Conference Agenda

Flicking through the pages of a guitar-song manuscript copied in seventeenth-century Avignon, filled with hundreds of songs in European languages, the reader encounters a song titled “Chanson Turque.” The song’s text is copied phonetically by a French speaker and the accompanying chords are in alfabeto, an Italian notation-system for the 5-course guitar. They leave a very partial trace of what this song might have sounded like. Yet, the song’s presence in a woman’s guitar songbook compiled within a papal enclave in the south of France, is highly significant.

Musicologists have recently demonstrated the important role of travelers, diplomatic envois, and plurilingual port cities in Franco-Ottoman musical contacts and exchanges. This paper contributes to this growing body of scholarship aiming to include France within histories of the Mediterranean and to acknowledge plurilingualism as an intrinsic part of Early Modern musical experiences. The “Chanson Turque” of the newly discovered Avignon manuscript, I argue, suggests that Ottoman songs resounded beyond coastal and Parisian spaces, travelling further inland to other cities and reaching private domestic musical practices.

To demonstrate this, I will discuss possible ways in which a Turkish song could have reached Avignon and in what contexts it was performed. I propose a translation and transcription of the “Chanson Turque,” emphasizing its hybrid nature as well as its relation to other surviving Turkish songs in France. I ask what it means for an elite French woman to sing a “Chanson Turque” alongside courtly European repertoires but also explicitly erotic songs in the Occitan local language. What does this say about transnational mobility, the permeability between public and private spaces, and personal song choices? The use of the 5-course guitar is noteworthy, as the instrument often served as vehicle of transnational European repertoires, as “translator” of foreign music to Europeans, and as marker of otherness in France.

The “Chanson Turque” is only a partial trace of lost sounds and voices, both French and Ottoman, but it opens a window into a connected and plurilingual world, uncovering new spaces and contexts in which Turkish songs were sung and heard in Early Modern France.