Immaculate Conflicts

Abstract This chapter explores the embodied musical world of nuns in early modern New Spain, as it relates the concept of immaculate sounds to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and the ideal of virginity. The sonification of virginity and the Virgin Mary became especially meaningful for nuns who vowed to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception upon professing. Mary was framed as a resonator of God’s voice, sonified and tied to the Incarnation through the daily singing of her Magnificat, which was essential to belief in her virginal status. The concept of virginity was moreover rhetorically associated with an aesthetically appealing imagined sound. In this regard, this chapter also shows that the conflict between the Church’s virginal ideal for nuns and the reality of non-virgin and indigenous women wishing to profess as nuns was sublimated to yield immaculate sounds.