Books by Rebekah Ahrendt
Grâce à la notion de «foyer», une série d’études pluridisciplinaires porte un regard nouveau su... more Grâce à la notion de «foyer», une série d’études pluridisciplinaires porte un regard nouveau sur les productions musicales et théâtrales en dehors de la cour de Versailles à la fin du règne de Louis XIV.
Les demeures aristocratiques de Paris et d’Île-de-France ont généralement été perçues comme des lieux périphériques, pâles reflets de la cour de Versailles. En réalité, les hôtels particuliers du Marais, où dominaient les sociabilités féminines, la résidence de Philippe d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, celle de la princesse de Conti à Versailles, les pavillons de plaisance bâtis entre Versailles et Paris, les demeures du duc et de la duchesse du Maine à Sceaux ou encore du roi d’Angleterre en exil à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, s’imposaient comme autant de foyers artistiques fort dynamiques, ouverts au théâtre et à la musique.
Le présent ouvrage, qui prend en considération ces différents lieux d’activité artistique comme un ensemble à la fois complémentaire et concurrent, enquête sur leur hiérarchie, leur fonctionnement concret ainsi que sur les relations qu’ils entretenaient avec la cour. Il met en lumière la tension entre le modèle versaillais, toujours prompt à imposer une norme artistique, et le développement d’autres espaces de création entre 1682 et 1715.
En illustrant la faculté des musiciens provinciaux à s’insérer dans les milieux artistiques de la capitale, en cernant l’identité de ceux qui façonnaient les goûts de leur époque et en considérant aussi les stratégies discursives et politiques qui visaient à constituer en foyers certains lieux de production et de performance alternatifs à la Cour, il propose une image plus complète de la vie musicale et spectaculaire de la France à la fin du règne de Louis XIV.
Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, 2014
How does music (its concepts, practices, and institutions) shape the exercise of diplomacy, the p... more How does music (its concepts, practices, and institutions) shape the exercise of diplomacy, the pursuit of power, and the conduct of international relations? Drawing together sixteen international scholars with backgrounds in musicology, ethnomusicology, political science, cultural history, French studies, German studies, and communication, this volume interweaves historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives. Considering such issues as what it means for political bodies to act "in concert," the question of music's "universality," the concept of free improvisation as it relates to twenty-first century political policy, the role of orchestras and traveling musicians in promoting cultural exchange, and the use of music as an agent of globalization and transnational encounter, the essays not only cross disciplinary boundaries but also geographical and musical ones.
Articles by Rebekah Ahrendt
Nature Communications
Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans... more 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 ...
The Opera Quarterly, 2012
In the fall of 1701, a new French-language opera company in The Hague opened with a production of... more 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
Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age: Standards, Systems, Scholarship, May 1, 2019
- Printed version available soon - Between 1500 and 1800, the rapid evolution of postal communica... more - 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.
Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Université Paris Descartes, Dec 28, 2021
Nature Communications, Mar 2, 2021
Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans... more 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 chart based on our study of 250,000 historical letters.
Les foyers artistiques à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (1682-1715). Musique et spectacles, ed. Anne-Madeleine Goulet et al., 2019
While the origins (roots) and destinations of travel are a frequent topic of study in histories o... more 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]
Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House, edited by Suzanne Aspden, 2019
International Relations, Music and Diplomacy: Sounds and Voices on the International Stage, 2018
French Historical Studies, Apr 2017
Our rediscovery of a seventeenth-century postmasters' trunk in the Museum voor Communicatie in Th... more Our rediscovery of a seventeenth-century postmasters' trunk in the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, containing some twenty-six hundred undelivered letters mostly sent from France, offers the opportunity to think from the ground up about what constitutes an archive and how to approach it. We argue that understanding the process of loss, destruction, and survival of collections is a crucial exercise for historians. Practicing this " archaeology of the archive " makes us keenly aware that the questions we ask are often dictated by the genesis and structure of the archive. Although document survival is often the result of intentional safekeeping, in other cases it can be attributed to sheer accident. Addressing questions of materiality, mobility, and preservation, this article explores the notion of the " accidental archive " to consider what best practices should be developed to ensure responsible access to this unique collection.
in Ciconia – Lassus – Froberger – Muffat #Europa: Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht 2013 (festival progrma book), 2013
Reviews & Reports by Rebekah Ahrendt
Musicology Now (http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/), Jul 14, 2015
Both practically and intellectually speaking, interest in musical diplomacy has never been greate... more Both practically and intellectually speaking, interest in musical diplomacy has never been greater. This Musicology Now blogpost outlines recent developments in the field.
Cambridge Opera Journal, Jan 2012
Conferences Organized by Rebekah Ahrendt
A two-day conference convened by Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet.
Uploads
Books by Rebekah Ahrendt
Les demeures aristocratiques de Paris et d’Île-de-France ont généralement été perçues comme des lieux périphériques, pâles reflets de la cour de Versailles. En réalité, les hôtels particuliers du Marais, où dominaient les sociabilités féminines, la résidence de Philippe d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, celle de la princesse de Conti à Versailles, les pavillons de plaisance bâtis entre Versailles et Paris, les demeures du duc et de la duchesse du Maine à Sceaux ou encore du roi d’Angleterre en exil à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, s’imposaient comme autant de foyers artistiques fort dynamiques, ouverts au théâtre et à la musique.
Le présent ouvrage, qui prend en considération ces différents lieux d’activité artistique comme un ensemble à la fois complémentaire et concurrent, enquête sur leur hiérarchie, leur fonctionnement concret ainsi que sur les relations qu’ils entretenaient avec la cour. Il met en lumière la tension entre le modèle versaillais, toujours prompt à imposer une norme artistique, et le développement d’autres espaces de création entre 1682 et 1715.
En illustrant la faculté des musiciens provinciaux à s’insérer dans les milieux artistiques de la capitale, en cernant l’identité de ceux qui façonnaient les goûts de leur époque et en considérant aussi les stratégies discursives et politiques qui visaient à constituer en foyers certains lieux de production et de performance alternatifs à la Cour, il propose une image plus complète de la vie musicale et spectaculaire de la France à la fin du règne de Louis XIV.
Articles by Rebekah Ahrendt
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]
Reviews & Reports by Rebekah Ahrendt
Conferences Organized by Rebekah Ahrendt
Les demeures aristocratiques de Paris et d’Île-de-France ont généralement été perçues comme des lieux périphériques, pâles reflets de la cour de Versailles. En réalité, les hôtels particuliers du Marais, où dominaient les sociabilités féminines, la résidence de Philippe d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, celle de la princesse de Conti à Versailles, les pavillons de plaisance bâtis entre Versailles et Paris, les demeures du duc et de la duchesse du Maine à Sceaux ou encore du roi d’Angleterre en exil à Saint-Germain-en-Laye, s’imposaient comme autant de foyers artistiques fort dynamiques, ouverts au théâtre et à la musique.
Le présent ouvrage, qui prend en considération ces différents lieux d’activité artistique comme un ensemble à la fois complémentaire et concurrent, enquête sur leur hiérarchie, leur fonctionnement concret ainsi que sur les relations qu’ils entretenaient avec la cour. Il met en lumière la tension entre le modèle versaillais, toujours prompt à imposer une norme artistique, et le développement d’autres espaces de création entre 1682 et 1715.
En illustrant la faculté des musiciens provinciaux à s’insérer dans les milieux artistiques de la capitale, en cernant l’identité de ceux qui façonnaient les goûts de leur époque et en considérant aussi les stratégies discursives et politiques qui visaient à constituer en foyers certains lieux de production et de performance alternatifs à la Cour, il propose une image plus complète de la vie musicale et spectaculaire de la France à la fin du règne de Louis XIV.
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]
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.
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.