MUSLIVE: Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300

Musical Lives is an interdisciplinary study of the earliest surviving French song repertories in the period of their creation and early transmission, 1100-1300. Within musicology and literary studies, these traditions have long had special status as a cornerstone of the emerging European poetic and musical canon. While scholarship to date has established important philological methods for recuperating songs as texts, and for generating critical insight into their poetic and musical craft, Musical Lives proposes a radical reorientation: a focus on the people who first made and sang these songs. It develops new philological and practice-led methodologies for song analysis, examining musical processes of adaptation and intertextual networking in the context of social networking through song, across wide geographies and traditions. MUSLIVE will couple musical evidence with exploration of song's makers and performers within structures of individual, family and community expression, and across distinctions of gender, generation, race and rank; it will trace song transmission through itineraries and encounters in an era of mass movement of people (crusade, pilgrimage, exile, economic migration); and it will widen the usual spheres of musical encounter, in particular including Arabic and Hebrew lyric, in order to establish a larger lyric tradition, from Western Europe across the Mediterranean to the Levant. The project has far-reaching implications not only for the disciplines of musicology and literary studies, but also for history more generally. As well as continuing to develop new transnational approaches to French literature of this period, the project calls attention to evidence that is often thought peripheral in most historians' accounts to date, developing a model for an historical anthropology which accounts for singing and song-making as crucial in the formation and articulation of human identities and relationships.