Songs in Unexpected Places: Language and Mobility in Sixteenth-Century Europe
An online talk by:
Dr. Kate van Orden
Professor, Harvard University Department of Music
*co-sponsored by the UBC Migration Mobilities Group and the UBC School of Music
Monday, October 5, 2020
4:00 – 5:30 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time)
[ Abstract ]
My title is a riff on Alastair Pennycook’s Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places (2012), a study that questions why language, peoples, and cultures seem to turn up in “unexpected places.” In brief, the problem lies with expectations themselves and their origins in nationalistic ideologies of language, place, and belonging that depend on beliefs in the rootedness of culture.
Pennycook is a sociolinguist and his research concerns present-day global Englishes, but his postcolonial critique resonates strongly with my work on sixteenth-century vernacular songs. In music, “national” designations are commonplace components of generic definitions (French chanson, Italian madrigal, German Lied), and the segregated categories they establish have been reinforced by historiographies that exclude, minoritize, and even exoticize songs that travel beyond the linguistic borders of proto nation-states. Despite substantial evidence that vernacular songs circulated widely, expectations about where people and songs belong in our histories have foreclosed studies that might instead embrace these musical migrants as precious evidence of human and cultural mobility.
In this talk, I discuss cases from my own research (Turkish songs printed in Paris, French songs copied in Florence, polyglot songs printed in Venice), the linguistic expectations that have silenced minority repertoires in music histories, and the ways that concepts such as “metrolingualism” being generated by Pennycook and Emi Otsuji can offer alternative critical tools and new intellectual grounding for musicologists and literary historians concerned with questions of cultural mobility.
