4 December 2023
Building on recent musicological research that emphasizes the mobility of songs, in this talk I investigate several descriptions of music-making in southern France by the French antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) and his efforts to find musical materials from across the Mediterranean for the Parisian music theorist Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).
Utilizing the constant influx of goods and people into the city of Marseille, Peiresc relied on mercantile networks to obtain transcriptions of songs and music theoretical texts, engaging various informers and translators across the Mediterranean. Viewed as part of Peiresc’s wider efforts to collect and circulate non-European texts and artefacts in the Republic of Letters, these moments offer a prism through which to look at the complexities of the mobility of music and the role of ‘exotic’ songs in French musical life in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on a description of a single song that has been lost, I trace this song’s connections to cultures of collection, cultural translation, and transcription, with singing as a central site in which otherness is negotiated and performed. Rather than being marginal, the encounter Peiresc described raises questions that were at the heart of seventeenth-century French musical culture, namely those of difference and sameness.
Leendert van der Miesen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. He has studied Musicology and Art Studies at the University of Amsterdam and went on to do his PhD in musicology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Together with Viktoria Tkaczyk he edited a special issue of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal entitled “Sonic Things: Knowledge Formation in Flux” on the relationships between sound, materiality, and knowledge. He has published on music printing, acoustical experiments, and echoes and is currently working on a book project that deals with the French music theorist Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).