Jess Herdman

This dissertation examines musical affective economies surrounding the Wars of Religion in Lyon. Expanding on affect theory that considers how emotions stick to and slide from subjects and objects, this research asks how musical affect also sank into bodies and ontologies, serving to both bond and break the community of Lyon. I consider how the boundaries of community were delimited through musical theatre in the early sixteenth century, demonstrating how techniques of communitas were essential to performing this community. I explore how the principal of Lyon’s Collège de la Trinité made use of these techniques, both in his pedagogical theatre, and in an elite musical print aimed at religious reconciliation.
From here, I examine how these techniques began to be used towards divisive ends, as Protestants confronted Catholics with psalms and “spiritual songs.” A group of martyr songs, disseminated amongst both elite and more popular audiences, activated the Protestant habitus through such genres, putting the visceral experiences of five young martyrs of Lyon into oral circulation. The subversiveness of such “spiritual songs” within orthodox martyrological practices underscores the musicality of how the theatre of martyrdom was memorialized. Polemic was especially propagated through the inflamed populace in the guise of “chansons nouvelles,” contrafacta songs that were “sung to the tune of” extant popular tunes. Exploring how this genre engaged with contemporary notions and concerns about anger, I demonstrate how the timbres (song bases) of these “chansons nouvelles” accumulated affect across the Wars of Religion as they were adhered to violent Catholic invective.
Finally, I turn to Lyon’s proto-social welfare project, permanently established in 1534, the Aumône Générale. Interrogating how the institution subjected the city’s impoverished residents to a Catholic economy of faith, I focus on how the hyper-marking of the forced musical processions of the poor would serve to facilitate their eventual confinement in the seventeenth century. Positioned within the emergent subfield of music and conflict studies, this dissertation argues that, because of its very ephemeral and emotional qualities, music was a vital force in cultivating both solidarity and animosity during the tumult of the Wars of Religion.

With the fear of decline of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition after the airing of The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler by the CBC in 1971, both the Cape Breton community and ethnographers clamored to preserve and maintain the extant practices and discourse. While this allowed for performance contexts and practices to burgeon, it also solidified certain perspectives about the “diasporic preservation” and resultant “authenticity.”
This work aims to trace the seeds and developments of the beliefs surrounding the Cape Breton fiddling tradition, from the idealizations of Enlightenment Scotland to the manipulation and commercialization of the folklore and Celticism of twentieth-century Nova Scotia. These contexts romanticized older practices as “authentic,” a construct that deeply impacted the narrative about the Cape Breton fiddling tradition.
One of the most rooted and complex concepts in this narrative is that of “old style,” a term that came to represent the idealized performance practice in post-1971 Cape Breton fiddling. As models were sought for younger players to emulate, pre-1971 “master” fiddlers with innovative stylistic approaches began to be identified as “old style” players. The interstices of the tradition allowed more extreme stylistic experimentation to be accepted as “traditional,” while the symbiotic social practice of dancing necessitated relative conservatism. Analysis will show that “listening” tunes fell into the interstices of allowable innovation, while dance (particularly step-dance) tunes demanded certain “old style” techniques. A more holistic view of the complexities of the Cape Breton fiddling tradition follows from a perspective not only of the socio-musical elements that shaped the historical narrative, but also of the musical elements of this dance-oriented “old style.”

This article examines how urban popular music mobilized violent emotions during the Wars of Religion in Lyon. Alongside a larger corpus of invective literature, the printed dissemination of polemical songs expanded rapidly with the rise of the Catholic League. Contributing to the study of the history of emotions, this article keys into the importance of popular song within early modern economies of anger. Bookended by an original contrafactum from 1572, the ‘New Song ... tremble tremble Huguenots’ and its reuse as a tune basis for the 1589 ‘New Song of rejoicing ... on the death of Henri de Valois’, this article demonstrates how these songs assimilated strategies of vitriolic preaching into the mobile media form of dance tunes. Emphasizing the physical energy of these invective songs sung for dancing, I illustrate the ways that such songs served to both reflect and to intensify confessional fury.

Beyond the religious-political discourse of Le Jeune’s musical publications, current academics regard his work as a key to elements of sixteenth-century compositional practice in the twelve-mode system. Le Jeune was highly regarded among his contemporaries for his modal compositions – a reputation that he purposefully exploited through the publication of modally-organized works.

In the current discourse on the theory and practice of mode during the Renaissance, scholars frequently cite Le Jeune’s Dodecacorde as an example of the Zarlinian theoretical-practical mixture of modal theory.An explicit analysis of Le Jeune’s application of Zarlinian dodecacordal theory, however, has not yet appeared in the academic literature. A comparison of excerpts from the Dodecacorde with polyphonic examples from Zarlino’s Institutione will illustrate the specific ways that Le Jeune adapts these modal practices. In attempting such a study, this paper will not only present a perspective on the concreteness of Zarlino’s modal conceits, but it will also clarify the degree to which these regulations were practically (i.e., how or whether they could be applied to contemporary composition) or speculatively based.

While not examining the broader relevance of Le Jeune’s application of the Zarlinian system in his psalm-settings, this paper will initiate the theoretical study of modality in the Dodecacorde in relation to Zarlino’s practical-speculative theory.