Category Archives: articles and essays

Lady Gaga cakes, continued

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Gaga has released a new album, Joanne, and the fan cake tributes continue. (I’ve written about these on my blog, in print, and now as a UCC op ed.) Gaga’s changing image is all part of her play with authenticity, and multifaceted identity performativity. For this album, Gaga’s costuming appears to be Americana with a twist.

Throughout Gaga’s stardom, she has encouraged her fans creativity. There is a tradition of fan cakes referencing Gaga costumes, and this continues. Bradley’s Baking Bible came up with this fun cake that nod to previous Gaga looks and tops them off with the new pink hat that she’s been wearing to write and promote Joanne.

Gaga’s pink hats are by Gladys Tamez, and are tweaked versions of her hats named for iconic women—Marianne Faithfull and Bianca Jagger.

#Joanne is here! We’re celebrating every @ladygaga album right back to #TheFame in our #LittleMonsters Cake! ⚡️ Video link in the bio! 💃

A photo posted by Bradley’s Baking Bible (@bradleysbakingbible) on

Purity in Early Music

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Following the Women, Music, Power conference, I received an email from Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, a freelance arts journalist who contributes regularly to the New York Times. She saw an interesting story in my work on purity and early music vocal practice in the disconnect between the way early music singers describe singing and the sound they make, and the way critics describe early music voices. She took the idea and ran with it, interviewing numerous singers and directors, as well as me, and the result is a rich and critical investigation. ‘Early-Music Ensembles: Praised as Pure, but Seeking More’ is a really thoughtful exploration of purity as the main adjective to describe women singers of early music. The article is published online already (link above), and will be in the print version of the New York Times on Saturday, 23 Jan. 2016.

As da Fonseca-Wollheim notes, ‘The lexicon of praise for female singers of early music can be narrow, with purity a recurrent concept’. I hope that this lexicon will now become richer.

Purity and Whiteness in Early Music

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It is pretty standard still to hear early music singing voices described as pure or clear. Purity is a selling point (see, for example, The Pure Voice of Emma Kirkby [1998/99]). In this article, I explore the use of the discourse of purity to adjudicate belonging in British early music practices–to claim some voices and reject others. Critics employ purity logic to police the boundaries of early music singing. Donald Grieg has already explored the relationship between class, gender, institutional belonging and valued ensemble singing skills; I add the dimension of race and whiteness. I argue that the style of singing developed and embodied by Dame Emma Kirkby was embraced as pure and rhetorically aligned with familiar vocal sounds from Anglican worship as part of the conservative turn of the late 1970s.

Melanie L. Marshall, ‘Voce Bianca: Purity and Whiteness in British Early Music Vocality,’ Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19 (2015), 36–44.
Available on Project Music (subscription required)

My thanks to Emily Wilbourne for inviting me to contribute to this special issue of Women and Music dedicated to Suzanne Cusick.

Prof. Ellie Hisama and Prof. Wilbourne will launch the special journal issue at a symposium in December, Women Music, Power: A Celebration of Suzanne G. Cusick’s Work.

‘”Farò quel che mi piacerà”: Fictional Women in Villotta Voice Resistance’

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My contribution to Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy ed. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver (Ashgate, 2014) is now available to the public courtesy of UCC’s institutional repository. Please do download and read it!

‘I will do what I want’, so Toni, a young woman, informs her father about his plans for her marital future. This line from a sixteenth-century villotta by a little-known actor-musician, Alvise Castellino, confounds much of the scholarly consensus around early modern female autonomy. Popular entertainment like Castellino’s villotte bears out the findings of recent archival studies by Linda L. Carroll, and Emlyn Eisenach, that women from the lower echelons of society had significant input into their marriages. Castellino appears to have specialised in solo performances of multi-character songs, and his women characters are outspoken and challenge patriarchal norms. His 1541 collection of villotte—his only known publication, and the only collection of its type to contain so many songs with women’s speech—was dedicated to Duke Ercole II d’Este and may have had particular significance at the ducal court of Ferrara, where the duke and Duchess Renée de France were engaged in battles over her authority and speech. The comic treatment of songs in women’s voice resonates with the fraught relationship between the duke and duchess, in particular Ercole’s struggle to control René and thereby control his relationship with France.

 

Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy Published

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A stack of three copies of Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, ed. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver. The front cover is uppermost. The cover art is Titian's Venus with the Organ Player (c.1550) from the Prado, Madrid. This painting shows a male organist at a small chamber organ. He is seated on the edge of a bed, and looking back over his right shoulder at the pudenda of the nude Venus. She is reclining on a sumptuous velvet cloth covering the bed. Her left hand caresses a small dog. She wears bracelets on each wrist, and a necklace. Her curly blonde hair is up. In the background is a painting of a fountain and a tree-lined avenue.

Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, ed. Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll, and Katherine A. McIver

This new book, co-edited by UCC Lecturer in Music and Marie Curie Fellow, Dr Melanie Marshall, with Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver, explores how the arts shape the erotic and the sexual. Taking medieval and early modern Italy as its focus, the authors follow a wide cross-section of subjects as they imagine, experience and strive to regulate the sensual in fields as diverse as religion, painting, literature, acting, musical performance and humour.

The result sheds light on a world very like our own: as economic, religious and political upheaval coalesced into a new European social order, the foremost artists, musicians and playwrights rubbed shoulders (and more) with cross-dressing actors, pimps, moralists and papal reformers. Sexual autonomy was sought, celebrated and veiled, subverted and sold, satirized and sentimentalized.

In a period before the emergence of formal definitions that encourage us now to perceive homosexuality and heterosexuality through a lens of difference, early-modern Italian culture makers like Titian, Giorgione, Vecchi, Boccaccio, Ruzante, Castellino, and even distinguished patrons and reformers like Pope Leo X and Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, were engaged in creating fluid and stimulating representations of human love and lust, capturing in their art the full realities of the sexual activity they themselves knew. Their realisations can inform our perspectives today on both early modern Italian art and culture and on modes of contemporary sexual expression.

Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, edited by Melanie L. Marshall, Linda L. Carroll and Katherine A. McIver is published by Ashgate.
ISBN: 978-1-4094-6468-6. Regular price €60, website price €54. http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409464686

Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy Coming Soon

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The volume on early modern sexualities that I have co-edited with Prof. Linda L. Carroll and Prof. Katherine A. McIver has just been sent to Ashgate’s production department to be printed! I’m very excited! The essays are marvelous, of course, and it now bears a comprehensive index, courtesy of Samantha Bassler. Thank you to our contributors: Catherine Baxter, Paul Schleuse, Catherine Lawless, Anthony Cummings, Flavio Rurale, Christophe Brouard. And a special thanks to my co-editors Katherine McIver and Linda Carroll.