In March, the MUSLIVE research team (Emma Dillon, Alice Hicklin, Betty Rosen and Geneviève Young) embarked on a ten-day visit to the United States, comprising conference and research presentations, meetings with colleagues, and a spot of guest-lecturing at Harvard to stir interest in music history among next generation medievalists. The busy itinerary allowed the team to meet inspiring medievalists from various disciplinary backgrounds, and we are grateful to all those who gave their time and expertise in MUSLIVE-led discussions as well as in Q&A sessions.
The trip was originally conceived when the project proposed a session at the Medieval Academy of America meeting, hosted in Cambridge at Harvard University. Our panel, titled ‘Musical Lives in the Mediterranean, 1100-1300: A Proposal for a Song-Centred History’, was the team’s first public presentation together, sharing not only individual research but also modelling the project’s collaborative approach. Each of the four papers presented were written and researched independently but with constant conversation among the team, thus working as four unique voices of an ensemble. The papers will be the basis of individual publications and but also laid the foundations for MUSLIVE’s co-created methodology for a cross-disciplinary approach to song-centred history.
MUSLIVE hosted two gatherings, in Cambridge and New York, bringing together colleagues from the fields of art history, history, literary studies, musicology, as well as poets, performers and curators. These meetings underlined the value of interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to histories of songs, poetry and people. Practice-led research was another important area of convergence and mutual interest.
Among other highlights from the trip, Emma presented her research on first-generation trouvères and introduced the project in a public lecture at the Maison Française at Columbia University, with ample time for a lively Q&A. Also in New York, the team heard an inspiring and moving performance, ‘Many Paths to the Divine’, hosted at St. Paul’s Chapel as part of Columbia University’s Sacred Music series. The musicians designed ‘suites’, threading together devotional poetry and song from Indian, Persian and Arabic repertoires (including several examples from the medieval period), creating ‘re-encounters’ between these different-yet-consonant musical and linguistic worlds. The performance and post-concert discussion with the musicians stirred conversation and reflection among the team about MUSLIVE’s own approach to cross-cultural intersections of songs and poetry in our research and performance programming with Siglo de Oro.
We are excited to continue the conversation and collaboration in the coming phase of the project’s work.