Books

Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book reveals the role of Latin refrains and refrain songs in the musical lives of religious communities by employing novel interdisciplinary and analytical approaches to the study of medieval song. Through interpretive frameworks focused on time and temporality, performance, memory, inscription, and language, each chapter offers an original perspective on how refrains were created, transmitted, and performed. Arguing for its significance as a marker of form and meaning, this book identifies the Latin refrain as a tool that communities used to negotiate their lived experiences of liturgical and calendrical time; to confirm their communal identity and belonging to song communities; and to navigate relationships between Latin and vernacular song and dance that emerge within their multilingual contexts.

Saintly Song: Musical Hagiography and the Medieval Cult of St. Nicholas (in progress)

One of the most widely-venerated saints in medieval Europe, St. Nicholas was also one of the most popular saintly subjects for composers and musicians. Music for Nicholas across genre, register, and language outpaced that composed for virtually all other non-biblical saints in the Middle Ages. Despite its quantity and diversity, however, Nicholas’s musical hagiography has yet to be examined. This project explores for the first time how the creation of new musical repertoires shaped and responded to the expansion of Nicholas’s cult, ca. 950-1400. Nicholas presents an exceptional case among medieval saints since hagiographical texts repeatedly draw attention to song and its role in defining and disseminating his cult. I suggest that music became a lynchpin in hagiographical and cultural negotiations, powerful enough to intervene in discourses around the saint and rituals of time and place, liturgy and devotion, race, religious identity, language, and nationhood. 

Journal Articles

“Singing and Learning (in) Latin in Medieval Europe.” Philomusica On-Line 22, no. 1 (2023) Musica e letteratura al tempo di Dante: 53-95.

This article explores how the learning of Latin from childhood as a literary and textual ‘mother tongue’ shaped the contours of Latin-texted song in medieval Europe. I show how, by contrast to most written traditions of vernacular song, medieval Latin song reveals traces of medieval childhoods, adolescent years, and young adulthood spent learning to sing, read, and write in Latin. I illustrate this in three ways: first, by considering notated Latin songs explicitly intended for young people to sing; second, by examining the refraction of Latin language learning in song; and finally, by exposing ways in which Latin song reflects upon or is connected to students, student life, and Latin educational contexts. Connecting the vast and complex tradition of Latin song to the realities of everyday life in medieval Europe and its emphasis on Latin education expands the scope of current scholarship to foreground the roles played by children, adolescents, and students in the creation and performance of Latin song.

“‘To His Beloved Friends…’: The Epistolary Art of Song in Medieval France.” Textus & Musica 5 (2022) Circulations et échanges des technicités et des savoirs musicaux et littéraires au Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance: https://textus-et-musica.edel.univ-poitiers.fr:443/textus-et-musica/index.php?id=2504.

The search for written traces of medieval Latin song has long consumed musicologists and literary scholars, leading to numerous catalogues and editions carefully tallying and comparing wide-spread concordances. As is readily acknowledged, however, song’s written transmission is complicated and inflected by its intangible transmission through oral processes, including as a form of knowledge and didactic tool whose lessons are remembered long after the melody has faded from sound. Shifts in language and register also influence the mouvance of Latin song, with melodies and poems slipping in and out of other genres and contexts through written and oral processes of citation, quotation, borrowing, and contrafacture. Song was on the move in the medieval Europe, carving out circuitous byways among places, people, and manuscripts. One less explored path for Latin song follows that laid by a literary medium well-known for its mobility: the medieval letter. Reflecting in practice the intersection of the pedagogically linked ars dictaminis and poetriae, letter writers since antiquity have included poetry and song in personal correspondence. While this relationship has been studied in vernacular contexts, contemporary Latin practices have been largely overlooked. This oversight is understandable; unless collected post factum into collections of model materials (formularies), letters – and accompanying poetic or musical content – were uniquely penned and intended for a specific audience to read and digest. Undertaken chiefly for personal correspondence and teaching, manuscript survival for letter collections containing poetry generally reflects planned compilations for posterity and teaching, or simple happenstance.
Despite this challenging archival situation, extant manuscripts shed light on aspects of Latin song’s circulation within and alongside epistolary writing, revealing how the arts of letter writing and poetry intersected and how epistolary modes of communication influenced the circulation of Latin song. As a comparative case study, I examine two such manuscripts copied in northern France in the late twelfth and late thirteenth centuries, respectively. The first is the Liber epistolarum of Gui of Bazoches, a collection of the twelfth-century French cleric and chronicler’s personal letters in a single manuscript (Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg, 27). A notable feature of the Liber epistolarum is that nearly all of Gui’s letters are accompanied by poetic verses of varying lengths and forms. The second manuscript is a textual miscellany, often labelled the St-Victor Miscellany (Paris, BnF, Lat. 15131), whose final gathering intermixes model letters, sermons, and Latin and multilingual poems. The two poetic-epistolary collections differ in terms of how each conveys ideas of authorship, modes of production, and the function of poetry in, and in relation to, letters. Both manuscripts, however, complicate the definition and identity of Latin song and its modes of circulation. Dozens of unique, unnotated Latin poems are copied into the two sources: Lux. 27 includes metrical as well as rhythmical poems (metra and rithmi), while in Lat. 15131 the poems are exclusively rithmi. Examining the identity of Latin rithmi in these manuscripts as songs – as opposed to poems unintended for musical realization – situates these sources within the broader culture and history of medieval Latin song and its circulation. Exploring how and why songs were copied with and alongside letters fosters an opportunity to explore how Latin song participated within lesser-studied networks that developed out of the teaching and practice of letter writing.

“‘I Have Trodden the Winepress Alone’: The Voice of Christ and the Mystical Winepress in a Thirteenth-Century Latin Song.” Revue de musicologie 108, no. 1 (2022): 3-40.

Beginning in the twelfth century, an image of Christ in a winepress emerged across visual media, rooted in a long tradition of scriptural exegesis. Typologically linking Old Testament images of the winepress to Christ’s crucifixion, one line in particular from Isaiah 63:3 was assigned to Christ as a textual and visual motto: “I have trodden the winepress alone.” I explore in this article how one thirteenth-century Latin song, Vineam meam plantavi, uniquely frames the singular voice of Christ pressed in the winepress. With the motto from Isaiah highlighted as a refrain, the song offers a new commentary on the theological and iconographic tradition of the mystic winepress that brings together voice, music, temporality, exegesis, and mysticism.

“Conductus, Sequence, Refrain: Composing Latin Song across Language and Genre in Thirteenth-Century France.” The Journal of Musicology 39, no. 2 (2022): 133-179.

Latin conducti do not typically come to mind when considering the medieval practice of French refrain citation; intertextual refrains were conventionally interpolated into French songs, narratives, and the upper voices of motets. Yet three conducti copied in late thirteenth-century northern French manuscripts intervene in this traditional narrative by engaging compositionally with French refrains: Veni sancte spiritus spes in GB-Lbl Egerton 274 (known as LoB or Trouv`ere F), and Marie preconio and Superne matris gaudia in F-Pn lat. 15131 (the St. Victor Miscellany). Previously identified as contrafacts of French refrain songs, Veni sancte spiritus spes shares its melody with a widely cited French refrain, while Marie preconio and Superne matris gaudia are rubricated with French refrains and scribal cues that suggest a musical relationship with French refrains. However, the poems of these conducti exhibit significant relationships not with French refrains but with homonymous and widely sung liturgical sequences. These conducti are not simply contrafacts but reflect a compositional negotiation between variously borrowed and new elements, resulting in Latin songs implicated within citational networks of liturgical chant and French refrains. Significantly, the repeated refrain serves in each song as the site for intertextual and intermusical processes, with borrowed material from French refrains and Latin sequences shaping the music and poetry of the new refrain-form conducti. Considered together, these conducti shed light on understudied Latin contexts for practices of multilingual intertextuality and intermusicality in late thirteenth-century France.

“Troping Time: Refrain Interpolation in Sacred Latin Songs, ca. 1140-1853.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 1 (2021).

This article explores a practice in evidence across Europe from the twelfth to the nineteenth century involving the singing of a brief refrain within sacred Latin songs and hymns. Tracing the circulation of the two-part refrain “Fulget dies . . . Fulget dies ista” across multiple centuries, in both songform tropes of the office versicle Benedicamus Domino and as a trope interpolated into hymns, I chart its unique movement between genres and in and out of written record. Examining the unusual origins, transmission, and function of the refrain, I begin with its emergence in twelfth-century manuscripts and conclude with its unnotated appearance in nineteenth-century printed Catholic songbooks. I argue that the refrain’s longstanding appeal can be located in its function as a poetic and liturgical trope of time itself. While tropes often enhance the “hic et nunc” (here and now) of the liturgy, the “Fulget dies” refrain gained additional temporal significance through its intimate link to songs of the Christmas season. The “shining day” imagery introduced by the refrain offered a tangible way of marking seasonal time in devotional rites, poetically indexing the light-based symbolism of Christmas, the winter solstice, and the New Year. The inherently temporal meaning of the refrain lent it flexibility as a trope, enabling its movement across genres and liturgies. Integrated into sacred Latin songs, the “Fulget dies” refrain functioned as a pithy musical and poetic commentary on liturgical, calendrical, and seasonal temporalities—in other words, as a trope of time in sacred song.

Caldwell, Mary Channen. "Singing Cato: Poetic Grammar and Moral Citation in Medieval Latin Song." Music & Letters 102, no. 2 (2021): 191–233.

Widely acknowledged as emerging from clerical, monastic, and pedagogical communities, the poetry of medieval Latin song was informed by the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric emanating from these spheres of knowledge and practice. I argue for the specific manifestation of these spheres through grammatical citation, a practice in which noun and verb paradigms poetically shape Latin songs. Specifically, grammatical paradigms structure select songs by declining or conjugating strophic incipits systematically throughout the poem. Grammatical citationality in Latin songs, whose poetry otherwise chiefly explores festive, religious topics, serves as a signal of their implicitly disciplinary and didactic function. With grammar operating as an emblem of correct, moral behaviour, these devotional songs exemplified morally and spiritually upright Christian behaviour for singers and listeners. A capstone to this sung didacticism is the thirteenth-century Cum animadverterem, a conductus uniquely linking grammatical citation with a quotation from Cato’s Distichs, a famed medieval textbook of moral learning.

“Cueing Refrains in the Medieval Conductus.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 143, no. 2 (2018): 273-324.

As lyrical refrain forms flourished beginning in the twelfth century and increased attention was paid to the mise en page of song in manuscript sources, scribes faced the dilemma of how to cue frequent repetition of poetry and music. Owing to a lack of shared conventions among these scribes, the signalling of repetition varied greatly among sources, the resulting inconsistencies furnishing what Ardis Butterfield calls ‘glimpses of scribal thinking’. Nowhere is this more evident than in approaches to notating the Latin refrain, a structural feature in a range of genres and an inexact yet related parallel to the French refrain. I argue in this article that the graphic treatment of refrains in Latin song exposes assumptions that both scribes and performers made about form, genre and the realization of song in performance. Attending to the visual cueing of refrains clarifies textual and musical ambiguities arising from the simultaneously oral, written and performative milieu within which Latin song was cultivated and disseminated.

“A Medieval Patchwork Song: Poetry, Prayer and Music in a Thirteenth-Century Conductus.” Plainsong and Medieval Music 25, no. 2 (2016): 139-165. 

Eight times a day, the prayer Deus in adiutorium meum intende sounded from the lips of the faithful as the standard introduction to the Office Hours. Infiltrating daily life through the liturgy and popular interjections, the psalm verse Deus in adiutorium served a devotional function marked by versatility and popularity. Yet, despite its omnipresence, as well as its inherently vocalic identity, the verse was only rarely troped musically or poetically. A collection of thirteenth-century monophonic and polyphonic tropes of the verse circulating in France in motet collections and festive offices represents one of the few moments of heightened musical interest in the prayer. This article draws attention, for the first time, to the musical and textual connection between these tropes and Pater creator omnium, a thirteenth-century refrain song. This monophonic song from France also belongs firmly to the medieval cento genre, with both its musical and textual construction based on the piecing together of borrowed text and music – including Deus in adiutorium. This article argues that Pater creator omnium stands at the intersection of two important yet understudied histories: the musical and textual troping of Deus in adiutorium and the medieval cento. Analysis of this song ultimately illustrates the creative processes behind the making of a pre-modern song.

“‘Flower of The Lily’: Late-Medieval Religious and Heraldic Symbolism in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS français 146.” Early Music History 33 (2014): 1-60. 

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146 (fr. 146), a manuscript well known for its inclusion of the Roman de Fauvel, also provides an important, albeit understudied, contribution to the history surrounding the allegorical ‘flower of the lily’, or fleur-de-lis – a floral symbol central to fourteenth-century theology and French royal heraldry. In medieval France, the fleur-de-lis emerges through text and music as a symbol capable of invoking, and being invoked by, the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mary and the Virtues, all in the interest of supporting the religious and monarchical well-being of France. This study argues that the persistent return to the fleur-de-lis throughout the dits, the Chronique metrique and most especially the music and text of Fauvel in fr. 146 offers a necessary link between sacred and heraldic symbology both within the manuscript as well as within the larger historical development of this allegorical flower.

“‘The Place of Dance in Human Life’: Perspectives on the Fieldwork and Dance Notation of Gertrude P. Kurath.” Ethnologies 30/1 Special issue: Dance in Canada (2008).  (nb: based on undergraduate research)

This article provides a brief biographical sketch of Gertrude P. Kurath and introduces her as a central figure in twentieth century dance scholarship. Her role in the emergence of the field of dance studies in the academia is examined and her promotion of the connection between dance studies and anthropology and ethnomusicology is stressed. This article examines in detail two specific features of her scholarship: her forward-looking fieldwork and her innovation and use of movement notation. Both her fieldwork and her use of notation are contextualized within her extensive research on Native American dance.

Book Chapters

Caldwell, Mary Channen. "Revisiting the ‘Clerical Dance Song’ in Medieval Europe." In Tanz und Musik: Perspektiven für die Historische Musikpraxis, edited by Christelle Cazaux, Martina Papiro and Agnese Pavanello. Basler Beiträge Zur Historischen Musikpraxis 42, 29-60. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2024.

The “clerical dance song” is something of a mystery, even while writers since the late sixteenth century have remarked upon the “primitive” and “ancient” custom of dancing to religious songs in the Christian church. Part of the appeal of this custom derives from the seeming incongruence of the decadence, even paganism, of dance and the perceived conservatism of the medieval church and its overt antagonism towards bodily forms of expression. Yet textual and archival evidence overwhelmingly shows that dance was embraced by many communities within the medieval church, even if dance practices were never officially sanctioned or codified. Religious dance practices chiefly emerged in localised contexts, whether integrated into regional saints’ cults, festive liturgies, mystical rites, or developing in the context of devotional theatre and extraliturgical rituals. In this chapter, an initial case study compares and contrasts two well-known fourteenth-century notated sources for religious dance songs: the Moosburger Graduale and the Llibre vermell. Considering how dance and its accompanying music are – or are not – cued by music as well as paratextual information, including prefaces and rubrication, I illustrate the complexities facing the study of dance-music interactions in devotional contexts. A second case study focuses on an example of a solo liturgical dance from Sens, France, for which a noteworthy amount of textual and musical evidence survives, inflected by an unusual degree of scribal annotation. I offer a close reading and analysis of the musical and choreographic features of thirteenth-century service books from Sens Cathedral, situating liturgical dance and dance music within a broader historical, ritual, and cultural context and analysing the potential intersection of musical form and movement. Ultimately, the case studies illustrate the value in returning to primary sources, which have long been under-analysed in the historiography of religious dance music. By considering the entanglement of manuscript sources, music, movement, and devotional context, a more nuanced and varied picture of the “clerical dance song” of medieval Europe begins to emerge.

“Texting Vocality: Musical and Material Poetics of the Voice in Medieval Latin Song.” In Ars Antiqua: Music and Culture in Europe, c. 1150-c. 1330, edited by Gregorio Bevilacqua and Thomas Payne. Speculum Musicae vol. 40, 35-72. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

What are the voices of medieval Latin song? While the importance of the voice in the performance of medieval Latin song is well understood, the voice as a conceptual, musical, and poetic idea has rarely been examined. Drawing on Paul Zumthor’s term ‘vocality’, I consider the musical and poetic behaviors of vocality, «the whole of the activities and values that belong to the voice as such, independently of language», in the context of Latin song from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Specifically, I argue that voice and its vocalic essence can be glimpsed in poetic and musical ruptures on the page and in performance engendered by vocabalic utterances, formed by means of interjections such as ‘eya’ or ‘hei’ or the repetition of morphemes, syllables, and vowels. These are moments when a poem’s lexicality is briefly but conspicuously obscured in favor of vocalic play with sound and text. Significantly, these vocalic ruptures are not melismas, a style of textless writing for the voice that has often evoked theories of ‘sheer vocality’ and the presence of affective sound over rationality or sense. Rather, the moments I identify across the medieval Latin song repertoire are characterized by text, whether or not it is lexical, grammatical, or syntactical.

Texted vocality, as I term it, refers to a temporary textural change in song when the sound or quality of the voice emerges as a carrier of non-lexical meaning, yet in the continued presence of text that may or may not relate semantically or structurally to the surrounding poetry. The first part of the chapter offers an overview both of previous scholarship on this topic, specifically that of Hans Spanke, and of techniques of texted vocality across several different songs. I highlight a series of compositional and poetic techniques for eliciting texted vocality that demonstrate the relationship between vocables, vowels, and repeated morphemes and the underlying poetic and musical framework; I show how texted vocality at times leads to the damaging of the underlying structure, while always being generated by the poetic structure and content of the surrounding song. The second part of the chapter comprises three case studies, a fourteenth-century song in praise of St. Nicholas, Intonent hodie; a thirteenth-century Benedicamus Domino song trope, Natum regem laudat; and the polyphonic New Year’s song Hac in die salutari. Each of these case studies presents subtle variations on the technique of texted vocality in Latin song, playing with the limits and boundaries of language, meaning, and melody in order to bring the singing voice to the foreground.

“Litanic Songs for the Virgin: Rhetoric, Repetition, and Marian Refrains in Medieval Latin Song.” In The Litany in Arts and Cultures, edited by Witold Sadowski and Francesco Marsciani. Studia Traditionis Theologiae, 143-174. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.

Songs for the Virgin Mary were abundant throughout the Middle Ages across linguistic and geographic regions. Alongside the nearly constant growth of her cult, Marian poetry and music were particularly cultivated in all the newest genres and forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a cultural moment in which devotional Latin and vernacular song production flourished. The Latin conductus—rhymed, rhythmical poetry set to music—holds a central place among these new genres, and also plays a key role in expanding the repertoire of songs venerating the Virgin in her numerous guises. Among hundreds of conducti celebrating the Virgin, a series of four simple, repetitive, monophonic songs stands out. Transmitted within a few folios of a mid-thirteenth-century musical manuscript produced in Paris, France (Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 29.1), these songs present a series of sung litanies to the Virgin structured by means of litanic rhetoric (specifically repetition and polyonymy), ritual performance, and musical style. While none of the works serves a specific liturgical function, each borrows from, and is influenced by, the form, function, and performative mode of ritualized litanies for the Virgin Mary. This chapter argues for an interpretation of these four conducti as strategically and purposefully litanic in their musico-poetic construction and performance. Key to this interpretation are the ways in which rhetoric, form, performance, and prayer intersect within the series of sung praises. Three of the songs (Salve virgo virginum, Ave Maria virgo virginum, and Salva nos, stella maris) feature Marian refrains, pointing toward a responsorial performance practice that connects them to the repetitive call-and-response structures of ritual litanies. The fourth song, O summi regis mater inclita, by contrast, does not include a refrain, but rather is characterized by rhetorical figures of repetition (including anaphora, conduplicatio, and epistrophe, among others) which revolve around invocations of the Virgin and enumeration of her attributes and names. Musically, the conducti take their cue not from florid melodic settings of Marian praise, but instead comprise only simple, formulaic, and highly repetitive melodic profiles that parallel the intonation formulae of liturgical litanies. While liturgical influences on devotional conducti have long been acknowledged, with links made to processional hymns, Office versicles, and tropes, the influence of litanic forms in their creation has yet to be explored. This chapter offers one perspective on the implications of the litanic liturgical and verse form for medieval song and the conductus in particular.

“‘Pax Gallie’: The Songs of Tours 927.” The Jeu d’Adam: MS Tours 927 and the Provenance of the Play, edited by Christophe Chaguinian. Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 87-176. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017.

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.

Encyclopedia Entries

with Timothy McGee. “Dance.” Oxford Bibliographies in “Medieval Studies.” New York: Oxford University Press (2022): DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195396584-0121.

“Musical Hagiography in Western Europe with Reference to the Cult of St Nicholas of Myra,” in “Holy Persons.” Edited by Aaron Hollander and Massimo Rondolino. In Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, Bloomsbury/ARC-Humanities Press, 2021.

 Reviews

Review of Kathryn Dickason, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 90, no. 4 (2021): 925-926.

Review of Karl Kügle, Sounding the Past: Music as History and Memory. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020. Revue de Musicologie 107, no. 2 (2021): 475-478.

Review of Jared C. Hartt, ed. A Critical Companion to Medieval Motets. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, vol. 17. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2018, Renaissance Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2019): 1118-1119.

Review of Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond, eds. The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle: Contents, Contexts, Chronologies.  Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2018, The Medieval Review (2018).

Review of Margot Fassler, Music in the Medieval West. Series: Western Music in Context: A Norton History, Walter Frisch, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), College Music Symposium 54 (2014).

Other Writings

“Finding God in a Song: Religion, Klezmer, and Country.” Sightings, a publication of The Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion. Edited by Myriam Renaud (July 25, 2013).  

“The Notation of Native American Dance: Systems of Dance Transcription and the Work of Gertrude P. Kurath.” In NativeDance.ca. Edited by Elaine Keillor et al. Carleton University and Canadian Heritage.

“The Organization of Movement: Approaches to Dance Scholarship and the Study of Native American Dance.” Institute for Canadian Music Newsletter 3, no. 3 (2005), pp. 5-12.