Vernacular Songs Research Articles

“I'm Workin’ on My Buildin”: Freedom and Foundation-Building in Florence Price's Two Violin Fantasies

AbstractFlorence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden

Review| December 01 2021 Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel MayGolden. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. xviii, 284 pp. Jennifer Saltzstein Jennifer Saltzstein JENNIFER SALTZSTEIN is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (D. S. Brewer, 2013). Her article “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (this Journal, 2017) received the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society. Her current book project explores relationships between song, landscape, and identity in medieval northern France. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2021) 74 (3): 673–677. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer Saltzstein; Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song, by Rachel May Golden. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 December 2021; 74 (3): 673–677. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2021.74.3.673 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search In Mapping Medieval Identities, Rachel May Golden explores the topic of crusade in the songs of twelfth-century Occitania, illustrating how song became a vehicle for the formation of crusader identity. This identity, she underscores, was forged collaboratively by knights and monks: crusade rhetoric appears first in the Latin monastic versus genre and subsequently in vernacular songs written by troubadour-crusaders. Golden illustrates the ways in which many crusade songs worked to articulate a geography of the crusade journey in which songs, through their lyrics and melodies, mapped a spatialized exploration of the experience of crusade and its dynamics of place and movement. Golden’s contention that crusade songs “acted as means for negotiating imagined and real geographies” (p. 233) relies fundamentally on relationships between lyrics and melody. Her close readings of such relationships explore how some songwriters combined music and words to articulate the geography and temporality of crusade. Golden argues... You do not currently have access to this content.

New Medieval Literatures 18 ed. by Laura Ashe et al.

Reviewed by: New Medieval Literatures 18 ed. by Laura Ashe et al. Cheryl Taylor Ashe, Laura, Philip Knox, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase, eds, New Medieval Literatures 18, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2018; hardback; pp. 242; 3 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844914. Each of the seven essays in this collection unfolds as a substantial work of scholarship that illuminates aspects of early or high medieval culture. Each contribution either questions received ideas about particular writings, or applies a new approach, or deepens understanding of a literary canon. The following outlines do not do justice to the breadth of evidence and subtlety of analysis on which each author bases her findings. Megan Cavell unfolds wide-ranging scholarship in a study of arachnophobia in early English literature—a topic that proves unexpectedly fruitful. She reveals that Old and Middle English authors, such as the translators of Boethius and the Physiologus, and the poet of the Owl and the Nightingale, rejected Latin authors' admiration for spiders as skilful weavers. Instead, they followed the Bible and its commentators in depicting them as dangerous, deceitful, dirty, and at times monstrous. This essay's uncovering of spiders' normalized gendering as feminine opens the prospect of historical research into their role in European misogyny. The same genus resurfaces as a topic in Hannah Bower's study, 'The Poetics of Late Medieval Medical Texts' (pp. 192–95). This broadly based study tests the applicability of 'literary' to late medieval vernacular recipes, remedies, and uroscopy texts by examining the figures—mainly similes—that they contain. An unconventional comparison between Gilbert of England's and Julian of Norwich's similes of rain falling from the eaves, the former applied to the passing of urine and the latter to Christ's blood, proves to be meticulous and fair-minded. Four essays share an interest in hermits, anchoresses, monks, saints, or devils. Hilary Powell argues that saints' lives were read, not for their (often unlikely) literal truth, but in order to experience 'a transcendent truth about divine grace' (p. 49). Osbern of Canterbury seems to have invented the tale of St Dunstan's grabbing the devil's nose with a pair of tongs. Embellished by Eadmer and paralleled before and after in other saints' lives, the story became a favourite in manuscript art. Powell proposes that such tales supplied meditators with mental images that fended off diabolic assaults in the form of intrusive thoughts. Next, Heather Blurton reconsiders the songs of a second hermit monk, St Godric of Finchale, as the work of a composer who was literate in Latin, but who chose (or was divinely inspired) to write in English. On this basis, she suggests that eleventh- and twelfth-century liturgy permitted the incorporation of some vernacular songs. Thirdly, Jenny C. Bledsoe analyses the role of devils in two saints' lives of the Katherine Group. In a technique that may have inspired C. S. Lewis's wartime [End Page 179] devil Screwtape, Seinte Iuliene suspends readers between sympathy and horror before returning them to an orthodox disgust for Belial in a comic denouement. Likewise, Saint Margaret's demon inadvertently instructs readers in temptation, confession, the Four Last Things, and contemplation of Christ's passion. In a fourth essay concerning demons, Isabella Wheater draws on correspondences newly discovered between Langland's B-Text and Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarium. She offers fresh interpretations of hawks and other raptors in depictions of Haukyn, Mede, Envy, Covetise, Sleuthe, and Piers/Perkyn. Piers Plowman is the most arcane and profuse of canonical Middle English poems, with the result that multiplying etymologies and speculative source studies in this article tend to overwhelm. The reader will therefore find it helpful to begin at the moving and lucid 'Conclusion' (pp. 178–82). Finally, Cathy Hume offers new insights into the verse Life of Job, possibly written in London between 1430 and 1470, and surviving uniquely in San Marino, CA, MS Huntington 140. This contribution builds on recent reappraisals of fifteenth-century literary culture as one in which, despite Arundel's 1408–09 Constitutions against dissemination of the Wycliffite Bible, biblical literature continued to flourish. Job's close relationship with the Bible, which its...

Mere claptrap jumble? Music and Tudor cheap print

AbstractA Newe Ballade of a Louer Extollinge his Ladye, published in 1568 by William Griffith, is unusual because it contains a printed melody, ‘Damon and Pithias’. For many years it was seen as the epitome of printers’ incompetence when it came to publishing music. This article suggests that the melody has much in common with other vernacular song tunes of the time, including metrical psalms and thanksgiving songs. It provides possible alternative explanations for the incorrectly rendered musical notation, including the suggestion that the mistake was not necessarily made by the printer himself. It surveys other musical anomalies of the period, to argue that the presence of music on the broadside indicates that Griffith was willing to experiment with new genres. These combined aspects of the most popular vernacular songs of the day in order to appeal to a new market of musically‐literate amateurs.

The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty: A Contextual History

It has not proved particularly easy to trace what is usually thought of as ‘folk song’ in England back into the eighteenth century. It is, however, possible in some instances to identify vernacular songs of the kind that were later recovered by folk song collectors circulating in earlier centuries in printed form, and to find contemporary references to the ways in which they were being used. This article takes this approach to one such ballad, The Bloody Gardener’s Cruelty, which was sung in England and was eventually collected in Newfoundland, but which in its earlier history strays well outside what might be thought of as the conventional folk song paradigm.

‘Tataḥ Śrī-Gurus-Tasmai Sūrimantraṃ Dadyāt’, ‘Then the Venerable Guru Ought to Give Him the Sūrimantra’: Early Modern Digambara Jaina Bhaṭṭāraka Consecrations

As recent research on the former bhaṭṭāraka lineages of Western and Central India has shown, the early modern Digambara tradition, rather than constituting a distinct, and defective, ‘bhaṭṭāraka era’, shows much similarity to contemporary Digambara Jainism. Bhaṭṭārakas were regarded and venerated as ideal renouncers. Many of their practices accorded to those of today’s Digambara munis, and the bhaṭṭāraka saṅghas also featured renouncers of the muni and ācārya ranks, long thought to have abruptly become obsolete in the late medieval period. This new understanding of early modern Digambara Jainism is corroborated by the present article, which deals with early modern bhaṭṭāraka consecration rituals (paṭṭābhiṣeka, dīkṣā). The study is mainly based on two genres of sources. Sanskrit bhaṭṭāraka consecration manuals (dīkṣā-vidhi, pada-sthāpanā-vidhi), firstly, outline the preparations, the ritual proceedings, and the festivities to be held. Some vernacular songs of praise (gīta, etc.) of individual bhaṭṭārakas, secondly, focus specifically on their consecrations. These song compositions confirm many of the manuals’ prescriptions, while also adding elements not attested in the latter. Read in conjunction, both sources allow a relatively detailed understanding of early modern bhaṭṭāraka consecrations, show they closely resembled contemporary Digambara initiations, and confirm the former venerability of early modern bhaṭṭārakas in their own times.

The ‘Mass-Motet Cycle’ Revisited

Coinciding with the rise of chansons with Latin cantus firmi, composers in the 1450s and 1460s started using the tenors of vernacular songs as cantus firmi for masses and motets. These two groups of pieces have significant similarities, and their transmission in three cases has led to the idea that they were often conceived as pairs both in composition and for performance. This theory has oversimplified a rather more complex reality, wherein few if any of these pairs were composed as such. Nevertheless, the interchangeability of structural techniques shows a high level of compositional exchange between genres.

Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War Douglas Shadle (bio) Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War. By Christian McWhirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Pp. vii, 321. $39.95 cloth) Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns paints a richly textured portrait of musical life during the Civil War. McWhirter has adopted the methodology of reception history, an approach that explores the shifting meanings listeners ascribe to specific musical works—here, vernacular songs—in their changing cultural and historical contexts. This focus on meaning, as opposed to the music itself, sets Battle Hymns apart from other standard books on the subject such as Music of the Civil War Era (2004) by Steven Cornelius and The Singing Sixties (1960) by Willard A. and Porter W. Heaps. The main chapters of the book detail the important roles music played as patriotic expression for both the Union and the Confederacy, political propaganda on the home front, a source of energy and entertainment for soldiers, a site of identity formation for African Americans, an emotional release at war's end, and a tool for reimagining history. Since topics such as nationalism, slavery, hardship, and death reappear in each chapter, this thematic organizational structure allows the reader to view the same phenomena from several different perspectives and to develop a sense of the intriguing and clever intertexuality found in many songs from the period. McWhirter deliberately focuses on widely popular and still-familiar tunes, such as "John Brown's Body," "Dixie," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and others that inspired multiple retextings (i.e., new words set to the same tune) or direct musical responses (parodies, "answer songs," or sequels). His refreshingly accessible prose likewise never approaches esotericism. The vast array of primary-source material that McWhirter has [End Page 602] carefully amassed is another of the chief strengths of the book. The scope of his sources speaks directly to his thesis that music was a powerful medium of political and emotional expression during the war. Its ubiquity in common discourse strongly suggests that it was an equally important feature of everyday life for soldiers, current and former slaves, and families on the home front, all of whom left documentation revealing their feelings about and experiences with music. McWhirter skillfully weaves their voices into his narrative. At times, however, the diffuseness of the sources may leave the reader wondering how representative a particular experience or opinion might have been. McWhirter's claims about the uniqueness of his topic are overstated and reveal his inexperience with areas outside of the scope of the book. Music was no less important during the Revolutionary War or the two world wars, for example. Composers, performers, and listeners alike confronted the particular cultural challenges posed by each. McWhirter also largely ignores the thriving musical cultures that were less directly affected by the war itself—music at theaters, beer gardens, or concert halls—thus potentially leaving the reader with the impression that the war was a singular musical obsession; it was not. Lastly, McWhirter's focus on meaning leaves questions about precisely what sounds elicited such strong responses. Perhaps he will consider creating a companion website that includes streaming musical examples. These weaknesses notwithstanding, Battle Hymns convincingly combines historical and musicological perspectives by illustrating the mutual enrichment of music and extramusical culture. A song written and printed first in Chicago, for example, could be sung at a political rally there, purchased at a music store by a rally attendee, mailed to her brother on the front lines, arranged by the regimental bandmaster for use at an evening performance, and finally retexted by drunken soldiers before bed. Such rapid movement and adaptation of music was made possible by the increased nationalization of the economy, transportation networks, and the musical marketplace, all [End Page 603] of which enter McWhirter's analyses. Battle Hymns is filled with many more stories like this (and much more compelling) and thus deserves a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the Civil War. Douglas Shadle Douglas Shadle is a visiting assistant professor of music history at the University of Louisville. He is...

Virgil, Abelard and Heloise, and the End of Neumes

From the tenth through the twelfth centuries some manuscripts containing Virgil’s poems contain the musical notation known as neumes. Thereafter such notation of Virgil apparently ceases for centuries. The neumes (and singing) may have fallen by the wayside as new practices developed of singing Latin rhythmic poems or vernacular songs based on Virgil, rather than excerpts from Virgil’s own quantitative poetry. In prefaces to the Paraclete Hymnbook Peter Abelard quotes observations by Heloise on the need for a more regular syllable count than in quantitative hymns. Virgilian reception and musical notation may have evolved together away from quantitative Latin.

The hierarchical structure of poetry and songs and critical views on vernacular songs

The hierarchical structure of poetry and songs and critical views on vernacular songs

Vernacular Songs as “Oral Pamphlets”: The Hussites and Their Propaganda Campaign

The Reformation of the 1520s is generally seen as the first major large-scale media campaign. The pamphlet has been especially touted as a vehicle for persuasion. However, seeing print as necessary for a mass campaign of any kind distorts our understanding of communication in centuries prior to the Reformation. Between 1415 and 1420, Hussite leaders launched a large-scale propaganda campaign in an effort to persuade the laity of their message. The movement relied on vernacular songs, so-called “oral pamphlets” instructing the laity in the Hussite message. Topics ranged from John Hus, simony, and anti-clericalism to the chalice and salvation. The Catholic party composed their own songs, mostly satirizing the reformers. The success of the Hussite movement should be attributed to a savvy propaganda campaign on the part of its leaders, a campaign which successfully incorporated concerns, fears, hopes, needs, and wants that already existed among the laity.

AN UNPUBLISHED FIFTEENTH-CENTURY CAROL COLLECTION: OXFORD, LINCOLN COLLEGE MS LAT. 141

qMedium Essay Prize 2008The fifteenth century is the first period from which substantial numbers of vernacular English songs survive, in both notated and un-notated manuscripts, together testifying to a vigorous written tradition. Many of these texts are in carol form: regular stanzas with a refrain section written at the head of the song.1 Such carols were often written singly on flyleaves or in margins, but hundreds were gathered together in anthologies.2 The short collection of English songs that fills the first quire of Oxford, Lincoln College MS Lat. 141 (hereafter, Lincoln Lat. 141) belongs within this corpus.The manuscript is a composite book put together around 1600 and the first quire contains a collection of song texts written in a late fifteenth-century hand. The quire is imperfect at the beginning, and now holds nine full texts and further fragments. The final two texts were edited by Edward Wilson in 1980, but the others remain unpublished.3 The New Index of Middle English Verse lists only the two carols edited by Wilson and one other, a version of a carol extant elsewhere.4 This article seeks to present and explore this previously overlooked material. It will begin with a description of the fifteenth-century part of the manuscript, then provide edited texts of the unpublished verses, and lasdy will analyse the group and examine their relation to other carol collections.As in numerous better-known manuscripts containing carols, the texts in Lincoln Lat. 141 appear to be gathered together according to coherent principles. The agreement between manuscript organization and the generic terminology used today appears promising for the purposes of the now wellestablished critical approach of exploring Middle English lyrics within their manuscript contexts, exemplified in work by Julia Boffey and Susanna Fein among others.5 The Lincoln carols illustrate the circulation of un-notated song in short sequences, possibly making up cheap, easily distributed booklets. This method of writing and distribution is especially significant to the development of vernacular short verse before print, and can be traced through the networks formed by textual connections in extant manuscripts. Dialect studies have tentatively associated Lincoln Lat. 141 with Norfolk, and several other fifteenthcentury carol manuscripts are also associated with the region. These texts can potentially contribute towards a 'literary geography', an idea explored by Richard Beadle with particular reference to late medieval Norfolk.6 Surviving manuscripts provide this collection with a rich context of vernacular song production, developed, written, and shared within a range of formats.The texts, six of which are macaronic, also illustrate the role of the liturgy in development of English verse. As an important source of shared song and narrative, directly linked with communal celebrations through the year, liturgy was intimately connected with vernacular festive songs, of which carols are the most successful type in this period. In emphasizing the centrality of liturgy to medieval cultural production, Bruce Holsinger has recently raised a series of challenging questions for literary studies in the period: 'What modes of convergence and mutuality affiliate the liturgical and the literary? . . . More radically, perhaps, in what sense might literature be seen as in part an effect of liturgy, a curious by-product of the immense cultural industry invested in the Word of God by the institutions that performed it?'7 As festive songs that could also be read, carols such as those contained in Lincoln Lat. 141 occupy an uncertain territory between the liturgical and the literary, making them especially pertinent to this area of research. The final section of this article will examine the ways in which the liturgical content of the texts is developed by the vernacular verse and how this interaction contributes to the texts' construction as group song. …

The origins of ci: A contemporary reflection on a thousand-year-old academic controversy

The academic controversy over the “origin of ci” has lasted over a thousand years throughout the study of this Chinese poetic genre. According to their own account by literati of the Tang dynasty, ci was collected from folks of the fields for both its phrase and tune. But since the Song dynasty, different arguments have arisen. Some held that ci had its origin in the so-called “long-and-short lines”, while others postulated “phrase-filling in uniform tunes”; still others believed in its derivation from “foreign-tune with Chinese phrase”. Starting from the 20th century, the focus of debate shifted to whether ci had evolved from native vernacular songs or been invented for new tunes, and, if the latter was true, whether the tune came from abroad (Hu 胡) or within China (Hua 华). However, all these arguments have some theoretical flaws resulting from: (i) an isolated and undefined academic context and research orientation; (ii) a method of substituting the part for the whole, which may have distorted the true picture of Chinese-foreign music exchange; (iii) the false premise that new tunes gave rise to new genres of poetry; and (iv) the disregard of the reality in learning and spread of ci performance and composition, and neglect of the role played by social changes and human subjectivity in the budding of new literary genres.

The Use of Dialect in African-American Spirituals, Popular Songs, and Folk Songs

The presence of vocal works that use dialect in African-American culture has been a controversial and difficult area of inquiry for those investigating the phenomenon. Dialect songs were first heard in the minstrel shows that toured the United States and Europe before the Civil War (Mahar 1999). They continued to be performed after the war as well, although not as frequently by professional troupes. Textually, many minstrel songs presented derogatory caricatures of African-American and slave culture known from depictions of southern plantations. By the 1870s, African-American dialect was still heard, most often in minstrelsy, although probably in some sacred repertory as well. While spirituals and jubilees sung in churches may have used dialect, existing evidence suggests that touring college groups, such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Hampton Students, avoided the use of dialect when they performed spirituals as part of their programs. The Fisk Singers' book The Story of the Jubilee Singers (Marsh 1880) and their later recordings (after 1909) offer their repertory in standard English. Ditson's (1887) publication Jubilee and Plantation Songs likewise eschews dialect. Undoubtedly, the use of standard English in these publications and in public performances reflected a desire to demonstrate that African Americans were educated and could speak and sing in standard English. Toward the end of the 1880s, a number of African-American vocal quartets began to appear in various venues, including vaudeville, country fairs, and variety shows. One of the most famous was the Standard Quartet, which toured with the South before the War company. The group made a number of cylinders in the early 1890s, of which one, Keep Movin', also sung in standard English, has survived (Brooks 2004, 96-97). However, the popularity of the antebellum spirituals and jubilees influenced a number of black minstrels to write and perform sacred dialect songs in their shows. James Bland's Oh, Dem Golden Slippers (1879) and Sam Lucas's On My Long White Robe (1879) are two examples of this sacred genre that migrated from the church and concert stage to the minstrel show. Lucas's song has no derogatory sense. Rather, the dialect conveys an African-American perspective (similar to that heard in spirituals) on the voyage that follows death. De gospel Trumpet am sounding loud, Put on my long white robe. See all de children a slipping proud, up an' down de road, When dey get near de pearly gate, Put on my long white robe, You can go inside if you ain't too late, And den how happy you'll feel. Chorus Oh! wait 'till I put on my long white robe, My starry crown and my golden shoes, I pass through the gates of de golden city Den I carry de news. During the 1890s, the most controversial dialect lyrics, which harkened back to the early days of minstrelsy, were set to ragtime melodies; this new genre is usually identified as the song. It was sung in a multiplicity of venues--in the minstrel show, in vaudeville, and on Broadway. It is generally stated that Ernest Hogan's All Coons Look Alike to Me was the first coon song (Woll 1989, 2), but in truth, a number of coon songs predate his piece. (1) His song, however, together with the Bully Song, whose authorship was claimed by no fewer than five composers, introduced the new genre to Broadway, where mainstream theatergoers readily accepted and approved their catchy tunes, sung by May Irwin. The coon song's popularity led many African-American lyricists and composers to write vernacular songs that were sung by both black and white performers. While most of these songs had slangy lyrics in which final sounds were dropped (hangin', for example) and contractions were used (ne'er), they did not use dialect (dere and dem). A small group, however, did. Bert Williams and George Walker, for example, wrote several that were heard in their musicals between 1897 and 1902, as did Irving Jones, Will Marion Cook, and Bob Cole. …

"Cobras e Son." Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria'

Cobras e Son. Papers on the Text, Music, and Manuscripts of the 'Cantigas de Santa Maria.' Ed. Stephen Parkinson. Oxford, England: European Humanities Research Centre, 2000. 246 pages. This handsome set of essays sprang from a Colloquium held at Oxford in 1994 and contains papers and discussions from that productive gathering. The authors revised and expanded their studies in the intervening years, producing one of the most thoughtful and studious anthologies of work on the four extant Cantigas manuscripts to date. A persistent thread of Cantigas research over the years is their assessment within diverse critical contexts and historical camps. Does the music represent true Spanish folk melodies that grew up with romance vernacular songs, are they commingled with Hispanoarabic rhythmic patterns, or do they perhaps anticipate aspects of French troubadour music? Does the participation of Moorish and Jewish musicians among the European performers shown in the illustrations and documented for at least post-- Alfonsine times, support those theses? Does the use of Galician-Portuguese hint at any sort of detachment from content, an artificiality that makes the lyrics ring true only for aesthetes and prevents their penetration into the common culture of the masses? On the flip side of the coin, did the Cantigas' perceived popular style (use of refrains, folk melodies, links to dance, etc.) lower their potential prestige among Europeans outside of Iberia? Although the physical books themselves were manufactured and illustrated by Christian artisans, do their realistic depictions hint at native Iberian experiences at odds with the formalisms of the lyrics or music? How much are the miniatures influenced by foreign models, how much originality do they display, and to what extent is that inventiveness an accidental byproduct of the absence of formal precedents for illustrating these story poems? The essays in this anthology probe these and many other questions, and even entertain the possibility that all the extent copies of the Cantigas were produced after Alfonso's death, perhaps well into the fourteenth century. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, Music and the Cantigas de Santa Maria, returns to the polarized debate about Arabic features using recently published hispanoarabic songs that survive with their musical notion to argue that an independent Andalusian stamp cannot be dismissed. Mary O'Neill, in Problems of Genre Definition: the Cantigas de Santa Maria in the Context of the Romance Lyric Tradition, points out how the very multi-culturalism inherent within these lyrics and the internationalism of their settings may have militated against earning them the stature they deserve vis-d-vis songs linked to modern nation states, specifically the troubadour lyrics of France. …

The Myth of the Medieval Minstrel: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Performers and the Chansonnier Repertory

"The Myth of the Medieval Minstrel: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Performers and the Chansonnier Repertory." The Old French trouvère song repertory, comprising about 2,400 lyrics with 1,500 extant melodies, originated ca. 1180-ca. 1250 and is mainly preserved in anthologies known as chansonniers copied between about 1250 and 1320: The editing and evaluation of these manuscripts, chiefly conducted by philologists and literary scholars, has generated copious discussions concerning lyric genres, intertextua1ities, and attribution. Although some recent editions include melodies, relatively little work has been done on reconstructing the performing traditions appropriate to this material, although these songs are among the oldest vernacular songs to have survived in written form in western Europe and are surely important in the context of cultural history. This article looks at the performers of the repertory, adducing evidence from a wide range of contemporary vernacular-literary descriptions of performances, nuances some current arguments on this basis, and suggests that the currently blurred picture derived from these eclectic testimonies could be improved when supplemented by more conventional historical evidence, including administrative records and relevant iconography.

Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts: Melodies of Stephen Foster

In his time, Stephen Foster's works were considered suitable for the blackface minstrel stage, the parlors of the most self-consciously genteel, and sometimes both. However originally designated (e.g. Ethiopian song, plantation melody,' ballad, or merely song), they are variously comic and ebullient, sentimental and refined. On Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts, the ensemblein-residence at the Stephen Foster Memorial of the University of Pittsburgh offers an assortment of types. The production is modestly conceived, and that is its greatest virtue. Available on cassette, it features Kate Young and Claudia Benack (sopranos), Guy Russo (tenor), James Ferla (guitar), Mark Graf (piano), and Jean Thomas (flute). In a mix of solos, duets, and trios, the group approximates the distribution of musicians one might find in a midnineteenth century parlor: sisters and a brother singing, perhaps, with friends or other family on instruments for which Foster's music was arranged. The ensemble successfully evokes a performance milieu of the composer's day. Then, as today, not all types of vocal music were performed the same way. In 1845 Walt Whitman contrasted the of the operatic troupes with the heart of the singing families. We know a great deal about the performance practice of art music; we know less about how vernacular songs were sung on the stage and in the parlor. But we do have phonograph records of the latter music, and while they do not reach back to Foster's lifetime, their trail is nearly a century long. Following it can help us see modern performances in the context of several generations of Foster performances, and thus establish a context for criticism.