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Soundscapes of Pilgrimage: Europeanand American Christians in Jerusalem'sOld CityAbigail WoodPublished online: 10 Oct 2014.

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Soundscapes of Pilgrimage: Europeanand American Christians in Jerusalem’sOld CityAbigail Wood

Building on the recent ‘auditory turn’ in ethnomusicology and on recent anthropologicalapproaches to pilgrimage, this article considers how the soundscapes and vocal practicesof European and American Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem’s Old City shape thepractices and experiences of pilgrimage. Sounds colour the ethical comportment ofpilgrims; listening, both voluntarily and involuntarily, intervenes in their interactionswith others in the pilgrimage environment, provoking a range of public and privateresponses. Focusing attention on the auditory landscape provides compelling insightsinto the practices and politics of pilgrimage, in particular revealing moments of tensionas pilgrims seek to realise personal and communal ideals in a crowded, shared space.

Keywords: Jerusalem; Christian Pilgrimage; Sacred Music; Sound Studies

I mean, you don’t come to Jerusalem, like, to pray. You sort of come to… be here—if I may use an analogy, rather like a rock concert. Some rock concerts are so loud,and so much work to go to, you know what I mean, you have to spend all night upwaiting […] so I don’t know what kind of enjoyment… I didn’t go to many of thembut I didn’t enjoy them, really I didn’t enjoy, the music was too loud—but it’s oneof those events that you want to go to, to say you went to it. And that’s important,that’s also valid as an experience. (Interview with Father Ignatius, senior Franciscanofficer, Custodial Status Quo Commission, Holy Sepulchre Church, 14 September2009; original emphasis)

Friday 2 April 2010: ‘Good Friday’

I rise at 5am, and it’s still dark when I enter the Old City. At the steps of theOmariya school, at the beginning of the Via Dolorosa, I find the group that I amlooking for: a large crowd from the Anglican, Lutheran and Scottish churches.

Abigail Wood is a graduate of Cambridge University lecturing in ethnomusicology at the University of Haifa.She has published widely on contemporary urban musics, including her recent book And We’re All Brothers:Singing in Yiddish in Contemporary North America (Ashgate, 2013). Her current research focuses on sounds andmusic in the public sphere in Jerusalem’s Old City. Correspondence to: Dr Abigail Wood, Music Department,University of Haifa, Mt Carmel 3498838, Israel. Email: avigail.wood@gmail.com

Ethnomusicology Forum, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2014.965080

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Their clergy assemble on the steps and a printed order of service is distributed.Later today, the Way of the Cross will host a continuing stream of processions ofincreasing intensity, culminating with the procession of the Greek Patriarch whosemany thousands of faithful, many of them Serbian pilgrims, will fill the street as faras the eye can see.1 For now, relatively few, smaller groups are using the path. Oneof the Protestant clergy gives a brief introduction and the ceremony begins with aBiblical reading in Arabic. After the liturgy for the first two stations of the cross, thegroup moves onto the Via Dolorosa: a large wooden cross held aloft at the head ofthe procession, followed by the clergy in formation, singing a hymn. At first, thesinging of the group is tentative, but by the time they round the second corner theyhave warmed up and sing ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’, [O Sacred Head, NowWounded] a chorale well known from Bach’s arrangement in the St MatthewPassion, whose text describes the crucified body of Jesus.

At the fifth station of the cross, a group of French Catholics waits patiently behindthe Protestants—and in the meantime an Asian group has vanished ahead. The streetis a hub of activity. At the same time, traders pushing carts pass the group; aPalestinian man moving in the opposite direction with a large wooden cross slungover his shoulder gesticulates amid a long conversation with a friend, as he returnsthe cross to the starting point of the pilgrims’ processions. A group of Muslims,presumably leaving morning prayers, pass by, as do a pair of Hasidic Jews, the man’ssilver robe marking the intermediate days of the Passover holiday. The Protestantgroup turns right, up the street that will eventually lead them to the Holy SepulchreChurch. (Field notes, Jerusalem)

In this field account, a group of Protestants negotiates the physical and auditory spaceof Jerusalem’s Old City. People move, groups move, sound events collide. The neatorder of service printed in the pilgrims’ booklets jostles with the physical reality ofbeing in this crowded, shared space. Physically, the group enacts a formal, hierarchicalstructure. Standing on the steps of the school, the robed clergy are raised above thecrowd and, as they process, the wooden cross is raised above the clergy. Their earlystart secures them the exclusive use of some of the spaces in which they gather torecite sections of liturgy. The comportment of the Protestant group performstogetherness and an ethical framework of tolerant listening: this is one of the fewevents of the year during which the German and Arabic congregations of the OldCity’s Lutheran Church of the Redeemer and their clergy come together; more oftenslotted into power struggles embedded in a framework of postcolonial politics,relations are usually strained at best.

Yet as the group moves on, the coherence of the procession is chafed by thesensory footprint of the streets. The everyday speech of El Wad Street, a busymarket, crosses the ritual space of the Way of the Cross. The co-presence ofmembers of other religions hurrying via different paths through the city,responding to different patterns of prayer and observance, gives rise to a disjunctivesacred timeframe. While polite turn-taking prevails among the Christian groups onthe Via Dolorosa, the acoustic space is not so forgiving. As the Protestants singBach’s chorale, citing one of the most canonic European musical settings of the

1Bowman (1991) discusses Orthodox pilgrimage/participation in Christian festivals in Jerusalem.

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Passion narrative, the singing of the waiting Catholics overlaps with them, as do theeveryday sounds of the street, an acoustic mirror of perforated space and doctrinaldifference.

Sound, Music and Pilgrimage: Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa

In this article, I explore the sonic and musical experiences of European and AmericanLatin Christian (Catholic and Protestant) pilgrims following the Via Dolorosa inJerusalem. As illustrated by the scene with which I began, the acoustic practices ofthese pilgrims are frequently diverse: singing devotional music brought from home;hearing the music of others; and a wider encounter with the layered soundscapes ofJerusalem’s Old City.2

Accounts of music in Western European and American pilgrimage have generallyfocused on the musical object itself, or on the functional roles played by music inbuilding the form or achieving the goals of pilgrimage, such as performing narrativeor mediating the experience of miracle and healing (Bohlman 1996: 430 and 439).Here, however, following Coleman and Eade’s call for a more fluid, dynamicaccount of pilgrimage that would critique the assumption that pilgrimage is anexceptional practice, divorced from everyday life (2004: 3), I place the musicalpractices of pilgrimage within the wider soundscape of the places through whichpilgrims move. While music and sound are indeed implicated in the core work ofpilgrimage—achieving liminal or ascetic spaces such as those described by VictorTurner and Edith Turner (1978), or in sacralising the movement of people in spacesas discussed by Simon Coleman (2004: 53)—they are also more widely involved inarticulating the processes of pilgrimage, contributing to the sense of intenseexperience cited by Fr Ignatius in the quotation with which I began this article.Among all of the elements of the sensorium, sound is a powerful mediator, forcingpilgrims to share acoustic space and creating bridges—intentionally or otherwise—between sacred and secular realms of human activity. Sound likewise bridges publicand private spaces. If pilgrimage rehearses intimate, local religious knowledge, theperformance of hymnody, prayer and processions is hardly intimate: pilgrims are ahighly visible and audible presence in Jerusalem’s public spaces. The ways in whichsounds travel outside group boundaries—seeping under doorways, resonating inarchitectural structures and permeating shared spaces—remind us in particular thateven practices imported from home are broadcast more widely, shaping theexperiences not only of the pilgrims themselves but of those with whom their pathscross.

Both sonically and theologically, the Via Dolorosa is a particularly resonant placeof Christian pilgrimage. When the group of Protestants described above sang aboutJesus’ broken body, they did so while ritually and spatially re-enacting Jesus’journey to crucifixion on the original Good Friday. The practice of following theVia Dolorosa, the route taken by Jesus to the Cross, dates from the Byzantine period

2In Wood (2013) I describe the wider sonic landscape of religious communities in Jerusalem’s Old City.

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when such processions began from the Mount of Olives. The current routebeginning from the Ecce Homo arch within the Old City, marking Jesus’ encounterwith Pontius Pilate, was formalised during the sixteenth century by Franciscanfriars, who until today lead a liturgical procession on this route every Fridayafternoon (see Figure 1). Whether participating in a formal liturgy of the Stations ofthe Cross or a more informal devotional structure, most Christian pilgrim groupsvisiting Jerusalem today follow this route. These processions form part of widerpilgrimage structures: in Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, the canonictext of the anthropology of pilgrimage, Victor Turner notes that Jerusalem is aniconic and paradigmatic site of Christian pilgrimage (Turner and Turner 1978: 4and 18). The history of western Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land is centuriesold and in modern times is richly documented in over a century of publishedtravelogues written by pilgrims. More recently, the contemporary practices andideological orientations of pilgrims of different denominations have been exten-sively surveyed (see, for example, Belhassen and Ebel 2009; Bowman 1991, 1992;Coleman 2004).

In their musical practices, Latin Christians from Western Europe and North Americaform a distinct subgroup of Christian visitors to Jerusalem. While Catholic and Protestanttheologies of pilgrimage do differ, sometimes substantially, these groups share a similarspectrum of devotional musical practices and sound ideals, which sets them significantlyapart from Orthodox Christian pilgrims and from the musical practices of local

Figure 1 Map of Via Dolorosa and locations mentioned in the text (not to scale). 1, OldCity walls/Lion’s Gate; 2, Temple Mount/Haram as-Sharif; 3, St Anne’s Basilica; 4,Omariya School and Ecce Homo arch; 5, Via Dolorosa; 6, El Wad Street; 7, Sixth station/Church of the Holy Face and Saint Veronica; 8, Church of the Holy Sepulchre; 9,Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Dotted line, Route of Stations of the Cross. a and b(marked on the map) are alternative routes.

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Palestinian Christians, even those from Catholic and Protestant denominations.3

Conversely, several of the Christians whose practices I describe here, both pilgrims andclergy, expressed to me sentiments of incomprehension or distance between their ownpractices and those of local Orthodox and Palestinian Christians.

The soundscape of western pilgrimage to the Holy Land is embedded in a specific,substantial history of theological and colonial encounter that colours both practices andencounters today. Jerusalem has provided a constant aesthetic trope in the Europeanliterary imagination, reflecting a long history of power relations betweenWest and East.Norms of pious practice in the Old City cemented by European Christian travellers,visitors and crusaders over hundreds of years shape the comportment of today’spilgrims, and the narratives through which western pilgrims parse the Jerusalemsoundscape are embedded—often unconsciously—in entrenched European discoursesconcerning the roles of harmony, silence, beauty and brotherhood in correct Christiancomportment. Nineteenth-century European Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land atonce sought romantic remnants of Biblical sounds in the contemporary landscape—perhaps a shepherd boy playing the flute on the road to Bethlehem—and on the otherhand expressed horror at the apparent noisy chaos of local practices, both Christianand non-Christian, seeing them as evidence of the ungodliness of the local populations.In his travelogue of a trip to the Holy Land that took place in 1901, AmericanProtestant minister Henry Fosdick describes a ‘mad tumult of song, shout, andviolence’ (1927: 262) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the Sacred Fireceremony on Holy Saturday, one of a string of experiences that lead him to concludethat ‘[t]he same land, however, which deepens faith in Christ, awakens shame forChristianity’ (1927: 247). By contrast, for Fosdick, counterposed with the noisy tumultof the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, familiar Christian music served an instrumentalprocess of remedy and catharsis: his group left the Church of the Holy Sepulchre andwent to a private room to sing familiar hymns and worship together:

How glad we were in the evening to forget the church full of rival sects, the Moslemguards smoking and gossiping in its entrance, the scores of pedlars in its front courtselling palms to the Greek pilgrims, whose Easter is a week later, selling everythingto eat and drink, and filling the place with their cries. At eight o’clock we all wentinto the city through the Damascus gate and threaded our way through the vaultedpassage-ways that pass for streets in this city (this city, ‘which is compact together’),till we entered a low door, and went up a flight of stone steps to an open court andinto a large upper room, furnished, where the Lord’s Passover had been made readyfor us. We sang ‘Just as I am,’ ‘There is a green hill far away,’ ‘Rock of Ages,’ ‘Myfaith looks up to Thee.’ Dr. Thurber, of the American Chapel in Paris, led theservice. (Fosdick 1927: 84–5)

3Bowman (1991) discusses the practices of different denominational groups of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem atlength, suggesting fundamental differences in approach and experience between eastern and western Christians. Myown observation that European and North American Catholics and Protestants often willingly share sonic space andpractices in Jerusalem (e.g., in St Anne’s Basilica, discussed below) resonates with Simon Coleman’s observation ofBritish Catholic and Protestant pilgrims sharing spaces at the Walsingham shrine in England. Coleman observed thatin the wake of wider changes in the religious landscape, ‘more flexible relations of cooperation and ecumenism’ (2004:49) between Catholic and Protestant pilgrims are evident than would have been the case in the early twentieth century.

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Musicologist Ruth HaCohen traces the history of these troubled sonic encountersto a theological order already established from the early years of the Church, withclose resonances through western music history:

As a classical heritage adopted and adapted by the church fathers from Greek andLatin sources, harmony invited the immediate association of a select sensory orderwith theological and political entities. It highlighted certain euphonious sonoritiesas the graceful emblem of the Lord’s celestial true and charitable dominion and itsembodiment on earth by the unified, ruling church. Hailing these sonorities thoughchants, hymns, chiming bells, processions, and carefully wrought polyphonic settings,the musical practices of the church were conceived to enhance this order in thesouls of individual believers and in the community as a whole. (HaCohen 2011: 2)

In turn, as illustrated by Fosdick’s words, these ideals of harmony formed an implicitethical and theological point of contrast with the sound-worlds of Others, whetherEuropean Jews (HaCohen 2011: 138) or Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians inthe Holy Land.4 While not explicitly recognised or acknowledged by most Europeanand American Christian pilgrims today, similar sentiments about the redemptivecharacter of familiar harmonious music (or prayerful silence), and the aesthetic–theological shock at confrontation with prayer norms that do not conform to theseideals, continue to underpin the sonic practices and experiences of these Christians—pilgrims, monks or ministers—in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Beyond participating in the embodiment of religious texts implicit in the act ofpilgrimage, musical and sonic practices also serve as a wider arena of experiential self-making during pilgrimage, contextualised within the long history of European Christianencounter with the Holy Land. Through song—and through listening—pilgrims expresscommunity, respond to spontaneous or unexpected encounters and work on the ethicaldesire to shape the body and mind to be receptive to the religious work of the pilgrimagejourney. The acoustic environment is also frequently a site of challenge, in which theOther is encountered even in seemingly private places and practices; the interplay andjuxtaposition of sounds also expose the work—and sometimes explicit antagonism—required to perform European and American Christian pieties in Jerusalem.

In the remainder of this article, I examine these themes more closely through threecase studies. The Christians that I discuss here encompass tourists and temporaryresidents; lay people, friars and clergy, based on extensive fieldwork in 2009/10,during which I observed and recorded the acoustic practices of pilgrims at key sites inJerusalem and walked with several groups along the Via Dolorosa. I turn first to StAnne’s Basilica, an unusually resonant acoustic space that is often visited byEuropean and American Catholic and Protestant pilgrim groups before they beginto walk the Via Dolorosa. The experience of singing in the resonant basilica directspilgrims’ attention to their embodied presence in physical space, often generating

4Following a similar thread, in her recent book Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West, RachelBeckles Willson (2013) describes the entanglement of music and mission among European Christians inPalestine from the mid nineteenth century until the present day, from the quasi-musicological search forremnants of Biblical music to the foundation of music schools and orchestras.

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spontaneous responses that move beyond the highly scripted pilgrim narrative.Second, I consider the engagement of monks and nuns resident in the Old City withthe wider soundscape of the streets of the Via Dolorosa that, in addition to theirsignificance for Christian pilgrims, are also busy everyday spaces in which membersof different religions live and pray in close proximity. As a response, some developlistening practices that re-frame disruptive noise as a component of pious self-making. Finally, I turn to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. While the HolySepulchre is the culminating point of the pilgrimage narrative mapped onto the ViaDolorosa, for western Christians, as a space antagonistically shared by five Christiandenominations, it is also often the most sonically jarring, immersing pilgrims into avocal ‘conflict’ between Christian denominations that challenges easy narratives of‘arrival’ at the core shrine marking Jesus’ resurrection.

Acoustic Imaginaries: St Anne’s Basilica

St Anne’s Basilica is renowned for its sober lines and its special echo. One can singthere but also pray personally, attend mass or speak with a priest. (Leaflet from StAnne’s Basilica, collected September 2009)

St Anne’s Basilica is the first destination inside the Old City for many European andAmerican Christian pilgrims preparing to walk the Via Dolorosa.5 Built in 1138 bythe Crusaders, the basilica is located just inside the Lions Gate, at the foot of theMount of Olives. The site of the church claims scriptural significance as the site of theBethesda pools, associated by the gospel writer John with miraculous healing. Yet adifferent kind of marvellous experience is sought by most of today’s tourists andpilgrims: St Anne’s is famed as a spectacularly reverberant acoustic space and, on anygiven day, tens of pilgrim groups enter the chapel to sing a hymn or spiritual songfrom their home repertory. The unusual acoustic properties of the church enable theexperience of pilgrimage as a ‘mode of liminality for the laity’ (Turner and Turner1978: 4); familiar musical material is transformed by the unfamiliar sonic experience,cueing non-verbal modes of interaction and spontaneous responses. For many LatinChristian groups, this is the only place they will formally sing inside the Old City:other pilgrimage sites within the Old City walls are too busy and crowded.

The architectural properties of St Anne’s provide the opportunity to retreat fromthe loud street outside into a quiet space in which aesthetic and theological ideals ofharmony, as outlined by Ruth HaCohen above, can be enacted at the outset of theformal pilgrimage journey, away from the loud sound of religious Others. From aphysical perspective, the interior of St Anne’s Basilica is the centre-point of a layeredacoustic space, characterised by progressive removal from the everyday soundscapeoutside. One enters St Anne’s through a small door set immediately on the street, abusy and noisy thoroughfare dividing the residential Muslim Quarter from the

5St Anne’s Basilica is extensively visited by Latin Christians (Catholics and Protestants) and by tourist groups;however, during a number of days of observations inside the Basilica, I only ever saw one group of OrthodoxChristian pilgrims visiting.

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Haram as-Sharif/Temple Mount. Entering the walled area inside, one moves from anoisy cosmopolitan worldy Muslim space to a quiet European Christian monasticone. A courtyard and tended garden lead to the church building, beyond which lie thearchaeological ruins of Bethesda and a Byzantine church that previously occupied thissite. To the side, set apart from the pilgrim trail, are monastery buildings. The soundsof the street grow less distinct as one approaches the church; groups of visitors, nowfree to walk undisturbed in a transitory space leading to the church building, talk ingroups or sit on benches opposite the church. An insistent sign on the door states:

Welcome for prayers and hymns …No explanations inside the basilica!

Visually, for most western Catholic and Protestant visitors, the church is a familiarspace (see Figure 2). The European Romanesque architecture, and the plain interior—stone pillars, wooden pews, an altar of carved stone and a plain metal cross at thefront—provide a spatial environment that conveys little imprint of sectarian identity.Groups walk in and adopt familiar postures: sitting in pews, standing to sing,arranging themselves in front of the altar like a choir, conducting, leading or duckingbehind a pillar. Shared codes of turn-taking allow easy negotiation when anothergroup comes in; well-worn roles of choir, congregation and audience are fluidlyreassigned. These practices are fully consonant with Simon Coleman’s suggestion, inhis analysis of British and Swedish Christian pilgrimage, that in both his case studies‘we are witnessing forms of action that are as much about reinvoking behaviour takenfrom “home” as they are about engaging in the “exceptional”’ (2004: 46).

Yet acoustically, entering the church marks a point of transformation. As onecrosses the threshold, outside sounds again fall away, this time more dramatically.6

Whether or not they heed the signs calling for silence, most visitors instinctively hushtheir voices and step carefully as they enter and sense the resonant echoes thatpromote a hyper-awareness of the surrounding soundscape. Singing in a seven-second reverberation is a physical experience and the mass of sound created in theresonant acoustic space is intense enough that pilgrims frequently look upwards,perhaps expecting to see some physical manifestation of their own sound.

While they are invited to fill the church with the wall-to-wall harmony that comeseasily from singing in this resonant space, singers must negotiate their own engagementwith an unfamiliar acoustic environment that prolongs every sound, demandingattention and self-awareness. Each note or chord resonates in the air for severalseconds, prompting many groups instinctively to slow their singing and to breakbetween lines to avoid a mushy blurring of sound. Although this physical acousticexperience is common to all, the musical behaviour of each group is unique, evidencing

6The interior of St Anne’s is a relatively quiet space in the noisy Old City. Nevertheless, the silence is far fromcomplete. Through my several recordings of ‘silence’ in the church, one hears the muffled sounds of traffic andsirens outside the Old City, the call of a cockerel from next door and the sounds of pilgrim groups outside. Thecall to prayer from the Al Aqsa mosque is also clearly heard inside, and resonates loudly enough to drown out asingle individual singing in the church while it sounds.

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an array of acoustic imaginaries in which musical practices brought from home aretransformed by the sound space of St Anne’s. During a few days in September, one ofthe busiest periods for pilgrimage, I sit in the back of the church and watch.

I slip in with some tourists and sit through two groups singing. The second is agroup of Croatians led by a friar in brown robes. … A couple enters the church—British or American, and middle aged. The woman starts singing on her own. Shemoves around the church, singing under her breath. She sits down, and herhusband puts his arm around her.A British group sings in a self-conscious undertone. Their leader announces ahymn number (though to whom? Are they embarrassed about filling the space withsound?)

Figure 2 St Anne’s Basilica, interior, November 2009.Source: Photograph by Abigail Wood.

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A group of college-aged American students from Alabama enters the church. I sawone of them, a girl in an orange sarong, look through the door earlier andwithdraw, disappointed that there was already a group inside. Outside, the studentshad been rather loud, and as they enter, they test the acoustics. Father Jean, who isstanding nearby, admonishes them: ‘OK, in the church, only singing and prayer,and nothing else.’ The group sits down to sing three arrangements of popularevangelical songs in four-part harmony interspersed with prayers from their leader.The girl in the orange sarong is excited. She makes musical gestures, motioning tofellow singers to let the sound float at the end of the song, then indicating vocalparts for the next one. The group ends on an ecstatic note. One person emits asound of relief afterwards: ‘I’m all choked up’.A single woman, perhaps mid-30s, her hair tied up and a skirt on, comes in. Shebegins to sing to herself, quietly, but exploring her full vocal range, floating betweensongs and improvisation. She is not disturbed by my presence, nor by Father Jeancoming in to empty the collection box by the candles, nor by other touristswandering in. She sings for well over twenty minutes.7 (Field notes, September2009, Jerusalem)

From the embarrassment of the British group to the exuberant jouaissance of theAmerican college students, from the sonic experimentation of the two solo singers tothe ordered singing of the groups in between, each group reshaped the soundscape ofSt Anne’s with their own voices and repertory. The potential of this sonic experienceto colour and mediate the wider pilgrimage experience is illustrated by the followingmore detailed account of the experiences of one pilgrimage group. During February2010 I accompanied a group of 14 American Protestant evangelical ‘mega-church’pastors on the final leg of a study tour/pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Their groupleader had meticulously planned the group’s journey along the Via Dolorosa,articulating the narrative of Jesus’ journey to the cross through spoken reflections.Within this format, however, singing acted as a creative space, both reinforcing thegroup’s experience of the key narrative of the pilgrimage and allowing pilgrims toassume unscripted roles that considerably expanded the narrative and performativeframework. I met up with the group as they entered the Lions Gate to walk the ViaDolorosa:

2nd February 2010. Disappointed to discover that St Anne’s Basilica is closed duringthe midday hours, the group moves straight on to Lithostratos, a religious andarchaeological site and descends to the chapel. As they enter, group members chatinformally. The group sits, and leader Paul leads them singing Amazing Grace inthe resonant space. Following a quiet rendition of the first verse, Paul moves to thefinal verse with a vigorous upwards key change. The energy of the singing steps upwith him, then falls back as the melody descends and he directs the singers to a soft,focused close. Paul uses this contemplative quiet to pull the group to a sense ofgravity. As the song ends, in an undertone, he says: ‘And so Jesus has chosen totake up his cross. In the Bible, when somebody takes up the cross, that’s the end oflife as they know it. … And so Jesus now is at that moment.’ After a few more

7These field notes are a composite account; I have taken some license in the order of the materials presented herein order to give an impression of the constant flow of groups in the church while also documenting a range ofmusical practices.

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words, the group leaves the chapel. However, the immediate resonance of thisexperience seems to be acoustic, rather than theological. Now attuned to theacoustic space around them, a few members discover that the corridor that theyhad passed through before is also an interesting acoustic space, and start to sing, aplayful re-creation of the ‘serious’ singing in the chapel. They sing the first lines ofAmazing Grace, with emphatic vibrato and harmony, until, reaching the climax ofthe verse, one participant far overshoots the harmony, and the singers and thosearound them burst out laughing at the loudly discordant chord.

After Lithostratos, the group walks back to St Anne’s. Here, Paul givesinstructions before the group enters the basilica: ‘We’re going to go up front, andhere’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to sing ‘How Great Thou Art’. I’d like to sing theverse, all of us singing the melody. When we get to the chorus, just go ahead intoharmonies. We’re going to have Ray sing the second verse, and then we’re going tosing the chorus again, and we’ll kind of see how it goes from there. We’re going totake our time and sing it slow.’ The group enters the basilica; as its membersarrange themselves on the steps, one of them tests out a few phrases of the songand another claps, both testing the acoustic properties of the space. Ray begins,singing the opening of the hymn at a quick pace. He stops, sensing that thereverberation is blurring his singing, and starts again at well under half the speed.As he sings his opening solo verse, he pauses between the lines, allowing the soundof his voice to resonate. The group joins in with the chorus, pausing at a pleasingdominant seventh chord in the penultimate line. Ray continues with the secondverse. This time he is bolder, exploring a wide range of tempos and a huge dynamicrange, dropping to almost nothing before a great crescendo to the end of the verse.The group joins with gusto; several look up towards the high domed ceiling; oneholds up a camera. As the group end the song, they burst into spontaneousapplause. This time, one member of the group responds in words, with a briefreflection on the acoustics of religious expression: ‘Worship should be as loud aspraise …’

As the group leaves the church, I hear singing coming once again from theinterior and turn back. Three of the group are once again singing Amazing Grace,this time an informal rendition in front of a Korean group who entered after them.As they finish, the Koreans respond, singing the same song in their own language.Friendly greetings are exchanged and the American group once again leaves.Outside, another group member gives a prepared sermon, before the groupcontinues on the Via Dolorosa. (Field notes, Jerusalem)

On this short stretch of street, the group engaged in a number of singing practices,planned and spontaneous, ecstatic and quiet. The spoken narrative of the pilgrimageremained in a tightly constructed discursive space: explanation of the sites they wereto see; the use of the historical present to encouraging the identification of trajectoryof the group’s itinerary with the trajectory of Jesus’ last days; and pre-preparedsermons that developed theological issues related to the sites (justice, healing).Nevertheless, at the same time, singing allowed the group to step beyond the confinesof pre-rehearsed roles and texts, accessing instead a spectrum of non-verbal sensoryexperiences. This, in turn, stimulated members of the group to take unscripted roles:leading two informal renditions of Amazing Grace; playing with dynamics, tempoand harmony in response to awareness of one’s own bodily presence in acousticspace; interacting among themselves and with those they met by a shared enjoyment

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of acoustic space; and being open to spontaneous theological connections, as in theshort reflection on praise and worship.

These unscripted responses to acoustic stimuli are often mimetic: here, ‘serious’singing in Lithostratos is followed by a ludic imitation of singing; the first echoes inthe church are prodded by singing musical lines; the loudest experience of resonanceis followed by applause (in western culture, probably one of the few regular practicesin which one is surrounded by loud sound produced by the bodies of oneself andothers); and singing by one group is echoed by the same song sung by the othergroup. Further, almost every group of pilgrims I saw in St Anne’s used a video camerato record their singing. While, following Sontag, it would be easy to dismiss thecamera as a shield protecting the singers from the experience of their own unexpectedsound, the camera is also an instrument of mimesis and responds to an urge tocapture the ‘thereness’ of the moment in which they are at one with the sensoryenvironment.8

Ethical Listening: The Streets of the Via Dolorosa

If St Anne’s Basilica primarily serves pilgrims as a site of self-making, where re-hearing familiar musical material in an ‘otherworldly’ acoustic promotes self-awareness and reflection, the streets of the Via Dolorosa, by contrast, are a site ofintense encounter with the Other. From St Anne’s Basilica to the Church of the HolySepulchre, the ritual path of the Via Dolorosa runs along everyday streets, along theside of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount and through busy markets whose vendorsalternately try to attract pilgrims’ attention and cater to local populations.

A more focused register of listening, however, emerged in my conversations withthose western Protestants and Catholics whose religious lives occupy the streets of thecity on a more extended basis, as resident religious figures. Personal practices ofethical listening stood out in several of our discussions about sound, within which thelistener recoded his or her relationship with a ‘noisy environment’; active listeningemerged as an act of piety re-shaping the encounter between self and other,transforming negative sensations of dislike or distance into tolerant, even positiveresponses, resonating with the ‘cultivation of the sensitive heart’ discussed by CharlesHirshkind (2006: 9) in his exploration of Egyptian Muslim listening practices. Thisprocess of training the ears and mind to respond differently to acoustic stimuli isillustrated in the following extract from an interview with Father Jean of St Anne’s:

At the beginning I didn’t like to be woken up at 4–4:30 in the morning by themuezzin. I went to Tanzania in 1970, so I have heard the muezzin since 1970, buthere it’s so loud because we are just next door. But I have decided instead of beinggrumpy and things like that, I get up with the call to prayer, you know. [AW: Wow,each day?] Yes, yes, and it’s amazing what you can do in the morning, answeringyour correspondence, the email, you can read, you can do a lot of work before theMass of 6:30. On the other hand, to counterbalance this, don’t mention this now,

8Sontag (1977: 10); see also Coleman (2004) for an opposition of photo-taking to ‘real’ religious experience.

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but I will go to bed 8:30, 9 o’clock, so they call me an old man… you know, I willgo to bed, we say in French ‘à l’heure des poules’ [at the chicken’s hour; figurativelymeaning: early bedtime], understand this? But it’s to compensate because I get upso early. But now it becomes a routine; even if there would be no call to prayer I’msure I would wake up, because I usually wake up two or three minutes before[laughs]. So I don’t find it disturbing at all. (Interview, 14 September 2009, StAnne’s Basilica, Jerusalem)

In this account, Father Jean reshapes an involuntary awakening, a brute effect ofproximity with negative emotional consequences (‘being grumpy’), as an earlyawakening accepted and internalised by his own body (‘I usually wake up two orthree minutes before’). This embodied reshaping of physical desires, shaped by themonastic tradition within which Father Jean lives, is an example of ascetic practice asidentified by Gavin Flood: ‘the ascetic submits her life to a form that transforms it, toa training that changes a person’s orientation from the fulfilment of desire to anarrative greater than the self’ (2004: 2). An important component of ascetic practiceis the belief that ‘in so doing a greater good or happiness can be achieved’ (Flood2004: 4); here, this ‘greater good’ is illustrated by Father Jean’s embracing of diligentwakefulness.

A similar effort to recode the sensory environment is apparent in the collectiveefforts of those who attended an evening ‘Taizé’ prayer service in December 2009,continuing with a quiet, reflective prayer service notwithstanding the considerableincursion of disruptive sounds. The service took place in the Church of the Holy Faceand Saint Veronica, a crypt chapel at the sixth station of the Via Dolorosa that formspart of the convent of the Little Sisters of Jesus, a Roman Catholic community ofreligious sisters:9

It is evening and dark when I enter the Old City. I head down the Via Dolorosa;seeing my European looks, one of the kids playing football on the street outsidepoints: ‘In here.’ In a small chapel, semi-underground with stained glass windows,twelve chairs are arranged around a bowl of sand, from which tapered candlesprotrude. A few more people arrive—some Germans, a Dutch woman, and twoelderly nuns, dressed in habits and house shoes; I later hear that one of the nunsattending tonight has lived in this convent for sixty years, the other for forty. Beforethe service, song books are circulated; one of the nuns rises, lights the candles andgoes outside to shoo away the children playing football outside—with limitedsuccess. It sounds like they are having a competition to keep the ball in the air,counting the number of kicks; whenever the ball falls, its bounce booms loudly inthe chapel. The service, which lasts for around an hour, consists of simple, repeatedsongs interspersed with biblical readings and periods of silence, overlaid with theconstant sound of the footballers outside.

Although the four Germans are visitors, they are familiar with the songs and singconfidently. When the singing winds to a close, I walk back to the Jaffa Gate withthe Dutch woman, who talks politics. She has been in Jerusalem for two years,working for her church and living in the Armenian quarter. She would like to stay

9Details of this liturgical model can be found online. http://www.taize.fr/en_rubrique12.html. (Accessed 4September 2014).

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longer, but she says that the Israelis don’t like what she is doing and thinks that shewill eventually get kicked out. I ask her about the history of this prayer group. Shesays that it was started a few years ago by some Germans. They left, but the prayercontinued to be advertised in a couple of German-speaking places, so it continues –they can’t stop it. Sometimes a German tour group turn up—twenty, forty people—but some months it is just her and the nuns. (Field notes, 15 December 2009)

Here, stoicism as a form of ascetic devotion is embodied by the nuns who have livedfor decades in a complex neighbourhood, and is mirrored by the young Dutchwoman who perceives her chosen path as encountering resistance.10 Moreimmediately in this account, a pious resilience characterises the soundscape of theservice. Outnumbered by loud children and passers-by, sometimes outdone in sound,and certainly unable to recreate the silence that lies at the heart of their chosenliturgy,11 the participants nonetheless continue.

These two examples suggests a different mode in which ethical listening—the re-hearing of the acoustic environment—might be understood as an act of piety. Thispiety is private and personal: in none of these cases is the listener’s practice activelyconveyed to those to whom she listens; rather, these listening practices are concernedwith the (re)making of the religious self. Sometimes, however, those employed inreligious establishments also need actively to intervene in acoustically mediatedconflict. When I mentioned that I had heard loud pop music playing in the courtyardof St Anne’s following Palm Sunday processions from the Mount of Olives, FatherJean recalled an uncomfortable moment:

Father Jean grimaces. The music [loud pop music played in the courtyard of StAnne’s, as the end of the procession turned into a social event] was so loud that youcouldn’t hear yourself speak! That was the visiting young Palestinian Christians.Two weeks later, some Muslim neighbours were holding a wedding party. It was soloud that the tour guides couldn’t speak to their groups, so they sent someone toask them to turn it down. OK, they said, we will turn it down a bit—but now youwill understand what it was like for us [on Palm Sunday]. ‘They think we havecontrol over it but we don’t,’ reflects Father Jean—the loud pop music was not ofhis community’s choosing. Regarding neighbours and sound matters: ‘We don’thave to bow down to them but we should be considerate.’ (Field notes, 13July 2010)

Here, sound-induced conflict is clearly a source of great discomfort, as is the lack ofcontrol over the circumstances by which one might be painted as a bad neighbour.Being a bad neighbour clearly contravenes desired ethical Christian behaviour, butthis is a matter of politics as well as piety. Not immediately implicated by ethnicityin the wider Israeli-Palestinian conflict yet easily subject to claims of partisanship,most of the long-term European/American Christian clergy to whom I spoke tookactive steps to preserve what they considered a reasonably ‘neutral’ position in the

10The description of this convent on the official website of the Little Sisters of Jesus emphasises the qualities ofsteadfastness despite difficult conditions. http://www.jesuscaritas.info/jcd/en/4620/jerusalem-v1-station. (Accessed 4September 2014).11Taizé, ‘The value of silence’. http://www.taize.fr/en_article12.html. (Accessed 4 September 2014).

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conflict, seeking good relations with members of other communities and faiths.12

Noise threatens not only personal piety, but also the already fragile intercommunalrelations.

Encounter and Acoustic Warfare: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The church itself is bedlam to the eye and ear. The garish, gawdy decorations, thecompeting din of five simultaneous services, the hideous, dissonant gongs, the verylamps which hang in multitudes from the roof, their differences advertising theirfivefold sectarianism—all this represents a type of religion that Jesus disliked mostand represents nothing that he pleaded for and for which he died. … [C]hicaneryand superstition shock the eyes while the ears are filled with the hideous dissonanceof five kinds of Christians venerating their sacred sites. (Travelogue of HarryEmerson Fosdick, American Protestant minister; Fosdick 1927: 244–5)

On entering, you are greeted by what sounds like a twentieth-century Pentecost, amedley of different languages and liturgies unfamiliar to a Western ear. At best, thiscan be a mystical and spiritual experience in the quiet of early morning whenJerusalem is waking up to the bells of its churches. (Hillard and Bailey 1999: 46)

If the neighbourly relations between different religious groups are a point of tensionin Jerusalem, the co-existence of different Christian denominations is sometimesequally fraught. The symbolic sites towards which pilgrims move are often a meetingpoint of very different pilgrimage practices and expectations that jostle to co-exist inthe same space (Coleman 2004; Eade 1991). Victor Turner optimistically char-acterised this kind of diversity as a potential source of religious strength:

At major pilgrim centers, the quality and degree of the emotional impact of thedevotions (which are often continuously performed, night and day) derive from theunion of the separate but similar emotional dispositions of the pilgrims convergingfrom all parts of a huge socio-geographical catchment area. (Turner and Turner1978: 13)

In reality, as John Eade has noted, this communitas is more readily characterised as‘the co-existence of numerous oppositions’ (1991: 52), in which a tension betweenindividual expression and collective order is played out.

For most Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem, the point towards which pilgrimagesconverge is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Believed by Catholic and EasternChristians to mark the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, this church is at once the mostsignificant Christian religious shrine in the Holy Land and perhaps the most intensesite of acoustic confrontation between western Christians and their sonic Others.13

The church is small, crowded and complex (see Figure 3). Five Christiandenominations lay claim to the interior space of the church: Greek Orthodox,Roman Catholics, represented by Franciscans, and Armenians are three majorstakeholders, joined by a smaller presence of Coptic and Syrian Christians. An

12This ethical stance also resonates with contemporary European discourses of multiculturalism.13This is not the only site venerated as the place of Jesus’s crucifixion: many western Protestants favour the siteof the Garden Tomb, a shrine outside the walls of the Old City.

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Ethiopian monastery occupies a side chapel and the roof of the church; members ofother denominations including Protestants visit the church on a daily basis. Therights of each denomination within the church, including precise allocations of timeand space, are codified in the Status Quo agreement of 1853.14 While the Status Quocodifies and coordinates the formal religious observances of the communities usingthe shared space of the church, these regular rituals have also to share the interior ofthe church with a constant stream of pilgrims and tourists who move freely aroundmuch of the church’s space, queuing to venerate shrines, holding pre-arrangedservices in side chapels and participating in larger rituals.

This complexity is reflected in the soundscape of the Holy Sepulchre Church,characterised above in the quotes from Fosdick and from Hillard and Bailey. Thechurch is almost always crowded, its air thick with incense; pilgrims queue for accessto the main shrines as ceremonial kawass (ceremonial guards) thump the groundwith metal-tipped staffs to announce a procession of a local community, church bellsring or groups of monks chant liturgies. Regardless of whether European Catholicsand Protestants arrive as members of the permanent religious orders stationed in the

Figure 3 Pilgrims in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, April 2010.Source: Photograph by Abigail Wood.

14The sharing and contestation of space in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is extensively discussed by GlennBowman (2011).

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church or as pilgrims, their first encounters with the overloaded sensory environmentand diverse religious practices of the Holy Sepulchre can be challenging; regardless ofdenomination, not many of the European or American pilgrims I spoke to found itan easy space in which to feel a religious connection. I interviewed two members ofthe Franciscan community at length about their own experiences and those of visitingEuropean and American pilgrims in the church.15 Brother Jozef, a young PolishFranciscan friar who came to Jerusalem in 2004, recalled:

For me, the first experience of the holy places [in Jerusalem], especially the HolySepulchre, was a little disgusting. Because from my imaginations about the HolySepulchre, I expected some very quiet, very amazing church. But the church wascrowded. There were many people yelling in different languages, the liturgies arevery fast inside the church, you don’t have time to meditate about what’s going on.You have to go because there is another procession is going after you. And there isno time to be. You are just going from place to place. And the first experiencewasn’t so nice for me, especially at the Holy Sepulchre. (Interview, 30 April 2010)

A number of factors seem to contribute to Brother Jozef’s initial negative reaction—which, his words suggest, was primarily instinctive and experiential (disgust, ‘notnice’ experience) rather than reasoned. Acoustic factors are prominent: the HolySepulchre church was not quiet, and people were ‘yelling’—a loud vocal expressionwith negative connotations, implying pain or anger rather than prayer—in differentlanguages. Coupled with this were physical factors: crowding and pressure of timeand imposed movement.

A senior Franciscan officer with years of experience welcoming pilgrims to the city,Father Ignatius reflected on the effects of sensory overload on pilgrims who may beunprepared for the experience. Nevertheless, sensory disorientation need not only bea negative experience. Later in the interview, Father Ignatius identified the experienceof difference in Jerusalem, manifested in sensory intensity, as a catalyst for a cathartic‘time out’ from regular life—or in Turner’s words, the experience of liminality:

My experience of Jerusalem through pilgrims’ eyes, is that … people come herewith the idea that it’s just a projection of their little church back in Idaho orsomething. It’s not. They get here, and they are sometimes really disorientated byeverything. … I had the experience two years ago for Palm Sunday where peoplewere just shocked by the level of noise, and because the cops were there… it’s notlike the quiet church back at home.16 … Some people come and they really get hit,bowled over by the sounds. Like, if I may use the term, they’re coming from a verysuburban, flat experience … and they’ve got a lot of problems in their life. And thisis totally different, and in a way, it takes them out of it: the sounds, the sights, thecolours. (Interview, 30 September 2009)

The immediate shock of disorientation and sensory saturation can wear off quickly asvisiting pilgrims become habituated to the sensory character of the space and find new

15The Franciscan community is particularly involved in welcoming and guiding western Christian pilgrims(primarily but not exclusively Catholic) in Jerusalem.16Israeli police are responsible for maintaining order in and around the church; their presence is particularlyvisible at festivals.

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ways to parse their experiences. For Father Ignatius, after two decades in Jerusalem,the noise simply becomes a disruption to his preferred sonic aesthetic of devotion:

During Lent you have sometimes five communities in the church at one time. Andit’s… something that some people find very unusual and fascinating, … certainly,in terms of the ability to pray—it’s a fascinating thing to do it once, but those of uswho have to do it all the time, it can be a jarring experience. [AW: Because you’redistracted?] Well, you know, you hear other people… you know they’re disturbingyou, and you know you’re disturbing them. … And if you have… our idea ofliturgy being quiet, silent—silence is an important component of liturgy, you know,it’s silence and music and the word—all of that is harder to do. You’re making atrade-off. What you’re saying is, I’m doing it in the place where it happened—sothat’s what makes it special. But the actual liturgy itself is … I don’t know, noteverybody likes the experience. […] Now, I had this conversation with the Greekbishop, and he was telling me that I was thinking too much of this as a Westerner,like in the chaos of the Middle East, the chaos of the Mediterranean: compared tothe nice, refined, delicate categories of northern Europe, there’s a lot of chaos, andthis church is part of that. (Interview, 30 September 2009)

While Father Ignatius’s account of his current experience of prayer in the churchcontinues to be negative (‘jarring’), a small but crucial difference in his characterisationof experience is his identification with the Other. Whereas the accounts of initialencounters in the church described a noisy morass, where the voices filling the soundspace were sharply distinguished from the norms of Western European prayer (yelling,shouting), here he frames the disruptive experience as a clash of aesthetic ideals betweenthe Franciscans and the Greek Orthodox Church, their major neighbours in the church.The value judgements cited by Father Ignatius echo the Western European conceptionsof silence and harmony outlined in the introduction to this article yet recognise theircultural relativity. The aesthetic debate is played out, of course, in a competitiveenvironment of mutual antagonism, where any seeming overstepping of rights isferociously opposed. Ultimately, the strict power-sharing framework of the Status Quoallows the groups to get along from day to day, but impedes substantial change.

In the meantime, the Franciscans must use other means to shape their acousticenvironment. A couple of friars or nuns move through the church ahead of their dailyprocession, carving out a sectorial sacred acoustic space within the general sacred spaceof the church by moving tourists out of the way and separating pilgrims following theprocession from the core group of Franciscans. These interventions preserve a bubbleof quiet around the procession of monks and nuns carrying candles and singingplainchant, although an imperfect one: in the middle of the ceremony, a Greek bellsounds loudly overhead, temporarily drowning out the Franciscans. Once again, twoaesthetics of Christian sacred sound are pitted against each other, exposing the workinvolved, and a social price is paid for maintaining in-group acoustic practices.

Neither are the Franciscans passive recipients of the sounds of others. At thebusiest times of the year, they are forced further into a structure of physical coercionand acoustic violence to create space for their liturgy, as in my field notes below fromthe night before Easter Sunday. This is a competitive and hectic sound environment,where the observances of different participants are forced into acoustic antagonism,

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whether in a symbolic battle for order and propriety or through the sheer weight ofsound. Physical boundaries may more or less be reinforced, but sound obeys no suchbarriers, and the Franciscans’ organ is left to enunciate a loud demarcation of space:

At 10:45pm a policeman starts to clear the crowded rotunda for the procession ofFranciscan monks who are about to enter the church. ‘Please, move back!’ ‘We havea procession coming through!’ he pleads—to little effect. Meanwhile, the other sideof the rotunda, a Copt is intoning a text from a large open book; pilgrims freelypass in front of him on their way to the Franciscan chapel. Suddenly, loud organmusic blares from the gallery above, blotting out the sound of the monk intoningthe text. A crush of people gathers at the Franciscan chapel space to the north ofthe rotunda as the friars arrive in procession. In the area of the service, attendees siton pews holding printed service booklets indicating plainchant tropes andmelodies. The service is firmly choreographed; the organ continues to play,supporting the plainchant which otherwise would barely be heard. Behind the finalrow of seating, however, the service is barely audible. A crowd about ten deepcranes to see the service. People push their way the crowd. Others yell at the peoplewho are pushing. I stand next to a group of three eastern European pilgrims withheadscarves; when they see the Catholic worshippers make the sign of the cross, orhear a familiar world like Halleluiah, they echo it but otherwise they continue theirconversation. One holds up a mobile phone so that her interlocutor can hear theFranciscans. Meanwhile, at the back of the Franciscan area, nuns occasionally helppilgrims to climb over the last row of seats and join the service. The smell ofincense is overpowering. (Field notes, 3 April 2010)

Given the inevitability of such acoustic conflict, perhaps the only strategy tosubvert this seemingly inevitable sonic confrontation is to opt out of participation.17

When I first met Brother Jozef he was sitting on the steps in the courtyard outside theHoly Sepulchre church, chatting to some pilgrims. I was confused: it was the morningof Easter Sunday and I knew that the Franciscan liturgy was currently taking placeinside. Yet Jozef corrected me: having experienced the noisy and contested space ofthe rituals in the church, he had found spiritual space outside, seeking to encounterpeople rather than places. Choosing not to listen and chant is equally an ethicalpractice, but one that points to a difficult disjuncture and compromise betweenJozef’s communal responsibilities as a friar and his personal desire to avoid conflict:

I think that I made the same mistake [as many pilgrims] in the beginning, that mythinking was more connected with the place, but not with what happened here.Because we want to touch the place where Jesus was, but we don’t want to touchwhat’s happened, and what it means for me. What I have to do after whathappened there. And I felt so badly about it. I can’t feel these places. But right nowI try to watch what people are doing. I think that I was a little blind in thebeginning. Because I didn’t see many people and what was going on around. Butthe places—it’s maybe not so nice to say it—the places are dead by themselves.They become living by people who are changing in this place, changing their lives.This is more important. But sometimes we think only about touching the place, andeven fight with others, even do some crazy things. (Interview, 30 April 2010)

17Several of my interview respondents expressed their belief that the different religious elements of the Old Citysoundscape were growing louder as an effect of competition for sonic superiority.

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Words and Sounds: Some Notes in Conclusion

In the above discussion, I have explored how the soundscapes and vocal practices ofEuropean and American Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem’s Old City—making sounds,listening, talking about sounds, avoiding sounds—shape the practices and experiencesof pilgrimage. Sounds colour the ethical comportment of pilgrims and intervene bothvoluntarily and involuntarily in their interactions with others in the pilgrimageenvironment, provoking a range of public and private responses. Building on the‘auditory turn’ in ethnomusicology (Porcello et al. 2010: 55) and on recentanthropological approaches to pilgrimage, I suggest that close attention to thesoundscapes of pilgrimage allows us to examine the frayed edges of religiousexperiences in the city which co-exist with the neater, familiar narratives ofpilgrimage, experienced not through textual exegesis but rather through embodiedexperiences of disgust, focus or wonder, and reconfigured through unspoken practicesof piety or through the heavy hand of acoustic force. Even the best-plannedpilgrimage is reconfigured spontaneously; even those most embedded in ritual playdown its spiritual potential. This is not to undermine the explicitly narrative planningof pilgrimages, nor the later parsing of experiences, but rather to let the grounding ofthese experiences in the specifics of the sensory environment to emerge, embedded intheir complex connections to the wider urban soundscape, where the political, thereligious, the everyday collide and are entangled.

Focusing on the contested aesthetic parsing of the sounded environment alsoprovides a useful counter to unrecognised Eurocentric discourses. After my firstconference paper on the contested Old City soundscape, an anthropologist came upto me: ‘But surely there are some sounds that are neutral—like that singing at StAnne’s that you played?’ A lack of recognition of the ingrained cultural specificity ofwestern aesthetic tastes pervades too much scholarly writing. Even Murray Schafer(1977), in his trailblazing study of the soundscape, seems to ascribe general validity toprinciples, such as the role of silence, that reflect just one kind of ear. Nevertheless,the wider soundscape of Jerusalem reminds us that heterophony and overlappingsounds are not instinctively heard by all as invasive. Rather, the awareness of creativeuse of sensory space by those who those who use it begs fine-grained interpretation:

Father Jean, the priest of St Anne’s, turns to me with a smile: ‘Of course for me, Imake no sounds with my shoes—I have Crocs!’ (Field notes, 14 September 2009,Jerusalem)

Acknowledgements

I undertook the fieldwork on which this paper is based during a SOAS researchsabbatical in 2009/10; additional funding from the British Academy (small grant54633) and SOAS Faculty of Arts and Humanities helped to make this researchpossible. Many thanks to all of the pilgrims and worshippers who allowed me toaccompany their journeys and gave me insights leading to the material presentedhere. Names of all local respondents have been changed. I would also like to thank

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those colleagues whose insightful readings of related materials have fed into mythought processes, especially Johannes Becker, Ruth HaCohen, Monique Ingalls,Trevor Marchand, Dina Matar, Caroline Osella, Trevor Wiggins and two anonymousreviewers. All responsibility for the material I cite above and all errors of citation orinterpretation, however, are my own.

References

Beckles Willson, Rachel. 2013. Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West. Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Bohlman, Philip V. 1996. ‘The Final Borderpost’. The Journal of Musicology 14(4): 427–52.Bowman, Glenn. 1991. ‘Christian Ideology and the Image of a Holy Land: The Place of Jerusalem

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