UPenn, Med/Ren Seminar Meeting: Mary Channen Caldwell

The third meeting of the year: on Wednesday, October 12, at 4:30PM in the English Department Grad Lounge (FBH 330), Professor Mary Channen Caldwell (UPenn, of course!) will be joining us to discuss — among other things — the prospectus for her upcoming book, Seasonal Refrains: A Calendar of Song in Premodern Europe.

Professor Caldwell writes: “Many thanks for allowing me to be a part of your group and to share the beginnings of my new project with you (despite its disciplinary focus on music). Taking full and grateful advantage of the seminar organizers’ willingness to allow me to depart from tradition, I am sharing a version of my book prospectus written last spring, rather than a chapter in progress. The genre of the book prospectus was new to me when I began, and may be new to some among the graduate student population (and hopefully might be useful/interesting as an example). The prospectus provides a preview of my book project, its larger goals and themes, and overall structure. In addition to this brief pre-circulated piece, I will be presenting some thoughts and examples of music/poetry on Wednesday to serve as further material for discussion. This is a new type of seminar for me, too, so I appreciate everyone’s willingness to participate!

I am looking forward to feedback from a group whose broader perspective (specifically outside music) will undoubtedly enrich my thinking as I proceed with the book. As the title suggests, I’m thinking about time in a specific way, which is to say I’m concerned with the lived experience of time and its multifaceted expression in music and poetry. When it comes to music, the assumption is often that the question of time relates to duration in sound (i.e. to rhythm), and, frequently, when time and music are studied together the goal is to uncover the relationship between the way time is measured (by clocks, for example) and how rhythmic notation has developed. Since I am specifically not concerned with sound’s duration, but instead with the multiple ways in which the conception of time is implicit in and formed by music and its lyrics, I am working against the current musicological/music theoretical grain. My question, then, for the medieval-renaissance seminar, is what do you see as informing ideas about time in literary and poetic contexts? For a non-musicologist, what ideas about medieval time need to be accounted for in a project such as this?”