AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday afternoon 143
emergent in French culture in the previous century, when new forms of sexually transgressive
material invaded the print market and the new word “obscène” or existing ones such as
“lascive” or “impudique” were deployed in a rapidly developing debate over the moral acceptability
of sexual vocabulary and images. Secular vocal music played a role in this discourse,
evident in Protestant polemic that identified the French royal court as a prime location for the
performance of chansons lascives that encouraged illicit thoughts, and worse, the translation
of those thoughts into immoral actions. These accusations are supported by the large number
of chansons with sexually explicit texts published by the royal music printers, who obtained
most of their repertory from court sources. But we know little about the performance contexts
for such pieces, under what circumstances they might be considered either morally legitimate
or obscene, and how they might figure in a broader history of obscenity in early modern
France.
In this paper, I first approach these questions through the elaborate wedding scene that
closes Jacques Gohory’s novel, Le trezieme livre d’Amadis de gaule (1571). Gohory describes the
large-scale public festivities that celebrate the wedding, then moves on to depict a banquet
during which several songs with explicit lyrics are performed. The chanson texts are included,
and he provides detailed descriptions of listeners’ reactions, making careful distinctions according
to the auditors’ gender and social rank, and emphasizing how the songs inspire shock
or laughter, or spur participants to enact the erotic content of their texts. Although fictional,
Gohory’s episode has links with the real wedding of Charles IX, celebrated at the French
court the previous year. And the chanson texts overlap significantly with those in the Musique
(1570) of the royal musician Guillaume Costeley, including its juxtaposition of classicizing
epithalamium with erotic chansons. Dedicated to Charles IX, the collection features prefatory
material by Gohory, suggesting that we can look to Costeley’s music for further insights into
how the performance of sexually transgressive pieces contributed to the blurring of representation
and action promoted by their texts.
Court festivities emerge as a convincing context for the sexually explicit songs that circulated
in contemporary French song prints. These events often featured play around the limits
of decency, serving important functions in defining court practice and affirming courtly identities.
I argue that rather than representing a species of Bahktinian carnivalesque in which
normal social distinctions are levelled, as has sometimes been claimed, these songs were used
to mark and reinforce courtly hierarchies of class and gender. They also brought music into a
broader debate around the moral character of court life, in which the chanson lascive figures as
a potential battleground for contemporary debates on the nature of the obscene.
THE HISSING OF PAGIN: DIDEROT’S APOSTLE MEETS
THE CABAL AT THE CONCERT SPIRITUEL
Beverly Wilcox
University of California, Davis
The French violinist André-Noël Pagin, one of Tartini’s prize pupils, was hissed at the
Concert Spirituel on Easter Sunday in 1750, and never played in public again. The concert
review in the Mercure de France concealed this scandal by listing the entire program and then
saying that “most of” the pieces “obtained repeated applause from the brilliant and numerous
assembly.” Two years later, in the incipient stages of the querelle des bouffons, an anonymous
pamphleteer demanded to know “for what purpose the nation, ungrateful to such a sublime