Dear all, In case any of you may be in London this coming Monday, I am giving a paper on French baroque lute music at the Music and Morality conference hosted by the Institute of Musical Research and the Institute of Philosophy (University of London). See below for details: [1]http://music.sas.ac.uk/imr-events/imr-conferences-colloquia-performa nce-events/music-and-morality.html This looks set to be a really interesting conference (Susan McClary, Jerrold Levinson, John Deathridge, Roger Scruton and many others will be there), and it even appears that parts of the conference may be broadcast on the BBC. I have included the abstract below. All best wishes, Benjamin
BENJAMIN NARVEYHonest Music: The Case of the Seventeenth-Century French Lute If morality can be understood to be a code of social conduct, then French lute music of the Grand Sicle presents us with an intriguing example of how music can function as a moral agent. In the wake of the civil war known as the Fronde (1648-53), the traditional French nobility amongst whom the lute counted as a favourite instrumentre-invented itself in a bid to preserve its challenged status through a code of social forms and manners they called honntet: literally honesty. This term at once evokes morality, but as we shall see, it is also intricately linked to contemporary discourses of power, representation, rhetoric, and artistic taste (bon got). In fact, many of the musical forms found in French lute music, and many of the luthistes playing techniques and compositional strategies, are directly linked to this moral code of honest courtly conductto the point that much of the lute repertoire proves uncommonly dependent on honesty for its coherence as an art form. Where from the view of modern common practice tonality this repertoire often appears to lack the very components that render musical discourse intelligible (its harmonies often seem aimless, there is not always a continuous or defi nable melody, and rhythms can be displaced well beyond the bounds of normative hypermetricity), a reading of this repertoire through the lens of honntet shows how French lute music functioned as a classic moral performance, since it reproduced contemporary social conduct through artistic experience. Thus, the case of the French lute serves to highlight the interdependence between contemporary ethics and aesthetics, and thereby provides a useful example of how music can be linked to moral sensibilities. Benjamin Narvey is professional lutenist and a post-doctoral fellow at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) working on a critical edition of the lute music of Robert de Vise (c.1660-c.1732). In 2008, Benjamin was the winner of the Goldberg Musical Essay Competition. -- Dr Benjamin A. Narvey Post-doctorant/Post-Doctoral Fellow Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) IVe Section des Sciences historiques et philologiques t +33 (0) 1 44 27 03 44 p/m +33 (0) 6 71 79 98 98 Site web/Website: [2]www.luthiste.com -- References 1. http://music.sas.ac.uk/imr-events/imr-conferences-colloquia-performance-events/music-and-morality.html 2. http://www.luthiste.com/ To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
