Panel: Musicking through Iconography
Friday, May 17, 2019, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
University of Oregon, Collier House
All Musicking events are free and open to the public. All events are subject to change
The Construction of Conflicting Jewish Identities: Two Multimedia Performances in the Cantigas de Santa Maria
Emily Korzeniewski, Yale University
The Cantigas de Santa Maria (hereafter CSM) recast several Marian miracles in a manner reflective of Alfonso X’s Castilian court in the thirteenth century. Scholars across the disciplines of history, literature, and art history have sought to interpret the diverse and often negative representations of Jewish characters in the collection of miracles compiled at Alfonso’s seemingly inclusive court; their approaches consider Alfonsian laws, shifts in Christian theology, and contemporaneous sets of Marian miracles. I argue that the dynamic relationship of text, image, and music in CSM reflects a negotiation of difference between unconverted Jews, converted Jews, and appropriated pre-Christian Hebrew figures. Drawing from Alison Campbell’s analytical framework, I present case studies of two cantigas (Cantigas 4 and 6) that recast previously-circulating miracles. Both songs villainize a primary Jewish character and portray secondary Jewish characters ambiguously. I first approach the cantigas through a close reading of the text, with attention to the terminology used to designate Jewish figures. I then consider how the illuminations retell the miracle by foregrounding certain scenes or depicting alternative versions of the miracle. Finally, I argue that the repeated refrain further complicates these visual and textual performances. In CSM’s threefold recasting of these miracles, counterpoint between the performative media navigates two incompatible ideologies: culturally pervasive antisemitism and theological ties to Judaism at the origins of Christianity.
Emily Korzeniewski is a first-year Ph.D. student in historical musicology at Yale. She completed her master’s thesis on the fourteenth-century poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut at the University of Oregon, under the advising of Dr. Lori Kruckenberg. Her current research interests include Guillaume de Machaut, multimedia presentations in manuscripts, and early developments in mensural notation.
“A Distance, an Absence, an Exile”: Charles Taylor, Ars Perfecta, and the Metaphysics of Performance Practice”
John Ahern, Princeton University
Recently in sociology and religious studies, scholars have focused their attention on secularization and its lived reality, what Charles Taylor has called secularity’s “conditions of experience.” Taylor’s etiology is useful for understanding the epistemological challenges for historians who look back at a pre-secular era from a secular era, through a secular gaze—for religious and non-religious alike. I would like to use some of the insights from Taylor to understand the implicit metaphysics of our performance practice, particularly performances of ars perfecta and stile antico music from the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries. I will compare common recordings of Josquin, Brumel, Palestrina, and Tallis with and against artistic portrayals on woodcuts, frescoes, and paintings, particularly Praetorius’ Syntagma Musicum and Saronno’s dome at the Santuario della Beata Vergine. The juxtaposition yields an intriguing hypothesis: while our recordings seem at pains to suppress gesture and rhetoric in this “spiritual” music, contemporaneous artistic portrayals of musicking in church hint at a theology entirely foreign to our secular episteme, a theology comfortable with much more textural heterogeneity and rowdy, near-chaotic polyphony. Routinely, artistic portrayals of polyphony show people who are actively resisting the physical boundaries that the cathedral imposes, rather than consonant with or imitative of the architecture. If this strikes us as dissonant with the serene spirituality of the music may, that may, in fact, be a by-product of our own metaphysical conditions within secularity. I will draw on some of the descriptions of sacred music in Carlerius, Tinctoris, Bardi, and Morley.
John Ahern is a Ph.D. student at Princeton University studying late Medieval and early modern music. My two primary areas of research are the musical features of 15th century composers Busnois, la Rue, and Josquin, and the history of music theory in treatises by Tinctoris, Zarlino, and Lippius. I am interested in exploring surface features of counterpoint so theorists can expand the typical sorts of parameters for formal and stylistic analysis. My broader interests include Plato, Boethius, Medieval rhetoric, Steve Reich, theology, and aesthetics.
Beverly Taflinger, Respondent
Beverly Taflinger is a musicologist and a classically-trained singer. She is currently completing her PhD in Musicology with a supporting area in Vocal Performance at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation focuses on the effects of the myth of genius on women composers in the nineteenth century. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to research, considering musical issues through the lenses of social history, philosophy, literature, and feminist studies. Her work is primarily centered on music and musical culture of the long nineteenth century, and women in music from the middle ages to the present day. She holds a Master of Music Performance from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Interdisciplinary Studies from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.
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