Stolen Song Zingesser, Eliza
2020, 2020-03-15
eBook
Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the ...European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the Frenchness of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.
This paper surveys the issues, aims and main ideas proposed by M. V. Fox's The Song of Song and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (1985) summarizing its approach and findings. It considers what we can ...know about the relationship between the Egyptian Songs and the Song of Songs. Six samples of different kinds of songs from both corpora are studied to show how they can be treated as literature and fruitfully compared to each other.
Nowhere in the art song repertoire dowes one find a more felicitous union than in the 200 or so mélodies of Fauré, Chausson, Duparc, and Debussy. These four composers brought to the magnificent world ...of their contemporaries—Verlaine, Gautier, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Leconte de Lisle, and others—the delicacy, sensitivity, and voluptuousness that characterize French music from 1865 to 1914. Song by song, this comprehensive study addresses each composer's complete works for solo, voice, and piano. Errors in popular published editions are pointed out and corrected. The full French text is given, followed by Barbara Meister's translation—in many cases, the first English version ever published. These exquisite renderings (not intended to substitute for the French lyrics in performance) vividly convey the sense and mood of the originals. Here the singer will find guidance on interpretation and pronunciation; the accompanist will profit from harmonic analyses intended to further genuine partnership with the vocalist; and the listener will gain a fuller satisfaction from learing how various works fit into their historical and aesthetic context, and in the lives of the poets and composers.
Singing the Land: Hebrew Music and Early Zionism in America examines the proliferation and use of popular Hebrew Zionist music amongst American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century. ...This music—one part in a greater process of instilling diasporic Zionism in American Jewish communities—represents an early and underexplored means of fostering mainstream American Jewish engagement with the Jewish state and Hebrew national culture as they emerged after Israel declared its independence in 1948. This evolutionary process brought Zionism from being an often-polemical notion in American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century to a mainstream component of American Jewish life by 1948. Hebrew music ultimately emerged as an important means through which many American Jews physically participated in or ‘performed’ aspects of Zionism and Hebrew national culture from afar. Exploring the history, events, contexts, and tensions that comprised what may be termed the ‘Zionization’ of American Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century, Eli Sperling analyzes primary sources within the historical contexts of Zionist national development and American Jewish life. Singing the Land offers insights into how and why musical frameworks were central to catalyzing American Jewry’s support of the Zionist cause by the 1940s, parallel to firm commitments to their American locale and national identities. The proliferation of this widespread American Jewish-Zionist embrace was achieved through a variety of educational, religious, economic, and political efforts, and Hebrew music was a thread consistent among them all.
This article tracks the life of the song 'Umshini Wami' (My Machine Gun) adopted by Jacob Zuma, the President of the African National Congress, since early 2005. It explores the wider implications of ...political song in the public sphere in South Africa and aims to show how 'Umshini Wami' helped Jacob Zuma to prominence and demonstrated a longing in the body politic for a political language other than that of a distancing and alienating technocracy. The article also explores the early pre-Zuma provenance of the song, its links to the pre-1994 struggle period and its entanglement in a seamless masculinity with little place for gendered identities in the new state to come. It argues too that the song can be seen as unstable and unruly, a signifier with a power of its own and not entirely beholden to its new owner.
