Thesis (Mus.Bach. 1968) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Music, 1968.

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This thesis addresses the relatively narrow understanding of simple polyphony in music history. Using three examples, I provide a survey, mostly of secondary literature available in English, and offer an overview of the use of simple polyphony in three different places and time periods in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More specifically, I examine the music of the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries and Northern Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Llibre Vermell and Iberian pilgrim culture in the fourteenth century, and the laude and processional genres in Northern Italy during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. My purpose is to bring the topic of simple polyphony—significant despite its simplicity—back to the center of the music history narrative.

Polyphony and homophony differ not only by their structural, but also by their expressive characteristics.

This thesis employs the concept of 'voice' in order to explore the variety of dialogic relationships between men and women in seven Shakespeare plays. Here, 'voice' is defined as an ideological position held by a character and voices within a dialogical relationship test dominant social ideas. In doing so, the aim is to explore how employing a linguistic approach allows us to develop a more nuanced perspective towards women and female voices in Shakespeare. Taking the early modern tradition of an all-male-cast into consideration, this project acknowledges the tension between the idea of embodiment and voice; however, it argues that even though there is no biological female body of the Shakespearean stage, there is a female voice. Dialogism, of course, derives from the work of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. These 'voices' are analysed in the context of a theoretical framework informed by his writings on the novel, which are also increasingly being used to make sense of drama in line with Bakhtin's own awareness of a nascent dialogism in Shakespearean drama. 'Polyphony', in particular, assumes a separation between the author's and the characters' points of view. Thus, this project considers Shakespeare's texts as dialogic and his plays as a dialogue of voices, in which the characters have the capacity to hold dialogical relationships where no voice holds more importance than any other. This is significant because these conflicting voices are what make the Shakespearean text different from those in which a single voice is heard - that of the author, for example. As this study talks about an oppressive authoritative/patriarchal language, a dialogic approach unlocks the languages of the others which it tries to marginalise and silence. The research reveals a complex relationship between space, time and voice. More precisely, the carnivalesque becomes visible in Shakespeare's use of innovative discursive devices, such as 'active parody', 'Menippean dialogue' and 'Socratic dialogue', which suggests a multi-toned and ambiguous female voice; a voice that has the capacity to covertly and overtly oppose and challenge social ideologies surrounding gender. The thesis offers new perspectives on the presentation of women and speech. Importantly, it offers a more sophisticated and complex Bakhtinian framework for looking at carnival in Shakespeare. Additionally, a linguistic model of analysis also develops current scholarly use of Bakhtin's concept of carnival. Rather than viewing carnival as simply a time-space of betwixt and between, this project looks at carnival in the context of language (the carnivalesque). More specifically, it reveals how Shakespeare's female figures find pockets of carnivalesque space in everyday existence through dialogue. Thus, suggesting that emancipation is not limited to an allocated time or space, rather, it can also be achieved through language.

Geoffrey Chaucer, grand traducteur, rhétoricien et poète courtois, fut longtemps considéré par la critique comme le père de la poésie anglaise. Or, un tel positionnement a non seulement tendance à occulter tout un pan de l'histoire de la littérature anglo-saxonne, mais également à mettre de côté les spécificités mêmes du style de Chaucer. Le but de cette étude est ainsi de démontrer que sa contribution à l'histoire de la littérature est bien plus importante qu'on ne le pensait. Car en décidant d'écrire en moyen-anglais à une époque où l'hégémonie du latin et du vieux-français était incontestée (en particulier à la cour d'Edouard III et de Richard II), Chaucer s'inscrivit dans un mouvement intellectuel visant à rendre aux vernaculaires européens le prestige nécessaire à une véritable production culturelle ayant permit l'émergence du genre romanesque. Ainsi, en assimilant successivement les caractéristiques de la poésie de Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Chaucer redonna à la poésie anglaise ses lettres de noblesse. Mais ce ne fut qu'après sa découverte de la Divina Commedia qu'il prit conscience du potentiel de la littérature : Dante lui permit, en effet, de libérer son art dialogique et d'ainsi donner à sa poésie une dimension polyphonique de premier ordre. De fait, si Chaucer ne peut être considéré comme le père de la poésie anglaise, il est en revanche le père de la prose anglaise et l'un des précurseurs de ce que Mikhaïl Bakhtine nomme le roman polyphonique. / Geoffrey Chaucer, translator, rhetorician and courtly poet, has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature, but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer's style. The purpose of this thesis is accordingly to try to demonstrate that his contribution to the history of literature is much more important than we had previously imagined. Indeed, Chaucer's decision to write in Middle-English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old-French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. The assimilation of the specificities of the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun thus allowed Chaucer to give back to English poetry some of its respectability. Nonetheless, it was his discovery of the Divina Commedia that made him aware of the true potential of literature: Dante thus allowed him to free the dialogism of his creations and to give his poetry a first-rate polyphonic dimension. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is however the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

The revisions to the biography of Josquin des Prez that followed new archival discoveries in the late 1990s has encouraged critical reappraisal of much of Josquin’s life and works, especially his periods of service in Milan (mid-1480s), Rome (1489 – ca. 1494/95), and Ferrara (1503-4). Yet the period of his life between his departure from Rome and arrival at Ferrara remains a lacuna as regards both his biographical details and his compositional activities. We can be relatively certain that he lived and worked in the orbit of the French royal court of King Louis XII (r. 1498-1515) during some of this time, although exactly when and in what capacity remains unclear. Alongside the gap in Josquin’s biography lies a gap in our understanding of certain consequential developments in style and genre of European sacred polyphony during these years. Early in the sixteenth century, a new iteration of the motet supplanted the polyphonic mass setting as the most widely-transmitted musical genre. The prolix cantus firmus-based motets on neoclassical devotional texts of the fifteenth century were replaced by more transparent and repetitive settings of liturgical and scriptural texts, rarely integrating a cantus firmus at all. Doubtlessly due to their new accessibility, multi-functionality, and the rise of music printing, these motets began to appear in many sources, often with a composer’s name attached—a distinct shift from the one or two often anonymous extant sources for most motets in the second half of the fifteenth century. It has already been suggested that these trends originated early in the century at the French royal court, where court singer-composers such as Jean Mouton, Antoine de Févin, Denis Prioris, and others appear to have played a central role in the development of this new motet style. Josquin, too, contributed to the genre, as a handful of motets in French court sources from ca. 1505-15 attest. This dissertation investigates these questions that follow: (1) When and in what capacity might Josquin have lived and worked in the orbit of the French royal court? (2) What might he have composed during these years, and how does the stylistic profile of that music compare to the music he had written earlier, in Milan and Rome? (3) How does Josquin’s French-court music relate to the music written by his colleagues and immediate successors there? In approaching the music at hand, I analyze motets by Josquin and his French-court contemporaries through the lens of form. We do not talk much about form in this period, insofar as it lacks the regulated conventions that we typically associate with the term as it applies to music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, I use the concept of form to describe how Josquin and others organized their motets globally—i.e., in horizontal space from start to finish—vis à vis the texts being set and, when applicable, a long-note cantus firmus. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Josquin displayed a particular interest in the repetition of text and music—in the form of what I call text-music elements—which manifested itself in various ways for the duration of his career. Second, I examine how Josquin’s particular deployment of this principle manifested itself in the form of literally-repeated paired duos in motets that were circulating at the French royal court in the first decade of the sixteenth century and, as I further argue, were likely composed during his association with the court ca. 1499-1503. Finally, I contextualize these motets of Josquin with those by his peers at the French court chapel, such as Loyset Compere, Jean Mouton, and Antoine de Févin—suggesting that Josquin may have brought to the court an underlying repetitive impulse that led to the coalescence of the consequential “French-court motet.”

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