Pots That Sing / 2022-25
creative non-fiction book
supported by a fellowship from the Camargo Foundation (Cassis, France)
photographs from a research trip with Bénédicte Bertholon, Laurent Philippon, and Ugo Robert at Chapelle Saint-Blaise, Gras, France
(The following is an excerpt from the opening chapter.)
Discussing the drive ahead, Bénédicte pulled out a letter-sized canvas bag embroidered with the words "my beauty treasures" containing her tobacco. Her look was pragmatic and unconcerned. She wore khaki nylon cargo pants, a diamond-patterned olive sweater, and white chunky Adidas with gold stripes. Her amber hair was gathered back loosely in a tie. Rolling her cigarette, she spoke coolly, halting occasionally to convert her thoughts into English on my behalf. Her reluctance to do so would only surface later. Long silent dinners and drives were to come. But for now, in the parking lot outside the Gare de Valence, standing amongst a field of soft edged European cars, Bénédicte generously acquiesced, explaining how we would reach the chapel in the only language I knew.
* * *
Bénédicte Bertholon is an archaeologist. Her research has focused on building materials from the Middle Ages. Mortar and plaster are her specializations. Looking at minerals, sands, and pigments, she sorts through time, chronicling the formation of buildings with a knowledge of the formation of the earth. Running her hands along structures, examining the glint of crushed minerals like quartz and feldspar, she keeps one eye on the surrounding landscape of riverbeds and landmasses whose deposits have become joints and seals, coatings and masonry, forming the place in which she stands. The strata out there is the strata inside: glittering fissures between slabs of building stone, marble sheets fanning outward in symmetrical arrays, heavy columns pocked and veined. Buildings, for Bertholon, are something of, not just on, the earth.Her other focus is pottery. What interests her is not at the wheel or in museum collections, but in churches. For nearly two decades, Bertholon has explored, more so than any other researcher, an unusual and little-known architectural practice. She has investigated why builders and masons in the Middle Ages sometimes cemented pottery into the interiors of churches. Jars, pots, vases, pitchers, amphora, pithoi, and urns are found lodged in walls, vaults, domes, floors, and underground chambers. With their mouths directed outward, made flush with the walls, they create small hollow cavities, sometimes so high in the vaults they appear as mere specks, indistinguishable from openings where chandeliers and other adornments once hung. Like mortar, they are wedged discreetly between brick and stone, sometimes plastered and painted over, lost in the monumentality of ecclesiastical design. The periphery beckons to Bertholon. What seems worth exploring is what she must strain to see.
Many scholars, including Bertholon, think these vessels were installed to treat the acoustics of churches. Medieval builders and masons, it is believed, thought they would resonate with the voices of cantors and choristers, enhancing what was being sung. There is much debate surrounding how these vessels were intended to do so. Most believe they were designed to reinforce or amplify sound. The logic may have followed from an easily observable phenomenon: singing into a large hollow vessel and hearing one's voice rebound more fully. By this design, ephemeral echoes of singing would emanate from the walls or vaults or floors; the building itself would sing. Others wonder if these pots were installed to absorb sound. Sound entering through a narrow opening can cause the air inside a vessel to oscillate, trapping sound energy related to its natural resonance, converting it into heat. There are also those who believe they were designed to spatialize sound, bringing incantations from one part of the church to another, across passageways, over rood screens, and between rooms. But nearly all these researchers agree they were intended to treat the voice. "The spoken or sung voice is undeniably the builders' primary focus in pot placement," writes Valière and Bertholon, "all studies, historical or scientific, agree on this fact, and there is no lack of evidence."[1]
Bertholon calls these archaeological objects pots acoustiques (acoustic pots). But there is no standard term. Scholars call them resonant cavities, sounding vessels, acoustic jars, voice pots, and nearly every combination therein. The lack of consensus on what to call them echoes the variety in where and how they are encountered. Evidence of acoustic pots have been found in over 400 places of worship.[2] Researchers have discovered them across much of Europe and as far east as Turkey and Russia. Most are found in France, where over 200 potted places have been identified.[3] The majority are Catholic churches, both parish and monastic, dating from the 9th to 16th centuries. But acoustic pots have also been found in mosques and Eastern Orthodox churches in Belarus[4] and Greece,[5] as well as early Christian churches[6] and 19th century concert halls.[7] Numbers of acoustic pots range from hundreds to a scattered few. One of the most extravagant examples is the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, where 224 pots are installed in rows of concentric circles within its large central dome.[8] At the other extreme, in the Carthusian monastery of Villeneuve lez Avignon, one amphora sits alone inside the northern wall of the church's nave.
* * *
Aminata and Pauline gave me a ride to Arles. Driving from Cassis, we passed by a Hollywood-style sign spelling M-A-R S-E-I-L-L-E, scrubby hills dotted with white structures, and salt marshes with pink flamingos. The sky was gray and formless, muting the mood in the car. Arriving in Arles, we bumped along narrow stone streets lined with dark galleries and empty cafés before arriving at a silver door marked 4. Aminata guided me up a few stairs into a small flat shared with other Bohemian types. Quaint and functional, adorned only with dried flowers and pale quilted blankets, the apartment seemed to diverge in nearly every way to the sacrosanct places I planned to visit. But in their courtyard, an unexpected echo appeared. Along a wall, where residents placed planter boxes and potted plants, were the fragmented remains of a bygone structure, a heart-shaped pointed archway, protruding above a weather-worn capital.
Église Saint-Blaise broods along the southeast ramparts of Arles. Sandy in complexion, dusted with soot, weeds growing from its facade, the medieval edifice seems to have absorbed the severity of the nameless ascetics who prayed here for centuries. The spirit of the monastic order appears to be symbolized in a window atop the church's frontal facade: two heads, serene and unwavering, extend their necks outward and appear to hold the weight of an ogival arch topped with an eroded figure in a throne. Below is a great wooden door, locked with knots of black rope. The deconsecrated church, I later learned at the Office de Tourisme, is now only used by a major international photography festival as an exhibition space. Through a hole in the door, I could glimpse shadowy arcades leading to a barren apse. A grid of gangways overlaid within the nave terminated at a block of jumbled, roughhewn pieces of limestone, presumably the altar, or what was left of it. The eight acoustic pots inside could not be glimpsed from the keyhole. This was not so different from my other visits to churches. Pots, I came to understand, are often unreachable, barely visible, often best seen through the grainy lens of a phone.
There were fewer pots but more to see the next day. I took a train from Arles to visit the Carthusian monastery of Villeneuve lez Avignon. The lead image on the "Acoustic jar" Wikipedia page was taken here. The photo shows a large terracotta amphora mortared into a rectangular niche below a window. Two small handles protrude from its neck. Along one corner of its dark mouth, looming in the milky stone wall, hang bits of dried twigs from a bird's nest. When I arrived, seven years after the photo was uploaded, stainless steel safety netting was now placed over the niche. The bird's nest had been cleared. What cannot be seen in the Wikipedia photo is the monumentality of the pot's surroundings. It sits alone in the first of three bays within the nave of a Gothic church, befit with ribbed vaults, towering walls, and stained-glass windows from which a yellowish, greenish light dapples along its pocked floors, the color of the Carathusian monk's signature liqueur. The two other bays are nearly identical but the niches below the windows are now empty. These holes lead to a much larger hole, a breach in the apse, the result of a botched restoration effort from the 19th century. This open-air vista at the end of the church looks out onto gardens cut with stone walls and a large medieval fort, a remnant of the Avignon papacy. Tilting my head back, peering into the wedge of blue sky in the fallen rib vault, was a theme I would encounter again and again: human folly and ingenuity intertwined, not resolving or opposing one another, but coexisting, yielding strange and unplanned forms of beauty.
[1] Jean-Christophe Valière and Bénédicte Palazzo-Bertholon, Towards a History of Architectural Acoustics Using Archaeological Evidence: Recent Research Contributions to Understanding the Use of Acoustic Pots in the Quest for Sound Quality in 11th–17th-Century Churches in France, 2017, 3, HAL archives, https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01922766.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Jean-Christophe Valière, Bénédicte Palazzo-Bertholon, Jean-Dominique Polack, and Pauline Carvalho, “Acoustic Pots in Ancient and Medieval Buildings: Literary Analysis of Ancient Texts and Comparison with Recent Observations in French Churches,” Acta Acustica United with Acustica 99, no. 1 (2013): 75.
[4] Nikolay Kanev, “Resonant Vessels in Russian Churches and Their Study in a Concert Hall,” Acoustics 2, no. 2 (2020): 399–415, https://doi.org/10.3390/acoustics2020023.
[5] Tilemachos Zakinthinos and Dimitris Skarlatos, “The Effect of Ceramic Vases on the Acoustics of Old Greek Orthodox Churches,” Applied Acoustics 68, nos. 11–12 (2007): 1307–1322, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2006.07.015.
[6] Valière and Palazzo-Bertholon, Towards a History of Architectural Acoustics, 3.
[7] Robert G. Arns and Bret E. Crawford, “Resonant Cavities in the History of Architectural Acoustics,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 1 (January 1995): 105, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106343.
[8] Gülnihan Atay and Zühre Sü Gül, “Clay Pots of Ottoman Architecture: Acoustics, Structure and Ventilation,” Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 42, no. 1 (December 11, 2020): 015003, https://doi.org/10.1121/2.0001387.
(The following is an excerpt from the second chapter.)
To reach the chapel, we drove along a crumbling rampart. The car whirred and leapt, traversing patchy mounds of earth. Bénédicte spun right, realized it was the wrong way, then backed up along the gravel incline, stopping momentarily to pick rosemary growing from the side of a Roman ruin. We parked along an embankment overlooking hills incised with limestone, some ribbed with terraces, a little house here or there. Exiting the car, we breathed the fragrance of wild thyme that blanketed the hillsides, made aromatic by a light dew clinging to the ground. One of the researchers, Ugo, a young graduate student studying in Tours, told me that thyme is used as an herbal remedy to soothe and heal the voices of singers. I learned later that the namesake of the chapel, Saint Blaise, is invoked to cure throat ailments.
* * *
As a cantor opens their mouth and begins to sing, a chamber of reflections, both sonorous and spiritual, spiraling along planes of time in and out of this world, emerges from their simple song. Chant, forged from air, passing through folds of flesh, shaped along a churning mouth, moves from a warm body and into a cold place. The church, stirred by the breath of singing, is now activated, no longer inert, transmuted into a vibrating, living thing. Sound flows from its head, the choir, where the cantor sings, into its torso, the nave, where the congregation listens, and seeps into its outstretched arms, the transept.[1] Elevated and central, the cantor incants words from and in the head of the church. This fleck of flesh, standing in the monumental anatomical enclosure, reminds the faithful that they are all echoes: "God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him." (Genesis 1:27) [2]
Reflections of the voice course through the cruciform passages of the church and return to its source, the cantor. But what comes back is no longer the same. What was once the song of the singer has now become the song of the edifice. The incantations have coupled with the church, scattering off pocked stone and smooth marble, nestling within woolen tapestries and painted altarpieces, bouncing along the perimeters of domes and vaults. Every echo is an echo of every thing. Here, matter expresses itself, creating fluttering oscillations and washes of overtones. Out of these countless doublings, a sonorous mist forms, unseen yet encompassing, gone before it can be grasped. What we are hearing is the stretching of time: there and then becoming here and now. Some call this reverberation.
* * *
Standing at the altar, Bénédicte asked us to face away from the pews, to turn our backs to the world, as priests once did in the Middle Ages. Ugo had prepared for this moment. He turned to me and sang the Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor, hoping that I could follow the contours and commit them to memory then and there. The melody, simple in retrospect, appeared then knotted and capricious, alien in form, having no center, a blur of falls and turns in muttering rhythms. As microphones loomed behind us, I failed to grasp its entirety. Learning a new phrase seemed to undo my memory of the last one. Singing chant with another is exposing and intimate, an act of devotion and coalescence, something I knew but now felt. Each misplaced note was a flagellation, humbling me at the foot of the altar.
Standing in the apse, a recessed arch built of stacked lumps of rock, Bénédicte explained that the limestone here, tufa, differed from the limestone forming the rest of the church. Tufa is found in riverbeds, explained Bénédicte, pointing to little perforations in the stone made from plants in the sediment and minerals in the water. Tufa has a double nature: it is light and porous, yet very strong from water running against it over time, making it an ideal material for vaulted structures, like the apse in the chapel. Looking into the landscape, Bénédicte pointed to areas where it may have been extracted. The chapel now seemed formed by some cosmic pull, a clumping of dust and earth around a gravitational point in space, where Ugo and I now sang, throwing our voices at its core.
* * *
Each utterance we make meets its past self. Said another way, when a sound is made, it often reflects off things and doubles back, sounding again at a slight delay, dovetailing with what is sounding presently. This phenomenon, so subtle it often goes unheard, is elaborated with great extravagance inside a church. This dramatic display of the physical nature of sound provides something ineffable: reverberance, where it begins and ends, where it is, is impossible to say. It is like Rilke's notion of "real singing" from his Sonnets to Orpheus: "A nothing-breath. A ripple in the god. A wind."[3] This disembodied voice, sounding both nowhere and everywhere at once, an intangible yet visceral sonority, points to something numinous and infinite.
"Real singing," according to Rilke, is something only "a god can do." [4] The ethereal aftersound of a cantor's voice, pulsing across space, merely indicates something unearthly. But liturgical singers are also believed to summon the actual presence of God with their song. In the Middle Ages, the faithful believed God was made present, actually not symbolically, through the holy liturgy. Just as God breathed life into the world through Adam, cantors and choristers bring God into life with their singing breath. When the church rings with the incantations and offerings of the liturgy, it is momentarily filled with God's magnificence. Like a zeppelin, this holy air, a lifting gas, frees the church from its surroundings, bringing the ceremony into a realm between earth and heaven.
The cantor effectuates this ascent by echoing something once heard or inspired from above. Transcribed and translated many times over, the sacred texts are recounted in concentric cycles across the liturgical calendar: some each hour, some each year. The cantor brings these words to the ears of the congregation with song. Most of the time they respond with silence, internalizing promulgations, rendering stories in their imaginations, absorbing sound and scripture, exciting their devotion. At other times, the lay people echo the cantor, singing repeated phrases in response—"Kyrie eleison," "Deo gratis," "Amen," "Domine, misere, Kyrie eleison"—looping themselves into the ongoing braiding of the liturgy. Singing back and forth, the cantor and congregation recite long cycles of petitions known as litanies, a form of sung worship of ancient origin.[5] These aural exchanges, echoing within liturgical cycles, symbolize and contribute to the eternal praise of God. Here, time seems not to pass; it is a place where "the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done." (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
Patterns of repetition are also found within the music itself. Certain melodic phrases recur again and again within certain genres of chant. Alleluias, graduals, antiphons, and so forth are made of distinctive formulas and phrasings of notes, making each liturgical moment distinctive and identifiable. Sometimes these repertories are ornamented and expanded to elevate them for special ceremonials. Here, chant is stretched from something syllabic and narrow into florid, twisting strains, wordless expanses where single vowels are embellished like the decorative margin of a manuscript. Inside these flourishes are more folds of repetition. Pitches turn around themselves, patterns descend with each iteration, sequences cycle and grow. Repetition is practical: it makes music easier to commit to memory, aiding singers who primarily learned music orally. Repetition also reinforces, making what is intoned strong and mesmeric. Repetition is also remembrance: melodies from the mind are brought into the now, recalling pasts and places near and far. Repetition made by the church itself, a corpus reflecting everything it hears, makes these incantations and prayers even more persistent.
[1] See Vincent Scully, Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade, 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 162, for an explanation and drawing by Francesco di Giorgio of the Gothic church as a body.
[2] Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Bible are taken from the New King James Version (NKJV), accessed online at BibleGateway.com.
[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. David Young (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), e-book, 7.
[4] Ibid., 7.
[5] Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 58.