seek out Quaker hexagonal and octagonal rooms for their singing. Shape-note singing is usually done with a roomful of participants — there is no audience per se, just as everyone is a potential participant at a Quaker meeting. The emphasis in shape-note singing is on the mid-range frequencies that mark a clearly articulated voice, the same frequencies emphasized in Quaker plain styles of speech.[25]
FIG. 3.14 Bank Street meetinghouse, ca. 1683. Philadelphia Meeting Houses, 911 A-F Box 1, Quaker Collections, Haverford College. Used by permission.
Quakers were not alone in their use of hexagonal meetinghouses. The eighteenth century witnessed the construction of several others among Wesleyan, Congregationalist, and Dutch reformed congregations, but the early and most emblematic use was by the Quakers. The old folk saying that attributed the hexagonal design to the notion that there was no corner for the devil to hide is perhaps a way to think about reverberation. Other early Quaker meetinghouses tended to be square and have galleries, much like the early Puritan meetinghouses, but with no pulpit.[26]
FIG. 3.15 Reconstruction of seventeenth-century cobblestone and pavement roadway, Elphreth’s Alley, Philadelphia. Photograph by author.
The soundscape of the room was critical to Quaker worship, and its delicate interplay of silence and speech rested uneasily in a bustling urban center like Philadelphia. Maintaining silence was often a challenge. The “Great Meeting House” at Second and Market Street in Philadelphia was driven into disuse in the eighteenth century because the street noise became too much. Iron hooves and cartwheels on cobblestones and pavement made a tremendous racket, much louder than present-day automobiles . Even with specially designed roadways with cobblestones in the middle to give the horse traction and smooth paving stones for the wheels, the noise in an urban environment could quickly overwhelm a meeting. Noisy children and barking dogs posed another set of problems, which meetinghouses tried to solve with gates and gatekeepers.[27]
FIG. 3.16 One of the sounding boards above the facing benches in the Arch Street Meetinghouse, Philadelphia. Notice the width and height of the board, both of which serve to collect sounds from the whole room, including the galleries, in addition to projecting sounds. Photograph by author.
Inside the room, careful attention was paid to acoustics above and beyond the shape of the room. Since everyone was in theory a potential preacher, the minister-audience dichotomy of other denominations would not work. Acoustics had to be clear and sharp everywhere, for all speakers and hearers alike. In practice, however, certain concessions to hierarchy were made as the meetings grew larger. A set of “facing benches” was set above the otherseats and often had a curved wall behind them to both collect and project voices. Although acoustically favored, the seats were sometimes called a gallery to make them seem less elite. The acoustic differences between these seats and the New England or Chesapeake minister’s pulpit were significant. Obviously, more people were seated in these seats than in the pulpit. But more important, there was an element of reciprocity to the facing benches. Other denominations focused the sounds of the minister’s voice sharply and directed it toward the audience. No care was taken to clarify the audience’s joyful noise, and no effort was made to make the minister’s pulpit a favored place for listening. The size of the sounding boards behind the facing benches did just that, though, collecting and amplifying sounds coming in from the room as well as projecting the voices of the “elders” who sat there. The importance of being able to listen was underscored in 1763 when a new stairway impaired the acoustics of the High Street Meeting in Philadelphia. And the meeting found it necessary to “fix up a suitable board for the conveyance of the voice when Friends are concerned in public testimony.”[28]
⚜ ⚜ ⚜ ⚜ ⚜
During the eighteenth century all denominations introduced more hierarchy and emphasized visual over auditory elements in reinforcing social order. Sounding boards fell into disrepair, with some ministers fearing injury so much as to have them removed from the pulpit. Slanted, acoustically effective testers were reset parallel to the floor, which improved them visually but defeated their sonic purpose. Churches were introduced into Congregationalist architecture, so that the Chesapeake and New England acoustic soundways converged. Quakers maintained some amount of reciprocity but sacrificed the primitive egalitarianism of the early meetings to a de facto system of elders who were expected to speak more often and non-elders who were expected to remain for the most part silent.
Perhaps because of its very nature, sound remained difficult to regulate and order. Rather than improving regulations, diminishing the importance of sound was ultimately how early Americans made their soundscapes more manageable. Before they did so, however, they spent a tremendous amount of effort on governing each other’s tongues, with ever-diminishing returns. The next chapter explores the vocal soundways without yet considering language.
Notes to Chapter 3
[1]Encyclopedia Brittanica, s.v. “Acoustics.” The source document was torn from the original volume and is not labeled. The attribution to the 1787 edition is from the finding aid, the attribution to 1792 from the archivist; in Warshaw Collection, Acoustics box, folder 2, Archive Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. “Diacoustics” included the generation of voices as well as sounds of instruments. “Catacoustics” often concerned the manipulated reflection of voices as well as other sounds. Today this field is known as architectural acoustics.
[2] I have reconstructed the acoustics of the chancel from descriptions found in G. W. O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship: An Inquiry into the Arrangements for Public Worship in the Church of England from the Reformation to the Present Day (London, 1948), 15-22. The lute analogy is my own. For the tympanum, see OED Online, s.v. “tympanum.”
[3] Michael Forsyth, Buildings for Music: The Architect, the Musician, and the Listener from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 4-13; Hope Bagenal, “Bach’s Music and Church Acoustics,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 37, no. 5 (1930): 154-63.
[4] Stephen Palmer Dorsey, Early English Churches in America, 1607-1807 (New York, 1952), 16; Addleshaw and Etchells, Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship, 54, 245-53; Marian C. Donnelly, The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century (Middletown, Conn., 1968), 36.
[5] In fact they are two separate signals, but once an echo is about 1/30 sec or less, the ear cannot distinguish it from the original signal. Thus they are in fact separate signals even though they are perceived together. In fact the original signal is louder than the reflection. The two together are perceived as a single “fat” signal that is louder than the unreflected one because it consists of the unreflected plus the reflected signal.
[6] Forsyth, Buildings for Music, 9; Addleshaw and Etchells, Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship, 22-63, 68-86, 245-53. Dell Upton makes the case that the cover over the pulpit was an ornament indicating power, and that it was called a “type” or “canopy” rather than a tester or sounding board. I believe that both Upton’s definition and a definition that treats them as acoustic devices can be sustained simultaneously. It is true that many testers, particularly in larger churches built at later dates in the eighteenth century, were ineffective both in their construction and placement as acoustic devices. It is equally true that many of them were built and placed in such a way as to direct the voice and amplify it. Where, how, and when testers were used acoustically is the focus of this study, not whether. The earliest reference to “sounding board” referring specifically to the apparatus over the pulpit in the OED Online is from 1766, which would place it in the colonial period. It is important to remember that vernacular usage of the term no doubt antedated the first published citation. References to musical instrument “sound boards” occur throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including one referring to a musician’s attempt to play the harmonic stops of a monochord in which “none wold speke” because “Pe sownd~borde was to hy.” This shows that the speech and sound boards were at least conceptually related in the sixteenth century. The OED Online dates “testers” with the meaning of pulpit coverings to 1908. Prior to that the word referred to bed canopies or canopies placed over dignitaries, which would support Upton’s usage if earlier references are found. The “tipe” or “type” is not listed in the OED Online as a pulpit cover in any of the references used to support the definition. Although the etymology of “tipe” as a canopy is regarded by the OED Online as unknown, the evidence presented points toward the same etymology as for other entries for “type,” which share the same Greek root, τύπτεω (meaning “to strike or beat, as in a drum”), from which “tympanum” is derived. See Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 134-35; and OED Online, s.v. “type,” “tipe,” “tympanum,” “tester,” “sound-board,” and “sounding board.”
[7] For an excellent discussion of the Globe’s acoustics, as well as the acoustics of other Elizabethan theaters, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (Chicago, 1999), 206-17. I disagree with Smith’s formulation of “two liturgical ideas — one [Catholicism] based on vision, the other [Protestantism] on audition.” The Reformation adopted soundways that valued characteristics of the sonic pallette different from those valued by Catholicism, as the Catholic emphasis on forcefulness and reverberation compared to the Protestant emphasis on clarity underscores. Arguments could be made for Protestantism to be more visual than Catholicism, in that a much greater proportion of the devout were expected to be literate enough to read the Bible than in Catholicism, where only the clergy were expected to be able to do so. Although vision was plainer for Protestants, with images removed as objects of learning, reading is still the taking in of language through the eyes. Again, the better argument would show how vision ways differed between the two branches of Christianity rather than asserting the primacy of one sense over another. The difference does not affect the main thrust of Smith’s argument. See Smith, Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 261.
[8] For the distinction between “auditory” and “Basilica” type churches, see Addleshaw and Etchells, Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship, 52-62, and Upton, Holy Things and Profane, 56-59.
[9] William Strachey, A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of Bermudas, in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, ed. Louis B. Wright (Charlottesville, 1964), 80; and Dorsey, Early English Churches in America, 16-23.
[12] Ibid., 59, 175-96. Jamestown’s old brick church was forty-six feet at the tip of the ceiling. See James Scott Rawlings, Virginia’s Colonial Churches: An Architectural Guide; Together with Their Surviving Books, Silver & Furnishings (Richmond, 1963), 19. Compare this to the twelve-to-seventeen foot average height of seventeenth-century New England Puritan meetinghouses.
[13] For the importance of chancel screens to Anglican services and their use in Virginia, see Dorsey, Early English Churches in America, 16-17. For Jamestown’s chancel see Strachey, True Reportory, 80. The evidence for a chancel screen at Jamestown is ambiguous, but they were common in later Virginia churches.
[15] Upton argues that testers were not acoustically reflective but were merely for show. Many testers earlier in the century, however, even some that he presents, did serve an acoustic purpose, in part because of their placement. Upton’s decorative testers became more prevalent as the decibel level of preaching styles diminished and pulpits were moved to visual rather than acoustic centers. The process was never complete, and acoustically effective pulpits were still prevalent later in the eighteenth century, particularly in more rural churches such as Christ Church in Broad Creek Hundred, near Laurel, Delaware.
[16] Peter Benes, New England Meeting House and Church, 1630-1850 (Boston, 1980), 35-43.
[17] Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay, 5 vols. (Boston, 1853), 1:157, 181, 291; Lemuel Shattuck, A History of the Town of Concord; Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from Its Earliest Settlement to 1832 (Boston, 1835), 7; Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, 5 vols. (Boston, 1929-47) 3: 181-82; and Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 17.
[18] Felix Emil Held, ed., Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis, cited in Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 33-35, 136 n. 41, 155.
[19] Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 69-72.
[21] Robert J. Dinkin, “Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 450-64, reprinted in Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston, 1988), 407-18. Subsequent references cite the reprint.
[22] Jane Neill Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (Oxford, 1998), 71-98, 169-79; and Carla Gardina Pestana, “The Quaker Executions as Myth and History,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 441-69.
[23] George W. Chase, The History of Haverhill, Massachusetts, from Its First Settlement in 1640 to the Year 1860 (Haverhill, Mass., 1861), 265, cited in Dinkin, “Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts,” 413.
[24] Dinkin, “Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts,” 413.
[25] The material on octagonal and hexagonal acoustics is derived from a visit to a Birmingham meeting in Pennsylvania in February 1998. Also see T[homas] Chalkley Matlack papers, Haverford College Quaker collection, mss 1106, box 1 book 4: “Friend’s meeting Houses in Pennsylvania: Columbia, Delaware, and Lycoming Counties,” s.v. “Cheyney: the Shelter.”
[26] Donnelly, New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century, 79; John Thomson Faris, Old Churches and Meeting Houses in and Around Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1926), 79-80; “Bank Street Meeting House,” Haverford College Quaker Collection, Philadelphia Meeting houses, 911 A-F Box 1; David A Barton, Discovering Chapels and Meeting Houses (Aylesbury, Bucks, [1975]), 56; Hubert Martin Lidbetter, The Friends Meeting House: An Historical Survey of the Places of Worship of the Society of Friends (Quakers), from the Days of Their Founder George Fox, in the Seventeenthth Century, to the Present Day (York, [Eng.], [1961]), 21.
[27] George Vaux, “The Great Meeting House,” Friend 63 (1890): 148, Division of Community Service Programs, Pennsylvania Historical Survey, Works Project Admnistration, Inventory of Church Archives, Society of Friends in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1941), 63.
[28] Division of Community Service Programs, Pennsylvania Historical Survey, Works Project Admnistration, Inventory of Church Archives, Society of Friends in Pennsylavania, 63.
