Conference Agenda

Eighteenth-century London was an increasingly noisy place, featuring a cacophony of traffic, metal smithing and other work noise, street hawkers, carousing alehouse/tavern patrons, pigs, dogs, and other animals. Around the edges of this bustling metropolis were the pleasure gardens, where visitors could promenade about the walks, enjoy entertainments, and see and be seen. The placement of the pleasure gardens on the outskirts of London, between the city and the country, paralleled the intermediate positioning of these venues in a variety of other respects.

In contrast to the informal performances of London’s itinerant street musicians, pleasure gardens, like many indoor theatres, employed musicians with fixed appointments, on organized programs. Pleasure gardens also had enclosed boundaries that likened them to indoor theatres. However, these boundaries were often visually disguised—using ha-has and other design elements—to create the illusion of a boundless idyllic landscape. They also contained semi-indoor structures, including roofed supper boxes and raised pavilions (called orchestras) for vocal and instrumental musicians. Supper boxes bore physical resemblance to opera boxes but were typically used by garden visitors for a single meal or evening, rather than rented out to one family for an entire season, thus broadening their accessibility to people of more diverse financial means. Similarly, open walks, groves, and other garden areas, along with affordable admission costs, fostered intermingling amongst diverse social classes, in contrast with the largely class-based audience segregation inherent in the layout and ticket pricing of opera houses.

Surveying eighteenth-century pleasure garden ephemera, this presentation will explore the intersection of sociological and ecological politics in the sonic cultivation of pleasure gardens as heterotopic spaces. In addition to their liminal positioning between urban/rural, formal/informal, indoor/outdoor, open/enclosed, and high-/low-class, the pleasure gardens also exploited the nebulous boundary between noise and music—sheltered to some degree from the urban cacophony, yet enhanced by the sounds of nature, of musicians, and of visitors themselves. It is no coincidence that, in chronological terms, the world of eighteenth-century London also occupied an intermediate position—between the unrestrained acoustic environment of the early modern period and the regulated soundscapes of modernity.

One of the five Elizabethan anthologies of Italian songs with “Englished” lyrics, the 1590 Italian Madrigalls Englished (IME) of Thomas Watson (1555-92) immediately stands out by its unique subtitle: it promises a collection of contrafactum texts that do not strictly translate the chosen madrigals’ original lyrics (“not to the sense of the originall dittie…”), yet remain equally suitable to the music they underlay (“…but after the affection of the Noate”). Whether by comparing Watson’s contrafacta to the more literal translations of madrigal lyrics in Nicholas Yonge’s famous Musica Transalpina (1588), or by prioritizing the few madrigals that Watson transformed into elegies for prominent Elizabethans, studies of the IME accordingly tend to emphasize the novel aspects of Watson’s lyrics over their connections to the original Italian poems set by Luca Marenzio—composer of 23 of the IME’s 26 Italian madrigals.

My paper argues that Watson’s “Englished” texts are, in fact, deeply and consistently invested in the appropriation and subversion of key themes and tropes of the original verse—much of it by Petrarch, Sannazaro, and other canonic poets. Most crucially, many of the contrafacta carefully reconfigure the pastoral landscapes already present in Marenzio’s madrigals, naturalizing Italian Arcadia by populating it with recognizable characters drawn from Watson’s own poetry. The contrafacta equally engage with the madrigals’ representation of characteristic formal elements of Italian verse, to prove not only the English language’s capacity to assimilate foreign rhymes and metres, but also the Italian madrigal’s capacity to accommodate the rhythms of native English prosody.

Watson’s goal is to question the fixity and exclusivity of the long-established relationship between Italian verse and its musical representation as Italian madrigal. The IME is thus not, as Joseph Kerman once described it, “direct propaganda for Italian art,” but rather propaganda for English art, and for England. At a time when Watson’s country increasingly sought to affirm its national identity and assert itself beyond the Channel, the IME declares English verse—and indeed, the English language itself—as equally suitable to being sung to the most prestigious secular music of the period, equally capable of evoking Arcadia in the domestic setting of Elizabethan England.

At the time of its publication in 1717, Marin Marais’s “Le Labyrinthe” for viola da gamba and continuo was an innovative, through-composed maze of modulations, one movement in his lengthy Suitte d’un goût Etranger. Marais was the first composer to employ the term pièce de caractère, and his literary, descriptive titles imply extramusical associations that are often difficult to discern. However, investigating the cultural context of pieces such as “Le Labyrinthe” and undertaking a formal analysis of the work in question reveals how its music resonates with its extramusical title. Since the seminal 1956 dissertation on Marais by Clyde Thompson, much has been written about Marais's life (Sylvette Milliot, Jérôme de La Gorce) and the performance practice of his works (Deborah Teplow, Sean Ng). But little has been written about the symbolism of “Le Labyrinthe.” Drawing upon previous research on the labyrinth in Guillaume de Machaut’s works by Anne Walters Robertson, and Craig Wright’s research on the medieval labyrinth in the Chartres Cathedral, this paper explores two interpretations of “Le Labyrinthe:” first, as a narrative through the Versailles hedge maze labyrinth designed by André Le Nôtre and Charles Perrault. By tracing the modulations in “Le Labyrinthe” through the circle of fifths, a path is created similar to the one charted through the overhead map of the Versailles labyrinth published by Perrault in 1677. In this sense, modulations through the circle of fifths in “Le Labyrinthe” can be understood as a geographical, spatial representation of the Versailles labyrinth. Second, viewed in its larger context, the structures of “Le Labyrinthe” closely echo the architectural dimensions found in the labyrinth on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, along with the cathedral’s rose window. In this way, Marais imbues his character piece with both sacred and secular meaning based on cultural symbolism from his own lifetime, crafting a lively, reimagined portrait of its mythological topic.