CFP: New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium (February 22-24, 2024)

A virtual conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Dance Studies Association’s Early Dance Working Group

What does it look like for historical expressions of dancing and movement arts to break out of traditional academic and performative boxes? How do scholars and practitioners escape the boundaries of discipline, chronology, geography, and methodology subsumed under the conventional appellation of “early dance”? Conversely, how can we demonstrate the ways in which our work complements and completes the work of other disciplines in light of these distinctions? This symposium explores early dance as an idea, a time, a place, a locus of cultural meaning and aims to draw together scholars working across disciplines and geographies who are nevertheless invested in “early” dance and movement.  

We invite papers for this virtual symposium from scholars across disciplines, exploring aspects of dance and movement from all methodological perspectives, finding commonality in the antecedental nature of their work. Whether looking at the musical, literary, cultural, political, religious, or social contexts of dance, or expanding knowledge of its somatic and kinesthetic dimensions, we find unity in the chronological earliness of our work. We encourage papers that explore dance outside of Western European frameworks of knowledge and movement production, including comparative or transhistorical perspectives on pre-1800 or “early” dance. 

Submission due date: Sept. 15, 2023

Notification of acceptance by Nov. 1, 2023

Learn more and submit here: https://web.sas.upenn.edu/earlydance/call-for-papers/

Silent Dance: A New Article

A little (writing about) dancing for Saturday night! My article "Dancing in silence in premodern Europe" just came out in postmedieval as part of a special issue on the "Legacies of medieval dance" edited by Kathryn Dickason. It's about what happens to the connection between music and movement when the music is unheard, inaudible, absent...

Full-text access here: https://rdcu.be/dhmC3

Abstract: In contemporary scholarship, emphasis on music and dance as intertwined art forms drives the popularity of terms such as choreomusicology. Premodern dance and music practices, however, are difficult to link together in the absence of evidence aligning music and choreography, calling into question the very categories of ‘music’ and ‘dance.’ This essay interrogates the relationship between dance and music in premodern Europe by focusing on moments when bodies move seemingly unaccompanied or unmotivated by audible music. Through case studies on choreomania and mystical dance I ask what is heard versus what is unheard, and who hears what when dance happens. I explore the interplay between embodied, corporeal, ‘real’ dance practices and inaudible, incorporeal, ‘virtual’ music. What happens to dance when music is inaudible to listeners or participants? What does imagined versus sounded music do to the perception of the cultural and theological meanings of movement practices in premodern Europe?

Evoking an ancient world: Beowulf at Penn

I was delighted last week to help organize a roundtable on Beowulf featuring Benjamin Bagby and Penn Faculty Caroline Batten, David Wallace, and myself! It was a wonderful conversation, which took place in the Pavilion of the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and served to introduce the next day’s performance of Beowulf by Bagby at Penn Live Arts.

Read more here on PennToday!

Benjamin Bagby talking about the meter and poetics of Beowulf

Photo: PennToday; Mary Caldwell enthusiastically talking about medieval music and notation at the Beowulf roundtable


Now available for free download! "The Jeu d'Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play"

I was delighted to discover today when searching for a link to this volume to email to a colleague that an edited collection from 2017 is now available in its entirety for free download!

Chaguinian, Christophe, ed. The Jeu d'Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017.

Prof. Chaguinian kindly invited me, and several other scholars, to participate first in a panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo and then to submit a chapter for this volume that aims to contextualize the Jeu d’Adam within its broader cultural, codicological, and musical contexts. It can be a hard volume to find in some libraries, especially in Europe, so I’m very happy it’s available now to download!

My own chapter is titled "'Pax Gallie’: The Songs of Tours 927" and focuses on the series of Latin songs in the first part of the manuscript.

Here’s the abstract!

“The manuscript Tours 927 (Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 927), in addition to containing the Jeu d'Adam, a Latin Easter play, and other textual items, preserves in its initial folios an unusual collection of sacred Latin songs. This collection includes 31 Latin refrain songs, an antiphon, two polyphonic sequences, and a moralizing conductus attributed to Philippe le Chancelier. Argument is made for the significance of the musical contents of Tours 927 and a more nuanced understanding of its origins, bringing into sharper focus the cultural, musical, and devotional backdrop of the manuscript by way of its lyrical and melodic content.”  

It's here!

Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song has arrived in hard copy TODAY and I’m beyond thrilled to hold it in my hands and flip through its pages.

Author stands in front of red brick wall holding her book with both hands.

I wrote about the book this week for the Cambridge blog FifteenEightyFour; read the post here: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2022/04/devotional-refrains-in-medieval-latin-song/

Medieval Dance and its Songs

I have long been drawn to medieval dance and dance music, even though dance historians and musicologists alike freely admit that premodern dance is confoundingly elusive as well as contentious. It’s not so much that there’s disagreement about the existence of dance, just that we have few ideas (and sometimes conflicting ones!) about how, why, and to what music people danced.

Musicologists in particular tend to think about medieval dance from two perspectives—vocal versus instrumental dance music. Although this distinction might not always be important, for me it is the vocal dance music that has long been compelling, and in fact was the inspiration for my doctoral work and my forthcoming book. Although I disagree in my book with some previous assessments of Latin dance songs in particular, there is no doubt in my mind that people in medieval Europe danced, and sometimes they also sang while they danced!

I continue to think about and research medieval dance and dance music, so it was a pleasure to be asked to update and revise Timothy McGee’s excellent entry in the Oxford Bibliographies series for Medieval Studies (an amazing resource if you don’t know about it already, although access for full entries is subscription based). It was so great to dive into dance and music scholarship of the last decade or so, and expand the entry to include gender, dance in Judaism and Islam, choreomania, and iconography, among other new material. The newly revised and expanded entry is available here; please reach out to me if you don’t have institutional access!

For the Tuesday Tune this week, here’s a song that has a fascinating history (or better, historiography!) as a Latin dance song, Fidelium sonet vox sobri, sung by Brigitte Lesne with Discantus.

London, British Library, Stowe MS 17, fol. 38r, marginal illustration of nun and friar

New recording of medieval songs!

Instead of just one song this week for Tuesday Tunes, I have seventeen of them! I am so pleased to share a debut album by one of my favorite early music ensembles based in NYC, Concordian Dawn. Years ago in 2018 I was fortunate enough to bring the group, directed by harpist, vocalist, and musicologist Christopher Preston Thompson, to the University of Pennsylvania to perform a concert in the Music in the Pavilion series, which was linked for that concert only to a symposium on the Gothic Arts co-organized by myself and fellow Penn faculty Sarah Guerin and Ada Kuskowski.

The concert performed by Concordian Dawn on that March evening in 2018, Fortuna antiqua et ultra, has since become the basis of this new recording, available to order here. I’ve had the physical CD in my hands for a week now, and am greatly enjoying and appreciating their take on some new and old favorites.

And because this is a weekly Latin song post, I’ll point out that the album includes seven Latin-texted works (motets and songs), including Procurans odium and De monte lapis.

Enjoy and support young artists and early music!

© Mary Channen Caldwell February 15, 2022

CFP: Latin Song in the Medieval World

I’m interrupting Tuesday Tunes to share a CFP for a volume titled “Latin Song in the Medieval World: Creation, Circulation, and Performance” co-edited by yours truly and Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne! She and I have been talking about this project for years, and we finally had the opportunity to get it started. We are looking forward to featuring the newest and most creative scholarship on medieval Latin song!

London, British Library, Egerton 274, fol. 48r

CFP: Latin Song in the Medieval World: Creation, Circulation, and Performance

Latin song in the medieval world is elusive, encompassing a wide range of devotional, didactic, and secular song practices, in addition to signifying specific genres such as the versus and conductus. Its language–the lingua franca of the Church, university, courtroom, and administration–enables Latin song to travel widely, yet it is equally unique and regional in its creation, style, and performance. The poems and melodies that comprise a single song might be carefully copied into deluxe manuscripts and accompanied by illuminations, or a poem could be sent as a sonic aside in personal correspondence or copied into a poetic miscellany intended for silent auralization. Latin song is seldom static in form and content, but instead fundamentally mobile; the mouvance that characterizes so many medieval texts (musical or otherwise) also characterizes Latin song. And although melody and poetry are often taken to be axiomatic, even these two elements do not fully capture the ways in which Latin song can take the form of an idea expressed in text alone; a single refrain; an incipit in an index; a divine vision; or a brief, textless melody. 

Given this plurality, what is Latin song? The essays collected in Latin Song in the Medieval World will explore the nebulous and porous boundaries and identities of medieval Latin song by means of novel methodologies, theoretical and analytical perspectives, and interdisciplinary approaches. For the purposes of this edited volume, Latin song is not liturgical chant. To be sure, plainchant is unquestionably Latin and sung; Latin Song in the Medieval World aims, however, to interrogate Latin song and singing as distinct from, even if related to, the long tradition of Latin plainchant. Moreover, this volume seeks to understand the complexities of Latin song traditions beyond the text|music binary, embracing approaches that privilege the cultural and social situatedness of Latin song and its multivalence across place and time. Ideally, contributions will bring the study of Latin song into dialogue with contemporary trajectories in musicology and medieval studies by engaging critical lenses employed in study of, for example, vernacular song and lyric, polyphony, and plainchant. While non-liturgical Latin song has long been shunted to the scholarly periphery, it represents a rich and often overlooked source of material for the study of identity, gender, politics, performance, memory, language, violence, sexuality, ritual and dance, and intertextuality, as scholarship of the last decade has begun to illustrate. 

In terms of scope, contributions will not be limited geographically, and explorations of Latin songs and sources outside of Europe are encouraged within the flexible chronological boundaries of ca. 900-1500 C.E. Although we distinguish between liturgical and non-liturgical song, we see this boundary as porous and consequently welcome abstracts exploring the intersection between the liturgical and the non-liturgical. Genre is a key issue for any study of Latin song, and we equally welcome abstracts that tackle questions around genre (considering, for example, the complicated questions around the conductus or the unnotated Latin lyric). We anticipate that essays will reflect the proportionally higher number of monophonic to polyphonic works, although we are invested in exploring the interstices of modern categorizations rather than reinforcing them by exclusion. Finally, we fully acknowledge and embrace the many possible ways in which Latin song presents itself–with or without notation; as a conceptual or theoretical idea; a cultural practice or devotional rite; a civic undertaking; or any other way in which Latin song existed or mattered to individuals and communities in the Middle Ages.

Submission Details

Abstracts (single or co-authored) should fall between 300 and 500 words in length, and may include a brief bibliography if desired. Abstracts are due by April 30, 2022 through Google Forms along with other required information (name, contact information, etc.), and authors will be informed of the status of their abstracts by May 30, 2022. We anticipate being able to accept 8-10 proposals. Once the chosen abstracts and finalized proposal are sent to the press for peer review, the final drafts of the essays, if accepted, will be due after April 2023 for publication in 2024. Each full-length essay will fall between 8,000 and 10,000 words (inclusive of notes) and will be subject to peer review. The volume will be published fully in English, but contributions in other languages are possible (translations will be facilitated by author(s) and/or the editors).

Please contact Mary Channen Caldwell (maryca@sas.upenn.edu) or Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne (anne.rillon@uco.fr) with any questions. 

© Mary Channen Caldwell and Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne 2022