Rebekah Ahrendt

Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization ...

In the fall of 1701, a new French-language opera company in The Hague opened with a production of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Philippe Quinault’s Armide (1686), a choice that can now be confirmed by a libretto (fig. 1). Yet the company’s choice of Armide was not self-evident, nor did their production follow that of Paris to the letter. Considering why and how this company came to perform Armide fifteen years after it first had appeared in Paris also raises questions about the stakes of operatic revival more generally. For revival is a transformative process: new productions of old operas looked, sounded, and meant differently to the diverse audiences who attended them in places far removed from the origin point, both geographically and temporally. Most significantly, the production in The Hague included a new prologue. At the heart of this essay, then, is a reconsideration of the relationship between the prologue to Armide and the five acts of the opera proper. Examining the choices made in The Hague in 1701 can lead to a new understanding of Armide’s premiere as well. Thematically, Armide appealed to audiences whose encounters with the rest of the globe were becoming ever more frequent and sustained around the turn of the eighteenth century. The otherness of the sorceress Armide, her Oriental origins, have inspired modern scholars to explore the opera as a staging of the fundamental struggle between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or as registering an ambivalence toward French colonialism. One might say that the opera’s engagement with the East made it a logical text for an opera company such as that of The Hague, which itself capitalized on cosmopolitanism and border crossing. After all, the company started as a cross-confessional, multiregional corporation involving a German Lutheran (Gerhard Schott); Schott’s agent in The Hague, the Huguenot refugee Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée; and a French Catholic couple (Catherine Dudard and Louis Deseschaliers). Their regular audience included diplomats, rulers, and merchants from across Europe, who shared the goal of reaping the world’s wealth. Armide made practical sense, for the company reused materials owned by Schott that had been prepared for a performance in Kiel. It was also a sensible choice for an inaugural production, because of the opera’s renown. By 1701 it was

- Printed version available soon - Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communication allowed ordinary men and women to scatter letters across Europe like never before. This exchange helped knit together what contemporaries called the ‘respublica litteraria’, a knowledge-based civil society, crucial to that era’s intellectual breakthroughs, formative of many modern values and institutions, and a potential cornerstone of a transnational level of European identity. Ironically, the exchange of letters which created this community also dispersed the documentation required to study it, posing enormous difficulties for historians of the subject ever since. To reassemble that scattered material and chart the history of that imagined community, we need a revolution in digital communications. Between 2014 and 2018, an EU networking grant assembled an interdisciplinary community of over 200 experts from 33 different countries and many different fields for four years of structured discussion. The aim was to envisage transnational digital infrastructure for facilitating the radically multilateral collaboration needed to reassemble this scattered documentation and to support a new generation of scholarly work and public dissemination. The framework emerging from those discussions – potentially applicable also to other forms of intellectual, cultural and economic exchange in other periods and regions – is documented in this book.

While the origins (roots) and destinations of travel are a frequent topic of study in histories of music, what is often overlooked are the actual routes. How can considering the roads traveled alter our conceptions of musical labor or stylistic change? To date, we have a poor understanding of the agents of (ex)change. Official documents can tell us who was where when, but a more personal view of performer’s lives has rarely been recoverable.
Until now. A previously-unstudied archive of letters reveals the long-distance connections fostered by performers. Still in their original sealskin-covered trunk, the letters are uncensored, unedited, and in some cases unopened—for they were never delivered. Around 100 of the 2300 letters, dated between 1692 and 1706, are to, from, or about French-trained performers. From Paris to The Hague, from Latvia to London, actors and musicians worked together, played together, and looked after one another, trading memories, aspirations, and cheese.
Adopting an approach centered on itinerant performers may indeed challenge our assumptions about stylistic change. The very fact that they played in so many different places—and that they knew one another well—implies that there may have been more uniformity of style and taste across Western Europe than has previously been guessed. [Article in French; open access provided by Utrecht University]

An observer of the negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht remarked “I thought the peace was being negotiated at the city hall, but it is really negotiated at social gatherings, parties, balls, and celebrations.” It is undeniable that social life at Utrecht played a significant part in the negotiations and that social contacts were used for diplomatic ends. Entertainment—especially musical entertainment—was perhaps the most important aspect of daily life in Utrecht. Social gatherings offered the ambassadors opportunities for polite interchange, thus increasing the chances that they could reach political agreement in their negotiations. Music accompanied all of these activities, from trumpeters on canal barges, to strolling violinists throughout town, to the sound of the carillon in the Dom. Musical parades were a regular feature, and the ambassadors (and their wives) often performed for each other.
While Utrecht marched to the soundtrack of diplomacy, the international Republic of Music was also searching for peaceful settlement to the wars over national style and musical taste that had raged sporadically over the past decades. Such debates reached new heights during the War of the Spanish Succession. Just as the peace was concluded at Utrecht in 1713, the first attempts at compromise—in the form of a mixed, cosmopolitan taste—were essayed. Significantly, the clearest statements as to how this new ‘European’ style could be achieved issued from two writers with diplomatic credentials: Johann Mattheson and Jean-Baptiste Du Bos. While Du Bos and Mattheson argued from opposing sides, as it were, both ended up altering the course of music history, with repercussions that are still felt today.

My work centres on the confluence of ‘French’ spectacular practices and Huguenot refugees at the turn of the eighteenth century. My primary interest is in the identification of the refugees and theatrical works as French, not just in linguistic terms, but in the sense of a lived cultural style that played out on the public stage. For it was in tandem with the arrival of the refugees that many European locations experienced a (re)new(ed) interest in cultural products marked as ‘French’.

Defining the status of refugees necessitated defining that of natives, establishing a border around national identities that solidified as it was contested. The Refuge of the Huguenots tended to simultaneously reduce and enlarge the identities of the French refugees; the sense of belonging to a village, a city, or a province was subsumed into a notion of ‘France.’ This constructed notion of ‘France’—more closely associated with behaviours and tastes than with the French state—emerged in dialectic with and was set in opposition to other, more local identities. Similarly, local theatrical practices were often set in opposition to imported French ones, carried to distant lands by itinerant French-speaking dramatic or operatic troupes. While such oppositions sometimes resulted in friction and outright bans on ‘foreign’ performers, in other cases, local creators adapted and expanded upon French models, creating new works and new forms of spectacle. At the same time, performers identified as ‘French’ transformed their own repertoires in accordance with local needs.

In this paper, I will focus on the theatrical networks around Huguenot impresario Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée (d. 1708). It was perhaps the sympathetic resonance that Quesnot found with theatre folk, whose own identities were necessarily flexible, that determined his choice of careers. Huguenots like Quesnot and the players of travelling troupes shared the commonalities of strangeness and mobility. It was no easy matter to be a Huguenot or an itinerant performer at a time when the differences accented by mobility resulted in questions of fidelity and accusations of impropriety. But strangeness could also provide opportunity. If played right, it granted the ability to slip easily across the borders of identity, confession, nation, and genre—as long as one had the proper paperwork.

The alternate public spheres in which Quesnot travelled, while in many ways separate from the surrounding community at large, created opportunities to establish solidarity between groups who shared similar experiences of displacement. But, as I stress here, there were important differences between the two groups as well. Even though both Huguenots and theatre people shared the experience of travel, the emergent Huguenot diaspora—in the sense of an established community-in-residence—incorporated a strong political element that was never a feature of theatrical networks. For Quesnot, establishing an identity as both a Huguenot refugee and an impresario allowed him access to the highest levels of society, enabling him to realize emergent political goals through participation in another sort of network—that of international espionage.

While the origins (roots) and destinations of travel are a frequent topic of study in histories of music, what is often overlooked are the actual routes. How can considering the roads traveled alter our conceptions of musical labor or stylistic change? To date, we have a poor understanding of the agents of (ex)change. Official documents can tell us who was where when, but a more personal view of performer’s lives has rarely been recoverable. Until now. A previously-unstudied archive of letters reveals the long-distance connections fostered by performers. Still in their original sealskin-covered trunk, the letters are uncensored, unedited, and in some cases unopened—for they were never delivered. Around 100 of the 2300 letters, dated between 1692 and 1706, are to, from, or about French-trained performers. From Paris to The Hague, from Latvia to London, actors and musicians worked together, played together, and looked after one another, trading memories, aspirations, and cheese. Adopting an approach centered on itinerant performers may indeed challenge our assumptions about stylistic change. The very fact that they played in so many different places—and that they knew one another well—implies that there may have been more uniformity of style and taste across Western Europe than has previously been guessed. [Article in French; open access provided by Utrecht University]

Introduction Damien Mahiet, Mark Ferraguto, and Rebekah Ahrendt PART I: REPRESENTATION 1. Concealed Music in Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial Arne Spohr 2. Serenatas in the Service of Diplomacy in Baroque Venice Giulia Giovani 3. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Wages of Diplomatic Service Jonathan Yaeger 4. Conflicting Dreams of Global Harmony in US-PRC Silk Road Diplomacy Harm Langenkamp PART II: MEDIATION 5. Constructing Universality in Early Modern French Treatises on Music and Dance Ellen R. Welch 6. Perpetual Peace and the Idea of "Concert" in Eighteenth-Century Thought Frederic Ramel 7. "Jazz-Made in Germany" and the Transatlantic Beginnings of Jazz Diplomacy Mario Dunkel 8. Music from the Embassy to the Underground in a Post-Soviet Belarus M. Paula Survilla PART III: NEGOTIATION 9. The Princesse des Ursins, Loyal Subject of the King of France and Foreign Princess in Rome Anne-Madeleine Goulet (translated by Rebekah Ahrendt) 10. Haitian Djaz Diplomacy and the Cultural Politics of Musical Collaboration Melvin L. Butler 11. The US Department of State's "Hip Hop Diplomacy" in Morocco Kendra Salois 12. Opening up Thinking Space for Improvised Collaborative Public Diplomacy Willow Williamson Afterword: Music's Powers Danielle Fosler-Lussier

Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée était un huguenot entrepreneur d'opéra à la « vie bigarée de bonnes & de mauvaises avantures ». Celle-ci l'amena à sillonner l'Europe. Cet article retrace sa carrière dans la république néerlandaise, notamment son bref passage à l'opéra français de La Hague, ainsi que ses échecs en matière de production d'opéras à Amsterdam et à Rotterdam.

Author(s): Ahrendt, Rebekah | Advisor(s): van Orden, Kate | Abstract: This dissertation examines the brief flowering of French opera on stages outside of France around the turn of the eighteenth century. I attribute the sudden rise and fall of interest in the genre to a large and noisy migration event--the flight of some 200,000 Huguenots from France. Dispersed across Western Europe and beyond, Huguenots maintained extensive networks that encouraged the exchange of ideas and of music. And it was precisely in the great centers of the Second Refuge that French opera was performed.Following the wide-ranging career path of Huguenot impresario, novelist, poet, and spy Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenee, I construct an alternative history of French opera by tracing its circulation and transformation along Huguenot migration routes. This history attributes the lack of a sustained tradition beyond la France not to the genre's musical or dramatic forms or its allegiance to French politics...

The viol is a five-, six-, or seven-string instrument made of wood and most commonly played with a bow, though it may also be plucked or struck. It comes in a variety of sizes, from high treble or pardessus down to contrabass (violone). As its Italian name, viola da gamba, implies, the instrument is customarily held upright between the legs. Common morphological characteristics of instruments in the viol family include a flat back and a slightly curved top. A bridge, usually fairly low and gently arched, supports the strings. The usually thin and wide neck features adjustable frets (typically seven), though other combinations are possible. Instruments related to the viol, such as the baryton or lirone, additionally accommodate a range of sympathetic strings. The belly of the instrument includes a soundhole on either side, often C-shaped, F-shaped (like a violin), or flame-shaped; anomalous sound holes are also present in historical exemplars, as are rosettes or other carved features...