Diane Oliva (University of Michigan): “Hearing the Subterranean Voice: Earthquakes in Eighteenth-Century Music”

This lecture will examine how a series of eighteenth-century earthquakes contributed to the creation, dissemination, and evolution of "Devoción a las tres horas de la agonía de Cristo", a Peruvian paraliturgical devotion best known to musicologists through Joseph Haydn's "The Seven Last Words".

Forged in the aftermath of a 1687 earthquake in Lima, the transatlantic circulation of "las tres horas" and its musical interludes demonstrates the surprisingly direct connections between contemporary natural events and music. Drawing on material from Dr. Oliva's current book project, "Seismic Sounds: Music and the Auditory Experience of Disaster in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World", her talk explores the ways music was shaped by the knowledge and experience of natural disasters.