George Herbert, Music, and Audiation (Dr Simon Jackson, Peterhouse, Cambridge)

The poet George Herbert (1593–1633) has long been recognised as a musical poet: his earliest biographers described him as the ‘sweet singer of the Temple’ and recorded that his ‘chiefest recreation was Musick’, playing the lute and viol and singing settings of his verse. Critical studies of the relationship between Herbert’s musical activities and his lyric poetry today must confront one particularly significant issue: the fact that no musical settings of Herbert’s verse from his lifetime are extant. This paper is concerned with that musical absence. To think through this problem, this talk will build on the recently published work of Lucía Martínez Valdivia, ‘Audiation: Listening to Writing’ (Modern Philology, 119: 4 (May 2022), pp. 555-79). Valdivia proposes the term ‘audiation’ – coined by Edwin Gordon and drawn from the discipline of music education, describing the sounds heard by musicians in their minds when no music is literally present – to think about the ways in which readers ‘hear’ poetry. Thinking in terms of ‘audiation’, she contends, helps to extend our conception of this cognitive ‘inner listening’ beyond an overly simplistic conception of ‘voice’. In this paper, I want to develop more explicitly the musical aspects of Valdivia’s contribution to critical sound studies, to explore how the idea of audiation can help us become attuned to Herbert’s now silent musical practices. Though the literal music Herbert heard, played, and enjoyed is no longer available to us, the ideas of inner listening, musical recall and improvisation embedded in Gordon’s conception of audiation offer new critical routes into understanding the interaction between Herbert’s literary and musical practices.

SIMON JACKSON is Director of Music at Peterhouse, and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. His research is interdisciplinary in its focus, exploring the interaction and intersection of words and music in seventeenth-century England, with particular interests in the musical activities of the poet George Herbert and his family. His doctoral thesis (Cambridge University, 2011) won the George Herbert Society Chauncey Wood Award (2013); his article The Visual Music of the Masque and George Herbert’s Temple won an English Literary Renaissance award (2015). He has appeared on a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, on the topic of George Herbert, and his first book, George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. With the Choir of Peterhouse, he has recently recorded a CD of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, music manuscripts closely associated with the Chapel and its Choir from the 1630s, due for release later this year on the Naxos label.