Paula Higgins
Royal Holloway, University of London, Music, Honorary Research Fellow, Institute of Musical Research
Paula Higgins is a cultural and intellectual historian of music from the Middle Ages to the present. Subjects of her research and teaching have included music and musicians in late medieval/early modern French courts, churches, and choir schools; women poets, composers, and musicians; musical lineage (teachers and students); mythologies of musical genius; music and sexual violence; death, mourning, and commemoration; opera in popular film; gender, race, and social justice in Anglo-American rock of the 60s and beyond.
She published some of the first studies treating late medieval and early modern music from a feminist critical perspective (cf “Parisian Nobles,” “The Other Minervas,” “Love and Death,” and “Musical ‘Parents’ and their ‘Progeny’”). Her article “Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology” (19th-Century Music), which situated Susan McClary’s *Feminine Endings* within a broader feminist context, figures as required reading on many syllabi internationally.
She created the first courses on women’s/gender studies and music in four universities in three countries (Duke; Notre Dame; Nottingham, UK; University of Vienna). Her signature course on Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality in Western Musical Culture, created in 1993, was one of the most sought after classes at Notre Dame. Blending the study of classical and popular musics, the course exposes longstanding institutional misogyny, racism, classism, and homophobia, and seeks to foster empathy with and sensitivity to issues of social justice, civil liberties, and human rights, both historically and currently.
She earned her B.A. in Music, Magna cum Laude, from Mount Holyoke College where she received the Carolyn Murray Reyer Music Prize for outstanding music major and graduated as a Mary Lyon Scholar with an Honors thesis and recital on Robert Schumann that won the Phi Beta Kappa Creative Arts Prize.
She went on to receive an MFA and PhD (1987) in Music History from Princeton University under the supervision of Lewis Lockwood and Margaret Bent.
She began her teaching career in 1984 as an Instructor at Duke University, promoted to Assistant Professor in 1987. Hired with early tenure at the University of Notre Dame in 1990, she was promoted to Full Professor in 2001 and held positions as Senior Fellow in the Medieval Institute and Concurrent Faculty in the Gender Studies Program. She moved to the UK as Chair (Professor) of Music (2004-2011) and Head of Department (2005-2006), University of Nottingham, the first woman to be hired externally into a UK Chair of Music. There she co-sponsored the School of Humanities initiative in Gender Histories and launched an MA Pathway in Gender Studies and Music, one of the first such programmes in the United Kingdom.
Visiting research and/or teaching positions took her to Harvard University; the University of Chicago; Wolfson College, Oxford University; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the University of Vienna as Käthe-Leichter Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies in the Institut für Musikwissenschaft; The Graduate Center, CUNY, PhD Program in Music; and the Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway University of London.
Her research has been widely recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (five), the American Council of Learned Societies (two), the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (France). She was the 1987 recipient of the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (AMS) for the most outstanding article by an early career scholar. She was nominated in 1992 for the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) and International Musicological Society (IMS) for outstanding contributions to musicology.
A former Editor-in-Chief (1996-98) of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), articles published under her editorship garnered five national awards: three Alfred Einstein Awards from the AMS; an ASCAP/Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; and an Irving Lowens Article Award for Distinguished Scholarship in American Music from the Society for American Music.
Further service to the AMS includes AMS Council; member of the Program Committee of the historic 1988 AMS Baltimore meeting (which featured the first papers devoted to feminist musicology); member and chair of the Alfred Einstein Award Committee; and election to the Board of Directors in 1991, where she drafted the first AMS anti-discrimination statement adopted by the AMS. In 2007, under the auspices of the AMS-OPUS Campaign, she launched the development initiative that endowed the Donna Cardamone Jackson Publication Fund, honouring the achievements (and now the memory) of a distinguished scholar of early music and women who died of ALS in 2009.
Full CV available upon request.
Email: Paula.Higgins at rhul.ac.uk
http://www.the-imr.uk/honorary-research-fellows
She published some of the first studies treating late medieval and early modern music from a feminist critical perspective (cf “Parisian Nobles,” “The Other Minervas,” “Love and Death,” and “Musical ‘Parents’ and their ‘Progeny’”). Her article “Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology” (19th-Century Music), which situated Susan McClary’s *Feminine Endings* within a broader feminist context, figures as required reading on many syllabi internationally.
She created the first courses on women’s/gender studies and music in four universities in three countries (Duke; Notre Dame; Nottingham, UK; University of Vienna). Her signature course on Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality in Western Musical Culture, created in 1993, was one of the most sought after classes at Notre Dame. Blending the study of classical and popular musics, the course exposes longstanding institutional misogyny, racism, classism, and homophobia, and seeks to foster empathy with and sensitivity to issues of social justice, civil liberties, and human rights, both historically and currently.
She earned her B.A. in Music, Magna cum Laude, from Mount Holyoke College where she received the Carolyn Murray Reyer Music Prize for outstanding music major and graduated as a Mary Lyon Scholar with an Honors thesis and recital on Robert Schumann that won the Phi Beta Kappa Creative Arts Prize.
She went on to receive an MFA and PhD (1987) in Music History from Princeton University under the supervision of Lewis Lockwood and Margaret Bent.
She began her teaching career in 1984 as an Instructor at Duke University, promoted to Assistant Professor in 1987. Hired with early tenure at the University of Notre Dame in 1990, she was promoted to Full Professor in 2001 and held positions as Senior Fellow in the Medieval Institute and Concurrent Faculty in the Gender Studies Program. She moved to the UK as Chair (Professor) of Music (2004-2011) and Head of Department (2005-2006), University of Nottingham, the first woman to be hired externally into a UK Chair of Music. There she co-sponsored the School of Humanities initiative in Gender Histories and launched an MA Pathway in Gender Studies and Music, one of the first such programmes in the United Kingdom.
Visiting research and/or teaching positions took her to Harvard University; the University of Chicago; Wolfson College, Oxford University; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the University of Vienna as Käthe-Leichter Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies and Gender Studies in the Institut für Musikwissenschaft; The Graduate Center, CUNY, PhD Program in Music; and the Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway University of London.
Her research has been widely recognized by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (five), the American Council of Learned Societies (two), the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (France). She was the 1987 recipient of the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (AMS) for the most outstanding article by an early career scholar. She was nominated in 1992 for the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (RMA) and International Musicological Society (IMS) for outstanding contributions to musicology.
A former Editor-in-Chief (1996-98) of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), articles published under her editorship garnered five national awards: three Alfred Einstein Awards from the AMS; an ASCAP/Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers; and an Irving Lowens Article Award for Distinguished Scholarship in American Music from the Society for American Music.
Further service to the AMS includes AMS Council; member of the Program Committee of the historic 1988 AMS Baltimore meeting (which featured the first papers devoted to feminist musicology); member and chair of the Alfred Einstein Award Committee; and election to the Board of Directors in 1991, where she drafted the first AMS anti-discrimination statement adopted by the AMS. In 2007, under the auspices of the AMS-OPUS Campaign, she launched the development initiative that endowed the Donna Cardamone Jackson Publication Fund, honouring the achievements (and now the memory) of a distinguished scholar of early music and women who died of ALS in 2009.
Full CV available upon request.
Email: Paula.Higgins at rhul.ac.uk
http://www.the-imr.uk/honorary-research-fellows
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Articles by Paula Higgins
Darwin F. Scott, Notes, Vol. 68, no.2 (December 2011).
Within the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes’s writings on myth and ideology, this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of musical genius that has long surrounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven came to infiltrate scholarship on Josquin des Prez, culminating in his late twentieth-century apotheosis. Contextualizing the composer’s reception history with respect to the debates between Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky in 1965 and especially the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, the author suggests that the ideological refashioning of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years. By privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the canon of works attributed to the composer is being decimated beyond historical recognition, the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments. The essay advocates a resolute historicization of sixteenth-century discourses of creative endowment, a critical reassessment of the role of authentication scholarship in Josquin studies, and a renewed sensitivity to the imbrication of mythologies of musical genius in music historiographies of both the past and the present.
Darwin F. Scott, Notes, Vol. 68, no.2 (December 2011).
Within the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes’s writings on myth and ideology, this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of musical genius that has long surrounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven came to infiltrate scholarship on Josquin des Prez, culminating in his late twentieth-century apotheosis. Contextualizing the composer’s reception history with respect to the debates between Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky in 1965 and especially the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, the author suggests that the ideological refashioning of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years. By privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the canon of works attributed to the composer is being decimated beyond historical recognition, the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments. The essay advocates a resolute historicization of sixteenth-century discourses of creative endowment, a critical reassessment of the role of authentication scholarship in Josquin studies, and a renewed sensitivity to the imbrication of mythologies of musical genius in music historiographies of both the past and the present.
1. Fabrice Fitch, “Busnoys the Bruiser,” Early Music, 28 (2000), 283-84
http://em.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/XXI/2/330.pdf
2. David N. Klausner, American Recorder, 41/5 (November 2000), 20-22.
http://www.americanrecorder.org/membership/pubs/magazine/2000/nov00/arnov00body.pdf
3. Susan Forcher Weiss, Notes, (2001), 888-91
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/notes/v057/57.4weiss.html
4. Maria Caraci Vela, Philomusica, 1 (2001-2002)
http://philomusica.unipv.it/annate/2001-2/intro.html
5. Cl. Lemaire, Scriptorium, 24/5 (2001), 319-21.
6. Jeffrey Dean, Tijdschrift van de Kongelige Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 51 (2001), 149-55.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/939194
7. Elizabeth Eva Leach, Music & Letters, 83 (2002), 443-47
http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/83/3/443.pdf
8. Mitchell Brauner, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55 (2002), 337-45.
http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/jams.2002.55.2.337?journalCode=jams
9. Henri Vanhulst, Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap, 56, (2002), 309-310.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3687021
1. David Fallows, Early Music, 14 (1986), 110-11
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3127612
2. John Caldwell, Music & Letters, 67 (1986), 113
https://www.jstor.org/stable/735558
“The mountains are in labor, but a ridiculous mouse will be born!” Thus invoking Horace, the Swiss humanist Heinrich Glarean launches a pre-emptive strike against would-be critics of the exordium of Josquin’s monumental _Planxit autem David_. Long regarded as one of the composer’s most stunning masterpieces, the motet now teeters on the brink of canonic disattribution thanks to skeptical readings of Glarean’s disclaimer in his _Dodecachordon_ of 1547. No one has yet considered that issues other than authorship might lie at the root of special pleading for an elegy treating the love of David and Jonathan, a complex and controversial topic deemed homoerotic since the beginning of Christianity.
Somewhat curiously for a polyphonic lament with approximate date, _Planxit autem David_ has resisted hermeneutical mining that would link it with a historical personage and/or elegiac occasion. It is widely presumed to have no liturgical connection beyond several recurrences of the Lamentation tone. Its earliest appearance in Petrucci’s _Motetti C_ of 1504 followed Josquin’s year-long sojourn (April 1503—April 1504) in Ferrara as master of the musical chapel of Ercole d’Este, and its first manuscript source stems from Florence under the Medici restoration about a decade later.
Building on groundwork of Todd Borgerding, my paper maps the rhetoric of aesthetic excess that characterizes Glarean’s opprobrium of Josquin’s love of musical ostentation and novelty, and the use of the adjective “lasciviens,” a word freighted with homoerotic meaning in medieval theoretical discourse. I probe the history of the biblical David and Jonathan story with respect to scholarly interpretations of its original Hebrew text, as well as its treatment in subsequent medieval and renaissance biblical exegesis, philosophy, and the visual arts. I draw attention to overlooked chant sources and an associated liturgical occasion for the text. Finally, I contextualize the composition of the motet with respect to coeval artistic representations of the subject of David in Renaissance Florence, thereby raising the possibility of an unforeseen connection with the creation and public display in that city, from 1501–1504, of Michelangelo’s monumental marble sculpture, _David_.
ABSTRACT
A tell-tale sign of the longstanding gender politics in which the subject of Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) and her quest for musical authorship have become enmeshed are repeated attempts on the part of biographers to shield and exonerate her brother, Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), from unseemly accusations of thwarting his sister’s ambitions, or, to put it more bluntly, of “suppressing” her. Certain Hensel scholars, they claim, have sought to demonize Felix and to victimize Fanny, thus vicariously acting out their own “feminist indignation” and appropriating Hensel for present-day political agendas. Felix- exonerators and -demonizers alike tend to share the unexamined (and by now entrenched) critical assumption that Hensel, who composed some 500 works, was herself “quite neutral” or “indifferent” to their publication--a happy dilettante blissfully devoid of inadmissible ambitions.
This paper proposes to explore the ongoing critical silence on the part of both Hensel and Mendelssohn scholars with respect to two documents (among others) bearing directly on Hensel’s life and works, both examples of unequivocal posthumous censorship: 1) the suppression from publication, by family members, of epistolary evidence that Mendelssohn sought his mother’s collusion in concealing from his sister his whole-hearted disapproval of her quest to publish her music; and 2) the deletion, via ellipsis, from the memoirs of composer Charles Gounod, of evidence asserting Mendelssohn’s appropriation and publication under his own name of a number of Hensel’s Songs Without Words for solo piano. The extent to which scholars have painstakingly glossed over and dismissed out of hand, when not ignored altogether, the implications of these censored documents for Hensel’s biography is quite remarkable, suppressing, as they do, inflammatory evidence both compromising the reputation of a famous brother and cherished public persona, and exposing the transgressive aspirations to authorship of his lesser known sister.
A tell-tale sign of the longstanding gender politics in which Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) and her quest for musical authorship have become enmeshed are repeated attempts on the part of biographers to shield her brother, Felix Mendelssohn, from accusations of thwarting his sister’s ambitions.
Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N 1AZ
Saturday 26th September 2015, 1-4pm
UK Women's Studies Group 1558-1837, Seminar Series 2015-2016
‘I‘m so tired of you, America’. The refrain of Rufus Wainwright‘s song ‘Going to a Town’ (Release the Stars, 2007) drew indignation even from ardent fans who heard it as a gratuitous indictment of the USA. Whilst denying the song’s anti-American theme, Wainwright dubbed the piece his ‘first political song’, notwithstanding his stridently out and proud anthem “Gay Messiah” (Want 2, 2005) which found itself the belated subject of denunciation by an extremist Italian Catholic youth group protesting Wainwright’s appearance at the San Remo festival.
Both text and music of ‘Going to a Town’ are rife with Wainwright‘s trademark allusivity, deploying cleverly concealed juxtapositions of well-known hymns and anthems. The music video of the song, directed by British filmmaker Sophie Muller, delivers a virtuosic display of provocative imagery equating the U.S. civil rights and social justice movements of the 1960s with the present-day LGBT struggle for civil liberties. As a longstanding out and proud gay man, Wainwright has frequently spoken of his mission to promote greater understanding and acknowledgement of a longstanding (and long-suppressed) queer history of artistic creativity.
Through a close intertexual scrutiny of the overt and covert antecedents of ‘Going to a Town’—drawn from music, literature, art history, and film--my paper offers a reading of the music video not only as a social activist manifesto against the neo-conservative, anti-gay agenda of the Bush 2 era, but also a celebratory encomium to a history of sexual dissidence and a specifically queer lineage of cultural achievement.
http://www.indiana.edu/~semhome/2010/pdf/SEM%202010%20Abstract%20Book.pdf, p. 47
2. University of London, 27 May 2008. Invited Research Seminar. School of Advanced Study, Institute of Historical Research. London Society for Medieval Studies,
Heinrich Glarean introduced his discussion of the opening of Josquin’s motet Planxit autem David with the famous line from Horace’s Ars poetica ‘The mountains are in labor, but a ridiculous mouse will be born’. This citation, together with Glarean’s ensuing disclaimer that ‘nothing in this piece is unworthy of the composer’, has long been adduced as evidence of the Swiss humanist’s doubts as to Josquin’s authorship. While Glarean’s somewhat defensive framing of the discussion seems to anticipate criticism, its presumed correlation with the motet’s inauthenticity remains open to interpretation.
This paper aims to map the discourses of aesthetic excess that have long characterized the Germanic reception history of the motet from Ambros to Finscher and to demonstrate its indebtedness to Glarean’s ostensible and insufficiently understood opprobrium of Josquin’s love of musical ostentation, transgression, and novelty. I propose a more nuanced reading of portions of Glarean’s original Latin text and its translation into English which, along with the odd genius-inflected allusion to Josquin’s manhood, seem tacitly to encode both an awareness of and resistance to its potentially homoerotic significance. These discursive strategies of aesthetic decontamination, I suggest, have fueled the historiographical process by which the rhetorical excess and extravagance once deemed paradigmatic of Josquin’s musical style, and of this motet in particular, transmogrifies over time into the disqualifying rhetoric of aesthetic devaluation and canonic disattribution.
(pp.112-13)
STEMMING THE ROSE, QUEERING THE SONG: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN , OLD HOLLYWOOD, AND THE RADICAL POLITICS OF RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
University of Newcastle, 18 October 2007. Paper. Musicology Research Seminar series.
Quebec City, 3 November 2007. Paper. Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society;
CUNY Graduate Center, 8 November 2007. Paper. Musicology Colloquium series.
*The abstract for this paper was accepted for and published in the Abstract Book for AMS National Meeting in Boston 2019 but transatlantic flight disruptions prevented my participation.
https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/death-life-studies/about-us/news/music-monuments-and-memory-symposium-13th-nov-2021-programme-and-registration/?fbclid=IwAR1EoHsv6vtyIXs7OWOx184nfO06SdAOwFTsx6HuKmYPFjxSC1XjDdnuJ0s
"Female participation seems to have been rare: medieval music making was an all male affair . . . and there is little evidence for the use of female voices before the mid-15th century."
His views as set out in 1973 were more or less indistinguishable from coeval notions of the creative sterility and inactivity of historical women generally. And yet, decades of research born of Women's Studies programs in the US and abroad have since shown that androcentric assertions that once passed as infallible dogma were never true to begin with. Some twenty-five years ago, I challenged Munrow's famous claim of early music as "all male affair." I drew attention to the dauphine Margaret of Scotland (1424-1445), her ladies-in-waiting, and their unforeseen involvement in writing poetry. I noted that the names of several of these women appeared in manuscripts of fifteenth-century poetry containing texts set to music by Antoine Busnoys and others, one of which transmits a poem by Busnoys found nowhere else. These critical details have gone unnoticed by scholars addressing aspects of the Loire Valley chansonniers and other fifteenth-century music books since that time.
This article seeks to reassess the activities of the Scottish princess and her ladies and their ongoing implications for the study of women as consumers of early music books. I suggest that we need at long last to move beyond seeing women in the passive role of disinterested recipients and to reckon with evidence of the strong likelihood of their more active participation in the creation, consumption, performance, and production (as composers, poets, music scribes, parcheminiers, and illuminators) of early music books and their repertoires.
PM Higgins
Paper presented at the Bach Network UK, Fifth Johann Sebastian Bach Dialogue Meeting, Edinburgh, 11-14 August 2011
In the summer of 1967 a song called A White Shade of Pale (hereafter AWSOP) by the British band Procol Harum burst forth from my hand-held transistor radio and forever changed my life. So awestruck was my 14-year-old aspiring classical pianist and sometime church organist self by AWSOP’s obvious indebtedness to Bach, I penned a fulsome fan letter (alas unsent) to one Matthew Fisher, identified in the liner notes as the organist, thanking him for making ‘Bach’s music’ known to the world of rock music. I could hardly have foreseen that the question of Fisher’s role in the ‘co-authorship’ of AWSOP, and Bach’s signal influence thereon, would form the basis for a landmark UK intellectual property case Fisher v. Brooker (2006) some 40 years later.
ASWOP is today the No.1 most played song in public places of the past 75 years according to a study by BBC2. ‘We are dealing with one of the most successful pop songs ever written by British artists’, said Mr Ian Purvis, QC, representing Mr Fisher in High Court. 'In the minds of many it defines the Summer of Love of 1967’. At the heart of both the court case and popular discourse about the song is the question of Fisher’s ‘authorial’ role in the famous solo organ exordium and the prominent Bach-inspired counterpoint interwoven throughout the song, a question hinging largely on the role of Bach’s influence, whether from the second movement of the Orchestral Suite in D major, BWV 1068 (‘Air on a G-string’) and/or the Schuebler chorale, ‘Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme’, BWV 645.
Long before Fisher v. Brooker though, the notion that AWSOP was ‘nicked from Bach’ was firmly seeded in the popular consciousness blissfully unconcerned about academic issues of ‘authorship’ and ‘authenticity’. Returning to matters first explored in my 1993 study of the influence of early music on popular culture, my paper raises a number of intertwined questions about the extraordinary popularity of AWSOP and what (if anything) this may say about the popular reception of Bach in the 20th and 21st centuries.
After a brief elucidation of the questions of quotation and influence I will explore the popular reception of AWSOP using unconventional source material--the hundreds of effusive comments by ordinary music lovers moved to write about the song on the social network spaces of Twitter and Youtube.com. The affective responses of this diverse international fan base—and their shared commonalities in particular--forms a compelling body of normally unheard critical voices that deserve validation and greater attention from musicologists. To what extent does it matter that AWSOP quotes Bach? Is it irrelevant or does it rather suggest a hitherto unforeseen breadth of new interpretive communities for Bach’s music? What does it say about negative stereotypes, widely uncontested, about the marginalized subjects of popular music fans and rock/popular musicians, and especially their musical tastes, literacy, and training/education? And what, above all, does it say about the rigid barriers traditionally erected between high and low cultures with respect to Bach in the 21st century?
University of Falmouth
23-25 April 2015
The New York Times as an Op-Ed contribution. It was not selected for publication