Department of Music

• Friday, November 30, 2012
• 107 Old Cabell Hall
• 3:30pm
• Free

Musica Transalpina: Janequin and the French in Italy

Kate van Orden, University of California, Berkeley

The programmatic chansons of Clément Janequin were enduringly popular south of the Alps. La bataglie, Le rossignol, etc. were printed until at least 1577, and are inventoried in the collections of a Paduan music teacher (1560), the Accademia filarmonica di Verona (1562), and San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (1583). One sign of their importance is the way their unique appearance inspired the creation of note negre madrigals in the 1540s.

Working outward from the networks of French composers, singers, printers and patrons in Italy, this paper tracks Janequin’s noisy chansons into private music lessons, Venetian salons, and Italian academies at midcentury. Janequin’s detailed notation provided extraordinary scripts for the performance of Frenchness by native speakers living abroad and Italians fascinated by oltremontani, their language, and foreign manners. Delving into the history of migration, I interpret accounts of these transalpine exchanges as a music history of ethnic encounter within Europe itself.

Professor van Orden has produced major studies of vernacular culture and the Renaissance chanson, edited a volume of essays on Music and the Cultures of Print (New York, 2000), and has just finished a book on the interrelationships between material culture, Renaissance humanism, and the chanson in print and manuscript. Her new research project, Musica Transalpina: French Music, Musicians, and Culture in Cinquecento Italy, has been funded by a generous grant from the ACLS; she was on leave in 2011. Her first book, Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2005), develops a political argument about music and military culture. Through detailed studies of dance, kingship, and warfare, it shows how music became a disciplinary agent of the absolutist state both on the battlefield and off. It won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society.