Sumer is icumen in! Say what?

Source: London, British Library, MS Harley 978, f. 11v

Is this the oldest surviving form of written polyphony? MS Harley 978 is renowned for its comical insert "Sumer is icumen in" (Summer is coming) dating from the mid thirteenth-century, originating in Reading Abbey. The manuscript, however, was most likely to have been copied in Oxford before it found its way to Reading, perhaps by a certain William of Winchester? Today, the musical item in MS Harley 978 is best known for its naughty explication of nature's somatic, indifferent delights:

Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes þu cuccu;
Ne swik þu nauer nu.

Pes:
Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow
blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing,
cuckoo;
Don't you ever stop now,

Pes:
Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

Few actually remember that the "music itself" is a plural diacritical force yanked between two seemingly polar loci; the added red lyrics beneath the secular call to nature is, indeed, a completely religious account of God's sacrifice of Jesus for the holy redemption of mankind:

Perspice Christicola

que dignacio

Celicus agricola

pro uitis vicio

Filio

non parcens exposuit mortis exicio

Qui captiuos semiuiuos a supplicio

Vite donat et secum coronat

in celi solio

Observe, Christian,

such honour!

The heavenly farmer,

due to a defect in the vine,

not sparing the Son,

exposed him to the destruction of death.

To the captives half-dead from torment,

He gives them life and crowns them with himself

on the throne of heaven.

What, then is sumer is icumen in? A neat sort of medieval pointe de capiton which knits two seemingly un-incorporatable texts together at musical "points" - the piece is contrapuntal in an extramusical sense, the two texts "touch" each other at musically prominent positions, to quite ludicrous effect. My favorite part occurs in the movement from the third stave to the fourth stave:


The wonderful explosive moment to the musical item - a worked ascent through A to high F, figures in a bullock stirring and the stag farting in this (musical and animistic) climax of this miniature tour around the farm of sumer is icumen in. The precise peak coincides with the ridiculous cuckoo call: "Sing cucco!" promptly echoed by the Pes repetitive parts, as unchanging as the actual irrational cuckoos who, for want of reason, are imprisoned by their own perpetual canon of mimetic birdsong. From the beastly dimensions of mock fin' amours, the corresponding juxtapositional text figures God as the "heavenly farmer" tending to his symbol-ridden bestiary. In an interpolative gesture, the text is precisely "layered," brought into corporeal proximity with its beastly other by the process of musical knitting. Religion, it seems "overwrites" the previous (proximal) secular lyric as the scribe "overwrites" (writes-over) the scraped, dried animal body (parchment) with meaningful symbols for reading. The music which is not one: always doubled by its own text-ure, but never fully reducible to the signifier either...

Corresponding to the (secular) lyric's conflation of the oral/anal drives (stag farting, the singer reaching a climatic high-f shriek), the sacred lyrics "supplies with captives half-dead with torment," a truly intriguing pairing of disconnect themes. Most interestingly, the climax of the sacred lyric - Vite (life) - is conspicuously disjointed from the musical phrase, only to be completed at the start of the next phrase after the brief rest. What is going on here? In the place of "vite," "supplicio" conforms to the high point, as does the inverted fart-breath of the stag sublimated into a joyous/ambiguous celebration/rejection/abjection of nature's machinic, hermetic writing and re-writing of its contradictory drives. The point of the verse, it seems, circulates around the mimesis of birdly (re)call, and the proper faculty of ars memoria: surely, by hammering in the cyclical (some say irritating) tapping of music, Christ's own torturous sacrifice is torturously hammered into the skull of the participant/listener, even musically displacing the actual receipts of Christ's sacrifice to the musical afterthought preceding the song's climax.

The registral shift from the (sung) bestiary to the ejaculatory wantonness of "cuccu!" frames Christian supplication to free the captive. Who is captive here? After a couple of rounds, inasmuch as music heightens the memoria of text, over-audibility could cause aural fatigue; the paradox, is that the climatic equivocal "cuccu!" flirts with an equally ambiguous "suplicio," perhaps the "suplicio" to rid oneself of the melody, to literally kill the music, to end a life by cutting short one's breath (which now stinks of flatulent music). Yet, the breath ironically supports the sustained (tone/)thought of Christ: the ridiculous conundrum of the cantor is therefore to sustain repetitiveness through perseverance: hopefully his singerly death (loss of voice) which becomes symptomatic of his devotion (his reduction to beastly ineloquence) transcends his corporeal (natural) enslavement: his flatulent "pneuma" turns into a blessed offering for the memorialization of Christ's sacrifice.

Locker Rooms: on exterior interiority

In my email inbox today, I received an intriguing proposition from "Sportsmen Asia," a Singapore-based website which teeters on the edge of the "open secret." Its concept is simple enough - a few dozen surreptitious "lockers" will be made available for hire in a dusty corner of Chinatown "away from prying eyes," enabling its patrons a sense of purchased security. Although I do not know the details of this enterprise (i.e. the limits on safety and purchased privacy, what is deemed a "storable item" in the box, or does the company impose a threshold on the sotrable), the immediate paradoxes of psychic space and its projective manifestations are made clear, albeit in the comic mode. It is worth noting that the idea of hiding-away pervades the enterprise of Sportsmen Asia. The company name is no more than a mask, a cover, a subterfuge which appears to appeal, on the surface, to fitness-inclined gentlemen. Beneath its misleading guise, however, is a throwback to the well-documented English "gentlemen's clubs" of the 19th Century. Put simply, Sportsmen Asia caters to a very select group of clientele. Ignoring for a moment the genereded implications, it's trade is remarkably queer, just have a look for yourself.

Could we say S.A. is properly queer? It offers no mode of identification except the communal experience of the pink-dollar that could as easily be used to shore up heterosexist desires. This, no doubt, begs the troubling question over queer capital: can the tenacity of capitalism indeed undermine the temporalized, apocalyptic, unsettling throes of queerness? As the owners of Sportsmen Asia have brilliantly shown, it can soundlessly transmorgify the symbolic resistance of ex-scribed, ex-temporalized, ex-iled queer space into its own signifier, the sign of the coin, the symbolic of global financial recognition. It's immediately amazing how quickly the acknowledgment of dangerous heterosexual spatio-temporalities governed by the linearity of the phallus and its fantasy of transparent disclosure threatens to fold up upon itself in another equally libidinous system driven by the flow of capital rather than the charge of skin (a question we may return to is whether the project of Capitalism, since it stabilizes the ex-spatialization of queer space through the dollar, as Edelman might say, returns metonymy to metaphor, disables the monetarily charged micro-spaces its ability to queer the "disclosed" outside in the filed of the heteronormative phallus). Is metonymy marketable? Or is Sportsmen Asia's brand of metonymy simply reminiscent of a flourishing circuitry of capital which, for its flaring moment, returns deferment and displacement to the "tyranny of the [homosexual] signifier"? Recall Edelman's critique of "gay" and "lesbian" lit crit.:

The questions, in short, demanded of us a willingness to assert and affirm a singular, recognizable, and therefore reproducible critical identity: to commodify lesbian and gay criticism by packaging it as a distinctive flavor of literary theory that might find its appropriate market share in the upscale economy of literary production. In the process these questions directed us to locate "homosexual difference" as a determinate entity rather than as an unstable differential relation, and they invited us to provide some general guidelines by which to define what constitutes the homosexual itself. (Edelman, "Homographesis," in Yale Journal of Criticism, 3:1, 1989)

Aside, the Locker Room project aligns other interiorities with queer ex-istence; the charged space of the locker room, of course, itself generates the dangerous - yet compellingly eroticizing - staging of homosociality. In the locker room, however, towels drop: the homosocial is left bare, its "members" jostling in (un)comfortably proximity. Conflicted desires thrash about viciously underneath a sea of calm nudity. Let us not forget that the concept of the "bathhouse," and the explicitly sexualized "sauna" (increasingly popular in Southeast Asia) transforms the hegemonic heteronormative neutral of hyper-masculine sociality into an electrified zone for "cruising" and the fulfillment of illicit (read: lawfully ambiguous) desires. Vis-a-vis Cary Howie, the threshold of the queer enclosure - it's enclosive function - borders on disclosure of the queer subject, but visibility happens literally at the threshold, and is never in itself complete, its borders leaving no cookie-cutter subject for easy alliance. The space of the Sauna is effortlessly recapitulated here; the danger of spatial danger still lurks. After all, is the idea of the "locker" the mediating passage between exteriority and queer (bathhouse) interiority? Paradoxically, what function does the "locker" serve in the sauna? Do the keys strapped around the ankles or wrists of its identity-obliterated folk seal something else other "protect" private possession? Or does the enclosed locker-space within the enclosure of queer space delimit the ultimate reversal within queer space: that is, the locking away of one's "proper" identity, ex-scribing one's queer subjectivity for a skin-taut tabula rasa of anonymity in which the historical particular is denied? From this view, the so-called "queer" space of the enclosure is but fantasy, it's "properly queer" zone, really, shut-away in the locker, ex-iled to interiority.

In the enclosure of the queer bathhouse, the most normative gesture would be to reject the ornamentations of the phallic Symbolic: the very codes which could eventually queer queerness itself. Seldom are words exchanged, seldom is identity revealed, codes govern the necessity for secrecy, but secrecy disables the radicant which demolishes both spaces, and prevents the queer from becoming mere repetition, a jukebox-language which plays the selfsame tune. What then, of Sportsmen Asia's locker room project? Does it not present us with a communal form of "shedding," of spatialized (albeit socialized) temporal dis-identification? Bodies (colliding in queer space) are exchanged for objects rubbing against each other; to be specific - shamefully charged materials which feed on excised abjection, leaving its users, its attached body-part, free to re-enter the Symbolic free of proximal shame, bartered through the (Capital) Symbolic itself. Put differently: is this queerness literally selling out by ex/en-closing in? Are patrons paying to demarcate, control, excise deviant eroticisms by returning it to the overdetermined flow of relations between homosexuals and heterosexuals, by confining it to the Laws and dynamics of homosociality?

And what of "prying eyes?" Whose "prying eyes"? In the discursive locale of the epistemological "locker room" space (not locker) within the Sauna, isn't the locker precisely meant to govern access to the "prying eyes" of individuals who may return the anonymity of metonymy (fleshy, identity-less bodies) to a "marked" form of existence by prying open one's suppressed Symbolic history? In the Bathhouse, 'safety' is guaranteed by de-marking one's libido organized by the (outside) Symbolic, throwing the sign of one's "phallus" into slippery play ("you can be anyone") simply a rejection of queerness? The queer is not, then enclosive function of communal desire, but the registral shift of enclosive/disclosive threat - of recognition, the possibility of bringing the play of (bodily) signs into being named, a name, an identity: a co-worker, a classmate, a colleague, a policeman, a statesperson, a senator, a father, a professional. The loops are endless - seizing the momentum of metonymy and bringing it back into the rigidity of metaphor, the electric circuit of signification, the "lightbulb" goes off. But the "lightbulb" goes off in a/c currents as well, frictional electricity governed by the very differential relation between opposing flows. The Locker Room Project then forcibly governs the spatio-temporalization of safe spaces, built upon an absolute understanding of the hermeticism of enclosures - be it the enclosure of one's public-private life on the verge of the visible (by normative communities), or the enclosure of the deviantly charged Sauna-space, which (falsely) proffers to castrate the flows between either communities. What queerness tries to locate (always impossibly), is the disjunctive, enclosive/disclosive momentum between registers, and the possibility of rupture within imagined, hermetic spaces. Metonymy is not marketable - irreducible to the signifier of queerness or the signifier of the coin, for to market is to designate a product which stabilizes the economy of desire.

Middle Th-[rough/]-ou[g]ht

Disclaimer: the following post may seem explicitly sexual, and hence offensive to some. Read at your own risk.

Thought - thinking through, thinking out [of the box]; what do these registers of heuristic "penetration" afford us? Historical "rimming" - I find unfocussed, unsettled thoughts tackling Cary Howie's outstanding philo-medieval project "Claustrophilia," or "the love of enclosures." Taking its starting point the attempt to think 'beside' historiography which, as Zizek rightly pronounces, is a metaphysical placeholder for authentic scholarship, Howie investigates the paradox of the enclosure - enclosive, while also orbiting around a disclosive gesture; the disclosure which emerges at the boundaries of enclosure. While I enjoy Howie's theorizing and its fantastic joy (jouissance?), has the disclosive enclosure walked so far ahead beyond penetrative modes? I'm not seeking an appraisal of penetrative violence, of strongly heterosexist models of domination and subordination, especially in an emergent field of Medieval studies creatively fuelled with the libido of enclosive phenomenology and the potency (albeit metonymic shiftiness) of a non-denotative queer, I want to return to one portion of Howie's formulation of "thinking-out-of" [the box] while - here he "enfolds" the Chinese notion of the "box," its paradoxical, in/egested other, that of thinking-through warrants some address.

Certain psychoanalytic directions in the Philosophy of History has sought to query the analysts' propensity to "act-out"  an inherited, textual encounter rather than to "work-through" the material, dis- and re-connecting circuits of meaning and their psychic flows vis-a-vis the libido. Acting-out: mimesis, reproduction of power-cycles which leans against a death-wish, a repetitive drive of the self-same, versus "working-through," the possibility of obliteration and reformulation, though flirting with the possibility of violence, of domination. The "binary-star-system" complex may be fantasy, two moments held in perpetual sublative motion without the full destruction of the other (also maintained in current political "translation theory"), but is there a moebius-strip like topology which can fully engage the two? 

Thinking-through and thinking-out, perhaps, returns to the ego of the phallus but, like Howie's temeprate ass-licking/rimming version of the historical and ahistorical, social and asocial, may father a non-reproductive (a-futurist, in Edelman-speak) method of ex-egesis. That is, the act of enclosure which preserves the resistiveness of the "historical" resembles more an act of masturbation than it does a clerkly violent rape of the "robed" text. Thinking through-out is a historical handjob, but the formulation begs the question: who gives whom pleasure? Is it text that invigorates the jouissance of the enclosed, or is it the jouissance of never approaching the text's own foreclosed desires? This way, the "wrapping" of the medieval is partial; as easily as it wraps, it unwraps, the penetrator is himself "penetrated," but penetration is never absolute, since the "hole" in question resists cartesian space. Meaning through disclosive-enclosure of the historical hand-job is literally at the limits of "wrapping": the phallus is never dominant, stoked to non-reproductive joy by that which it penetrates, and is enclosed-by. By speaking the medieval, is one's throat choked, or does it wrap? By singing the medieval, does one spit, or does it ingest? A primer for claustrophillic middle-ages music-making might then consider the metonymic relation between reading and listening, except that listening is a sort of a "double-fuck," to extend Madhavi Menon's reflections - the mouth and ears participate in... in what? Can the ear be penetrated, or does it enforce an aural form of "rimming," where sound [from the mouth, the lips] orbits the functional pinnae (the ear's outer bone structure), filtering it into a vor-textual abyss? Then there is the narcissistic mouth, (gagging? spitting?) which flows through the ears and back to the mouth again in a circuitous loop. Where is the enclosure here, then? Through-out. At the threshold of a handjob's joyous friction.

The end of a thesis era: back to the books I love

I am proud to report that my nocturnal adventures in the enclosures of thesis-land have not been for naught. To my delight, an email arrived a few days ago confirming that my thesis entitled "Musical 'Beastliness' in the Roman de Fauvel: Chaillous 'addicions' and Sensory Danger" was awarded high honors. Retroactively, perhaps I should have bought a more expensive bottle of Champagne instead (refer below):



This queer ritual captured above is known as the annual end-of-thesis-party-on-Olin-Library-Senior-Sendoff, where Wesleyan Seniors indulge in blind drunkenness in the (possibly false) celebration of life's little challenges. This unfortunate event is usually followed by denial, aggression, a chronic lack of academic motivation, and several episodes of nudity on Foss hill. Fortunately, the condition wears off within a few weeks, and most nocturnal subjects return, rejuvenated, to a diurnal lifestyle. Some even manage to recalibrate their scholarly sensibilities towards intellectual productivity, but, alas, constitute a minority especially since the anxieties of graduation are quick to kick in.

To alleviate the aforesaid, I have broken my word by breaking the piggy bank. Amazon be damned! Ever since disappearing into the vortex of "thesis," I am happy to report that several stimulating reads temporarily put on hold for sake of education are now making their way across states, and into my mailbox (hopefully by tomorrow):

"The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I (The Seminars of Jacques Derrida)"
- Definitely one I've been meaning to pick up after examining Derrida's highly provocative essay "The Animal therefore I am" chocked full of titillating ideas on the ani-mot, an ontology modeled on "following," and the gaze of his cat which brings the enterprise of Universalism/Particularism under scrutiny.

"The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History"
- Anyone who was at AMS 2009 who heard Mengozzi's paper would agree that this is a hugely important work for late medieval conceptions of the Guidonian Hand, and, correspondingly, the schema of hexachordal space. I'm hoping that Mengozzi's "semantic turn" investigative style will provide clues to the nature of late medieval ars, especially regarding the re-appraisal of musica ficta/falsa, whose story, I believe hasn't been fully told with much certainty.

"The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q)"
- Inexorably excited about this one, ever since reading Edelman's "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," in which Edelman critiques the fantasy of "reproductive futurism." He leaves the fantasy intact, however, by avoiding the "queer child" in his accounts of the child-as-Big (or little)-Other supporting the foundation of an anti-anti-futurist ethic. Freud himself is credited by attempting to formulate an understanding of the pre-Symbolic queer subject (as does Lacan), and should be pertinent in unveiling yet another fantasy structured on models of domination, that is, Adultism. I'm interested in seeing how "growing sideways" may be complementary to Sara Ahmed's take on "Queer Phenomenology" which discusses /dis/re-orientation.

"The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years"
- Finally! Christopher Page's scholarship on the disciplining of singers in the later medieval ages!

"First As Tragedy, Then As Farce"
- One of Zizek's latest offerings. Anyone read it? How is it? I meant to put a purchase hold on his soon-to-be-released "living in the end times," but I'd rather wait for it to come out before I spend more than I can manage. Was looking forward to "The Monster of Christ," but isn't that topic a little worn out by now?

"This Incredible Need to Believe"
- Kristeva's latest book. Kristeva is always magnificent food for thought.

And with that, I conclude my anticipated reading list for these few months in between gasps of merry-making, singing, concerts, and future-less preparations.

In the [Medieval] "Mittle"

It's about time that I vociferously slogan the wonderful work of In The Medieval Middle, a truly stunning set of Shenkerian-esque "unfoldings" about everything off-centered we find about the Middle Ages. Or is it time to topple the "Middle" from "Middle Ages," many of the posts argue, not in the least in our exciting age of posthuman scholarship. Rarely do critical medieval-middle-isms meet Musicologists; the latter are still wringing hands over the search for origins, and schema for structural, traceable, "historical" answers. As Jeffrey Cohen (famed for his truly original work on monsters and nonhuman medieval Others, not forgetting their Queer in/carnations for scholarship today) has constantly sought to befuddle our predilections for a "dark" Middle legible only by the light of empiricism, we constantly find our temporalities thrown into deep question when the "Middle," that is, the expositionary, the pulsative inching towards the "/" which enables presentness to be present, infiltrates and muddies the medieval me.

In celebration of (hopefully) another Rhizomatic flight path which "wraps" and imagines a kind of historical "embrace" brought on by contemporary "touch" theory, perhaps (in the spirit of D&G), I will contribute this first act of touching with not a history of music, but a musical history, already somewhat hinted at by Daniel Albright in his strange livret Untwisting the Serpent. My model considers the "flickering" that ensues within the vor-text of the "middle" via Schenkerianism - that (often difficult) mode of musical analysis which, at its perverse core of overdetermining the exactitude of individual constituent pitches in the musical score, disfigures the object itself in favor of a hegemonic "chord of nature" understanding - God's Claves, if you wish:



What draws me to Schenker is not his insistence on the "chord of nature," which supposedly exists only in the hintergrund (background), strenuously extrapolated from the Vordergrund (foreground), but the idea of the Mittelgrund (Middle-ground), that indistinct mediatory step which fluctuates between the despotic one-size-fits-all "chord of nature" and the particular, the full glory of the notated score itself. A musical history wedged in the Mittlegrund gestures uneasily towards both poles, while much more recent work recognizing the creative potential of Schenkerian analysis has re-emphasized the Mittlegrund for its d/r-econstructive potency. What's more - each "level" extrapolated from the score-trace is predicated on a series of chordal "unfoldings," a historical sense which, while seeking consonance between the Vordergrund und der hintergrund demands the analyst to eludicate linear patterns while molding the Mittlegrund to the contours of the Vordergrund.

A musical historical note then to medievalist/musicologists - what does an aesthetic of the medieval "mittle" propose? A reversion to the infinite nature of "unfoldings," to the rhizomatic understanding of the "Mittle" which, even as it acknowledges the insufficiencies of the present hintergrund, nevertheless avails the (analytical) possibility of rebuking it, while weaving a set of twisting-connective operations vis-a-vis the "textual," Vordergrund. If we can think music through history, why shouldn't we be able to think history through music? An aesthetics of the Medieval Mittle, perhaps, would respond to an "unfolding," "leading" quality whilst actively dealing with the manifold received "medievals" and "moderns." For the operation of Schenker's graph of the Mittle is not to lead-to, but to lead-for, to lead-in-lieu-of.

Ah! Cappella!

On Monday I was contacted by a Hartford Courant reporter who wished to conduct an interview regarding the rise in popularity of collegiate a cappella. And why should one feign an interest in this socio-economic (mostly university) phenomenon? From about 300 singing groups in New England, "a cappella," or, more accurately, its collegiate incarnation, has literally taken the US by storm. I myself am in two very different a cappella groups, Wesleyan's all-male The Wesleyan Spirits and another group I formed with three other individuals in my freshman year named The Mixolydians (you can conceive of all the bad puns by yourself).

But what exactly of a cappella music and its fresh, new faces? When one mentions collegiate a cappella, perhaps the first thing to bubble up to memory's surface is Tuft's Beezelbubs, thanks (or no thanks) to the highly popular, albeit sensationalized Sing Off program produced by NBC. Under the dazzling overexposure of glitzy lights and adoring fans, a cappella's new faces have somewhat trampled the memories of them good 'ol fraternity-like Glee Clubs and barbershop quartets so pervasive in the mid twenties. Less remembered, however, is that the association between "a cappella" and its modern counterpart was based on a mistaken attribution of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th Century.

But first, back to basics. A-cappella; "cappella" meaning "Church" in Italian. The term first arose in the early 17th Century, denoting polyphonic music composed in the more "modern" concertato style as compared to the older Renaissance form of high counterpoint, exemplified by Palestrina. The surprising twist comes about in the late 19th Century when the Roman Catholic Church (along with a few non-Catholic music conservatists/museumists) attached special favor to the polyphonic repertory of the 16th Century. A cappella then came to connote music sung "without instruments," or so they believed, with Palestrina hilariously heroicized as its exemplar. And so, it is the latter definition we have inherited, although we've unwittingly knocked Palestrina off the pedestal again.

BACK IN THE WORLD OF THE LIVING! (And anticipating MedRen 2010)

Dearest (fellow) Bloggo-musico-logists of the new world order,

I am pleased to announce that, countless sleepless nights, hundreds of edits and one soused episode of champagne overdose later, my Honors thesis is finally done, uploaded, and I'm back amongst the living. (And, saying that, I'm typing this from a tiny carrel). The lack of sunlight on skin has taken its toll, and I seem to gleam under the moon as well. But for anyone who's curious, I rolled out a thesis investigating musical ontologies of "beastliness" in our favorite fourteenth century source. Everyone repeat after me: Le Roman de Fauvel.



Curious? For all those with spare time (don't laugh...) you can access the FULL unrestricted thesis here:

HANSEL'S THESIS

... and get ready for some Horsey Musicology!

HELLO EVERYONE, it's nice to be back outside!

That said, this year's medieval and renaissance conference looks totally baller. Here are some of my favorite picks from the lineup:

Yossi Maurey: Singing the Praises of
God without Words: The Meaning of
Neumas in Medieval Liturgy

Andrew Hicks: Re-interpreting an
Arithmetical Error in Boethius’s De
institutione music (iii.14-16)

Ali Pemble: Timaeus and the Trumpet:
The Harmonizing Logos in Medieval Art

Timothy Chenette: The Role of Complex
Notation in Complex Rhythm of the Late
14th Century (YES!)

Jeffrey Levenberg: Ouds or Lutes?
“Fumeux Fume’s” Ficta Speculacion
(Finally, another voice about Fumeux Fume that isn't Lefferts)

Richard Parncutt: Historical origins of
major-minor tonality: A psychological
approach (Seriously? Rick Cohn better watch his back!)

Gábor Kiss: Spontaneity or
consciousness? Late-medieval
approaches to the differences of the
liturgical repertories (can't even begin to wonder)

Stefano Mengozzi: Facets of Musical
Renovatio in the Early 15th Century (Everyone should go buy his book when it officially hits the shelves)

Catherine Bradley: Clausula or Motet: Which
Came First? (We're still arguing about it, folks!)

Anna Zayaruznaya: The Composite Tenor of
Vitry’s Cum statua/Hugo (This should be magnificently interesting! Vitry's motet talks about lying and interior deception, using the metaphor of Nebuchadnezzar's statue. She's gonna talk about a hybrid tenor, and I'm hoping she'll court with notions of Alchemy...)

Rachel Lumsden: Mode, Gender, and Aribo’s De Musica (Everyone remember the 12th Century Aribo's very strange articulation of modes as woman's body? I wanted to talk about it in my thesis; never got round to it)

AND FINALLY,

This one's for Phil who lamented some blogposts ago that there really isn't much on musicology and Derrida. I'm happy to say that (1) I've used Derrida's "Hauntology" in my thesis at least once, and MedRen has this in store...

Kate Maxwell: Boethius, Guido, ...
Derrida? ‘Grammatology’ as a means of
understanding early music notation

Curious? So am I. I think I know where she's going with this one, but let's see if it's true.

Signing off,

HT. Going to get coffee now.