some early modernist stuff for ya
New School is trying very hard to pull me in the direction of Early Modern studies. We have some pretty impressive faculty doing Early Modern + sexuality stuff, and so I’m in all the Early Modern classes trying to figure out how to graft theoretical interests and articulations onto my period of interest, which, despite the lure of the Renaissance, remains Anglo-Saxon (and despite the fact that I’m not exactly making a name for myself as a master of the necessary languages to do the medievalist thing).
Anyway, Susan McClary, author of Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, came to New School to give a lecture yesterday, and then she asked to be a part of our 17th century poetry class today, which is taught by somebody who knows a little something about sacred eroticism in the Renaissance. McClary talked to us about Girolamo Frescobaldi’s “Maddalena alla Croce,” and about the history of gender and sexuality studies’ reception in music studies (which has ranged from hostile through cold and has in the past couple of decades broken out into a feverish tepidity, apparently).
Then she illustrated her major points about the multiple valences of Frescobaldi’s “Maddalena” by *playing the song for us on a piano, and singing.* I can read music (slowly), and I know one or two things (not much more) about diatonic and chromatic scales, but had I known nothing, McClary’s presentation would have convinced me. It was the coolest damned thing I’ve seen all year. She was arguing for 1) the overtly erotic resonance of the piece, through not only lyrics but also and especially the “profoundly unstable” acoustics of Frescobaldi’s rupturing of “accepted,” “Pythagorean,” tonality; 2) for a related movement of which Frescobaldi was a part, analogous to the movement of which Bernini was a part in the visual arts, wherein the sacred erotic in the early 17th century can reasonably be connected to Sufi/Islamic influences of affective piety and mysticism via Spain; and 3) for some of her male undergraduate guitarist students having theorbo envy (ok, that last was not part of her presentation or argument, but emerged in the Q & A and was too delicious to pass up).
She did an incredible job of making her argument not only intelligible but also compelling to the non-musician, and she speaks with candor, passion, intelligence, and humor about her field. Her book has nothing to do with anything I’m working on but I’m going to buy it, and furthermore I think I’ll download some Frescobaldi to help me get through Seminar Paper Hell this semester (four seminar papers due the same week. Possibly one will be on angels, and one more will be on affective piety in Crashaw). I think I need all the Frescobaldi I can get.
emerging briefly from the mere
So for those of you just tuning in, I’m in my first year of a PhD program, working on a degree in medieval literature.
I’m also 10-15 years older than most of my cohort, a first-generation college student, a single mother from a working class background, and irredeemably rough around the edges, or, to put it kindly, “colloquial.” I wrote my way into a five year fellowship at a (private) RU/VH university, and now I’m here and I don’t know what fork to use, how to ask the library if I can have a book, or how one goes about teaching these 20 year olds who are already in command of three languages, have families who don’t think a six pack of beer is a nice Christmas present, drive cars that were made in this century, know how to use EndNote, and have spent the last few summers abroad.
I’ve been having a hell of a time adjusting to this place, and this semester has basically seen me fall into several holes without having any clear idea of how to get myself out, including getting my first “B” on an English paper since I was a sophomore in college in 1992. I am happy to say I’m working on it, and I’m getting my “drive” back, but my confidence has really taken a nose dive, and to be honest, it wasn’t all that great before.
I think one of the things that makes me irredeemably rough around the edges is that my feelings are probably not all that rare, but admitting them and talking about them is something of a faux pas, yet I do it anyway. But hey — I never figured out what fork to use for shrimp or whatever, I wear boots every day, I cuss a lot, and I vent. I doubt that’s going to change any time soon, so I’m not going to try to hide it. (And yes, I know how to dress in the classroom and at conferences, and you can ask my former students — I only cuss in class when it’s absolutely necessary).
I don’t actually have any idea why I’m posting this, except I’m feeling lame that I haven’t posted anything at all in a while, and this is my gesture towards “this blog is not dead, just temporarily impaired.”
Anyway, I expect I’ll be posting an annotated bibliography of materials dealing with Grendel and Cain here in a week or two, assuming I can get through Emerson’s 1906, hundred-page “Legends of Cain” with my summarizing abilities intact. So there’s that to look forward to. If you’re a masochist.
