Conference Agenda

Although popular music as a theoretical concept and as a genre is a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation, musical practices encapsulated by the notion of “the popular”—which entails mass distribution, broad transmission, and diverse mediation within and across the so-called public sphere—are long-standing. This panel brings together three studies on what we would now refer to as popular music as it existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They aim to illuminate the mobile characteristics of early modern music and its diverse media forms, which afforded music new sets of communicative protocols to traverse wide-ranging social spaces less encumbered by fixed categories of class, wealth, and nationality. As music moved across such spaces with greater efficacy, it also actively shaped them by articulating complex relationships that individuals and groups maintained with larger artistic, political, and economic movements.

John Romey’s paper sheds light on the difficult-to-access experiences of the servant class in seventeenth-century Paris. Romey argues that servants were powerful cultural mediators who interacted with their masters in operatic song games while simultaneously functioning as agents in the transfer of tunes from the Opéra to the streets of Paris.

Erica Levenson's paper analyzes the mobility of French musical comedies in London, showing how songs and plays took on new aesthetic connotations across the Channel. Levenson demonstrates how portrayals of French identity across a range of media reflected the economic realities of London’s increasingly competitive entertainment industry.

Morton Wan's paper considers the mutual impacts of Britain’s nascent stock market and its music during the South Sea Bubble. By examining a series of “bubble ballads,” this paper shows how music as a form of early-modern social media played a vital part in shaping economic narratives and spreading market (dis)information during the investment mania.

This panel’s attention to the interrelated themes of mobility, media, and money, ultimately helps historicize early modern “popular” music within the socio-economic landscape of its own time, and offers alternative models for thinking outside of the rigid categories of “high and low” that have so often been simplistically applied to music of this era.

In the seventeenth century, opera in Paris was understood as an interactive experience. Audience members purchased livrets and scores published by the Ballard firm, sought prized manuscript copies of the operas before Jean-Baptiste Lully published his scores; copied airs into manuscript songbooks for personal use; memorized their favorite airs and even entire scenes from the latest operas; sang along with airs and choruses at the Opéra; performed transcriptions of tunes from operas for keyboard, lute, guitar, and other instruments; used operatic material as a creative form of self-expression and agency at salons and in public spaces like the Pont-Neuf; and collected parodic verse in their manuscript chansonniers. Spectators attended the Opéra regularly, witnessing the same tragédie en musique dozens of times, and the most fashionable tunes from operas rapidly circulated around the city between all social ranks.

When nobles and upwardly mobile bourgeois attended the Opéra, even using their opera boxes as an extension of their private homes and salons, they went with their servants. An omnipresent and often silent presence in the private lives of Parisian elites, servants were therefore intermediary figures who transmitted information, including through the medium of song, between social spheres. Although servants seldom appear in archival sources of the period—and their presence is especially rare in musical sources—anecdotal evidence proves that they gathered in public spaces to hear street singers perform parodies of opera airs and composed and sang new texts for voguish tunes that circulated around the city. Further, a series of contemporary opera parodies performed at the Comédie-Française and at literary salons offers unique evidence of the ways in which servants interacted with operatic music and both imitated and mocked the manners, mores, and fashions of the nobles and bourgeois who employed them. These spoken plays with interpolated operatic music portray servants as powerful cultural mediators capable of interacting with their masters in operatic song games and of indulging their “opera madness” while simultaneously functioning as central agents in the transfer of tunes from the Opéra to the cabarets and streets of Paris.

In the early eighteenth century, the London stage saw a proliferation of French musical comedies, whose catchy tunes (“vaudevilles”) circulated widely not only in theatrical parodies and French “entr’acte” dances, but also through everyday objects, such as playing cards, newspapers, and published song collections. While scholars have analyzed these French theatrical imports to London for evidence of shifting conceptions of national identity, they have yet to explore the economic underpinnings of this moment of early modern musical transnationalism.

This paper addresses this gap in the literature, by demonstrating that ideas about British nationhood, formed in reaction to the French theatrical “invasion,” were inextricable from ideas about social standing and commerce. As Britons began to conceptualize social class less as a rank inherited at birth and more as something that could be earned, performed, or purchased, French theatrical culture and its music became viewed as commodities emblematic of novelty and luxury that could be used for social advancement. At the same time, depictions of Frenchness in the British press and in re-workings of French plays and tunes in English ballad operas, represented French theater as vulgar and crude, likely as a means of depreciating their foreign competition. The French performers, too, marketed their own French identity to London audiences, strategically playing up pre-existing stereotypes to diffuse any political tensions as they fostered their theatrical careers on the turf of their former military enemies. Thus, although portrayals of French identity on the London stage and in the press are steeped in their fair share of xenophobic rhetoric based in cultural biases, the anxiety towards French theatrical culture in London also derived from its perceived lucrative financial possibilities on the London stage and beyond. Such amorphous portrayals of French identity across various media ultimately reveals how early modern music took on multiple and conflicting aesthetic resonances at once to suit the economic aspirations and concerns of its creators and consumers.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 inspired no fewer than two dozen plays on London’s stages, including most notably The Beggar's Opera. These satirical dramas brought the folly and misfortune of market speculators to life on stage while also evoking a collective English sonic memory of the financial crisis through the full or partial inclusions of “bubble ballads”—popular street songs used to feature topical references to market happenings. Functioning as both entertainment and journalism, these ballads not only furnished the cacophonous soundscape of London’s Exchange Alley but also disseminated market (dis)information during the South Sea boom-and-bust, blurring the lines between music, literature, and finance.

This paper challenges the received notion that bubble ballads were trivial, lowbrow, and slipshod musical consumables. To do so, I combine hermeneutics with artifactual analysis to bring these musical-financial ephemera to bear on the recent historiographic turn towards a behavioral understanding of the South Sea crisis. I argue that the ballads played an active role in inflating, sustaining, and bursting the speculative bubble while simultaneously prompting the English public to grapple with a new financial order of money and class.

My analysis focuses on the production and circulation of select bubble ballads within London's burgeoning print media, where financial speculation and cultural production overlapped. The ballads’ varied media forms—ranging from inexpensive blackletter broadsides, to engraved song sheets, to handwritten copies in commonplace books—reveal their cross-class appeal and resonate with the motley demographic of South Sea investors, for whom pecuniary and aesthetic interests converged under the speculative practice’s informational demand. However, these mass-purveyed and mass-consumed ballads offered no single vision about the runaway market; they instead propagated competing and ever-changing economic narratives, which both characterized and contributed to the volatility and uncertainty of the market. Moreover, I suggest that the bubble ballads can be productively understood in apposition to contemporaneous financial documents as objects of “paper knowledge” that rendered musical meanings and economic values both imaginary and fungible. As such, the ballads may lend further insight into the rampantly growing derivatives finance during the Bubble and its destabilizing effects.