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On keeping things as books
No full textMusic, literature, history. These things are not quite alike. But in Europe, before the advent of recording machines thatmade it possible for sounds to be recorded and played back, the three activities relied on the same technology ofpreservation. They were kept in/as books. Bookishness, in European and colonial imaginaries, was an often idealized,powerful means of keeping things from slipping away. An understanding of bookish things as a repository can beevinced in laws that required preserving a copy of newly published literary works and music for the benefit ofposterity; or in popular novels where a book featured as the chronicler (both recorder and narrator) of its ownadventures, beyond the lifespans of individual users. Scholars have paid specialist attention to the ontologicaldifferences among music, literature, and history when they are kept as books. Discipline-specific trainings andconversations tend to emphasize how different these objects and practices are. Yet focusing on their shared mode ofbookish preservation offers other rewards. Our multi-authored article is a creative experiment in bringing togethermusicologists, literary scholars, and historians to test the potential, for our own fields and with implications for otherhumanities disciplines, of foregrounding this technological convergence. We propose the more capacious categories ofbookkeepers (people who keep things as books) and cultures of note-taking (whether glossing a textbook or notatingmusic) as fruitful avenues to avoid writing the artificially separate histories of creation versus consumption, publicversus personal, authoritative versus amateurish, or artistic versus documentary practices. Music, broadly conceived,and the nineteenth-century album (a book of blank pages to keep verses, music, memories, and many more things)serve as the starting point for our reflections. Both exhibit a tangential connection to the normative codes of whatRoger Chartier called“the order of books.” In considering actors/artefacts/acts at the very margins of textuality, orexisting in a perverse relationship with bookishness, our aim is to redraw the knowledge-making structures we use toinvestigate our objects of study, calling attention to the intermedial and social practices, and cultures of remembrance,in which they are historically imbricated
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Repertory Migration in the Czech Crown Lands, 1570-1630
Get PDFThis dissertation studies the production and transmission of musical repertories in the Czech Crown Lands between 1570 and 1630. The region had long been closely linked to bordering lands, but immigration from other countries to the region escalated in the final decades of the sixteenth century with the arrival of the imperial court in Prague, particularly from Spain, Italy, and the Low Lands. The period I have chosen for study thus encompasses this time of unusually intensive travel, migration, and cultural exchange, with the reign of Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol as King of Bohemia at the beginning, and the start of the Thirty Years War at its end. My object has been to track cultural movement and the mobility of musicians, performance styles, and genres that accompanied and even precipitated it. I treat music at the court of the Habsburgs and the tastes we can presume reigned there among the international group of nobles that made up court society. But as a work of cultural history, this study also reaches out beyond the Rudolfine court to take stock of the broader cultural terrain of the Czech Crown Lands. Chapter 1, "The Music Book Market in Bohemia and Moravia," gives a broad account of the transmission of musical texts in manuscript and print, including studies of local printers, the distribution of music books printed in Germany and Venice, booksellers in Prague and beyond, and what we can discern of the collecting of music by literary brotherhoods, Latin schools, churches, monasteries, and private individuals not directly associated with the court. Chapter 2, "Italians in Bohemia," circles in closer to the court and its strikingly Italianate tastes in music (since many nobles studied abroad in Italy). I begin with a brief history of Prague's substantial Italian community, which included stonemasons, architects, and merchants in addition to the Italian musicians at court, among whom Italian trumpeters held a particular monopoly. The core of the chapter studies the Italianate output of court composers, both Italians and northerners, with detailed studies of madrigals by Alessandro Orologio and the canzoni napolitane of Giovannni Battista Pinello. Their local production for the court at Prague shows how they modified their approach to this Italian genre to better suit the tastes of their central European audiences, which included courtiers and consumers of print.Chapter 3, "The Reception of Italian Music in Bohemia and Moravia," takes in six decades of Italian music reception in Bohemia and Moravia with specific concentration on court culture. Beginning with the wedding of Maximilian II's daughter Anna to Philipp II, King of Spain, in 1570 and ending with the coronation of Ferdinand II's wife Eleonora Gonzaga and his son Ferdinand as King and Queen of Bohemia in 1627, I show the essential role played by monarchs and the Austrian and Czech nobility in instilling a local taste among aristocrats for Italian music and theater, including the commedia dell'arte.Chapter 4, "The Quodlibet," closes the dissertation with a study of the genre that represents the multiethnic nature of Prague and the Czech Crown Lands most vividly--the polylingual quodlibet, in which quotes from tunes popular with audiences are woven together in polyphonic settings by composers. Thus, they record not only the great variety of music that was enjoyed by consumers of polyphony--German lied, sacred songs in German and Czech, Italian villanelle and napolitane, and Latin drinking songs--but also bear witness to the convergence of these languages, musics, and the cultures they reference in what was truly one of the most densely international regions of early modern Europe
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A Second Refuge: French Opera and the Huguenot Migration, c. 1680 - c. 1710
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the brief flowering of French opera on stages outside of France around the turn of the eighteenth century. I attribute the sudden rise and fall of interest in the genre to a large and noisy migration event--the flight of some 200,000 Huguenots from France. Dispersed across Western Europe and beyond, Huguenots maintained extensive networks that encouraged the exchange of ideas and of music. And it was precisely in the great centers of the Second Refuge that French opera was performed.Following the wide-ranging career path of Huguenot impresario, novelist, poet, and spy Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée, I construct an alternative history of French opera by tracing its circulation and transformation along Huguenot migration routes. This history attributes the lack of a sustained tradition beyond la France not to the genre's musical or dramatic forms or its allegiance to French politics, but rather to the changing social and religious pressures on its primary foreign audience. My primary argument is that only after they left France did the Huguenots--and French opera--become identifiably "French," for one of the most significant effects of this migration event was the contesting and reconfiguration of the nature of Frenchness itself. Once abroad, the Huguenots were viewed by their hosts first and foremost as French. Similarly, the appearance of French opera outside of its place of origin contributed to distinctions between various "national" styles of composition precisely because of its placement in comparison with other forms of spectacular entertainment. Engaging questions of translation, performance, mobility, and reception, I show that the nostalgia for French cultural products experienced by these displaced persons, as well as the received opinion amongst host societies that French spectacle was of a higher order, created opportunities for entrepreneurs and contributed to the canonization of Lully and the codification of the French style. And French opera, because of its associations with Paris and its focus on spectacle and group expression, became an important instrument in discourses of identity and cultural competence abroad. However, the shifting status of French immigrants during this period limited the usefulness--and indeed the feasibility--of actual productions. In sum, I argue that the opera was itself a site of refuge that could exist only as long as the French community abroad remained culturally distinct
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Musical Affective Economies and the Wars of Religion in Lyon
Get PDFThis dissertation examines musical affective economies surrounding the Wars of Religion in Lyon. Expanding on affect theory that considers how emotions stick to and slide from subjects and objects, this research asks how musical affect also sank into bodies and ontologies, serving to both bond and break the community of Lyon. I consider how the boundaries of community were delimited through musical theatre in the early sixteenth century, demonstrating how techniques of communitas were essential to performing this community. I explore how the principal of Lyon’s Collège de la Trinité made use of these techniques, both in his pedagogical theatre, and in an elite musical print aimed at religious reconciliation. From here, I examine how these techniques began to be used towards divisive ends, as Protestants confronted Catholics with psalms and “spiritual songs.” A group of martyr songs, disseminated amongst both elite and more popular audiences, activated the Protestant habitus through such genres, putting the visceral experiences of five young martyrs of Lyon into oral circulation. The subversiveness of such “spiritual songs” within orthodox martyrological practices underscores the musicality of how the theatre of martyrdom was memorialized. Polemic was especially propagated through the inflamed populace in the guise of “chansons nouvelles,” contrafacta songs that were “sung to the tune of” extant popular tunes. Exploring how this genre engaged with contemporary notions and concerns about anger, I demonstrate how the timbres (song bases) of these “chansons nouvelles” accumulated affect across the Wars of Religion as they were adhered to violent Catholic invective. Finally, I turn to Lyon’s proto-social welfare project, permanently established in 1534, the Aumône Générale. Interrogating how the institution subjected the city’s impoverished residents to a Catholic economy of faith, I focus on how the hyper-marking of the forced musical processions of the poor would serve to facilitate their eventual confinement in the seventeenth century. Positioned within the emergent subfield of music and conflict studies, this dissertation argues that, because of its very ephemeral and emotional qualities, music was a vital force in cultivating both solidarity and animosity during the tumult of the Wars of Religion
Musician, Neapolitan, Migrant: Origins of the Seventeenth-Century Diaspora of Neapolitan Music and Musicians
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Cultures of Music Print in Hamburg, ca. 1550-1630
Get PDFThis dissertation investigates the intersections of music, print, devotion, and city culture in Hamburg around 1600, a period of general prosperity for the city that also saw a new flourishing of the print industry throughout Germany. The time period under consideration begins with the debut of printed Lutheran hymnals in Hamburg at mid-century, and culminates in the career of Hieronymus Praetorius (1560-1629), whose publications of sacred polyphony were among the first of their kind in the North. Hamburg is chosen not only because of its prominence as a musical center, but also because of its autonomous political position as a Hanseatic city, which distinctly influenced the cultural climate in which this music originated.Combining methodologies of cultural history and the sociology of texts with traditional methods of musical and textual analysis, I link the upsurge of Hamburg's musical cultures around 1600 to the contemporary flowering of print and the book in the German-speaking lands. Musical books - hymnals, liturgical compendia, printed collections of vocal polyphony, and pamphlets containing occasional motets - took part in larger cultural programs of devotional education, both in the humanistic climate of the Latin school and in vernacular Protestant lay culture. At the same time, these works and the music they contained were integral expressions of a Hanseatic civic culture that exulted in autonomy, yet freely adopted aristocratic modes of representation and ceremonial. The printed vocal works of Hieronymus Praetorius and his son Jacob Praetorius (1586-1651) take center stage in my investigation, both because of the instrumental role of these composers in the musical life of Hamburg around 1600 and because of their legacies in musical print. In particular, case studies of Hieronymus's three motet collections (Cantiones sacrae, 1599, 1607, and 1622; Cantiones variae, 1618; Cantiones novae officiosae, 1625) and Jacob Praetorius's individually printed wedding motets (1601-1635) delineate essential characteristics of the function of the motet in early modern North Germany. Taking surviving imprints as its starting point, then, this study essays a cultural history of music in Hamburg, offering a new perspective on one of North Germany's leading musical cities at a pivotal period
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The Contrafacta of Thomas Watson and Simon Goulart: Resignifying the Polyphonic Song in 16th-Century England and France
No full textExamining the polyphonic contrafacta of two late 16th-century writers—the Calvinist pastor Simon Goulart (1543-1628) and the English poet Thomas Watson (1555-1592)—I consider how these two authors employed the practice of song re-texting to make prestigious music from another culture accessible and acceptable to a new community of singers. Focusing on the Sonets Chrestiens (1578-80) of Goulart and the Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590) of Watson, I demonstrate the importance of contrafaction to the development of new poetic genres, as well as to the formation of new religious or national identities.
The first chapter investigates various types of contrafactum writing and singing in France. From simple tunes to the complex polyphony of Guillaume Boni and Anthoine de Bertrand, employed in the Sonets Chrestiens, I consider how different musical forms can influence or constrain the re-texting of a song in different ways. In other words, what aspects of rhythm, melody, and harmony make a song “open” to being sung with different lyrics, and how is the sense of a song altered by the use of a contrafactum text? In the second chapter, I establish the Sonets Chrestiens’ crucial role within Goulart’s larger project of inaugurating a Genevan school of learned verse and polyphony in the 1570s and 80s—both an artistic response to the poets and composers associated with the French court, especially the Pléiade, as well as a material response to the luxurious music books of the royal printers Le Roy & Ballard. By judicious replacement of key terms, allied with allusions to the original lyrics by Pierre de Ronsard within the Christian narrative of Goulart’s new texts, the pastor stages an intertextual penitential itinerary through his practice of contrafaction. Ronsard’s Petrarchan love sonnets are first revealed as examples of sin and vanity, then corrected and superseded by contrafacta modeling the path away from these worldly passions. To conclude the first part of the dissertation, I briefly compare the Sonets Chrestiens to Goulart’s final contrafactum collection, the 1594 Cinquante pseaumes de David.
In the third chapter, I turn to Thomas Watson. I first situate the poet among his contemporaries in 1580s England, demonstrating how Watson’s verse develops from an aesthetic of “faithfulness” and literal translation of continental and classical models towards a more confidently appropriative and nationalistic practice in his later pastoral works. Contrary to earlier studies of the Italian Madrigalls Englished, the final chapter argues that Watson’s contrafacta, while indeed far from faithful translations, in fact remain deeply invested in the appropriation and subversion of his chosen madrigals’ original verse. Most crucially, the Italian Madrigalls Englished carefully naturalizes the pastoral lyrics employed by the celebrated composer Luca Marenzio—lyrics originally meant at least in part to evoke the Roman milieu of Marenzio’s patron. Watson’s contrafacta equally engage with the madrigals’ representation of characteristic formal elements of Italian verse, manipulating the underlay, phrasing, and rhythms of Marenzio’s madrigals, in order that this music might accommodate the patterns of native English prosody. Ultimately, the Italian Madrigalls Englished argues for both the English language’s capacity to assimilate foreign prosody and verse form, as well as the Italian madrigal’s capacity to accommodate native English rhythms, and native English topical concerns
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Music and Health Regimens in Early Modern England
No full textThis project is a cultural history of music’s role in household healthcare in early modern England. Much of the research on music’s medicinal powers in this period, especially in England, focuses on theories of the body and sound exchanged in university circles and through printed texts. Missing, however, are granular accounts of everyday musical activities that were meant to have a restorative effect on the body or mind, for which we must turn to the material traces of the domestic sphere. I argue that even as music was broadly touted as physically beneficial in print sources, especially in music anthologies full of bawdy songs, individuals tended to gather their own musical repertories and assemble them alongside medicinal material. Such collecting practices structure what I call “musical health regimens”: bodily and household management involving a combination of musical and medicinal knowledge. Drawing from book historical methodology and history of science, I consider not only the musical and medicinal contents of archival sources, but also how they were read, assembled, and used, the status of their music notation, and how disciplinary boundaries have partitioned their diverse musical, medicinal, and nutritional contents.
I shift musicology’s focus from theoretical discourse about music’s healing powers to the idiosyncrasies of individual, everyday practice by examining well-known but under-contextualized sources, such as anthologies of popular songs advertised as “pills to purge melancholy,” alongside archival sources completely new to musicology: music housed within recipe books for food and medicine. Early modern recipe books were home to the personalized music collections of individuals who sang hymns and psalms alone or with their families for daily prayer, and who fumbled their way through roughhewn cittern tablature for dance tunes and ballads as part of preventative, dietetic medicine. These amateurs inscribed songs alongside recipes for plague cures and pies and bought printed song anthologies that likened their contents to prefabricated remedies. By examining music’s utilitarian purpose in the daily lives of early modern people, music’s affective powers to move the body and its passions can be understood as a discourse of household care.
Chapter One charts the intellectual history of music’s medicinal qualities in this period, with a particular focus on interrogating the secondary literature’s preference for the works of Ficino and other learned authors over trade writers and lay knowledge. Chapter Two is a short introduction to a source previously unknown to musicology: the corpus of manuscript medicine and cookery recipe books that contain music. Here I present a typology of the many ways music can appear in these books, an overview of the repertories present, notational styles, organizational techniques, and cataloguing and searchability challenges. Chapter Three presents case studies on music in recipe books in a practice of household care, showing how compilers, especially women, included texts for psalms, hymns, and sometimes ballads to tend to the health of their households, emphasizing the interconnectedness of music, health, and spiritual well-being. Chapter Four considers cases of music notation found within manuscript recipe books, including lute and cittern tablature, examining how music was gathered, inscribed, and used. This chapter argues that music notation’s similarity and proximity to recipes in these books gave it the function of a recipe for early modern compilers; both are sparse, personalized, and embodied inscriptions of ephemeral household practices.
The fifth and final chapter turns from manuscript sources to consider the better-known printed music anthologies advertising their contents as medicinal. Here, I suggest that the nascent pharmaceutical industry influenced music publishers’ and printers’ language around music’s healing potential; while such language draws on the real connections between music, health, compilation, and consumption already explored in this dissertation, I ultimately argue that the bawdy contents of supposedly medicinal printed anthologies are a far cry from the repertories found in recipe books long before and after this printed tradition
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