Seminar: Kate van Orden, "Music as a Sonic Record: Sixteenth-Century Vernaculars in Perspective"

As pieces designed for vocal performance, secular songs such as French chansons and Italian madrigals record vernacular accents, dialects, and sounds often excluded in literary and scientific texts. 

This work-in-progress suggests how we might "play back" these records and put these scripts or transcripts "into play," and is intended to open a conversation with all scholars interested in the vocal dimension of literature in early modern Europe.  

Kate van Orden, Dwight P. Robinson Professor of Music at Harvard University, specializes in cultural history. Her books include Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005), which won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, and a series of books on print culture, including (ed.) Music and the Cultures of Print (2000); Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (2014); and Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in 16th-c. Europe (2015). Her research has been supported by the AAUW, the ACLS, and the CNRS. She also performs on historical bassoons and can be heard on Sony, Virgin Classics, Glossa, Teldec, and Harmonia Mundi.