Episode 106 of Sound Expertise

What does it mean to bring music of the distant past back to life? What happens when scholars focus not just on reconstructing the notes and words of Renaissance song but also on trying to recapture the lived experience of singing it? A conversation with Jesse Rodin, Associate Professor of music at Stanford.

If you’re interested in learning more about Prof Rodin’s work, check out:

• The Josquin Research Project, with scores and recordings of hundreds of Renaissance polyphonic works
• His vocal ensemble, Cut Circle – their album of Ockeghem songs will be released in September
• His 2012 book Josquin’s Rome (Oxford University Press)
• The forthcoming short film Sounds of Renaissance Florence (Fall 2020). “Inside, outside, and in the streets—hear the bellowing of sacred texts and the howling of carnival songs, the devotion of the faithful and the revelry of the drunk. A 1430s chant book in Stanford’s Special Collections serves as the starting point for a featurette connecting Cut Circle’s flexible vocal technique to the soundscape of fifteenth-century Italy.”
• The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music, co-edited with Anna Maria Busse Berger (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• His 2014 volume of the two L’homme armé masses for the New Josquin Edition
• His controversial article “The Songbook as Sensory Artifact,” in Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts, ed. Fiona Griffiths and Kathryn Starkey (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 22–49

Also, some recommended listening:

• Missa Gross senen, Credo (excerpt)
• Ockeghem, Tant fuz gentement (excerpt)
• Song of the Tailors (Carnival song, excerpt)

Sound Expertise is hosted by Will Robin (@seatedovation), and produced by D. Edward Davis (@warmsilence). Please subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and/or Spotify. Questions or comments? Email williamlrobin@ gmail

A written transcript of this episode is available here; many, many thanks to Andrew Dell’Antonio for volunteering to prepare transcripts for the show!

Stay tuned for Episode 107, coming next Tuesday, September 1: an interview with George E. Lewis on experimental music!