Polyphonies of Sound and Space Motet Mon PDF

Polyphonies of Sound and Space: Motet,
Montage, Voices of Light, and La

Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Rachel May Golden
Downloaded from http://mq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Tennessee Library on July 31, 2014

Widely viewed as a cinematic tour de force, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), a depiction of the trial and execution of
Joan of Arc, was the first portrayal on film of the saint following her canon-
ization in 1920.1 Although not well known in popular culture, the film
enjoys much critical acclaim and scholarly commentary due to its emo-
tional power and Dreyer’s innovative cinematography.
When New York-based composer Richard Einhorn (b. 1952) first
viewed La Passion in 1988, the movie had a deep impact on him. In
response, he composed Voices of Light ( premiered 1994), an opera-oratorio
for orchestra, chorus, and four vocal soloists that drew inspiration from the
film’s “strange and deeply ambiguous material.”2 In addressing La Passion’s
themes, particularly Joan’s experiences as a religious visionary, Einhorn
sought in his composition to comment on the film, not as a subordinate to
the primary action, but rather as a contrapuntal partner in an interactive
montage. In performance, the oratorio is accompanied by the projection
of Dreyer’s film, creating a multimedia artwork in which a layered, techno-
logical space links a medieval past to a collection of later presents:
Dreyer’s, Einhorn’s, and ours.
The resulting synthesis of Voices of Light and La Passion de Jeanne
d’Arc reinvents the motet, a medieval vocal genre distinguished by a mul-
tilingual, polytextual, and intricately layered architecture. Voices – Passion,
as I will refer to it when speaking of the simultaneous performance, con-
structs commentary over preexisting foundations, utilizes contemporary
technologies, collapses disparate time periods, explores gender ambigu-
ities, and speaks through multiple languages and voices. Dreyer’s film and
Einhorn’s score reflect and complement one another as they create a con-
temporary, motet-like structure in multimedia, one that proclaims a
mosaic of meanings and embraces contradictions.
doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdt013 96:296 – 330

Advance Access publication November 25, 2013.
The Musical Quarterly
# The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,
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Polyphonies of Sound and Space 297
Despite its roots in medieval practice, Voices clearly appealed to

modern interests, “touch[ing] a chord” with a wide audience, somewhat to
Einhorn’s surprise.3 Employing what Einhorn described as a self-consciously
“simple” style,4 the work has drawn comparisons to late-twentieth-century
musical-stylistic approaches loosely referred to as postminimalism, new sim-
plicity, new spirituality, or neo-medievalism, and associated with composers
such as Henryck Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and Sir John Tavener.5 The 1995
Sony sound recording of Voices of Light 6 became a bestseller in Europe and
the United States, holding a spot on the classical Billboard charts for seven

weeks.7 In 2002, it was substantially excerpted in the film K-19: The
Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford, in which sound editor Walter Murch
layered together different sections of Voices. Touring widely with Dreyer’s
film, live performances of Voices reached audiences in North America,
Western Europe, South Africa, and Australia.8
While scholar Carina Yervasi argues that “cinematic reproductions
of Joan of Arc [including Dreyer’s] have . . . little to do with the Middle
Ages,”9 Dreyer’s and Einhorn’s works whisper of a medieval heritage that
informs subject, source materials, and artistic styles and techniques.
Among his medieval models for Voices, Einhorn importantly cited the
motet. To review the form briefly, the motet’s classic manifestation in thir-
teenth-century France employed three-part musical polyphony, a texture
comprising multiple, equally important lines, in this case voice parts, with
each part articulating a unique text.10 The motet’s polyphonic characteris-
tics inform both Einhorn’s opera-oratorio and Dreyer’s film, both of which
filter medieval sources and techniques through a web of motet-like effects.
The process of unraveling this intertwined complex of voices
includes a consideration of both the stance of the composer/author/film-
maker and the relative positions and reactions of his audience-partici-
pants. Einhorn assigns to his listeners a creative opportunity to synthesize.
He asks his listener-viewer to “put together her/his own meaning, to con-
struct a personal narrative from a shared experience.”11
Motets in Medieval and Modern Minds

Cultivated at Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, the earliest motets derived
from preexisting structures—particularly the polyphonic, sectional compo-
sition known as the clausula. The clausula rested on a preexisting melody,
which, in turn, became the musical basis for—i.e., the lowest stratum
of—the motet. Initially limited to Gregorian chant, motet’s foundational
melodies later included secular tunes as well.
Notre Dame composers constructed the first motets by fitting each
of the clausula’s upper voices with a new, distinctive set of words (motets
298 The Musical Quarterly
typically featured two upper voices—designated duplum/motetus, and

triplum). Upper voices textually and melodically comment on the funda-
mental (bottom) line, in keeping with the high-medieval fascination with
ornamentation and glossing. Motets demonstrate the participation of
Notre Dame-based composers and poets in popular medieval practices of
commentary, such as troping and experimentation with new composi-
tional techniques.12
When it broke free of the clausula skeleton, the motet developed
new compositional layers and, consequently, further temporal amalgam.

Now, instead of reworking an entire polyphonic clausula, composers uti-
lized a single line, either chant or a secular tune. Above it, they built
upper voices that were newly fashioned in both poetry and music.
An idiosyncrasy of the medieval motet is its simultaneous declama-
tion of juxtaposed texts, languages, and topics. Its textual aggregate
embraces both French and Latin poetry (although it may focus on one or
the other). Topically blending both sacred and secular themes, the motet
merges, as Beverly Evans writes, “the voice of the cleric . . . in chorus
with that of the courtly lover, the shepherdess, and the others of secular
poetry”; the resulting interactivity among the motet’s voices has been
associated with Paul Zumthor’s principles of “intervocality.”13
Collectively, the individual texts functioning within a motet radiated
an assortment of both explicit and implicit connotations. According to
musicologist Gerald Hoekstra, the sacred and secular “double meanings”
embraced by motets would have been readily understood by medieval
audiences as multiply coded.14 Such intricacies and dualities resided not
only in motet content, but also in motet structures. Hence Christopher
Page, director of the early music ensemble Gothic Voices, comments upon
the essential musical and poetic overlap in motet phrase design.15
Like theorists of our own time, medieval musicians associated motets
with intricate compositional techniques and meanings (e.g., intertextual-
ity, intervocality, polyphony). For example, Johannes de Grocheio16
addressed the motet in his treatise on the musical culture of Paris, De
musica (c. 1300). In an oft-cited passage, de Grocheio describes the motet
genre in terms of complication: “The motet is a song [cantus] assembled
from numerous elements, having numerous poetic texts or a multifarious
structure of syllables according together at every point.”17 Given the
genre’s subtlety, he found it suited for learned (clerical) audiences (coram
litteratis), rather than gatherings of uneducated commoners:18
This kind of music should not be set before a lay public because they are
not alert to its refinement nor are they delighted by hearing it, but [it]
should only be performed before the literati and those who look for the
refinements of skills. It is the custom for motets to be sung in their holiday

festivities to adorn them.19
As de Grocheio implies, motets inspired a variety of listening experiences

and perceptions, generating rereadings, misreadings, and manifold inter-
pretations.20
Like de Grocheio, modern scholars recognize the particular roles of
audience and context in encounters with and understanding of medieval
motets. In the analysis of a motet by Burgundian composer Antoine

Busnoys (c. 1430– 92), musicologist Rob Wegman argues that the work’s
reception was shaped interactively, in dialogue with its audiences’ inter-
pretive communities, in the fifteenth century. In turn, the motet had an
impact upon the beliefs and interests of the listeners who absorbed it.21
Sylvia Huot stresses the thirteenth-century listener’s agency in the inter-
pretation of motets. Faced with the motet’s dynamic interplay among
voices, the listener pondered relationships between foreground and back-
ground, language and text, and imagery and context.22 The motet’s chal-
lenges to its listeners illuminate de Grocheio’s classification of the literati
as the most prepared, or “alert,” motet audience.
Voices of Light offers a similarly resonant web of significations
through its blending of media and language, varying performance con-
texts, multifaceted temporality, and enigmatic qualities. On the most
basic level, Voices of Light is a performance piece. Reliant on both live
sound and technological mediation, the typical performance configuration
situates singers and orchestra in front of an overhead projection of
Dreyer’s film. Alternatively, one could watch the La Passion DVD where
the silent film takes center stage, with the option to hear Einhorn’s com-
position simultaneously. Listening to the oratorio while watching the
silent action and reading the intertitles, we are asked, like medieval listen-
ers, to resolve the polyphonies we hear and relate them to images before
our eyes.
Grafting, Glossing, and Sampling

Passion –Voices uses techniques affiliated with the medieval motet, such as
integration, elaboration, and grafting. By synthesizing interrelated but
unlike elements, the medieval motet produced noteworthy conjunctions
of temporal, topical, linguistic, and compositional parameters. Dubbing
this process “assimilation,” Evans sees it reflected in the motet’s ability to
unify religious and secular devotions, connect French and Latin poetry,
and “absorb its [own] past,” with each parameter “absorbed into the
other.”23 Paralleling medieval glossing activities, the motet’s distinctive
additive constructions enclosed contemporary commentaries, addressing

social, political, and religious concerns.
The motet’s glossing techniques buttressed the genre’s connection
to elaboration and exegesis and sustained its broad appeal. In particular,
Huot notes, motets presented creators, performers, and listeners with rich
opportunities to engage in intertextual play, explore allegory and contra-
diction, and ultimately “alter the character of a given composition, bring-
ing out latent meanings, foregrounding and expanding on certain features
and obscuring others.”24 Huot’s language in framing the motet hints at

polysensory experiences, which, as discussed below, also pertain to the
subject and reception of Voices. Her description also evokes the parlance
and effects of modern cinematic shot orientation, such as those employed
by Dreyer, in which directors expand and contract space, manipulate
time, and regulate character focus by means of close-ups, pans, jump-cuts,
and dissolves.25
In conception and performance, Voices enfolds and stimulates com-
mentary and interpretation in ways that recollect the glossing practices at
the heart of the medieval motet’s reinvention procedures.26 As a gloss of
La Passion and its themes, Einhorn’s composition engages directly with
multiple original historical sources and twentieth-century musical lan-
guages rooted in medieval conventions; his inspirations include Dreyer’s
film, a bell, the medieval motet, and an assortment of medieval literary
writings—including passages from Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of
Foligno, Na Prous Boneta, Christine de Pizan, and the fifteenth-century
transcript of Joan’s trial. Voices also comments on Dreyer’s film, but
without complete adherence to it. As Einhorn says, “Whenever I had to
decide between changing something because the film calls for it, or follow-
ing out a musical idea, I followed the musical idea.”27
In glossing preexisting medieval and earlier twentieth-century mate-
rials, Voices confronts, resolves, and creates contradictions—a favorite
modus operandi of motet construction. Einhorn consciously adopted
opposition as a compositional topos, he explained, because he likes to
“create pieces that have many layers of meaning, some of which contradict
each other.”28 In fact, the constituent strands of his polyphonic textures
and concepts that result from such layering can clash so strongly as to
evade real-time comprehensibility in performance. Critic Jane Komarov,
for example, found the libretto of Voices “close to impossible to make head
or tail of” in 1996.29
In its “assimilation” of disparate components, the motet actualized a
phenomenon that musicologist Judith Peraino, in an article on mono-
phonic motets, has likened to medieval grafting processes, the conjoining
of two similar plants to achieve predetermined traits in the ensuing fruit.30
As medieval nobility commonly enjoyed such activities in their gardens,

grafting became linked to class, signifying “cultivation in general.” In
medieval romances and lyric, the grafted tree came to symbolize human
refinement.
Like grafted trees, motets were associated with courtesy, inventive-
ness, and design, as Grocheio did when he linked literati audiences with
motets. Thus Peraino asserts:

The idea of a single complexly bountiful grafted tree yielding a plethora of
fruit seems an apt analogy for a polyphonic motet yielding diverse lyrics,
melodies, and rhythms through notation. Both “grafted” and “motet” argu-
ably connote advances in technology—human manipulation of material . . .
to achieve a concordance of disparate elements.31
The motet’s composite aspect led Evans to define the genre according to
concordance, by “coming together rather than . . . moving apart.”32
Einhorn’s oratorio similarly enacts concordance and acts of grafting. In
depicting Joan’s spiritual experiences, the oratorio illuminates incongrui-
ties, engages technologies, and achieves fusions through its linguistic,
textual, and temporal manipulations.
Einhorn assembled his libretto texts in a collage-like fashion,
excerpting and synthesizing writings by various women mystics of the thir-
teenth through fifteenth centuries. He selected passages that pertained to
the film’s themes but also texts that he found “beautiful” and “startling.”33
The libretto is composed of texts in Old French and in Latin, the lan-
guages of medieval motets. With these languages lending a sense of
“antiqueness” to his score,34 Einhorn felt they would suggest to the
modern listener the presence of “some inaccessible, ancient truth.”35 In
fact, most modern-day listeners will likely perceive the sung score as pure
sound (versus semantically meaningful language), just as many medieval
listeners likely heard the motet primarily as a sonic abstraction projecting
indistinguishable texts and veiled messages. Similar confrontations with
translation and linguistic mixture complicate contemporary efforts to
retrieve the actual Joan from written history. Meltzer describes transmis-
sions of Joan’s trial chronicle, “Out of the spoken Middle French, it is tran-
scribed into French, translated into Latin, and . . . [then, often] rendered
into English.”36
Browsing through volumes of Latin and medieval French mystical
writings, Einhorn looked for phrases that “leap off the page.”37 He
described his progress as “a little like the Magic Eye photograph effect:
one moment there’d be total incoherence, and in the next it would all
make sense.” Einhorn sometimes used complete passages to set to music,
other times fragments, and sometimes “layered with two or three texts
heard simultaneously.” The resultant multi-layered design, intricate in
oppositions and concordances, encourages audience contemplation and
multimodal interpretations, which parallels the mutable and contextually
based facets of medieval motet perception.
The dualistic treatments and grafting procedures of the motet
proved particularly well suited for Voices and La Passion due to the richly
polyphonic persona of their subject, Joan of Arc. Einhorn enjoyed the
various paradoxical images of Joan because they further encouraged mani-

fold, subjective receptions by the audience: “What drew me to Joan as a
subject was that so many disparate people—witches and priests, lesbians
and right-wingers, young girls and learned old men—found her so compel-
ling. Dreyer’s film captures this perfectly. I wanted my music to have that
same quality.”38 Based on the interpreter’s vantage point, Joan flows in
and out of perspective like a holographic image.
Overall, these multivalent interpretations of Joan are based in the
contradictions ascribed to her, as Einhorn outlined:
she was a great warrior, but she was also a pious mystic. . . . She was an
illiterate farm girl, but she had no problem consorting with royalty.
Although she was the most practical and skeptical of leaders—she had
quite a reputation for debunking fraudulent prophets.39
Joan’s enigmatic quality also includes her androgyny, which merges a femi-
nine body with a virgin’s chastity, a soldier’s abilities, and a rebelliously
male appearance. The historical Joan’s choice to don men’s clothing, keep
short hair, and carry a warrior’s armor proved a subject of great scandal
and contention at her trial.40 Her captors accordingly spoke of her dis-
dainfully, dubbing her “hommasse,” an aspersion meaning “man –
woman.”41 Her detractors sought not only to disprove the validity of her
messages from God, but also to quash what they saw as her perversions of
costume, which in their mind defied scriptural decree, biological nature,
and the boundaries of social hierarchy.42
The sections of Voices entitled “Victory at Orleans” and
“Interrogation,” which correspond to Dreyer’s “Chapel” scene, demon-
strate Joan’s gender ambiguity, as well as other opaque aspects of her char-
acter. In the film scene, a large, threatening jury of clerics seeks to extract
from Joan a confession of heresy. While vastly outnumbered and over-
whelmed, Joan maintains her voice, as her testimony makes clear.
Revealing her intellect, she frequently deflects questions with questions,
recognizing the traps set by the judges, and offering responses that
Dreyer’s screenplay characterizes as “brilliant,” “inspired,” and “careful.”43
In the first portion of the Chapel scene, for instance, judges direct
the witness to testify on basic elements of her identity—her name, age,
Christian piety, and her religious-political attitudes toward the French
and English. Yet Joan’s responses prove entirely equivocal, excepting her
conviction in God’s support of the French. The historical Joan had acted
similarly, offering only incomplete answers to the judges’ litany of interrog-
atives. To protect herself from perjury, she sought to avoid violating her
previous oaths; in particular, she did not disclose the details of her pro-
phetic visions nor talk of the divine voices she heard.44

Dreyer’s Joan proves likewise guarded. Her name, she testifies, varies
with locale—she answers to “Joan” in English-controlled Rouen, but goes
by “Jeanette” at home. Only after uncertainly counting on her fingers
does she estimate her age as nineteen. She cannot presume to know God’s
feeling toward the English and she refuses to demonstrate her purity by
reciting the Lord’s Prayer, a decision that, in the jurors’ eyes, attests to her
likely possession by the devil. Joan offers only one truly voluntary, trans-
parent pronouncement—the English will certainly meet demise.
Joan thus maintains a certain power within the hostile environment
surrounding her. She holds firmly to her name—her very self—and her
beliefs. Accordingly, it is Joan’s voice that we hear in Einhorn’s corre-
sponding oratorio movement, “Victory of Orleans.” The all-women vocal
ensemble Anonymous 4 embodies Joan’s voice, singing a sweetly chro-
matic melody, intermittently underscored by a lament-style string bass
line. The vocal line is matched to a text drawn from Joan of Arc’s Orleans
letter to the King of England in 1429, which reports victory over the
English and promises French triumph.
The film then depicts lead interrogator Bishop Cauchon introducing
a new line of questioning that highlights anxieties and uncertainties con-
cerning gender. In a conflation of form and content, this portion of the
examination proceeds indirectly, focusing initially on the apparition of
Saint Michael. The judges seek to implicate Joan in capitulating to the
devil’s trickery and to compel her admission that the saintly apparition
was a demonic phantasm.
At the coinciding point, Einhorn’s oratorio precipitates a marked
structural disjunction and introduces the “Interrogation” section, which
begins with the exclamation “Homasse!” [sic].45 The word subsequently
returns as a refrain, interspersed with verses supportive of or authored by
Christine de Pizan, Hildegard of Bingen, and others. Sung by mixed male
and female choir, hommasse is pronounced in a manner suggesting accusa-
tion. Thus, Joan’s voice now yields to that of her prosecutor; in parallel,
the on-screen interrogators become increasingly belligerent in their
interview.
The lead interrogator’s line of questioning—the form in which

St. Michael appeared—is meant to demonstrate Joan’s gender confusion.
The implication is that Joan’s perceptions cannot be trusted; if she mis-
gauges gender, she can easily mistake other crucial oppositions—evil for
good, hell for salvation, satanic apparition for angel. The jurors erupt in a
flurry of whispers and interject additional questions. Voices, in tandem,
features a vaguely ethereal combination of pizzicato strings and flute obbli-
gato as the judges debate angelic nature and sexual identity. As if to
emphasize the importance of physicality to their debate, judges draw

attention to their own bodies; inquiring about Michael’s wings, one judge
widely opens his arms, spreading his dark robe in a bat-like extension;
another cleric points to his own tonsured head as he inquires about
Michael’s crown.
When Dreyer’s Joan is asked, “How can you know whether the
person you saw was a man or a woman,”46 the “Interrogation” movement
shifts from the accusatory hommasse refrain into its first verse, a Christine
de Pizan text extolling women’s virtue. This passage, sung by a tenor,
exhibits a particularly high range, light timbre, and meandering chromatic
lyricism, characteristics redolent of femininity for many contemporary
audiences.47 The high-pitched melody articulating Pizan’s text alternates
and contrasts with the deeper, low-ranged refrain, which speaks to the
derogation of women and the judges’ disdainful attitude toward Joan.
Soon the gender questions focus on Joan herself as the judge asks
why she wears men’s clothing. The oratorio choir reintroduces the word
hommasse at this point, literally invoking the religious and social transgres-
sions implied by Joan’s choice of clothing. On screen, Joan acknowledges
herself as subject of the questioning. As the monks previously had ges-
tured toward themselves, Joan now touches her own body, briefly laying
her hands on her neck. She asserts that her clothes are not superficial, but
rather at the heart of her mission. She must maintain her masculine dress
on God’s orders and until her divine calling is completed; only then, she
vows, will she “again dress as a woman.”
The Voices “Interrogation” section reinforces tensions surrounding
gendered balances of power as suggested by Passion –Voices. It confronts us
with a number of compelling ideas: feminist assertions of medieval women
mystics set against medieval misogyny; male judges at odds with the
woman captive; Joan’s strength and steady poise, even in the face of her
impending death; Joan’s masculine appearance and military calling set
against her legal vulnerability; and, in Henry Ansgar Kelly’s words, the
“judicial rape”48 to which she is subjected by the trial. Ultimately, Joan
uses her qualities to her advantage, maintaining her self-defined masculin-
ity in concordance with her female identity. She also successfully thwarts
her inquisitors’ attempts to extort her confession, propelling the clerics to

fabricate a ruse to force Joan’s acquiescence.
In assembling the diverse strands of Joan’s femininity, Einhorn recog-
nized her grafted disposition:
The piece explores the patchwork of emotions and thoughts that get stitched
together into the notion of a female hero . . . [who] invariably transgresses the
conventions and restrictions her society imposes. And Joan of Arc—the

illiterate teenage peasant girl who led an army, the transvestite witch who
became a saint—Joan of Arc transgressed them all.49
Einhorn’s treatment reinstated the thirteenth-century motet’s exploration

of seemingly incongruous feminine identities. Medieval duplum and
triplum texts frequently juxtaposed the sacred imagery of Marian devotion
(here Joan’s holiness) with secular references to courtly love and the shep-
herdess maidens found in pastorelles (Joan’s peasant roots).50 The resul-
tant intertextuality was frequently expressed disjunctively in the
languages associated with each realm (Latin and French, respectively).
Upper motet voices also suggested similarities between the feminine per-
sonas by advancing related phrasing, motifs, and commentary.
Joan’s ambiguous femininity similarly comes to life in Dreyer’s film,
rendered through the performance of Renée Falconetti (1892–1947), the
comedienne of a French boulevard theater,51 who would never act in
another film. As Françoise Meltzer notes, Falconetti’s performance
embodies a “relatively androgynous” Joan, marked by the “fusion” of
typical gender norms. The portrayal erases gendered conventions.52
While exploring the mosaic aspects of gender, Voices of Light also
effected temporal syntheses consistent with motet-like grafting processes.
Medieval motets collapsed several layers of time into a single, vertically
stratified composition, with each layer remaining discrete, yet producing a
coherent amalgam. Scholarly descriptions of the motet’s temporal refrac-
tions similarly apply to Voices and its interactions with La Passion. In
Peraino’s analysis, for example, the motet’s “dialogue between the old and
new song,”53 realized “a network of texts (musical and otherwise) that
potentially extend[ed] beyond the moment of composition.”54 Using similar
terms, Evans designated the motet as a genre in which “each work is, in a
sense, its own past.”55 The motet thus reflects its thirteenth-century envi-
ronment. New rhythmic constructions, for example, such as the transition
from “foursquare” musical homogeneity to more complex, variable forms,
coincided with the use of innovative technologies in timekeeping, such as
the mechanical clock.56
The motet’s temporal innovation and fluidity appealed to Einhorn

and resonated with his notions of modernity:
As I was developing the piece, I recalled my studies of medieval musical

practice, in particular the multi-lingual motets that I love to listen to. The
notion of a work of art with simultaneous layers of text struck me as a medie-
val idea that was also delightfully modern as well.57
In 2001, Einhorn similarly recalled his intent to erase boundaries between

musical style periods in Voices: “What I wanted and what I love is music
that kind of floats outside of a period, outside of a time. Where if you were
listening to it on the radio or at home, you just don’t know when or where
it was.”58
Voices – Passion also participates in several historical periods simulta-
neously, as composer and music critic Frank Oteri pointed out to
Einhorn:
You’ve got three layers of history going on and potentially four. You’ve got
the Joan of Arc historical reality. You’ve got Dreyer’s interpretation of that
reality from 1928. You’ve got your reality of it from the nineties and you
have the perception of everyone in your audience experiencing this super-
imposition of the three historical layers.59
Voices’s medieval-style weaving together of separate temporalities con-

cords with La Passion’s aesthetics. Yervasi describes Joan-related films,
including Dreyer’s, as possessing the “ability to expand and compress
space, time, and history, into a compact package.”60 Dreyer, in 1929, like-
wise attested to a desire to transcend time by juxtaposing form with
content and past with present, stating, “What counted was getting the
spectator involved in the past; the means were multifarious and new.”61
In melding together Voices’s diverse temporal, spatial, and sonic
strands, Einhorn relied on modern sampling techniques, the modern-day
musical equivalent to grafting. As Peraino defines it, sampling is the “digi-
talization and filtering of a segment or isolated part of prerecorded mate-
rial for use in a new musical context.”62 Medieval motet composition had
exploited sampling in its manifold dependence upon, and reintegration of,
preexisting material.
Einhorn’s sampling included his use of the church bell of Joan’s
hometown of Domremy, which he recorded with a portable DAT
recorder.63 It reinvents Joan’s bell as an instrumental foundation that
recalls the saint and her context, effects temporal conflation, and makes
reference to the prophetic voices Joan heard. Fellow villagers later testified
that Joan knelt in prayer whenever she heard bells, and that the sound
triggered her clearest perception of angels’ voices. Church bells were a

constant in Joan’s surrounding soundscape, as the Busnoys motet Anthoni
usque limina attests, in which regularly spaced bell strokes alerted worship-
pers to Mass.64 Medieval religious communities likely established their
starting pitches in vocal performance by referencing church bells.65
Bells continue to play key roles in contemporary musics and soci-
eties. Composer Arvo Pärt, for instance, cultivated the tintinnabuli techni-
que, featuring an ongoing, drone-like repetition of triadic pitches, whose
effect mirrors chiming bells.66 Combining medieval and modern aesthetics

and techniques, Pärt’s work has been characterized as “a postmodern
blending of historical layers,”67 a description evocative of motet concep-
tion, as well as of Einhorn’s approach. More broadly, anthropologist and
musician Steven Feld has argued that bells compel “how people experi-
ence and think about space and time.”68 Bells encode temporal conflation
by folding layers of the past into the present moment:
After twenty-five years of recording rainforest soundscapes in Papua New

Guinea, I’ve started to listen to Europe. I’m struck by a sonic resemblance:
bells stand to European time as birds do to rainforest time. Daily time, sea-
sonal time, work time, ritual time, social time, collective time, cosmologi-
cal time—all have their parallels, with . . . European bells heralding civil
and religious time . . . bells simultaneously sound a present and past . . . .their
immediate resonance also ring the longue durée of their technological and
social history.69
The sampled bells appear in the section entitled “The Final Walk,” which
in the film corresponds with Joan’s procession to the stake. Three strokes
of the church bell open the section, the only sounds that interrupt the
silence, signaling the upcoming spectacle of Joan’s execution. It also
demarcates a spatial transition out of the prison’s interior to the castle
yard, as Joan steps into the open air for the only time in the film. The bell,
normally calling to worship, likewise suggests the scene’s inherent tran-
scendence; it heralds Joan’s upcoming demise and her transition from the
physical to the spiritual realm. The screenplay, in fact, specifies that Joan
already “appears to many of those present as a vision from God”70 when
she first emerges before the crowd, clothed in the floor-length robe she
will wear to her death.
Following the opening bell, we hear women’s voices, which, as in the
preceding section, represent Joan and favor first-person diction. The bell
punctuates the end of each sung phrase, asserting itself as an instrumental
foundation within the texture, akin to a preexisting melody in polyphony.
Musical instruments (as opposed to, or perhaps in conjunction with,
voices) often acted as a “ground” in medieval motet practice too, playing

the motet’s fundamental line.71 In a seamless blend of timbres, voices in
homorhythm sing the words of the scriptural Susannah,72 who was con-
demned to death based on false accusations of adultery and subsequently
redeemed by Daniel. The words parallel Joan’s situation: “I die, although I
am innocent of everything their malice has invented against me.” Soon, at
the beginning of the phrase “tu scis quoniam falsum testimonium tulerunt
contra me” (you know they have borne false witness against me), the
vocal unison gives way to a staggered texture and the voices now create

dovetailed phrases and echo effects reminiscent of sixteenth-century imi-
tation. Another polyphonic shift coincides with the text, “contra me,”
where the vocal lines, in an act of literal text painting, slide into a counter-
point marked by more independently conceived lines, one against
another. Similarly, at “et ecce morior,” the layered voices sound stark dis-
sonances, in alternation with consonant resolutions.
The resultant sonorities, reminiscent of clashes found in early medie-
val polyphony, underscore the suffering within the film scene. They also
follow the motet’s development, in which a single line is gradually sub-
jected to increased ornamentation and absorbed into newly complex poly-
phonic structures. At the same time, the gradually shifting textures of
“The Final Walk” recall phasing and tape-loop techniques associated with
twentieth-century minimalism and, sometimes, neo-medieval works.
Christopher Page, without positing direct correspondence between medie-
val music and contemporary media, invokes twentieth-century minimalist
terminology when he describes the thirteenth-century motet’s layered
architecture. He writes of the voices’ interactions, “While the upper parts
possess a melodiousness that may have an instant appeal to the modern
listener, the tenor parts do their best to sound like a three-inch tape-
loop.”73
Einhorn’s sampling techniques aid his splicing together of opposi-
tions: ancient bells sound by means of modern technology; living voices
issue forth new music evocative of a medieval style. As medieval and
modern elements converge, we hear sung words that both are, and are
not, Joan’s own.
Appropriately, the film scenes depicting Joan’s execution actualize
elements of grafting and contradiction by inter-cutting the spectacle of
Joan’s death with shots of birds soaring heavenward, as well as logs ablaze
on the ground. We see Joan fastened to a tall wood post, mediating
between earth and sky. In the screenplay, Judge Nicolas Midi formally
severs Joan from the Church, as her execution will rend her spirit from her
mortal body; he proclaims: “Like a rotten member we cut you off from the
body of the Church.”74
In the film’s final scenes, Dreyer literally cuts Joan apart by fre-
quently juxtaposing her face with her body. Haunting close-ups of
Falconetti emphasize the martyr’s humanity, as Yervasi has argued. In
fact, among the many cinematic representations of Joan that would follow
Dreyer’s, it is Falconetti’s face that has come to most iconically exemplify
“the vision and spectatorial experience of the victimized Joan.”75 In
Dreyer’s cinematic portrayal, the soul and spirit of the dying Joan are
imprinted on her face, ultimately transcending the body’s earthly limita-
tions. The final text titles of the film state that even when the physical

reality of Joan ends, Joan herself endures as the heart of France.
Einhorn’s grafting techniques in Voices of Light also encompassed
sonic considerations, as, for example, in his emphasis on vocal blending.
Einhorn chose to distinguish Joan musically as the only character consis-
tently represented by voice—and not with only a single vocal line, but
with a combination of women singers of differing voice ranges. Through
this layering technique, Einhorn marks Joan’s voice as equivocal and ulti-
mately unknown, neither soprano nor alto, “but both simultaneously.”76
The composite text adds to this impression.
On the recording of Voices of Light, the parts representing Joan are
sung by the all-female ensemble Anonymous 4, a group highly regarded
for their performance of medieval music. In an interview, Einhorn
expressed his admiration for Anonymous 4’s consistent and harmonious
blend of voices, their precisely coordinated and tuned vocal quality,77 a
hallmark of the ensemble’s expertise with singing monophony, especially
Gregorian chant. The resultant sound, a “mammoth hyper-voice,” com-
municated Einhorn’s concept of Joan.
Page believes that the motet at its essence synthesized many voices
into one. Accordingly, he has opposed the view that modern performers
should strive to make each individual line of medieval polyphony stand out:
blend, and not contrast, is the guiding colour principle of the Ars Antiqua
motet. . . . This is quintessentially music for singers, designed to exploit the
sounds of Latin and Old French as put into song by voices of very similar
type singing in much the same kind of way.78
Another reason for Einhorn’s choice of voices to depict Joan was that she
considered herself surrounded by supernatural voices. The phenomenon is
described in the books on Joan by Victoria Sackville-West and by Marina
Warner, both of which Einhorn acknowledged as sources in researching
his libretto.79 Sackville-West speaks of “disembodied voices speaking to
her in the open air,” which then materialized as the Archangel Michael,
Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine.80 Warner asserts that the very
“fulcrum of her [Joan’s] personality”81 was her apprehension of these

voices. In the charges against Joan, these voices—viewed as a source of
her alleged heresy and perversion—emerged as a primary concern.
Finally, vocality had additional significance in that it defined the
communications of the historical Joan. Meltzer, for example, remarks
upon the power of voices as vital for the illiterate Joan:
In her experiential context, she is surrounded by academic clerics, and she

is not speaking from the same culture: her knowledge does not partake of

the court’s. She hears and speaks, or she is silent. Her entire experience is
determined by speech and sound; all she has to answer the questions is her
voice and her voices.82
Joan communicates here not just through her own vocalizations, but also
through the voices that she hears. Einhorn’s title, Voices of Light, of course
alludes to the significance of voices for Joan. It also links sound with sight.
Joan herself made the same connection, as her trial testimony corrobo-
rates. Describing her first divine visitation, she writes, “When God sent a
voice to guide me . . . I heard the voice on my right hand, in the direction
of the church. I seldom hear it without [seeing] a light. That light always
appears on the side from which I hear the voice.”83 Sackville-West, who
looked at the trial transcripts, writes that Joan had “heard, seen, touched,
and even smelt” the voices.84 This synaesthesia is implicit in the Voices of
Light title and the sensory merger of hearing Einhorn’s oratorio while
viewing Dreyer’s film. Similarly, the film reveals Joan through thorough
blending.
On screen, Falconetti becoming one, i.e., blending, with the charac-
ter she plays is one of the most important aspects of the film’s expressivity
and its portrayal of Joan’s nature. As Yervasi notes, “The conflation of the
actress’s body with the body of Joan of Arc is essential to understanding
these films as films about the body.”85 As Dreyer wrote of her: “Maybe it
was right that an actor can understand another human being only when
he [sic] has that other human being . . . in himself [sic]. . . . She lived
the part of Joan of Arc. It was clear that she had Joan in her.” In another
essay, the director referred to Falconetti as “the martyr’s reincarnation.”86
Falconetti’s death in 1946 was popularly attributed to her role as Joan in
Dreyer’s film.
La Passion and History

As earlier music acted as a fundamental baseline for Einhorn’s oratorio, so
too did earlier cinema. Dreyer’s film modeled for Einhorn not only aspects
of subject matter, but also manners of methodology—the processes of
engaging medieval models, evoking motets, and building upon preexisting

and historical foundations.
In La Passion, Dreyer constructed motet-like layers of commentary
upon his subject, using techniques of grafting and fusion. Dreyer had care-
fully researched Joan of Arc’s milieu and integrated his findings into his
screenplay and the style and design of the film. Simultaneously, he
molded his medieval bases to his concepts of drama, tragedy, and visual
effect. His construct features medieval-style, tableau-like images married
with disorienting, modernistic movement.

Dreyer wanted his film to reflect historical truth and therefore dis-
carded much of the initial screenplay written by surrealist poet and novel-
ist Joseph Delteil (1894–1978). Delteil had based his scenario on his
recent biography of Joan, entitled Jeanne d’Arc (1925),87 which, released
only five years after Joan’s canonization, became a bestseller. Though the
book had a “strenuously researched” substance,88 it also tended to be
overly romantic, exaggerated, mannerist, and satiric,89 quite unlike
Dreyer’s inclinations toward seriousness. Delteil’s screenplay, published
independently in 1927 as a freestanding literary work, betrayed a fascina-
tion with stylistic innovation in lieu of a presentation of the past. In fact,
its highly experimental nature caused Nadia Margolis, who worked with
Einhorn on the Voices libretto, to liken it to an “anti-script.”90 Delteil also
gave minor attention to Joan’s trial, the affair that Dreyer ultimately
placed at the heart of his film.91
Meanwhile, Dreyer had been writing a film script himself, which,
unlike Delteil’s, was strongly rooted in history. As Tony Pipolo argues,
within Dreyer’s film output, La Passion is uniquely derived from direct use
of historical events and records; as a result, the film’s factual component
creates for the viewer a sense of predetermined unfolding.92 Among his
sources, Dreyer relied upon the authoritative edition of Joan’s trial docu-
ments, completed in 1921 by Pierre Champion.93 Dreyer subsequently
engaged Champion as a film consultant,94 betraying a penchant for “quin-
tessentially medievalist scholarly practice,” and entrusting his film to “the
leading scholar” (Champion) rather than “the leading poet” (Delteil) on
the subject.95 Dreyer adopted Joan’s medieval history as his polyphonic
ground.
The opening shot, of a large bound manuscript identified as the orig-
inal record of Joan’s 1431 trial confirms Dreyer’s interest in history. As an
off-camera hand turns the pages, intertitles proclaim the manuscript’s
authenticity: “At the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris[,] it is possible to see
one of the most famous documents in the history of the world—the official
record of the trial of Joan of Arc.”96 While the film’s manuscript does not
follow completely Joan’s actual trial record, its introductory cinematic
function establishes Dreyer’s visual reference points as emblematic of,

or equivalent to, Joan’s history.97 Textual headings additionally assert
that the on-screen document contains Joan’s true essence: “if you turn
over the pages . . . you will find Joan herself.” Dreyer thus frames
history as the film’s generating premise, underscoring his efforts to
position his film “as close to event [of Joan’s trial] as possible,” according
to Bill Scalia.98
Dreyer’s artistic and directorial style further evokes the Middle Ages
while remaining distinctively modern. Assembling the film as a series of

close-up stills, Dreyer eschews movement in favor of a medieval, still-
frame style through focus on single individuals, and particularly their
facial expressions. For Dreyer, facial expression rested at the heart of
emotion and he celebrated its use in modern film: “In French and
American psychological films of recent years,” he remarked, “facial expres-
sion is again brought to honor and given value.”99
This emphasis on faces, particularly Falconetti’s, creates what Carl
Plantinga calls “scene[s] of empathy,” which focus on a character’s interior
experience. These scenes, Plantinga explains, present the viewer with “a
character’s face, typically in closeup, either for a single shot of long dura-
tion or . . . [in] a point-of-view structure alternating between . . . the
character’s face and shots of what she or he sees.”100 In La Passion, these
techniques evoke the viewer’s sympathy for Joan—indeed, the critic,
author, and imagist poet H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] was left “numb and
beaten” by the film101—but also serve to blend medieval stylistic elements
with the modern. While alternation evokes modernity by creating disori-
enting juxtapositions, close-up techniques evoke the static planes of medi-
eval panels and tableaux.
Critics noted the film’s evocation of medieval art at the time of its
first release. In 1928, H. D., writing for the Swiss film journal Close Up,
described the film as “a series of pictures, portraits burnt on copper . . .
done in hard clear lines, remorseless, poignant, bronze stations of the
cross, carved upon medieval cathedral doors.” A year later, critic Evelyn
Gerstein found the film’s attention to detail, lack of action, and use of a
light background evocative of a Flemish painting.102 More recently, film
scholar Tony Pipolo compared the film’s emphasis on stills to a series of
medieval friezes.103 Art historian Britta Martensen-Larsen related its com-
positional and design elements to medieval miniatures found in Sir John
Mandeville’s Book of Miracles (c. 1356– 57).104 And Paul Schrader saw
similarities to Gothic art and architecture: “Dreyer sought a place for spiri-
tual values within corporeality, and like the Gothic artist his search ended
in frustration, abstraction, and in some cases, distortion.” He also identi-
fied Joan’s own struggle in the film as “typically Gothic.”105
Such analogies concord with explanations offered by Dreyer’s art

director for the film, Hermann Warm: “In a Parisian Library I found the
story of Jeanne d’Arc illustrated by a miniature-painter from the Middle
Ages. The simple reproduction of the buildings, landscapes and the
people, the naive lines and the incorrect perspective provided ideas for
the film’s sets.”106 Dreyer also favored stark period costumes and set-
tings107 and directed the actors to perform without makeup. Dreyer’s sty-
listic choices may have inspired Einhorn’s atypically and self-consciously
sparse musical idiom.108

Yet, rather than achieve axiomatic verisimilitude, both aimed to
“suggest the era without imposing itself.”109 While Dreyer’s films all drew
upon literary models, none maintained rigid allegiance to the originals.
Rather, Dreyer altered his sources as he saw fit, crafting new statements
out of historical and literary foundations. In describing Dreyer’s adaptation
of source material, Ole Storm evokes the impulses behind medieval sam-
pling and glossing: “From every source he took only what he could use;
and this he reshaped with a boldness and willfulness . . . [he] . . . never
accepted conventional ideas about the sacrosanct nature of the
source.”110 In fact, aspects of Dreyer’s treatment of Joan’s fifteenth
century drew criticism due to their twentieth-century resonances, such as
the presence of Sam Browne belts and trench helmets.111
As redactor of history, Dreyer played freely with time, often overtly
defying history’s chronological demarcations. In a dramatic temporal com-
pression, La Passion condensed Joan’s five-month-long trial into a single
day, applying the Aristotelian ideal for tragedy of unity of time and
place.112 According to film expert David Bordwell, this results in a daring
experiment in plot continuity and intensity.113
Instead of details of history, Dreyer promoted specific psychological
effects that resulted from the events in his film. He explained his efforts as
an attempt to “force the realities into a form of simplification and abbrevi-
ation in order to reach . . . psychological realism.” In a 1955 lecture,
Dreyer addressed this concept: “The cinematic representation of reality
should be true, but purged of trivial details. It should also be realistic, but
transformed in the director’s mind in such a way that it becomes
poetry.”114 This type of transformation allows the subject matter to effec-
tively communicate beyond its own time of origin.115
Montage, Sense, and Space

Cinematically, La Passion presents a “stitched-together” collective,
assembled in a manner reminiscent of medieval grafting and layering tech-
niques. Featuring abrupt juxtapositions and cuts, the film’s style embraces
a rich polyphony of views, angles, and continuities in physical space. In

particular, Dreyer employs a mosaic-like editing style that forges and
maneuvers through quickly changing perspectives. His choices of camera
angles, cuts, proportion, and focus create a complex array of relationships
among characters, spaces, and motifs, which overlap and resonate in con-
tradictory ways.
Dreyer’s unexpected, often unsettling style emphasizes conflict and
has been classified as “impactive montage” by Donald Skoller.116 Known
for its rhetorical and expressive effects, montage is marked by juxtaposi-

tion of disconnected images or chunks of narrative, assemblage of dispa-
rate components, and intellectual demands on an audience, a definition
that could just as easily pertain to the motet.117 In requiring the viewer’s
engaged participation, La Passion resonates with Sergei Eisenstein’s tenets
on intellect and counterpoint.
For Eisenstein, film engages its audience’s intellect by presenting
strands of images discordant with commonly held preconceptions. Such
disjointed chains of images challenge the viewer and demand her active
role in resolving the resultant conflicts.118 Dreyer’s film continues to chal-
lenge its viewers today. Film scholar Raymond Carney described Dreyer’s
cinematic construction as one that “performs brain surgery on the viewer,
rewiring our synapses and changing our bio-rhythms.”119 Critics have like-
wise described La Passion as “one of the most bizarre, perceptually difficult
films ever made.”120
Dreyer’s disjunctions frequently operate in the physical plane. In
particular, La Passion cultivates multivalent physical distortions, creating
what Bordwell calls a “cubist space,” compiled from geometrical
abstractions, puzzling combinations of perspective and dimension, and
figures that lean, float, and appear truncated within the frames.121
(The latter quality is evident in the upper portion of figure 1, which
crops Joan’s upward line of vision.) Dreyer’s editing techniques further
defy principles of classical continuity. With close-ups dominating, the
film refuses to delineate the coherent formation of space that would
normally be established through the series “long shot/medium shot/
close-up.”122
Such techniques serve to isolate Joan visually from her inquisitors,
fragmenting her within the frames. Out of sync with the warped space she
inhabits, Dreyer’s Joan is forced to buckle and bend in order to conform
to the rigid spaces surrounding her. Dreyer plays with physical reality by
cutting between perspectives, highlighting characters in ambiguous
positions, and intermixing the contradictory directions of their gazes.
Moreover, as Bordwell states, Dreyer frequently positions his figures as if
“hovering in a gravityless space.”123 Such constructions represent Joan’s

Figure 1. Voices of Light with La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc in performance, Fairfax,
Virginia, 2001. Photo Courtesy of Fairfax Choral Society, Fairfax, Virginia. Used with
permission.
captivity, confusion, and loneliness,124 and they help to define the “alien
systems of power” forced upon her.125
Yet, much like the historical Joan, Dreyer’s Joan is not merely a help-
less victim, but a woman of strength and depth. The richness of her char-
acter is depicted through a variety of transpositions, established through
Joan’s placement in the cinematic frame, her physical and psychological
relationships to her interrogators, and Dreyer’s innovative camera shots.
Joan displays power and transcendence as she defies the charges against
her, devoutly gazing heavenward. As she endures mockery and punish-
ment, her essence is reflected in the close-up, full-frame shots of
Falconetti’s facial expressions.
Spatial ambiguities emerge in the torture-chamber scene, in which
Joan’s inquisitors threaten her with instruments of torment in attempts to
compel her abjuration. Like the motet, the scene proves disorienting in its
radical shifts of perspective, which dynamically threaten Joan’s bodily
integrity as well as the viewer’s assumptions about space. Indeed, Bordwell
argues that ultimately the responsibility to make sense of the acute cine-
matic montage lies with the audience: “The film’s intelligibility hinges
upon our connecting one close-up with another.”126
Our encounter with the film likewise replicates aspects of the intel-
lectual and analytical experiences that de Grocheio and Einhorn suggest
underlie hearing and comprehending musical expressions. The abruptness
and velocity of the shots in La Passion’s torture-chamber scene create a
polyphonic terrain that engages person and object, stasis and movement,
and the divisions within Joan’s own agonized mind.
At times, the camera’s movements are abstract, creating effects
rather than conveying information. Sudden cuts, juxtaposition of move-
ment and stillness, and opposition of background and foreground enhance

the layered appearance of the visual space and create motet-like results,
positioning characters in related but independent strata, against which
camera movements speak as an additional voice.
At first, Dreyer establishes Joan’s presence as peripheral and tenuous
in the scene, allocating to her only the margins of the main frame. Her
physical placement in this respect parallels the marginal commentaries
that frequently gloss and surround medieval compositions in manuscript
sources.127 Dreyer asserts Joan’s presence in the room in indirect fashion.
When she enters, she does so in the background, and through a skewed
doorway that she approaches from below. She rises through it unsteadily,
in shackles, as the dark and foregrounded judges “press in on [Joan’s]
distant, diminutive figure.”128 Doorways and their crooked frames are
thresholds that, as Bordwell argues, force characters to experience enter-
ing a doorway as equivalent to “climbing uphill.”129
During the interrogation, close-up shots of Joan’s wide-eyed terror
contend and alternate with the faces of her inquisitors and torture instru-
ments. Creating rapidly shifting polyphonic effects, the montage embraces
a variety of psychologically charged perceptions and their intersections,
materializing as overlaid, interrelated but clearly divergent voices that
“speak different languages.” Moving shots across the judges’ faces convey
Joan’s overwhelmed and frightened perspective.130 Disjunctions actualize
the transitions between Joan’s upward gaze, directed variously through a
range of angles, and the men who determine her fate. Dreyer’s distorted
space even leaves Joan impossibly in two positions at once, as judges
seated in a row turn to look at her, some looking off left, others simultane-
ously looking off right.131 Many of Dreyer’s choices further emphasize the
dichotomous unity of body and face, the physical and the sublime, the
doomed and the transcendent.
As Joan denies that her visions come from the devil, Dreyer’s presen-
tation soon gives way to short, tracking shots of various torture devices.
The patchwork style of the scene culminates in an intense focus on a
spiked, spinning torture wheel, interspersed with fleeting shots of Joan’s
static face. While Joan contemplates the wheel, the cutting pace
accelerates, highlighting Joan’s alternatives—torture or confession—by

connecting close-ups of Joan’s face, the wheel’s spikes, her torturers, and a
pen held in Joan’s hand, hesitating over the abjuration document. Like
Joan’s psyche, our attentions splinter as each element competes for promi-
nence within the scene’s fabric. Similarly, like the turning of film’s wheel,
Joan’s mind darts among the dissonant voices of her judges.
In keeping with historical accounts, the instruments of torture are
presented but not used, and their physical ramifications are implied rather
than depicted.132 The connotations, however, are clear. As the Middle

Ages’ leading means of aggravated execution and forced confession, the
wheel conjures up images of broken bodies, excruciating suffering, the
patterns of fortune’s wheel, and the inevitability of Joan’s fate.133 The
quick cuts in this passage illustrate the wheel’s symbolism and significance;
abrupt transitions between Joan’s face and the wheel’s spikes create a
“slashing sensation” that nearly rips Joan open.134
As Dreyer dealt with this scene through a collage-like technique of
suggestive cuts, Einhorn similarly responded to the torture chamber by
compiling devotional texts that allude to physical pain. Einhorn wrote of
this scene, “I thought that, rather than speak directly about this horror, it
might be more interesting to explore some of the stranger aspects of the
medieval view of physical pain, the tradition of suffering as a means of
achieving spiritual ecstasy.”135 Each of the three stanzas associated with
the scene sets writings of a medieval woman mystic, namely, Angela of
Foligno, Na Prous Boneta, and Margarita, a fourteenth-century disciple of
St. Umiltà. Together these excerpts emphasize the bodily conflation of
the woman mystic and Christ, portray tactile images of torture and vio-
lence, and suggest the transcendent nature of devotional suffering.
Einhorn paired these writings with a motet-like musical setting, in
which different texts and perspectives are interspersed and interact and
distinctive performing forces vie for attention and focus. This section of
Voices defines contrasts between a flowing, tranquil melody and forceful
repetition, high and low pitch range, male and female singers, and solo
voice and choral ensemble. The result parallels the conflict and counter-
point established in Dreyer’s film.
The chorus opens the first musical theme, singing an open syllable
(“O”), accompanied by aggressive and low-pitched string strokes from the
orchestra. Throughout the scene, the chorus repeats the phrase “Glorioses
playes” as a refrain between the stanzas of verses. A soprano melody com-
prises the first two of these stanzas. The chant-like tune features fluid,
stepwise motion and exhibits the narrow range of plainchant. The repeat-
ing melody regularly approaches the central pitch from above and below in
fairly equal proportions, creating a circular shape. In this respect, the solo
melody acts as a sonic precursor to the spinning torture wheel that soon
appears on screen. While the melody suggests the Middle Ages, its repeti-
tive simplicity also is rooted in a minimalist style.
As the on-screen action crescendos, cutting more rapidly to the
instruments of torture, including the ever more quickly turning wheel, the
music undergoes a corresponding textural shift. In particular, the third
stanza builds in dynamic intensity as a full ensemble of male and female
voices enters. This conjunction of performing forces plays out the libretto’s
cross-gendered merger between Christ and his female devotees. The resul-

tant polyphony of meanings blends women’s ecstatic views of Christ’s
passion with visual suggestions of Joan’s torture. The refrain, “O glorious
wounds” projects the words of the mystic Marguerite d’Oingt (d. 1310),
whose writings and meditations reflect the thirteenth-century fascination
with Christ’s passion and the weapons of his suffering (arma Christi), such
as nails, pincers, scourges, and a crown of thorns.136
The chosen texts also blend violence with eroticism. The text by
Angela (stanza 1) exclaims, “Et desiderabam videre vel saltem illud parum
de carne Christi quod portaverant clavi in ligno.” (And I longed to see at
least that little bit of Christ’s flesh that the nails had fixed to the wood.)
The third stanza, from writings of Margarita, adopts Christ’s voice: “non
est aequum, velle solum de melle meo gustare, et non de felle: si perfecte
vis mecum uniri, mente intenta recogita illusiones, opprobria, flagella,
mortem, et tormenta, quae pro te sustinui” (It is not fair to wish to taste
only of my honey, and not the gall. If you wish to be perfectly united with
me, contemplate deeply the mockery, insults, whippings, death, and tor-
ments that I endured for you).
The writings by women mystics lend themselves not only to depic-
tions of physical pain but also to the evocation of sounding music. As
Bruce Holsinger has argued, late medieval thinking about women mystics
identified the “female body as a spectacular site of musical suffering,” pro-
ducing sound during moments of anguish and devotional ecstasy.137
Einhorn’s libretto also unites devotion with a kind of synaesthesia. In par-
ticular, the selected mystical writings suggest sensory mergers between
sight, physical desire, bodily pain, the sounds of mockery and insult, the
taste of honey and gall, and the entities of the heart, body, and light. In
this way, it again parallels medieval theological beliefs, whose notions of
suffering, Holsinger notes, encompassed all five senses of the human expe-
rience.138
Sensory awareness, physicality, and body– soul interrelationships
have been recognized as meaningful not only to medieval devotions in
general, but also to medieval women’s mystical writings in particular.
Referring to Angela of Foligno and Marguerite d’Oingt, among others,
Caroline Walker Bynum explains this concept as physical, sensual, and

multisensory, somewhat evocative of synaesthetic experience:
Mystical women . . . spoke of selves (body and soul together) yearning in

heaven with a desire that was piqued and delighted into ever greater frenzy
by encounter with their lover, God. . . . It is . . . [a] desire . . . not only for
bodies; it is lodged in bodies. When Mechtild and Marguerite speak of
being lifted into the arms of God, tasting his goodness, seeing themselves
reflected in his shining surface, they make it explicit that they speak of

embodied persons. . . . All their senses are in play.139
Joan’s own juncture between body and soul is evident in the torture scene
when she speaks the line, “Even though you torture my soul out of my
body I shall confess nothing.”140At this juncture too lies a fluidity of
gender and person that merges Joan with Christ. As Tony Pipolo notes,
Dreyer’s title for the film first establishes this motif, confirming the impor-
tance of Christ’s image, his passion, and crucifixion in the portrayal of
Joan’s life and death.141 Likewise, Yervasi points out that Dreyer’s film
uses “the Passion of Christ as a narrative model for [Joan’s] bodily humilia-
tion.”142 In fact, as Pipolo has demonstrated, the film portrays virtually
every stage of Joan’s trial as reminiscent of Christ’s passion. Among these
are Joan’s anointing with a straw crown, the guards’ mockery of her as a
daughter of God, and her procession to the stake adorned in coarse gar-
ments. Even Dreyer’s reduction of Joan’s five-month-long trial to one day
parallels the long night and day of Christ’s trial, condemnation, and
execution.
Einhorn underscored these facets of Dreyer’s representation. The
film’s ambiguities—between Christ and Joan, man and woman, and inher-
ent in Joan’s own androgyny—are given voice in the torture scene
through the words of female mystics.
Counterpoint and Synaesthesia

Appropriately, the synaesthetic impressions created by the sight – sound
conjunction in Passion, Voices, and both in combination, accord with early
beliefs about cinema’s multisensory and empathetic powers. Citing art his-
torian E. H. Gombrich, Carl Plantinga notes that synaesthesia occurs in
film by means of “the splashing over of impressions from one sense modal-
ity to another.” In particular, sound and sight in association forge corre-
spondences that “extend beyond cross-modal sensory experience” to
impact the affect and emotions of the listener-viewer.143
In its multisensory presence, Voices – Passion creates effects consis-
tent with theories of counterpoint advanced by Russian filmmakers
Eisenstein, W. I. Alexandrov, and G. V. Pudovkin. In 1928, the year of

Dreyer’s La Passion, the three directors co-authored a statement that out-
lined their philosophies on the appropriate use of sound in cinema.144
They were inspired in part by the U.S. opening of the first talkie, The Jazz
Singer, in 1927, which left avant-garde film makers concerned about the
dilution of film’s visual power. True filmmaking, they feared, would
become subjugated to sound. In particular, cutting and montage would
fall victim to the trivial theatricality of spoken drama.145 Film would ulti-
mately become nothing more than a vehicle for “commercial exploita-

tion,” or a mere “photographic performance,” merging sight and sound to
create only “illusion.”146
Eisenstein and his colleagues advocated for an alternative: the culti-
vation of counterpoint. This technique was characterized by a “pro-
nounced non-coincidence” between aural and visual image, thus creating
a “new orchestral counterpoint” in sight and sound. Sound does not over-
take visual communication, but rather is treated as an additional element
of the montage technique and contributes to film’s expression of ideas. It
communicates independently, creating a disjunctive commentary on the
on-screen images.
The prison scene exemplifies this contrapuntal technique, so too
does the overall interaction between oratorio and film as they engage in
actively disjunctive dialogues that weave together diverse contrapuntal
strands of Joan’s life and representations. Indeed, the large-scale synergy
between Voices and Passion realizes Eisenstein’s comments on the relation-
ship between sound and film. For Eisenstein, conflict lies at the root of
filmic expression, including the “conflict between optical and acoustical
experience.” The incongruities expressed through such “audio-visual
counterpoint” engage the viewer in what Eisenstein called “intellectual
dynamization.”147
Above and Beyond

Dreyer’s film and Voices of Light create richly dynamic explorations of ver-
tical space, reenacting aspects of the motet’s vertically layered architec-
ture. Dreyer established such space in La Passion by employing vertical
visual motives and gravity-defying shots. Motivically, La Passion presents
upright elements such as the crucifix, stilts, legs, and arches throughout,
as Tony Pipolo has noted.148 Dreyer also played with a sense of verticality
by photographing Joan as she is looking upward, her face rising toward her
judges, or heavenward, regardless of where she is situated in the true phys-
ical field149 (fig. 1). Low camera angles help to accomplish the effect of
antigravity by sloping upward toward the characters. Camera placement
also tends to distort and distend the bodies of the various officials and
clerics, frequently cutting them off at the waist or the chest, so that
“swathed in ecclesiastical drapery, the judges seem not to walk, but to
glide or drift.”150
The impression that the film’s space defies gravity is enhanced when
it is projected in conjunction with a performance of Voices of Light. In
Einhorn’s preferred performance environment, chorus and orchestra
perform in full view of the audience, with the movie screen above their
heads. This arrangement creates three vertical layers and visually estab-

lishes the oratorio as a generating foundation, even while it provides com-
mentary upon the film. The film projection acts much like the highest
voice of a motet, related to the ground but moving freely from it, while
commenting on the action below. In this arrangement, the film also
embodies the physical position of a glossing triplum voice, layered above
two lower entities. Its placement and function likewise recall the cine-
matic notions of counterpoint discussed above.
Overall, the layering of Voices –Passion in performance presents an
inversion of the relationship of film and musical soundtrack, in which the
music accompanies—rather than underlies—the film. It also inverts the
process Einhorn used to create Voices, in which the film acted as inspira-
tional underpinning for the score. In these respects, Voices – Passion
creates a conflict typical of counterpoint. It likewise synthesizes the motet
anew, reveling in the reversals, ambiguities, and juxtapositions already
inherent in both film and oratorio individually. Appropriately, Einhorn
refers to the resulting live performance texture as a “ritualistic kind of
experience, rather than just a movie screen . . . [it is] an event.”151 The
arrangement is also reminiscent of Eisenstein’s principles of cinematic
movement in which “each sequential element is perceived not next to the
other, but on top of the other. . . . From the superimposition of two ele-
ments of the same dimension always arises a new, higher dimension.”152
Such contraposition is reminiscent of Joan’s life and the ways she
experienced movement and space. Perceval de Boulainvilliers, courtier in
the circle of Charles VII and recruiting officer for the French army,153
described the scene of Joan’s first visitation by voices in terms of levita-
tion, reporting that one girl cried out to Joan, “I see you flying above the
ground.”154 Joan also triumphs over gravity in the tale of her attempt to
escape from imprisonment at Beaurevoir. She reportedly threw herself
from the castle tower, falling to the ground at least sixty or seventy feet,
but landed barely harmed.155
The scene of Joan’s death also echoed a sense of upward movement.
The historical Joan asked for a cross and a priest held it up for her to
see.156 This scene is echoed in La Passion, when trial bailiff Jean Massieu,
played by Antonin Artaud, extends a crucifix on a long pole to her, slant-

ing it upward so that the cross appears to hover over her. Soon shots of
smoke billowing upward are intercut with the spectacle of Joan’s burning,
physically contrasting the heights of divinity with the lowness of earth.
Similarly, Joan’s eyes rise skyward toward soaring birds overhead.
In her analysis of recent films on Joan of Arc, Gwendolyn Morgan
argues that Joan incarnates a characteristically medieval theme of duality
and conflict. Morgan notes, after Norman Cantor, that medieval charac-
ter reflect the problem of the “divided self,” an identity torn between this

world and the next, the chosen and the pragmatic. This duality is mani-
fested in Joan herself, as well as in her portrayals in Voices of Light and La
Passion. Morgan suggests that it also emblemizes modern life experiences,
typifying “the struggle with divided selves that we experience today.”157
At the same time, Voices –Passion, understood through the lens of
motet-like grafting, evokes a sense unity and community, as separate
strands are integrated into a concordant whole. Wegman’s characteriza-
tion of Busnoys’s St. Anthony motet is fitting:
The motet could itself be taken as a metaphor of the medieval commun-

ity—each voice having its assigned place in a hierarchical structure,
unfolding freely, yet firmly guided by the straight melodic path set out,
with perfect metric regularity, by the saint’s attribute, the bell.158
The description enfolds much of the medieval motet repertory in general,

Dreyer’s montage style, and the medieval and postmodern aspects of
Einhorn’s musical-textual constructions and sampling techniques. It con-
cords also with the polyphony of resonant voices that surround, represent,
and enlighten the ever-enigmatic Joan of Arc.
Voices – Passion embodies the medieval motet’s harmonious contra-
diction, an idea in keeping with Joan’s own paradoxical nature. The inter-
relationships between Joan’s story, Dreyer’s film, and Einhorn’s oratorio
demonstrate the concept of the medieval motet as a “richly intertwined
edifice,”158 constructed from disparate components. At the same time,
these works manifest the postmodern aesthetics, combining layers of
history, and reflecting on twentieth-century experiences.
Notes
Rachel May Golden is an associate professor of Musicology in the School of Music at the
University of Tennessee. She earned a PhD in musicology from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her primary research focuses on medieval music of the twelfth
century, including aspects of monastic devotion, songs of the Crusades, words–music
relationships, and the cult of the Virgin Mary. She is the author of articles on both medie-
val and twentieth-century topics. E-mail: rmgolden@utk.edu.
1. See Nadia Margolis, “Trial by Passion: Philology, Film, and Ideology in the Portrayal
of Joan of Arc (1900– 1930),” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 3
(1997): 469.
2. Richard Einhorn, “A Conversation with Composer Richard Einhorn,” Richard
Einhorn Productions, http://www.richardeinhorn.com/VOL/VOLRichardInterview.html
(accessed 22 September 2013).
3. Andrew Shapiro, “Arch Vision from Richard Einhorn,” 21st Century Music 10, no. 10

(October 2003): 1.
4. Shapiro, “Arch Vision,” 2.
5. See, for example, the large sampling of critical responses listed at Richard Einhorn,
“Voices of Light: Excerpts from Reviews,” Richard Einhorn Productions, http://
www.richardeinhorn.com/VOL/VOLPressExtracts.html (accessed 22 September 2013);
see also Wilfrid Mellers, “Redemption Ancient and Modern,” review of Voices of Light, by
Richard Einhorn, Choir & Organ 5, no. 6 (1997): 64 –65, which associates Voices of Light
with the “new simplicity” movement.
6. Richard Einhorn, Voices of Light, with Anonymous 4 (Ruth Cunningham, Marsha
Genensky, Susan Hellauer, and Johanna Rose), Susan Narucki, Corrie Pronk, Frank
Hameleers, Henk van Heijnsbergen, the Netherlands Radio Choir, and the Netherlands
Radio Philharmonic, dir. Steven Mercurio, compact disc, Sony Classical SK 62006.
7. Shapiro, “Arch Vision,” 1.
8. See Richard Einhorn, “What’s New with Voices of Light,” Richard Einhorn
Productions, http://www.richardeinhorn.com/VOL/VOLWhatsNew.html (accessed
22 September 2013).
9. Carina Yervasi, “The Faces of Joan: Cinematic Representations of Joan of Arc,”
Film & History 29, no. 3– 4 (1999): 8.
10. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. “Motet” (by Ernest H.
Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts), sec. I.1, “France: Ars Antiqua,” http://
www.grovemusic.com/ (accessed 22 September 2013).
11. Einhorn, “Conversation.”
12. For further discussion of the French motet and its use of preexisting material, see,
for example, Mark Everist, French Motets in the Thirteenth Century: Music, Poetry and
Genre, Cambridge Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
13. Beverly J. Evans, “Music, Text, and Social Context: Reexamining Thirteenth-Century
Styles,” in “Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature,” ed. Daniel Poirion
and Nancy Freeman Regalado, special issue, Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 184–85.
14. Gerald R. Hoekstra, “The French Motet as Trope: Multiple Levels of Meaning in
Quant florist la violete/El mois de mai/Et gaudebit,” Speculum 73, no. 1 (1998): 33.
15. Christopher Page, “The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” Early Music 16, no. 2
(1988): 156.
16. On Johannes’s identity and biography, see Christopher Page, “Johannes de

Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation,” Plainsong and
Medieval Music 2, no. 1 (1993): 18.
17. “Motetus vero est cantus ex pluribus compositus, habens plura dictamina vel multi-
modam discretionem syllabarum, utrobique harmonialiter consonans.” Latin text in Page,
“Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music,” 36; English translation in Judith A. Peraino,
“Monophonic Motets: Sampling and Grafting in the Middle Ages,” Musical Quarterly 85,
no. 4 (2001): 656 –67.
18. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. “Grocheio, Johannes de” (by

Christopher Page), http://www.grovemusic.com/ (accessed 22 November 2013).
19. “Cantus autem iste non debet coram vulgaribus propinari eo quod eius subtilitatem
non advertunt nec in eius auditu delectantur sed coram litteratis et illis qui subtilitates
artium sunt quaerentes. Et solet in eorum festis decantari ad eorum decorationem . . .”
Latin text and English translation in Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music,” 36;
see also Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 656–67. Elsewhere, Page offers an expanded dis-
cussion of these de Grocheio passages, and argues that many vernacular motets had more
broadly based audiences, cultivated a lighter tone, and carried carnivalesque associations;
see Christopher Page, Discarding Images: Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval
France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 43 –56, 65–111.
20. Dolores Pesce, “Beyond Glossing: The Old Made New in Mout me fu grief/Robin
m’aime/Portare,” in Hearing the Motet: Essays on the Motet of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, ed. Dolores Pesce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40.
21. Rob C. Wegman, “For Whom the Bell Tolls: Reading and Hearing Busnoys’s
Anthoni usque limina,” in Hearing the Motet (see note 20), 124, 136.
22. Sylvia Huot, Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in
Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 11.
23. Evans, “Music, Text,” 194.
24. Huot, Allegorical Play, 5.
25. See, for example, the brief discussion in Roy Huss and Norman Silverstein, “Film
Study: Shot Orientation for the Literary Minded,” College English 27, no. 7 (1966):
566– 68.
26. See, for example, Pesce, “Beyond Glossing,” 37; Mary Carruthers, The Book of
Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 214.
27. Nicole Potter, “The Passion of Joan of Arc/Voices of Light,” Films in Review 47,
no. 3–4 (1996): 30.
29. Jane L. Komarov, review of Voices of Light, by Richard Einhorn, “Recordings,” Opera
News 60, no. 11 (1996): 40.
30. See Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 656.
31. Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 658.
32. Evans, “Music, Text,” 194.

34. Potter, “Passion of Joan of Arc,” 29.
36. Françoise Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 121.
37. See Einhorn, “Conversation.”

39. Richard Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light (see note 6); also available online, http://
www.richardeinhorn.com/VOL/VOLLinerNotes.html (accessed 22 September 2013).
40. Yervasi, “Faces of Joan,” 10, 11n19.
41. Charles Wayland Lightbody, The Judgements of Joan: Joan of Arc, A Study in Cultural
History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 60.
42. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1981), 147; see also Warner’s complete discussion of Joan as “Ideal
Androgyne,” 139– 58.
43. Carl Theodor Dreyer, Four Screenplays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1970), 32–33.
44. H[enry] Ansgar Kelly, “The Right to Remain Silent: Before and after Joan of Arc,”
Speculum 68, no. 4 (1993): 1013–18.
45. Richard Einhorn, libretto, Voices of Light, booklet accompanying The Passion of Joan
of Arc, DVD, directed by Carl Th. Dreyer (1928; Irvington: Criterion Collection, 1999);
also available online, www.richardeinhorn.com/VOL/vol.libretto.pdf (accessed 22
September 2013). Unless otherwise indicated, passages from the Voices of Light libretto
refer to this source.
46. Dreyer, Four Screenplays, 33.
47. See Renée Cox Lorraine, “Recovering Jouissance: Feminist Aesthetics and Music,”
in Women and Music: A History, ed. Karin Pendle, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001), 3–20; Susan McClary, “Sexual Politics in Classical Music,” in
Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd ed. with a new introduction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 53–79.
48. Kelly, “Right to Remain Silent,” 1026.
49. Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light (my emphasis).
50. See, for example, Evans, “Music, Text,” 187–89.
51. Yervasi, “Faces of Joan,” 8.
52. Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire, 4.
53. Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 659.
54. Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 646 (my emphasis).
55. Evans, “Music, Text,” 194 (emphasis original).
56. New Grove Dictionary, “Motet.”
57. Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light (my emphasis).

58. Frank J. Oteri, “Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today,” interview with Richard
Einhorn,” newmusicbox: The Web Magazine from the American Music Center, 1 September
2001, sec. 7, “New Music for an Old Film,” http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/richard-
einhorn-yesterday-is-not-today/ (accessed 22 September 2013).
59. Oteri, “Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today.”
61. Dreyer in Double Reflection: Translation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Writings About the Film

(Om Filmen), ed. Donald Skoller (1973; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 50.
62. See Peraino, “Monophonic Motets,” 658.
63. Einhorn writes, “I felt that Joan, who so loved churchbells, whose voices seemed to
speak to her whenever they were ringing, would appreciate the effort” of traveling to
Domremy and recording the sound. Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light; see also Einhorn,
“Conversation”; Amy Gamerman, “The Man Who Gave ‘Joan of Arc’ Her Voice,” Wall
Street Journal, 23 January 1996.
64. Wegman, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” 129.
65. Page, “Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 154.
66. Paul Hillier, “Arvo Pärt: Magister Ludi,” Musical Times 130, no. 1753 (1989): 135.
67. Leopold Brauneiss, “Arvo Pärt’s Tintinnabuli Style: Contemporary Music Toward a
New Middle Ages?,” in Postmodern Medievalisms, ed. Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan, with
the assistance of Paul Plisiewicz, Studies in Medievalism 13 (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer,
2005), 27.
68. Gino Robair, “In the Time of the Bells with Steven Feld,” interview with Steven
Feld, Electronic Musician, 22 February 2006, http://www.emusician.com/features-interviews/
0777/in-the-time-of-bells-with-steven-feld/146639 (accessed 22 September 2013).
69. Steven Feld, liner notes, The Time of Bells, vol. 1, Soundscapes of Italy, Finland,
Greece and France, compact disc, VoxLox 634479827815; also available online,
http://voxlox.myshopify.com/products/steven-feld-the-time-of-bells-1 (accessed 22
September 2013).
71. New Grove, “Motet.”
72. See Dan. 13:42–43 (Vulgate); Sus. 1:42 –43 (King James Apocrypha).
73. Page, “Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 149.
76. Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light.
77. Oteri, “Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today,” sec. 6.
78. Page, “Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets,” 153–54 (my emphasis).
79. Einhorn, libretto, Voices of Light.
80. Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc, 53, 59.

81. Warner, Joan of Arc, 118.
82. Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire, 144 (my emphasis).
83. Quoted in Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc, 56.
84. Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc, 61.
85. See Yervasi, “Faces of Joan,” 16.
86. Dreyer in Double Reflection, 201 and 50.

87. Joseph Delteil, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris: B. Grasset, 1925).
88. Margolis, “Trial by Passion,” 464.
89. Wilhelmina Van Ness, “Joseph Delteil: The Passion of Joan of Arc,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1975): 292– 93.
91. Van Ness, “Joseph Delteil,” 294.
92. Tony Pipolo, “Metaphorical Structures in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” Millennium
Film Journal 19 (1987): 56.
94. David Bordwell, Filmguide to “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” Indiana University Press
Filmguide Series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 14.
95. Margolis, “Trial by Passion,” 468 and 470.
98. Bill Scalia, “Contrasting Visions of a Saint: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan
of Arc and Luc Besson’s The Messenger,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2004):
181 –82.
99. Quoted in Schrader, Transcendental Style, 116.
100. Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in
Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 239.
101. Quoted in Laura Marcus, introduction to Part 3: “The Contribution of H. D.,” in
Close Up, 1927–3: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura
Marcus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 97; or “numb and raw,” see H. D.,
“Joan of Arc” in Close Up, 1927– 3, 132.
102. American Film Criticism, From the Beginnings to “Citizen Kane”: Reviews of Significant
Films at the Time They First Appeared, ed. Stanley Kauffmann with Bruce Henstell
(New York: Liveright, 1972), 216, 215.
103. Pipolo, “Metaphorical Structures,” 56.
104. Britta Martensen-Larsen, “Inspirationen fra middelalderens miniaturer,”
Kosmorama: Det Danske Filmmuseums Tidsskrift 39, no. 204 (1993): 26– 31.
105. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972; reprint,
Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1988), 141.
106. Quoted in David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 213.
107. Potter, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” 29.
108. Einhorn described his approach as “very, very pared down, at least for my style and
many other people’s styles. . . . It’s very stripped down and it was that way on purpose.”
Oteri, “Richard Einhorn: Yesterday Is Not Today,” sec. 7.
109. Dreyer in Double Reflection, 144.

110. Ole Storm, introduction to Four Screenplays, by Carl Theodor Dreyer
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 9, quote on 12.
111. Kirk Bond, “The World of Carl Dreyer,” Film Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1965): 32; see
also 37– 38. In a 1950 radio interview, Dreyer defended his choices, arguing that English
soldiers’ steel helmets and monks’ horn-rimmed glasses appropriately depicted both his
own times and earlier ones. Dreyer in Double Reflection, 144.
112. Dreyer, Foreward to Four Screenplays, 7.
113. Bordwell, Filmguide, 14.
114. Dreyer in Double Reflection, 145 and 184.
115. For example, Dreyer’s biographers Jean and Dale Drum define the effect of La
Passion as one of a temporal concatenation: “The terror, the naive wisdom and the reality
of Joan as a woman, not as a saint or a symbol, was no less moving in the twentieth
century than it would have been in the fifteenth.” Jean Drum and Dale D. Drum, My
Only Great Passion: The Life and Films of Carl Th. Dreyer, Scarecrow Filmmakers Series 68
(Lanham and London: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 127.
116. Dreyer in Double Reflection, 125.
117. David Bordwell, “The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film,” Cinema Journal
11, no. 2 (1972): 10; see also Dreyer in Double Reflection, 157.
118. Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form: Essays in
Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 62.
119. Raymond Carney, Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.
120. Bordwell, Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 66.
124. Pipolo, “Metaphorical Structures,” passim.
125. Carney, Speaking the Language of Desire, 111.
127. See, for example, Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
128. Bordwell, Filmguide, 42.

130. Bordwell, Filmguide, 45; see also Bordwell, Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, 79, which
describes the shots of the judges in the first scene as “heads roll[ing] through the frame as
if on a conveyor belt.”
132. Einhorn remarks upon this aspect of Joan’s trial in the Voices of Light liner notes,
“Although the Inquisitors did not physically harm Joan, she was shown the instruments of

torture.”
133. Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of
Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 158–72.
134. Bordwell, Filmguide, 44 –45.
135. Einhorn, liner notes, Voices of Light.
136. The Writings of Margaret of Oingt: Medieval Prioress and Mystic, trans. and ed.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Newburyport: Focus Information Group, 1990), 12.
137. Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of
Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 218 (my italics). For
further discussion see chap. 5, “The Musical Body in Pain: Passion, Percussion, and
Melody in Thirteenth-Century Religious Practice,” 191– 258.
138. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 191–258.
139. Caroline Bynum, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,”
Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 26 (emphasis original).
141. This paragraph relies on Pipolo, “Metaphorical Structures” 56 –57.
143. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 366–67, quoted in Plantinga, “Scene of
Empathy,” 253, 254.
144. See S. M. Eisenstein, W. I. Pudowkin [Pudovkin], and G. V. Alexandroff
[Alexandrov], “The Sound Film: A Statement from the U.S.S.R,” in Close Up, 1927–3:
Cinema and Modernism, 83 –84.
145. See James Donald, introduction to Part 2: “From Silence to Sound’,” in Close Up,
1927–3: Cinema and Modernism, 80 –81.
146. Eisenstein et al., “Sound Film,” 83 –84.
147. Eisenstein, “Dialectic Approach,” 54 –55 and 61 –62.
148. Pipolo, “Metaphorical Structures in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” 62 –66.
149. Kauffman and Henstell, American Film Criticism, 215.
150. Kauffman and Henstell, American Film Criticism.

152. Eisenstein, “Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” 49.
153. Warner, Joan of Arc, 119.
154. “video te volantem juxta terram,” quoted in Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc, 54.
155. See the discussion in Sackville-West, Saint Joan of Arc, 266–72.
156. Meltzer, For Fear of the Fire, 18.
157. Gwendolyn Morgan, “Modern Mystics, Medieval Saints,” in Film and Fiction:

Reviewing the Middle Ages, ed. Tom Shippey with Martin Arnold, Studies in Medievalism
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), 49 –50.
158. Wegman, “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” 136.
158. Pesce, “Beyond Glossing,” 37.

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Polyphonies of Sound and Space: Motet,

Montage, Voices of Light, and La

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doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdt013 96:296 – 330

Despite its roots in medieval practice, Voices clearly appealed to

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Motets in Medieval and Modern Minds

typically featured two upper voices—designated duplum/motetus, and

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refinements of skills. It is the custom for motets to be sung in their holiday

As de Grocheio implies, motets inspired a variety of listening experiences

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Grafting, Glossing, and Sampling

additive constructions enclosed contemporary commentaries, addressing

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As medieval nobility commonly enjoyed such activities in their gardens,

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The lead interrogator’s line of questioning—the form in which

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her inquisitors’ attempts to extort her confession, propelling the clerics to

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Einhorn’s treatment reinstated the thirteenth-century motet’s exploration

The motet’s temporal innovation and fluidity appealed to Einhorn

As I was developing the piece, I recalled my studies of medieval musical

In 2001, Einhorn similarly recalled his intent to erase boundaries between

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Voices’s medieval-style weaving together of separate temporalities con-

triggered her clearest perception of angels’ voices. Church bells were a

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After twenty-five years of recording rainforest soundscapes in Papua New

voices) often acted as a “ground” in medieval motet practice too, playing

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“fulcrum of her [Joan’s] personality”81 was her apprehension of these

In her experiential context, she is surrounded by academic clerics, and she

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La Passion and History

engaging medieval models, evoking motets, and building upon preexisting

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function establishes Dreyer’s visual reference points as emblematic of,

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Such analogies concord with explanations offered by Dreyer’s art

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Montage, Sense, and Space

a rich polyphony of views, angles, and continuities in physical space. In

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accelerates, highlighting Joan’s alternatives—torture or confession—by

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Caroline Walker Bynum explains this concept as physical, sensual, and

Mystical women . . . spoke of selves (body and soul together) yearning in

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Counterpoint and Synaesthesia

Eisenstein, W. I. Alexandrov, and G. V. Pudovkin. In 1928, the year of

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Above and Beyond

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played by Antonin Artaud, extends a crucifix on a long pole to her, slant-

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