Music and Visual Culture in Early Modern England
My Leverhulme-funded project aims to deepen our understanding of early modern musical experience, emotion, and musical knowledge through music's complex relationship to the visual. So often musicologists have attended to musical art only to the extent that notated compositions and celebrated musicians can be recognised in them, leaving important questions about the representation of music-making and musical experience largely neglected.
My research has shown that the musical-visual culture of early modern England contains abundant insight into how visual/auditory sensing built interior culture, both of the home and the self. I am interested in what the act of making music meant to people and what they felt when they experienced it. The impact of this study will be felt beyond the disciplines of art history and musicology, as it provides fresh clues and theoretical models for accessing and understanding the structures, relationships, and emotions upon which households were built.​
Can Beauty Save The World?: Aesthetic Engagement Among The Spiritual But Not Religious
Part of the John Templeton Foundation project, 'Can Beauty Save the World?​' at Catholic University of America, our UK-based subgrant explores singing as a 'spiritual' practice, both of the past and today.
​
In 1665, Samuel Pepys experienced an extraordinary night singing with friends: ‘Here the best company for musique I ever was in, in my life, and wish I could live and die in it’. This cocktail of good music & good company (plus a few pretty faces) was, for Peyps, key to a life well lived.
His yearning to ‘live and die in it’, described as ‘extasy’, resonates with choral singers today. Song is a universally occurring human practice. Group singing produces a ‘high’ like the one described by Pepys, releasing endorphins, dopamine & serotonin. Like many in his society, Pepys was a regular church goer yet much of his most ‘spiritual’ writing was often reserved for musical, rather than overtly religious experiences. In religious & more secular eras alike, one finds musical-spiritual experience on the periphery of, or central to fundamental questions of human existence, such as the quality & purpose of beauty, being, or community.
Our study combines qualitative, historical, & practical approaches to better understand non-religious devotion to, & participation in, sacred music-making as a fulfilment of spiritual yearning. ​The UK-team includes Katie Bank (Birmingham) Rebekah Wallace (Birmingham and Blackfriars Oxford), and Stephen Bullivant (St Mary's Twickenham).
A New Fa-La: Sense in Nonsense Song
Non-lexical vocables such as 'fala' and 'heigh-nonny-no' are so deeply engrained in early modern English polyphonic song that they remained an iconic feature of this repertoire even today, with regular appearances at May Day and Christmas. Nonetheless, they were left out of Edmund Fellowes’ classic edition English Madrigal Verse (1920) for having 'nothing to do with the poem'. My research in this area makes the case for the musical/textual significance of non-lexical refrains.
While such refrains may appear void of meaning, they are effectively symbols rife with musicalised significance, sometimes drastically altering the very meaning of the poetic text. Paradoxically, the lack of definite lexical meaning created a vacuum that increased the semantic potency of these refrains. This body of research, focusing on satire, the history of emotions, and performance studies aims to provide the first comprehensive study of musical meaning in early modern 'nonsense' syllable refrains. It will demonstrate that contemporary use of the Elizabethan/Stuart non-lexical vocable was far more meaningful than our current understanding permits, an argument with robust implications for musical-textual relationships and the creation of meaning in performances of English song. This study will significantly deepen our understanding of music’s communicative functions in early modern England, which operated on symbolic and expressive levels. Having hardened into a symbol of national heritage, these ‘phatic’ tropes are still relevant to modern audiences and remain a part of current-day musical practice, particularly when invoking historical Englishness.​
