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Hello, my name is Anya Ponger and this is New Books in Music, a podcast with a new books network. Today I'm talking to Dr. Anna Catherine Grou, and Professor Lisa Colton, editors of a companion to female voice song and women's musical agency in the Middle Ages, the fifth volume in Brill's Companions to Musical Culture of the Deagle and Early Modern Europe series. Published in August 2022, this collection brings together 17 essays that identify various ways that women contributed to musical culture before 1500 across Europe and in the Islamic courts.
So, Anna Lisa, thank you so much for taking time to talk today especially I know we're coming to the start of the new semester. Welcome to the podcast. Hi. And, yeah, just to get started, I was wondering if you'd both be able to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your work and where you're coming from intellectually and professionally.
Lisa, if you'd like to go first. Hello, so I'm Professor Lisa Colton. I'm at the University of Liverpool, although quite a lot of this book was prepared when I was at my previous institution, which was the University of Huddersfield. My fields of expertise relate to late medieval song generally, but especially from England and France.
And I'm really interested in lots of different methodologies, whether that's sort of studies, music analysis or putting music in a kind of cultural context. And the theme of gender and women's contribution to musical culture is really important to me in all sorts of areas of my work. Thank you. Anna, do you want to speak a little bit?
Yeah, so I'm Dr. Anna Catherine Grou. I'm a music and performing arts librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Though I also changed jobs in the middle of this book, so I was mostly adjunct professor at a couple of institutions in Chicago before this.
And I also take a lot of the same approaches as Lisa, which I think is part of how we ended up paired up for the project in the first place, but really have always focused on women and representation of women and music, even going back to my undergrad thesis, which is on non-area motets. So it's been very consistent. So now I'm sort of juggling the trying to keep in this research field while also working my nine to five job as a librarian. That is great.
I feel like writing an undergrad thesis on non-area motets is pretty hardcore, so congratulations. That's pretty cool. So a companion to Puma Voice Song brings together 17 essays, which is very impressive, congratulations from various subfields and parts of the academy to think about how women have participated in medieval musical culture and you kind of propose different ways we can think about women's voices about song and music more generally. So before we talk about the process of actually putting the book together, I'd love to talk a bit about just the broader field of scholarship on women and medieval music.
So I kind of in your eyes, what is going on in the field right now and where does this volume in particular fit into that broader field of scholarship? So I can start. So if we starting now, I think one of the things that got us interested in this project in the first place are the scummy interest in the project is that I felt like there had been sort of waves of interest in the field, starting with some of the earliest college, starting with 19th century French and German writers. And for me, it had been really important to sort of formative that early 21st century sort of wave part of the reason I did that undergrad thesis is because songs of the women's reveres came out while I was kind of casting about for an undergrad thesis topic.
And Thomas Payne was my advisor in my undergrad and he wanted me to do something that he felt good about working with me on, and so that felt like a really good fit. And I was so inspired by those were the songs of women's reveres and the songs of women's troubadours and the medieval women's song volume and the Vox feminine volume, all these things that came out right around that time. And then while I was working on my PhD, if I was not much new coming out during that time, there were some really great articles, but not a lot of these sort of larger collections and more comprehensive efforts. And so part of what we wanted to do was to sort of catch up on some of those people who've been working on all these little projects in that time and bring them together so that somebody knew maybe a student casting out for thesis topic now would be able to sort of figure out what the approaches were that were available to them.
And then I feel like there's there has started to be another wave sort of during during the putting together this book where there were additional works coming out, like the Golden and Kong volume on gender and voice and medieval French literature and song that came out that we both contributed to and came out during the process of writing this book. So what was the sort of a new interest in playing together these projects? I think that's absolutely right. But it's like complex to try and imagine all the different historiographical themes that have resulted in this in this book.
So, for example, you know, we were both inspired by some of the interesting really historical writing which tried to try to find actual women musicians, you know, where can we find them? Where's the evidence? Were there any, you know, those are the questions that were asked by those early scholars and then sort of occasional low voices saying, oh yes, there were a few, but they only did these things or by others saying, yes, we can find them every time a poem or lyric is written in a female voice. So, it must must be a real woman in there somewhere on the way.
So different approaches to where women's musicality might be represented and how, where there wasn't really a clear single ideology that fed into our approach, but where we were often, and our contributors were often responding to one little threat that they pulled out from that earlier literature, which of course was from lots of different fields. There are, of course, non concentrated areas of this literature as well that aren't, I'll try that again. There are of course other areas of the discipline that are not really specifically medical song, but that has affected how we came to, to compile the way that we did. One of them is about what's happened in the last 20 or so years about these centering composers.
So, for example, we might have been looking for genius, the genius women composers to rival my show, which obviously is almost impossible. Dream, whereas with this book, we weren't only looking at composers, we were looking at the agency of women, and we were also looking at the ways in which they might be represented as listeners, as performers, as patrons. And it just absolutely opened up a whole variety of different approaches that allowed us not to be too worried about the plurality of the stories that we were telling. And that was, I should credit Anna with the idea of looking at the idea of female voice song, rather than women's musicianship, for example, as a thing that was equivalent to male composers of the past and how we find them, very much came from her inspiration.
So, I think we respond to things that have happened across musicology, as well as within the histories of medieval song and try to give them a moment of where we then, where are we now. Okay, there's a lot of exciting work happening and here's some of it, but where can we go next. Yeah, that's fantastic. I wonder, I'm just kind of going back a little bit, I think picking up on that thread of like moving away from authorship, but, um, and you mentioned the anthology songs of the women's true fairs and true stories and I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what, I mean, that was 23 years ago, maybe at this point, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what those volumes were, how they were put together, also maybe just to the true stories, the true fairs weren't cases I was listening to, is not completely familiar with medieval music and this is kind of a new area.
If either of you want to respond to that. So I can start with it just who are the true stories and the true bears that we tend to use most people use true stories and a much outside of musicology and French studies tend to use it a much broader sort of traveling minstrels kind of association but usually when we are talking about true stories in the field we're talking about what we now call southern French or Aussie Tan from all singers songwriters kind of they were not necessarily the musicians playing the music but the creators of that music or the finders of the music and then the true bears are the northern French equivalent that tends the match friend kind of happened slightly later in the north of France so they tend to be a little bit chronologically displaced from the true stories but we're talking about sort of 12 and 13th century. And the books I'm so familiar with the songs of the women true bears book that's the one that I really have dug into the most because that's the area that I focused in but I think what sort of ties that back to the comments we're making about authorship is that just the titles of these collection songs of the women true bears and songs of women true bears and medieval women songs are all seem to really want to assert authorship for women and to sort of I think shift from the default of assuming that all the music is by men even if it's a female voice to the other extreme to say if it's a female voice let's just assume it's by women and start from that from that presumption. So part of what we're doing is in this collection I think is pulling sort of refinding the middle ground there to say maybe some of these are by women but if we even if we can't prove that what could they still tell us about women and about the way the women were viewed.
Because there are lots of reasons why you know lyrics might be written in a female voice within the liturgy there are you find examples of the direct personalised experiences of women saints but we don't expect that those are chance written by women but when they happen in secular contexts immediately they're not going to be real people and they're really experienced. So one of the things that is appealing to scholars of the true bears and true bears is that lived experience that seems to be evidenced in that repertory and one of the things that I think we were just sort of wanting to push back at is that assumption is then an assumption of or anonymous being either only ever a man or a woman if the gender of the poetic voice is female. So it's hard. Yeah of course and I wonder if I could just pick up on us once again I was mentioned earlier the Shonzo and Mary as maybe an example could you explain a little bit what goes on in those and if you can just think about other kinds of female voice genres as we go on the other side.
So the female voice genres as we go on through the podcast. I think one of the things that our readers will pick up on is that to some extent we are a little bit reliant in that this is a book for a wide audience on using genre descriptors that aren't necessarily medieval ones. So you'll find words like Pastor L, you'll find words like Shonzo and Mary A, but themselves speak to literature on those genres or on those types of songs but aren't necessarily the terms in those cases of the period in which the songs are being written. Shonzo and Mary A is used quite loosely to describe those songs and there are quite a lot of them that seem to describe unhappily married, usually women but also unhappily married men who are unhappily married often with violence in the relationship or there's some form of adulterous relationship going on.
And you often get direct speech in those so it might be a woman saying why does my husband beat me or it might be a man saying why is my woman not behaving the way that she ought to behave with me. So the bad marriage is often really quite a difficult social relationship and they do feel very personalized but they're also very stylized for the most part. Is that fair say Anna? Yeah, I think that's a good description and I think this, how prevalent that genre that sort of type is in the literature plays into a lot of the history of the field that we talked about because some of this early 19th century authors were saying this can't be by women because it would be more modest and they wouldn't be so open about this behavior if it was by women and then later even later in the 20th century scholars saying this can't be by women because it's a male fantasy of this sort of promiscuous woman.
But because the type is so strong it's been used on both sides to say this can't just be a description of someone's experience because it's too stereotyped across all these pieces. And one of the sort of offshoots of that I've done some work on the Shon-Sondra non the non-song is effectively also with Shon-Sondra Mary. In this case she's trapped in a nunnery and unable to have sex with the men that she desires. Of course those are strange, pricy situations where apparently a very young nun usually she's described as kind of a teen age, early teen age is describing wanting relationships outside of what's committed in a nunnery and she's down trodden and pre-pubescent.
So you have to ask, who was wanting to imagine those things? Who was wanting to imagine those things? And whereas some authors have taken that as historical examples of women who are in nunnery against their will, finally getting their say about how miserable they are, others, and I'd count this up amongst them. See that?
Well that sounds to me like the fairly dodgy imaginings of a dirty old man, monastic or not. So they can be read in lots of different ways and one of the things we wanted to make sure we did in the book was I now the authors have lots of different perspectives on quite diverse ways. Not expect everybody to agree on where along the spectrum of historical reality or male fantasy or whatever these songs might like. Yeah, just picking up on the older generation of scholars from the 19th century, I know you've had this written down because it's just a wonderfully evocative quote.
This quote from Alfred Schonroy that you include in your introduction and he rejects any surviving songs could have been written by women because if these songs are attributable to women, one would find without a more tender tone, more moving and more discreet, especially and some shadow of female modesty. It is not so. I think that quote just really stands as a wonderful testimony to the kind of great work that has been done more recently and how that's moving the field to kind of music studies forward. This was really, I guess not that much more than 100 years ago I don't know if you know when the quote was from off the top your heads but not that deep in history.
Well, we said you'd have to be too worried about the unnecessary modesty of our female contributors, for example, you know, some of them were really bold and the volume speaks really colourfully to both medieval culture and to modern interpretations in ways that seem. Very, very useful, very timely and which John Roy would be massively shocked by. I think it feels like a really natural segue to thinking about how the book was put together. I know Lisa, you just already mentioned the great number of female contributors you had and how that I think I would also comment on the wonderful spread of both kind of geographic areas and also time periods that you have in here, the middle ages is not actually a small and niche area.
It's quite a few centuries. So congratulations on getting such a wide and I think nothing's ever perfectly representative with this felt very kind of opening, I think, could you talk a little bit about how putting what the process of putting the book together was like? Well, Anna started it. So I think Anna should start with this one.
So I had been contacted by Brill and asked about writing about writing the volume. So they actually sort of got the ball rolling actually 10 years ago now. They originally reached out and then the person who had reached out at that point retired before I sort of was able to turn my attention to it. And then they reached out again in I think 2017.
And I was a little bit unsure about taking something like this on for the first time. So I asked Lisa to join me as a little bit more experience with editing and also because I felt a little nervous about the secret music that I really wanted to include in this, but was not sure I had the background to be a really effective editor for that. So Lisa luckily agreed to join on with me and work on this and we wanted to invite contributors rather than putting out a call for paper or call for submissions because we wanted that really broad representation. We wanted to make sure that we were finding people writing about anything we could even like even stretch Europe to possibly mean so we have like Iceland and we have a lot of Islamic courts because we really wanted to be able to do that.
And we also wanted to make sure that we were getting a lot of different approaches and methodologies and also that we were getting projects by people who had been working on women for some time, either more established sellers or new scholars were working closely with people who are established in this field because the great thing about I think the state of the field is that it's no longer completely a separate field right like everyone is acknowledging that women were part of this music and writing about women as it intersects with whatever their area is but I really wanted to make sure we were getting submissions from people who had been thinking about this as a field rather than just as something that was kind of intersecting their interests temporarily. Yeah, I mean, our initial conversations which of course were you know via I don't know was it Skype then I don't think I heard of Zoom at that point was we were thinking about who's working in this field at the moment. Obviously I'm based in the UK and I'm in the States we have overlapping communities that were invested in but I know the sort of commissivity community much better than I do and I go to the men more regularly because it's based in Europe. So we know different people so that was helpful but also we really wanted to find as wide a range of scholars as possible including it was really important to us that we helped and supported early career researchers find a good solid venue for publication that they we could support them through into making maybe their first publication effective and in a prominent place as well as working with more established scholars I don't want to say older you know just but from different from different levels of experience.
So the number of chapters that we ended up with was quite big and indeed various stages was a bit bigger but obviously over time things go a little bit more during COVID is you imagine people's situations change and we did sketch and approach quite a few men. And you'll see from the contents page that only one of our contributors is male David Catalunia working on the well gas managed with contexts and so that's not by design we did approach quite a few men. We were we were wanting to make sure that the that we engage them in this project you know I think it's important to have men interested in investing in writing about the mother's son some of them I would say just aren't ready yet. So we were working on repertories that would speak very very nicely to these sorts of themes and hopefully they will go on to do that but for various reasons they weren't able to quite find a way into their weaponry where that's the county has to stand up every year or whether that's particular plane or whatever which would lend themselves beautifully to female voice song but they weren't themselves able to identify something that they could contribute to this collection for lots of reasons maybe they were in the middle of three other projects and that's fair enough.
I was a bit disappointed how few men ended up as authors in the collection but it wasn't because we only wanted it to include women however it was rather nice that the content that the contents were also dominated by women with all sorts of voices if you like with representing all sorts of different perspectives because you know women don't totally do this thing one way and the collection sort of its variety I think is one of its strengths. Yeah I think the interdisciplinary of this volume and this is something that I think is quite common in music studies and medieval studies more generally but you really do have contributors coming from all different kind of departments and disciplinary backgrounds and trainings and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what's going on with this project. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that meant in terms of getting a kind of cohesive running line through the volume or if you feel that that wasn't even a priority and you're just going to let it happen and it happened as it did. We said we couldn't do a chronological spread we couldn't start in the ninth century the eighth century and sort of plow one through chronologically there would have been very obvious clusters of attention and they would have been gaping holes and also it's not a sort of linear history of the mother with song really that they will be written in one book any more than there's a linear history of song to be written in one book.
So Anna's suggestion was to theme it in these different categories I'm sure that Anna can speak to that for us how those came out. Right so we I feel like we wanted to be really broad and as this is saying that it would have maybe a chronological or geographical organization. You would have ended up reading you know maybe multiple articles about or chapters about no text back to back but with so much different approaches and because this is a companion. We wanted to showcase the different approaches to women's song but more as a place for people to find their own entry into future projects.
It felt more appropriate to me to organize it around the kinds of approaches and to draw people's attention to that variety rather than the maybe less variety in what people have written about so far and you're trying to instead show we could take these and apply them to a little bit broader to other kinds of music. I found it was really inspiring to work across this different disciplines. I think there were some practical implications of that one of them was trying to figure out how to order Arabic names and index whether we didn't have the experience of that. And then the on the other hand it did involve some coaching of these scholars because when we approached the ones who are not musicologists we said you know we want this.
This is a companion to musical culture. So we were really focusing on the whatever phenomenon you're talking about as a musical phenomenon even if that's not your disciplinary focus so we did end up sort of coaching a couple of these contributors into including their first musical examples in the article, even people who write extensively about musical culture. But from our perspective, like to draw those lines threads across multiple articles will be really helpful for our musicologist readers for you to actually notate this so that we can sort of or hear the conventions for writing out song form that musicologists are going to respond to and understand and have a framework for. So we have a lot of different directions for us to as a musicologist work with these other scholars in literature and other fields and also to learn a lot from them about their fields.
And I don't think animal Mummy saying that the order of things did change considerably as we work through the project. So Anna's very neat topics of sort of ritual discourse, materiality, subject to emotion and representation as we find in the final volume. The articles were reordered within those quite a few times, eventually we sort of end up with a kind of mini chronological arrangement of articles within each of those categories just to help people through a little bit. And we spent a lot more time in later versions of the introduction just sort of talking people through how best to use the volume or what the rationale was if you like for how that might work but things did change change in order and placement and whatever through through the writing and editing of the volume, the editor of the series would also say the two reviewers comments, you know, who said, are you sure you want to put it that way around or what about this up or very famous person, you should have them and we try to avoid the more personal reasons for arranging people in particular orders and went instead for more objective arrangements of material.
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Just to turn to the book itself and I especially Anna, because you mentioned the music examples in it, it's just a really beautiful volume. It's really gorgeous, hardcover, it'll just do lovely work I think, but there's a wonderful amount of both music examples. And also you have color plates, which I just think is really lovely and not even in the middle of the book, they're just on the page. That's a really nice detail.
Maybe I'm easily wooed. But I wonder if you could talk about where you've alluded to this already, but who do you see the ideal audience for the kind of real companion series is being? Is this great for the undergrad classroom for grad students, for researchers of any point? Or who do you see as the person who gets the most benefit of looking through this book?
We hope very much that people who work in any one of the disciplines that are represented in the book will be able to quite easily assign chapters to their undergraduate and graduate classes. But I learned so much from reading and very closely that the different chapters that were adjacent to my fields that I know from personal experience, it's going to be useful to play you before researchers on, even in your own specialist area, if you're a medicalist or a medicalist. Interdisciplinarity of the book means that we have designed it to be usable by people across the whole of medical studies, you know, you have the Kalamazoo crowd, but also to, you know, musicologists who want to talk about music. And we haven't, you know, avoided talking about music, but we have tried to make sure any time that we use terminology that is specific to a repertory, we try to be consistent, we try to make sure that explanations or glossing comes at the right level and the right time.
You know, there's no point writing a big book about subject that you think merits it, but then excluding all of its readers by being too parochial or too focused or whatever. So we try to, I mean, I'm sure there will be chapters that speak more readily to certain types of reader, but you should be able to, if you're a knowledgeable musician or you've got an interest in medieval studies, you should be able to access all of it on some level. I know. I can sort of imagine that, you know, someone who might be thinking about getting into this field, either from the perspective of a non-musicalist who's thinking about starting to incorporate some musical study into their work, or a medievalist musicologist who's thinking about getting into, you know, these people who maybe are not quite have not been quite ready to write about women, but are looking for how to how to enter into that and to get caught up on it.
That this could be an entry point. So that could be a student, but it could be somebody just looking for new approaches to the different repositories that are represented or to adjacent repositories. And I think that there are areas that are less well covered than others, as we mentioned, like Lisa and I both read about 13th century French motets. So there's a couple of chapters about that.
We were lucky to get a chapter on Italian music, but I think if you read the chapter on Italian music, you'll see that that field is at a different place than some of the other French studies in terms of attention to gender. And I think they're still sort of in the phase of gathering evidence that there are women involved and pulling that all together. And so I would hope that maybe putting that chapter together with the other chapters in the book shows some exciting possible directions to go to go next. So even if you're already in one of these fields, I think it could maybe be a great jumping off point.
I'm going to be signing a couple of chapters to my new module in the next semester, and that will be under the second year, undergraduate who have no area of their curriculum before Beethoven yet. So that's a lot of people will be all to be popsicles. So there's, there are ways in which sections this book can be quite widely I think. I think this is such a fantastic introduction to me as a little bit of ladies as well, just kind of putting women in the center of its straightaway.
Drawing attention, I guess to the timeline of this book, I know it was largely put together during the COVID years and also during a couple of years where I think we've all seen the field of music studies and of medieval studies change massively and kind of people really re-prioritizing. I would say this feels like a very timely volume even if it's all those changes and I think it's really come up the other side and it speaks to music studies in the year of 2023. But I wonder if you had any thoughts about what that kind of process is like of putting that book together in what I think we can all recognize for some pretty stressful years. It was bad luck in terms of the timing.
And of course, COVID didn't just affect us as editors, it also affected every single one of our contributors in all sorts of ways that we can to foreseen. It additionally affected anybody who wanted to use an archive, who needed to access a library, who wanted to communicate with each other, who might normally have met each other at a conference. On every level, COVID was disrupting to everybody involved in the project. It also meant that both Anne and I were juggling this project not just alongside our kind of more standard academic or librarianship roles, but also alongside our parenting family roles because homeschooling was a thing in both the UK and the USA.
And as a parent or children, one of whom has additional needs, that was a really challenging context. So what we tended to do, and I hope this is not just my impression, and you can kind of shake this down. There were times when for one of those, actually everything was quite a lot. And so we would take on the next phase of the moment, it needs to be music examples and there's got a few more bits of energy to work on that at the moment.
Or the next thing is contacting contributors about their revisions. Oh, but at least there's got a bit of space, well, something's happening in family context or whatever and can do that. So we sort of talked and tell quite a lot. I have to say, very straight away, it was an absolute pleasure working with Anne.
I think we had a good understanding. Have we met in person, Anna? I don't know. Anna's 2012.
I remember only because I was so nervous and he made some very kind comments after my paper. Oh, you see? You see? That's why I didn't scare you away.
But we don't have an in person ongoing working relationship like many editors might work in the same institution as one another. So we were lucky in a sense that we had a sort of complementary ways of working and we were very compassionate with one another and also with our contributors in terms of the fact that life goes on and life had to take a priority. So there was no point in which we sort of threatened contributors. If you can't get it by this deadline, you're off the project.
You know, contributors got ill, their family members got ill, as you can imagine. And also, I think the patient had babies, you know, all sorts of things during that time period. So you've got to kind of work around it. That said, it was flexible and it didn't hold us back much, looking at our initial plans for the timeline of publication.
I think in the end, we were not far off a year away, maybe. Is that right, Anna? Yeah, I think so. We had also, even before COVID, yeah, as soon as we started the project, I went back to grad school for a library degree as well as parenting.
And then as soon as I finished my library degree and started the new job, COVID hit right within two months after that, we both moved, I think at least once, I think, two or three times during this. So that, yeah, there was a lot of, we had to be very flexible and forgiving of ourselves and each other and our contributors. I think overall it was really positive experience because we didn't have a lot of people on any side of that to were inflexible or not understanding of all this balancing our lives with this big project. I wonder if now would be a good moment to kind of zoom in a little bit on both of your own contributions because of course there's 50 other contributors, but chat, let's again to reiterate what a press of a large number that is.
But you both have wonderful chapters on, as you mentioned already, the 13th century Motet in here. So Anna, your chapter is entitled Transmission of female voice motets in late 13th century manuscripts, and I wonder if you could, in the broadest strokes, you would feel are appropriate to kind of describe what you discussed in that chapter. So I love motets for talking about voice because for anyone who's not familiar with the form of the motet, old French motets are generally, well, modern, again, modern scholars, when we use motet, what we're usually talking about is a polyphonic work that's built on a slow moving lower voice that is usually derived from a chantimalism. So it's just this one little snippet of chant that's been slowed down sort of, and then between one and three faster moving additional voices on top of that.
And what's really fascinating about motets is that those will all be singing usually different texts that each be singing their own texts, sometimes in different languages. And the voices represented by those texts are sometimes really drastically different. They might be one of these non-mercations combined with a song to the Virgin Mary happening right together on top of this chant. And to me, even my whole career, I've been fascinated by the question of like, why does someone choose those voices to combine?
And there have been a musicologist who have said, you know, who cares? Like, you can't even tell what's going on in these things. It's probably about what it sounds like. Don't worry so much about what the texts are about.
But I just can't let go of the idea that there's some agency, someone put those together. But it does affect the sound and sometimes the sound of those voices also affects the sense of like one word might come through really clearly because two voices say it at the same time. So sound and the sense of the text are really connected. So it's really right for, I think, for talking about voice, but also for talking about the way that the music, the actual music analysis can help us understand the text, that they're not just sort of two separate things that we're studying.
So my chapter is talking about some of the core largest manuscripts for these for these motets in the 13th century coming out of the Paris kind of environs. And these three manuscripts really overlap a lot in their contents. They have, there's a number of motets that appear in two or three of these three manuscripts that also come from similar time and place. Maybe we're drawing on each other or on some sort of shared source material.
So in this article, I just sort of turned my attention to if there's so much overlap, why are there some pieces that are different? Like, why would somebody have what why would somebody who might have had access all the same pieces chosen not to copy some of these or to select others to include in their compilation. And that's something I've invested in some other articles as well in the past, especially the Monplique Codex thinking about why are certain motets there in a certain order, and can that tell us something about the source materials or the process of the compiler or what their priorities or page on edge might have been like how they were made. I think there's a lot we can learn from how the individual voices within the motel are combined and then how different motets are combined in the same source material.
That is a fantastic kind of summary and I think especially introduction to what a motel is and what some of these kind of really interesting questions are. I know one of the cool things about your chapter is you kind of bring in the idea of back to you and grown to talk into it. You also brought back to you into your work previously I know and I wonder I think that particular kind of marriage of medieval source material and more recent theories really interesting one. But you talked a little bit about how you see that approach and what it kind of brought you with this chapter or your work more generally.
So my grad program was very theory heavy. We read a lot of theory in my grad program. It took a lot of classes with Gary Tomlinson. That was the sort of emphasis and most of it didn't speak to me really but I really found that Bakhtin's theories seem once you get through in force and reading and translation because they don't read Russian but once you get through the language of it.
A lot of it seems pretty common sense like the idea that that there are patterns in a lot of genres where a particular sort of passage of time and a location are sort of tied together and are part of what this defines that genre. And really it's I don't think it's much of a stretch to apply it to medieval sources because he writes he draws on ancient Greek romances and Arthurian stories and so on as examples he intends those theories to be so broad that they apply to Western literature throughout throughout sort of written history really he goes back quite far. I think what's actually maybe unusual about the way I've used it here and elsewhere is that he varies specifically is not applying it to lyric. This is his theories are for discussing novels and his sense of asserting that there's some continuity between Greek romance and Arthurian stories and novelistic literature.
And I think he's the same as if this doesn't apply to lyric. So I think that's what's maybe a bit more unusual here but I think it actually works really well it's just that I think medieval lyric is actually really good about protecting the chronotope for example, is so concisely and powerfully so the pastoral opening and at least I'll probably talk more about the pastoral later but so many of them open with I went out writing the other day in some in some sense and that's art like there's so much about passage of time and location just in that little couplet where they you know where we are placing this in time and that he's outdoors that he's on horse like that chronotope of the pastoral is really powerful. So in this case I'm talking about a much smaller and sort of I talk about a much more specific chronotope that only seems to appear in a very small repertory but I think we see it. I think it's a major sort of genre defining thing in medieval song is just using Joaquin's language to try to summarize it.
And this is a great moment maybe to help over to Lisa and talk a little bit about the pastoral which I love this conversation is kind of already raising how wonderfully repetitive medieval songs can be. So maybe you could kind of describe what the kind of generic norms of the pastoral are generally how you understand the term and then maybe talk a little bit about your chapter in the book. So, I'd be pleased to so that's an idea of the pastoral obviously is a modern one but the way in which scholars have treated pastoral texts and songs has really changed quite a lot over the past century or so. The thing that sort of ties them together all the things that tie them together are usually some form of encounter.
That's the most objective way I can put it you know and also sort of stopped there in this romantic encounter as people like Jennifer Salts died and others reminders actually largely this is a sexual assault element to lots of these songs. And whether or not consent is necessarily part of the narrative there's a there is underpinning of elements of romance or just sex and a wide spectrum between those two things evidence in these songs usually in the outdoors usually in terms of a power dynamic of a night or a high ranking person on a beautiful white horse riding through a meadow he spots a lowly damsel she's usually singing to herself or playing a flute or hiding behind a bush and he finds her and they end up having sex in some way shape or form. There are elements of court behavior in their sorts of elements that can possibly happen at court involved in this situation and usually the woman's voice is sort of it's represented and it's a and a recognize certain tropes if you like of their experience or of their identity so they're really interesting and quite problematic category of song because it's not just a sort of rustic rural it'll you know a beautiful nostalgic picture of song and love making in the hay sacks. For the majority of time there's also some element of you know darker theme underpinning a lot of them not all of them are so explicit as that but some are.
So the song that particularly caught my eye had some stock characters of the pastoral in it had metal it had a M. and it had Robin and Robin Robin and Robin and whereas we might expect the narrator to be Robin in this particular song it caught my eye because the narrator is a female protagonist M. which seemed to me unusual as far as saying I've not seen any others in which M. is the narrator in there for you know what does what does that afford the author or compiler of this of this motel what does that allow them to say about the experience or about the situation and how does that affect how those ideas are handled musically.
In a sense I started off quite excited you know as one does in you know finding a way into a song quite excited this is always like a feminist pastoral you know women on top women in charge of the situation she basically tells Robin to go away go and find M. who he's actually in love with you know leaving it alone and he goes away whereas in the other text it's less clear that's what's happening. So from that point of view it seemed to have female empowerment somewhere in there and so that was the first way in which I came to do a kind of analysis of what has been known as a resistance reading you know what is this telling us about maybe empowering pastoral what would that be like anyway the more I look to sit and more carefully I looked at it. And then of course, that little nagging voice back of your brain going I don't think that's the only way in which you could read that.
And in particular the both texts both both text voices because it's a three voice sorry two words I'll try to get both text text voices in this three voice piece and end with a common refrain and the refrain itself. So I'm going to go all through the valley with my row so I'm going to I'm going to commit myself to my row so you can see that as like a an act of being committed to the woman he was meant to be with. Fine. On the other hand and valleys and so forth can be read quite seriously across the literature period is also being representative of female genitalia so a little bit like the the modern phrase going all the way with somebody this is this is the same sort of thing you know going all the way that's why to the title and made it tell you more so I'm just going all the way with the way with the idea that actually this is about objectifying women this is about whatever they say even when they tell you to go away.
Actually I will I will go all the way with with with with it can be read in different ways and I want to explore not only the potential resistance reading but also to really carefully take seriously the idea of a sentence in court text of this period which aren't just nice songs which can't which are not only readable at the face value if you look at troubadour songs for example it's slightly earlier and people like Simon Gordon have shown that they are absolutely infused with at least double if not triple meanings in the language and in their in their tone and I think perhaps me sometimes a little bit fearful little bit nervous about saying things that are just impolite or spotting calling out potential obscenity the fear of it looking like they're reading into it because they've got to dirty mind themselves and you know maybe that's the case here who knows but the difficulty is if we overlook that it just becomes a nice song about women in the field whereas actually there are the residences here of a whole variety of courtly song in which women are sexualized objectified and objects are sexual assault. So it's a song that can be read in lots of ways and I guess that's what I wanted to explore in it it raises all sorts of questions I did not have time to explore about one earth we do in performing that sort of song. And I mean I guess maybe related to the idea of performance but also just I'm you already spoke about the where you see music and Alice is kind of fitting into thinking about the Motette in general and Lisa where did you bring music or how did you bring music into your kind of thinking through these particular Motette. So one of the things that is interesting about Motette is that even though the musical language can be relatively stylized and it seems very tightly controlled.
On the other hand when you when you know the corpus very well and you get used to that language you can start to see ways in which particular ideas are brought to the fore particularly in the combination of different texts in the placement of voices in the way that different voices cross over in terms of their vocal range in the use of sound and silence in the use of rhyme. For me the song absolutely infused with the name metal which is not just the tenet but is found sort of manner a for the marrow but also which is found across the three texts in terms of the sound world of those texts that seem to be built around the name of metal for example so there are different ways in which you can text can be brought together and kind of unpicked a bit that can be really fascinating and Anna has shown that you can do that in all sorts of ways across the truth as a whole. Yeah that's fantastic. We are coming up to an hour which feels like a good time to maybe offer you both an opportunity to talk about any exciting work you have coming up or things that people can keep an eye out for that might have your name attached to them.
Anna would you like to start. Sure and since I've made this sort of career change actually the things I'm working on most right now are the library science world but one that I think might be relevant to other. Other listeners or readers might be the work that I'm doing with other members of the music library association to create a document about information literacy teaching in music and specifically applying some sort of research. I'm specifically applying some sort of broader ideas about information literacy to a music specific context basically giving some guidelines for how you might teach information literacy even if you don't have a research paper.
You know even if you're teaching a studio course how teaching students to be good users of information even if that's information they get from their own body when they're when they're performing or information that they find from in a masterclass from an instructor teaching students to use that material to seek seek out to be ethical in their approach to information. It's important across the board but this document will be sort of helping people's music librarians and hopefully also music faculty see those connections and we're hoping to present about it at some musicology conferences in the future so you might see me back at musicology conferences in the next couple of years. Fantastic I keep an eye out Lisa. So my most recent work and voltage to two areas one I'm just finishing a project on 14th century masculinity and music and listening to English Mutettes you know what were the role models that male clerics had for their own lives in the symphony that they were singing which has been quite special to fun I need to finish that that's the priority.
And then more widely actually lots of my work is falling into the 15th century at the moment and looking at networks of patronage and sort of what musicians it meant in the 15th century in England. I was really inspired by some of the work in this volume by Anne Bagnell Yardley and by Gillian Gower that you know reminds us there's still a lot to do about really articulating women's musical knowledge in the 15th century and in England and neighboring countries. So I'm looking at women's of surgical knowledge in particularly in the southeast of England but also musicianship in areas such as York that seem to be ignored a little bit compared with London. You know who were the female patrons of this stuff particularly elite female patrons who were often associated with their own chapels adjacent to their sort of male nobility for example they don't tend to turn up in our standard narrative so let's let's let's rewrite some of those sorts of things.
So to do it through working on quite prominent male musicians like you know John Dunstalk for example or Lael Powell that musicians of that generation who were absolutely working in Jason Lee with some really knowledgeable women and also with female houses conference at Zion for example, or the women that saw well none are adjacent to Nelson Albans. So there are lots of ways that we can do that sort of work with the slightly later repertory in ways that I think are largely absent from from the historical narrative at the moment. Fantastic. Professor Lisa Colton, Dr.
Anna Catherine Gart, thank you so much for taking some time out today. To anyone who's new please check out a companion to you from the voice song and the musical agency from your library and if your library doesn't have one try and ask them if they can get one because it's a really beautiful book and I think it's a really valuable asset to any collection. Thank you so much for taking time today.