Julia Shinnick

Abstract from Albrecht Classen, “Introduction,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme , ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 1-143; here 106-107. Julia Wingo Shinnick examines the Old French song “Bele Ysabiauz,” a chanson de toile by Audefroi le Bâtard, and the Old Occitan song, “Lo ferm voler” by Arnaut Daniel in light of the sexual innuendoes implied in the musical structures. The first poem describes the tragic development in the relationship of a young couple who have to separate because her parents marry her off to another man. But before the male lover Gerard departs on a crusade, he encounters his lady Ysabiauz one more time, and they suddenly embrace each other passionately, falling to the ground. When her husband unexpectedly comes across this scene, he is so shocked about the presumed death of his wife that he dies from grief. This frees Ysabiauz, making it possible for her to marry her true love. The musical composition strongly supports the narrative development, as Shinnick demonstrates through a careful analysis of the stanzas, the neumes, pitches, syllables, and the refrain. Although none of the melismas contain more than five pitches, Shinnick underscores how much the musical structure lent itself for the audience imagining the erotic, if not specifically sexual, content of the song, the innuendo being created mostly through the musical development. In Arnaut Daniel’s canso, “Lo ferm voler,” which was deeply admired by many late-medieval poets, including Dante and Petrarch, the directness of the language and narrative treatment of sexuality finds its full confirmation through the intensively syllabic musical setting by which Daniel succeeded in closely correlating text and music, creating a new type of song, only later called sestina, specifically drawing from the technique of repeating the rhyme words. These all carry noteworthy sexual meaning, as literary scholarship has often commented on, but Shinnick takes the additional step to examine more closely how musical arrangement supports the textual messages, surprisingly openly addressing the singer’s desire for sexual pleasures with his lady. Here innuendo perfectly assists in grasping the poet’s/composer’s strategy insofar as the musical gestures evoke allusions, associations, and evocations, ultimately exploding into dramatic sexual suggestions. Shinnick points out how easily a singer could realize these innuendoes by way of melodic gestures, supported by vocal inflection, facial expressions, and bodily movement. Her analysis convincingly demonstrates how the musical progression directly reflects the growth of the singer’s sexual desires, which he communicates to his lady quite openly in his text. There is no bashfulness or a tentative, hesitating wooing; instead, both words and the melody specifically address the erotic intentions and support each other in this operation. Generally, courtly songs were performed in public and constituted courtly culture in many different ways. Shinnick’s study therefore allows us to gain additional perspectives regarding the performative nature of sexuality in the premodern world. But her observations also alert us to a critical aspect in most musical presentations that heavily rely on innuendos as part of the dramatic enactment. Undoubtedly, this realization could also be applied to modern music, or songs, but it particularly applies to medieval poems in their melodic structure.

Abstract from Albrecht Classen, “Introduction,” Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme , ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 1-143; here 106-107.

Julia Wingo Shinnick examines the Old French song “Bele Ysabiauz,” a chanson de toile by Audefroi le Bâtard, and the Old Occitan song, “Lo ferm voler” by Arnaut Daniel in light of the sexual innuendoes implied in the musical structures.
The first poem describes the tragic development in the relationship of a young couple who have to separate because her parents marry her off to another man.  But before the male lover Gerard departs on a crusade, he encounters his lady Ysabiauz one more time, and they suddenly embrace each other passionately, falling to the ground.  When her husband unexpectedly comes across this scene, he is so shocked about the presumed death of his wife that he dies from grief.  This frees Ysabiauz, making it possible for her to marry her true love.
The musical composition strongly supports the narrative development, as Shinnick demonstrates through a careful analysis of the stanzas, the neumes, pitches, syllables, and the refrain.  Although none of the melismas contain more than five pitches, Shinnick underscores how much the musical structure lent itself for the audience imagining the erotic, if not specifically sexual, content of the song, the innuendo being created mostly through the musical development.
In Arnaut Daniel’s canso, “Lo ferm voler,” which was deeply admired by many late-medieval poets, including Dante and Petrarch, the directness of the language and narrative treatment of sexuality finds its full confirmation through the intensively syllabic musical setting by which Daniel succeeded in closely correlating text and music, creating a new type of song, only later called sestina, specifically drawing from the technique of repeating the rhyme words.  These all carry noteworthy sexual meaning, as literary scholarship has often commented on, but Shinnick takes the additional step to examine more closely how musical arrangement supports the textual messages, surprisingly openly addressing the singer’s desire for sexual pleasures with his lady.
Here innuendo perfectly assists in grasping the poet’s/composer’s strategy insofar as the musical gestures evoke allusions, associations, and evocations, ultimately exploding into dramatic sexual suggestions.  Shinnick points out how easily a singer could realize these innuendoes by way of melodic gestures, supported by vocal inflection, facial  expressions, and bodily movement.  Her analysis convincingly demonstrates how the musical progression directly reflects the growth of the singer’s sexual desires, which he communicates to his lady quite openly in his text.  There is no bashfulness or a tentative, hesitating wooing; instead, both words and the melody specifically address the erotic intentions and support each other in this operation. 
Generally, courtly songs were performed in public and constituted courtly culture in many different ways.  Shinnick’s study therefore allows us to gain additional perspectives regarding the performative nature of sexuality in the premodern world.  But her observations also alert us to a critical aspect in most musical presentations that heavily rely on innuendos as part of the dramatic enactment.  Undoubtedly, this realization could also be applied to modern music, or songs, but it particularly applies to medieval poems in their melodic structure.

Sponsa virum lugeo, a unique sequence from the thirteenth-century manuscript Assisi 695, explicitly communicates, through a narrative of the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury, the ideal of imitatio Christi.  The piece implicitly afforded its hearers a powerful experience of the paradoxes explained in the mimetic theory of René Girard, author of the acclaimed study, Violence and the Sacred.
Within the ordered events of the medieval Mass -- a ritual with distinct hierarchical differences between its component actions and chants -- this sequence emphasizes the hallmark of mimetic crisis: the loss of the normal distinctions of difference that undergird societal norms of behavior and belief.  For Girard, such distinctions hold civilization together by simultaneously containing and releasing its inherent foundational violence.  The melody, a masterpiece of compositional skill, manages to contain the disturbing text, while also paradoxically highlighting its violent images.  At the climatic point of the sequence, a direct address to the grieving church of Canterbury orders it to “rave like the Bacchants,” conveying a threatening allusion to an inversion of the Eucharist.  Here the piece, and perhaps even the sequence form itself, has reached a breaking point in the face of the mimetic crisis it depicts.
But, the composer-poet manages to restore order, chiefly through his skillfully constructed melodic line, exemplifying the role of music as related to Girard’s mimetic theory.

Although energetic rebuilding campaigns had begun soon after a disastrous fire damaged the cathedral of Reims in 1210, the work slowed as it entered the more expensive stages of constructing the upper levels of the edifice.  The archbishop and the chapter of canons tried various strategies to raise funds for the enterprise, including, in 1213, a public ceremony involving the cranium of Saint Nicasius, a prized relic shown in an effort to prompt donations to the building effort.  Indulgences were offered as an incentive to contributors in 1221 and 1222, but rifts between the citizens of the town and the clerical authorities widened.  The situation reached a point of crisis in 1233, when the archbishop levied a tithe on the burghers of Reims, and in retaliation for their refusal to pay the tax, commanded the burghers to remain in their parishes.  The burghers rebelled, attacking the archbishop’s house and killing one of his officials, and harassing the canons as well.  The canons sought refuge outside the city; they were unable to return until 1236, after Louis IX stepped in to pacify the situation, levying fines and ordering the burghers to perform public penance for their sins. 

The manuscript Assisi 695, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento, ms. 695 (c. 1230) provides an indirect witness to these events and speaks to the conflicts between the Rémois and their clergy in two pieces original to the manuscript. The text of Stans a longe publicanus, a “Publican” sequence, refers to “the temple of Christ” and calls for the assembly to be “dedicated and humble” so that they may be justified as was the Publican.  The music of this setting, also original to the codex, draws briefly upon the Lauds antiphon found as far back as Hartker’s antiphoner. 

O felices et beati, a mature, fully rhyming sequence, is rubricated for the feast of the Dedication and includes references to two biblical figures represented in statues completed c. 1230 for Notre-Dame-de-Reims.  The text urges the assembly to offer financial support to the cathedral and also encourages them to “abandon confusion” and “come to peace with Christ our leader.” I suggest that this exhortation testifies to some hope for reconciliation between the burghers and the clergy, a reconciliation eventually effected only in 1241 after much monetary and symbolic penance on the part of the Rémois.

A comparison of seven different settings (six French and one English; five 13th-century, one 10th-century and one late 12th-century) of the Laudes regiae yields intriguing information about the Laudes in the archiepiscopal city of Reims, c. 1230.  Not only does the 13th-century Reims version from the manuscript Assisi 695 have the greatest number of invocations for aid to the Pope, King, Archbishop, and the Army of the Franks, but the local emphasis is quite pronounced; every saint invoked has clear ties to Reims, either in terms of relics owned by the cathedral or a local church, oratory or cemetery dedicated to the saint.  Although such local emphasis is not uncommon in Laudes regiae, the Reims version in Assisi 695 seems to be a conscious attempt to outdo other versions.  The Reims Laudes regiae contributes to the city’s wish to establish beyond a doubt the supremacy of Reims as coronation city for the kings of France, an honor which had only in 1223 (with the first royal crowning and anointing, that of Louis VIII, in the newly built Reims cathedral) become a fait accompli over St. Denis, Reims’ long-standing competitor for the honor.  The Assisi 695 Laudes regiae was probably the version used at Mass after that 1223 crowning in the newly built cathedral, and as such would have been a source of pride to the archdiocese and the city, with its grandeur and length surpassing any other Laudes regiae version of the time.

According to Eric Gans, a work of art is given its beauty by the collective desire mediated through the signs constituting the esthetic experience, a variant of the sacrificial event in which human culture originated.  The inviolability of the esthetic form “both arouses desire and keeps this desire at a distance, thereby maintaining the desirer in the oscillatory relation characteristic of esthetic experience.”  As inviolable crucibles for the forging and containment of powerful desires and ideals, performances of troubadour and trouvère songs functioned to maintain the courtly culture of the era, not only through their poems and melodies but also through crucial interactions of text and music.

The work of René Girard also sheds light on the ideal of courtly love and its expression, through melody and text, in the corpus of troubadour and trouvère song.  Melody serves as both temenos and expressive vehicle – for an individual text, for the ideal of fin amour, and as part of the primary esthetic experience of courtly culture, for the actual constraints of the social order.  An individual song has as its overall structure the same general structure of all cultural experience, in terms of Girard’s mimetic theory, a crisis brought to a resolution – a sacrifice – that simultaneously contains and releases the energy of the generative scapegoat mechanism.

The repertoires of the troubadours and trouvères provide a testing ground for Gans’s and Girard’s ideas, particularly the genre of the trouvère pastourelle.  The performance of these songs featured the singer and his performance at the center of attention, and the shepherdess at the center of his subject, replicating the “circle of actors designating a central object” in Gans’s originary scene.  The pastourelle is readily identifiable as the locus for a sacrifice or victimizing of a young woman by a predatory knight, and the poems relate varying degrees of violence, ranging from seduction or coercion to rape.  In the musical settings of these texts, elements such as degree of melismatic density, high or low range, melodic motion, contour, zenith and/or nadir, and the use of major or minor “mode” provide hints toward a system of signs indicating the role of music vis-à-vis the text in concealing or revealing the violence that lurks, lures, or attacks in these songs.

Music has been associated with scapegoating and murder by some scholars of René Girard’s mimetic theory. Certainly, there are examples of music used to fire up a crowd to commit violent acts. But music can also function to promote pacific mimesis. Singers of hymns jointly create a physical, sounded object, a process that resonates with Eric Gans’s ideas of the aesthetic of desire in relation to music as an artwork. An analysis of two Christian hymns, "They cast their nets in Galilee" and "Draw nigh and take the body of the Lord," from The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church, reveals musical and textual means by which hymns used in congregational singing can function to build peaceful community unification without the positing of an antagonistic “other” against which to unite.