Kate van Orden – författare

Ephemeral, fragile, often left unbound, sixteenth-century songbooks led fleeting lives in the pockets of singers and on the music desks of instrumentalists. Constantly in action, they were forever being used up, replaced, or abandoned as ways of reading changed. As such they document the acts of early musicians and the practices of everyday life at the unseen margins of elite society. Materialities is a cultural history of song on the page. It addresses a series of central questions concerning the audiences for written music by concentrating on the first genre to be commercialized by music printers: the French chanson. Scholars have long stressed that chansons represent the most broadly disseminated polyphony of the sixteenth century, but Materialities is the first book to account for the cultural reach of the chanson across a considerable cross-section of European society. Musicologist Kate van Orden brings extensive primary research and new analytical models to bear in this remarkable history of songbooks, music literacy, and social transformation during the first century of music printing. By tracking chansons into private libraries and schoolrooms and putting chansonniers into dialogue with catechisms, civility manuals, and chapbooks, Materialities charts the social distribution of songbooks, the gradual moralization of song, and the ways children learned their letters and notes. Its fresh conclusions revise several common assumptions about the value early moderns attributed to printed music, the levels of literacy required to perform polyphony, and the way musicians did or did not "read" their songbooks. With musical perspectives that can invigorate studies of print culture and the history of reading, Materialities is an essential guide for musicologists working with original sources and historians of the book interested in the vocal performances that operated alongside print.

What does it mean to author a piece of music? What transforms the performance scripts written down by musicians into authored books? In this fascinating cultural history of Western music's adaptation to print, Kate van Orden looks at how musical authorship first developed through the medium of printing. When music printing began in the sixteenth century, publication did not always involve the composer: printers used the names of famous composers to market books that might include little or none of their music. Publishing sacred music could be career-building for a composer, while some types of popular song proved too light to support a reputation in print, no matter how quickly they sold. Van Orden addresses the complexities that arose for music and musicians in the burgeoning cultures of print, concluding that authoring books of polyphony gained only uneven cultural traction across a century in which composers were still first and foremost performers.

Seachanges brings together original essays examining human and cultural mobility from a musical perspective. Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. But hearing past musicking that took place in diaspora and foreign lands requires new methodologies designed to center unsettled lives and ephemeral practices in history.Employing interpretive strategies from musicology, ethnomusicology, historical performance practice, sociolinguistics, and cultural history, the contributors intentionally complicate national and regional accounts of music from 1550 to 1800. Repertorial subjects include Spanish guitar music in Italy, Italian songs in Bohemia, Turkish songs in France, Jewish rituals on Corfu, Jesuit hymns in the Greek Archipelago, and Ottoman court music; further chapters recover the experiences of Indigenous musicians in colonial Latin America, the diaspora of Neapolitan singers, fictional cartographies of Baroque opera, and the careers of enslaved Black musicians in Venice and pre-revolutionary Haiti. They promote a new theoretical vocabulary that coalesces around orality, voice, performers, and performance as matters to foreground in mobility studies.Seachanges illustrates how musical microhistories can address mobility at the macro level of Mediterranean and Atlantic Studies while respecting the tempo of individual human lives and musical timeframes.