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Music, passions and emotions

Thursday 3rd May, 2012

1pm, Arts 2

Music, Time, and Emotion: Emotional Narratives and Music in the Burgundian Territories of the Fifteenth Century (Matthew Champion, PhD Candidate, School of History)

Treatises on music, the Mass, and mystical experience which circulated in the territories of the Dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century develop a complex affective and narrative vocabulary for describing devotional life, liturgy, and music. By connecting these vocabularies with the liturgical life of Cambrai Cathedral, one of the fifteenth century’s most extraordinary musical institutions, Matthew Champion proposes a method for historicizing music’s emotional roles in the temporal life’s vale of tears.

‘What Passion cannot MUSICK raise and quell!’ Passions, Emotions and the Sublime in Early Modern England (Miranda Stanyon, PhD Candidate, School of English and Drama)

When John Dryden wrote his Song for St. Cecilia’s Day 1687, music’s power over the passions seemed unrivalled and incontestable. But what was happening in 1783, when William Jackson turned Dryden’s exclamation into a pointed question: ‘What passion can music raise or quell?’ Examining Dryden’s music odes and some of their eighteenth-century recensions, this paper set debates about music and passion in the context of the emergence of the sublime, another discourse with a surprisingly volatile relationship to affective life.