The Body in Cinquecento Music-Making
I read music theoretical works, poetry and accounts of music-making for Cinquecento concepts relating to the “musicking body”. I am interested in exploring post-structuralist and feminist ideas of the body in relation to these models. This specifically arises from my unhappiness with McClary’s model of performance in which the performers apparently lack agency. This idea is very much in its development stage but will form a part of my work for the bodies/music project.Sixteenth-century Italian masculinities and music at the court of Ferrara
I demonstrate the challenges to male authority contained in some of Castellino’s songs and relate these to Ercole’s feelings of vulnerability in the face of his wife’s religious sensibilities and ‘resolute Frenchness’ (the phrase is Charmarie Blaisdell’s). I argue that by fashioning a rustic other through patronage of Castellino and the Paduan playwright Ruzante Ercole could also fashion a noble self, and that Ercole’s probable sponsorship of Castellino’s book allowed him to display an ability to contain criticism and to exhibit masculine power. (Currently being edited by Massimo Ossi for an essay collection with OUP.)Grateful Friends, True Friends: Gifts of Music and Poetry Associated with Girolamo Fenaruolo
I discuss music and poetry associated with the cleric Girolamo Fenaruolo, exploring the different types of friendship mentioned, and the symbolic nature of a gift of a music book. If the gift of a book between friends is a token of the friend’s body, as Alan Bray has argued, what (if anything) might it mean for the book to be a collection of songs that the friends are to sound with their bodies? (To be published in a forthcoming essay collection edited by Gioia Filocamo and M. Jennifer Bloxam.)Sprezzatura and Musical Eroticism
I demonstrate that sprezzatura, the ability to be two things at once (skilful and unskilful, decent and indecent), is related to the ability to construct two things at once: the categories of high and low. I analyse dialect songs by Antonino Barges and Perissone Cambio associated with Domenico Venier’s literary ridotto which reflect both of these aspects of sprezzatura. Barges’s dialect songs depend upon metaphors that simultaneously conceal and reveal sexual content and suggest gynosodomitical relations while Perissone Cambio’s artful word setting exposes sexual obscenities otherwise hidden in the text. Both composers violate Pietro Bembo’s discrete stylistic categories for vernacular poetry by setting "low" dialect texts in learned polyphony. (Drafted; to be submitted to JAMS.)Social Decorum and Sexual Representations in the Cinquecento
I examine the language used to describe sexual representations in present-day scholarship and in the sixteenth-century. I draw upon the work of the art historian Bette Talvacchia and augment her discussion of decency in relation to sexual representation by referring to Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo. I posit that the potential for different responses to sexual representation is related not only to the content of the representation but also to the social status of the viewer and the context of the viewing. I apply this to texts relevant to musicology, especially Antonfrancesco Doni’s Dialogo della musica. (Status: currently being revised for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.)Fashioning ‘Foreign’ Courtly Femininity in Italy
In 1543, Renée de France was the dedicatee of a collection of six voice canzoni francese by Jacques Buus (Venice: Gardano). My initial perusal of the partbooks suggests that this might be Renée’s answer to the issues raised in Castellino’s villotta collection dedicated to Ercole in 1541. Ercole was reportedly annoyed by Renée’s ‘resolute Frenchness’ (the phrase is Charmarie Blaisdell’s): a collection of French songs seems to reaffirm her intention to stick to the French language. Renée was ‘other’ in nationality and ‘other’ in religious inclination. What does this collection say about her self-fashioning as a duchess in Ferrara?Status: This is a new project that grows from my doctoral research; I am editing the partbooks, and I already have under my belt much of the secondary literature on Renée.
Gentlemanly Conduct, Memory, and Music
I study gender identities, shamefulness and the history of memory by examining the repercussions of a shameful event (bigamy) in the history of two elite Florentine families, the Della Casa and the Rucellai. Since later members of these families, the maternal uncle and nephew Giovanni Della Casa and Pandolfo Rucellai, were the dedicatees of secular vocal music from opposite ends of the conventional hierarchy (Rore’s madrigals and anonymous dialect song), I wish to test the history of memory theory with respect to their own conduct and to seek connections between life and music. This will result in an article.Status: I have written a fairly substantial account of Pandolfo Rucellai and his relationship with his uncle, substantiated with extracts from Della Casa’s letters, and I am currently reading various histories and theories of memory.
Transgressing Boundaries: Rore and the Erotics of Counterpoint
This paper analyses certain of Rore’s madrigals and motets in light of the findings of Laurie Stras and Bonnie Blackburn that Cinquecento music theory associated certain contrapuntal practices with certain erotic practices; frequently, composers use these contrapuntal practices to highlight double entendres in a text.The musical encoding of textual eroticism in sixteenth-century Italian secular song by means of B flats and contrapuntal and modal irregularities, which has been amply demonstrated in recent research by Laurie Stras and Bonnie Blackburn, can also be documented in the work of Cipriano de Rore, who in 'Non è lasso martire' and 'Se ben il duol' from the Quarto libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1557) transgresses conventions of counterpoint in sections that are open to erotic readings, and also employs suggestive B flats on appropriate words. However, similar passages occur in his settings of Petrarch's 'Vergine' texts in the Terzo libro de madrigali a cinque voci (1548) and in his settings from the Song of Songs. In each case the transgression accompanies a word that in secular contexts might have an erotic meaning: for example, the consecutive fifths at 'pena' (a word with sexual connotations in many secular erotic texts) in 'Vergine, quante lagrim'ho già sparte'. I demonstrate that the conventions of musical eroticism established for the secular repertoire are also applicable to spiritual music, and I consider the possibility of intertextual relations between the two.
Status: Being incorporated into book project.
Sex and the Cinquecento City: Musical Eroticism in Ferrara, Venice and the Veneto
This project extends my theoretical and contextual work on mid-cinquecento musical eroticism, gender, decency and nobility in relation to the villotta to encompass other vocal genres in northern Italy, and will result in a monograph. Musical eroticism encompasses equivocal texts that employ a vast erotic lexicon and part-writing that infringes conventional contrapuntal procedures. I favour a New Historicist approach to music, which views all culture as text for analysis and attempts to understand that culture both from an ‘indigenous’ viewpoint and an external, analytic position; to this end I draw upon diverse theoretical perspectives, including Bakhtinian heteroglossia, to scrutinise the multivocality of equivocal poetry and its musical settings. I will analyse a corpus of secular madrigals and Song of Songs settings associated with Ferrarese courts and Venetian and Venetan academies, and demonstrate that erotic musical transgressions in madrigals were adopted from the so-called ‘lighter’ genres such as the villotta and villanesca. I will show that a similar erotic and musical language appears in the chansons associated with the court of Renée de France in Ferrara. Finally, my examination of Song of Songs settings by composers associated with Ferrara and Venice will demonstrate the use of music-theoretical transgressions in Italian sacred music and demonstrate their association with the erotic.Status: Drafting book proposal.
Contemporary Composers and Canons: Performativity and Representation
Recent sociological studies show there are fewer restrictions on certain elements of physical appearance for women than men in modern British and U.S. society. The smaller range of variation in male composers’ images associates them with stability, while the greater variation in female composers’ images associates them with instability. A reading of concert reviews and interviews demonstrates the impact of these presentations of identity upon the contemporaneous reception of the composer. Moreover, the comparatively "unruly" female composers might not sit easily with musicology’s disciplinary requirements, which value the stable and constant over the unstable. This will initially result in an article but there is considerable scope for expanding this to a larger-scale research project.Status: Being drafted for conference & essay collection.
Early music, modernity and whiteness
Links the practice and growth of early music in Ireland to the production of modernity and whiteness.Status: Research & drafting stage.
Striking Terror: Music of The Dark Knight (co-authored with Han-earl Park)
An examination of the latest Batman movie as a comment on the USA and UK response to 9/11, and an exploration of its homophobic equation of homosexuality with terrorism. The Joker's theme represents him as a timeless figure, while the movie portrays him as a timeless terrorist figure of a kind that Britain (personified by Alfred) has faced before. Taking its lead from Frank Miller, the Joker 'queers' Batman but whereas in Miller the Joker-Batman pairing is homoerotic, here it is Batman and Harvey Dent/Two-Face who are paired: initially part of a homoerotic triangle linked through Rachel Dawes, the Joker misleads Batman into rescuing the damsel in distress, Dent. Dent is 'queered' through a hospital conversation with the Joker (dressed as a nurse) that turns Dent into Two-Face and eventually leads him literally into Batman's arms.Status: Research & drafting stage.
Her Majesty, Queen and Intertextuality
An examination of Brian May’s performance of “God Save the Queen” from the roof of Buckingham Palace during the jubilee celebrations.Status: On hold for the moment.
Imaginary space in select songs by Duran Duran (co-authored with Han-earl Park)
The sound editing of many recordings produces a spacing of musicians that is impossible to realise in an ‘unplugged’ performance.Status: On hold for the moment.
Performing Readings and Reading Performances: Cinquecento Dialect Songs, Then and Now
An examination of recent performances of Cinquecento dialect songs, particularly I Fagiolini's performance of songs by Andrea Gabrieli.Status: On hold for the moment.