This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of wo... more This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, thecomplaintearose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded fromfin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by thecomplaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.
A first glance, the subjects taken up in several new books on early modern Europe seem to announc... more A first glance, the subjects taken up in several new books on early modern Europe seem to announce a slide toward the banal in women’s studies. McIver “looks at women as collectors of precious material goods, as organizers of the early modern home, and as decorators of its interior” (dust jacket). Harness studies the involvement of Medici women in organizing musical festivities in early-seventeenth-century Florence. Gordon imagines the voices of women whose singing titillated Italian audiences circa 1600. And Phillippy considers—among other things—“women who paint themselves with cosmetics” (dust jacket). Home décor? Parties? Makeup? Obviously I jest. But to make the joke is important, for it suggests the breath of fresh air these books bring to the history of women in early modern Europe. Of course, my title also parodies the risk of studying ephemera. To write a book that puts painting in dialogue with cosmetics hazards frivolity. But carefully argued, looking deep into the rouge pot can cast oil paintings in an entirely new light. It takes courage, wit, and imagination
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1995
Chanson texts featuring birds form a unique nexus of voices in the sexual discourse pervading the... more Chanson texts featuring birds form a unique nexus of voices in the sexual discourse pervading the Parisian repertory of the late sixteenth century. The eroticism of these chansons is often expressed according to the older poetic conventions of unrequited courtly love and its carnivalesque abasement focusing on the lower body, or by a synthesis of the two characterized by the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard's sensual lyricism tended to employ avian imagery in support of a naturalized philosophy of love encouraging sexuality. Birds, considered to have a libido surpassing that of humans, became a favored theme, and composers set many of these Ronsardian texts. In the second part of this essay, I contextualize the reception of the erotic chanson among France's upper classes, relating it to the crisis of the French aristocracy and the noble aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The nouveaux nobles, or bourgeois that ennobled themselves with the purchase of seigneurial titles, had ...
... versity of Chicago Early Music Study Group. I would like to thank the members of it for their... more ... versity of Chicago Early Music Study Group. I would like to thank the members of it for their helpful comments, particu-larly Cathy Elias, Michael McGrade, Stefano Mengozzi, and Stephen Miller. I should also like to thank Martha ...
Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters ... more Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1–2). In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themse...
A substantial collection of Cinque- and Seicento prints lies hidden in the Museo Internazionale e... more A substantial collection of Cinque- and Seicento prints lies hidden in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna. Practically unknown to scholars, at 274 titles it is among the largest collections dating from the Renaissance. The fortunate series of events that account for its survival are retraced, beginning with its formation c. 1580 and its purchase by Padre Giambattista Martini (1706–84) from the Pagliarini booksellers in Rome with the aid of Girolamo Chiti, and ending with its partial dispersion in the nineteenth century. A complete index of the collection is included, together with a list of the unica.
The goal of this series is to foster scholarship on campus by providing new faculty members with ... more The goal of this series is to foster scholarship on campus by providing new faculty members with the opportunity to share their research interest with their colleagues and students. We see the role of an academic library not only as a place where bibliographic materials are acquired, stored, and made accessible to the intellectual community, but also as an institution that is an active participant in the generation of knowledge. New faculty members represent areas of scholarship the University wishes to develop or further strengthen. They are also among the best minds in their respective fields of specialization. The Morrison Library will provide an environment where the latest research trends and research questions in these areas can be presented and discussed. Editorial Board
A virtual debate organized by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko for Perspectives, with Bojana Cvejic... more A virtual debate organized by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko for Perspectives, with Bojana Cvejić, Marc Downie, Mark Franko, Paul Kaiser, Benjamin Piekut, Frédéric Pouillaude, Kate van Orden et Edward C. Warburton
Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Ch... more Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New Cultural History of Music) Kate van Orden Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New Cultural History of Music) Kate van Orden Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable crosssection of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not read their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.
This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of wo... more This essay studies a large repertory of French laments (complaintes,) written in the voices of women. As a feminine counterpart to masculine love lyric, thecomplaintearose from an alternative poetics, treating subjects excluded fromfin amors, such as death, crime, and war. Essentially, lyric assigned erotic longing to men and mourning to women. The unusual subject matter accommodated by thecomplaintes, coupled with a set of material and musical forms locating them amid the cultures of cheap print, psalmody, and street song, ultimately embroiled them in the battles of the religious wars. Thus female voices came to trumpet confessional politics in songs that levied lyric, gender, and faith to serve in civil war.
A first glance, the subjects taken up in several new books on early modern Europe seem to announc... more A first glance, the subjects taken up in several new books on early modern Europe seem to announce a slide toward the banal in women’s studies. McIver “looks at women as collectors of precious material goods, as organizers of the early modern home, and as decorators of its interior” (dust jacket). Harness studies the involvement of Medici women in organizing musical festivities in early-seventeenth-century Florence. Gordon imagines the voices of women whose singing titillated Italian audiences circa 1600. And Phillippy considers—among other things—“women who paint themselves with cosmetics” (dust jacket). Home décor? Parties? Makeup? Obviously I jest. But to make the joke is important, for it suggests the breath of fresh air these books bring to the history of women in early modern Europe. Of course, my title also parodies the risk of studying ephemera. To write a book that puts painting in dialogue with cosmetics hazards frivolity. But carefully argued, looking deep into the rouge pot can cast oil paintings in an entirely new light. It takes courage, wit, and imagination
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1995
Chanson texts featuring birds form a unique nexus of voices in the sexual discourse pervading the... more Chanson texts featuring birds form a unique nexus of voices in the sexual discourse pervading the Parisian repertory of the late sixteenth century. The eroticism of these chansons is often expressed according to the older poetic conventions of unrequited courtly love and its carnivalesque abasement focusing on the lower body, or by a synthesis of the two characterized by the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard's sensual lyricism tended to employ avian imagery in support of a naturalized philosophy of love encouraging sexuality. Birds, considered to have a libido surpassing that of humans, became a favored theme, and composers set many of these Ronsardian texts. In the second part of this essay, I contextualize the reception of the erotic chanson among France's upper classes, relating it to the crisis of the French aristocracy and the noble aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The nouveaux nobles, or bourgeois that ennobled themselves with the purchase of seigneurial titles, had ...
... versity of Chicago Early Music Study Group. I would like to thank the members of it for their... more ... versity of Chicago Early Music Study Group. I would like to thank the members of it for their helpful comments, particu-larly Cathy Elias, Michael McGrade, Stefano Mengozzi, and Stephen Miller. I should also like to thank Martha ...
Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters ... more Around 1600, students in France learnt to read with printed primers. They began with the letters of the alphabet, learning them by playing with little wooden or cardboard tablets or picking them out of books, and then moved on to syllables, which were learnt from syllabaries printed in large letters and containing the Pater noster, Ave Maria, Credo, Confiteor and the Benedicite. When they began to spell out whole words, children moved on to another syllabary containing the Magnificat, the Nunc Dimittis, Salve Regina, the Seven Penitential Psalms and the litanies of the Saints, all of them common prayers. Two pages from Jacques Cossard's Methodes pour apprendre a lire, a escripre, chanter le plain chant, et compter (Paris, 1633) can give us some idea of what these early modern primers looked like (see Figures 1–2). In the first lesson the text of the Pater noster is broken into syllables, whereas in the second lesson the students must discern the syllables of the Ave Maria themse...
A substantial collection of Cinque- and Seicento prints lies hidden in the Museo Internazionale e... more A substantial collection of Cinque- and Seicento prints lies hidden in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica in Bologna. Practically unknown to scholars, at 274 titles it is among the largest collections dating from the Renaissance. The fortunate series of events that account for its survival are retraced, beginning with its formation c. 1580 and its purchase by Padre Giambattista Martini (1706–84) from the Pagliarini booksellers in Rome with the aid of Girolamo Chiti, and ending with its partial dispersion in the nineteenth century. A complete index of the collection is included, together with a list of the unica.
The goal of this series is to foster scholarship on campus by providing new faculty members with ... more The goal of this series is to foster scholarship on campus by providing new faculty members with the opportunity to share their research interest with their colleagues and students. We see the role of an academic library not only as a place where bibliographic materials are acquired, stored, and made accessible to the intellectual community, but also as an institution that is an active participant in the generation of knowledge. New faculty members represent areas of scholarship the University wishes to develop or further strengthen. They are also among the best minds in their respective fields of specialization. The Morrison Library will provide an environment where the latest research trends and research questions in these areas can be presented and discussed. Editorial Board
A virtual debate organized by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko for Perspectives, with Bojana Cvejic... more A virtual debate organized by Kate van Orden and Mark Franko for Perspectives, with Bojana Cvejić, Marc Downie, Mark Franko, Paul Kaiser, Benjamin Piekut, Frédéric Pouillaude, Kate van Orden et Edward C. Warburton
Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Ch... more Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New Cultural History of Music) Kate van Orden Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe (New Cultural History of Music) Kate van Orden Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable crosssection of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not read their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.
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