Conference Agenda

When the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648, Europe had endured three decades of war that had altered not only political structures but also the sonic environment of daily life. The transition from war to peace was not immediate, nor was it silent. The sounds of war did not disappear but returned, in part, to peaceful functions. Cannon fire, once a herald of destruction, now marked civic celebrations; drums and trumpets continued to signal authority, but in diplomatic rather than military contexts. Some sounds disappeared and others were transformed, reshaping experience through auditory perception. Sound was not merely a passive trace of the past—it actively participated in defining the new socio-political order.

In this paper, I analyze broadsheets, memorabilia, and historical accounts to show this sonic transformation. A 1650 broadsheet describing Nuremberg’s Friedensexekutionstag celebrations, for instance, contrasts the former roar of siege guns with the controlled swoosh of crossbows in a symbolic tournament. The shift from explosive to restrained sounds demonstrates a conscious effort to manage the transition from war to peace. Similarly, the children’s Steckenreiter cavalcade, commemorated in a coin, replaced the thunder of real cavalry with the clatter of hobby horses, transforming war’s legacy into an imaginative reenactment devoid of fear. These examples reveal that sound was not only reflective of historical change but instrumental in its construction. More than a marker of change, sound functioned as a mnemonic device, shaping how communities remembered war and peace.

This paper introduces “Resonant Memory,” a new theoretical framework for understanding how sound actively contributed to cultural memory building on the work of Jan and Aleida Assmann, Paul Connerton, and Pierre Nora. Here, Resonant Memory captures the transformation of war into civic noises—cannon fire into festival salutes, siege guns into ceremonial sounds—demonstrating that music and sound were not mere reflections of history but active forces in shaping it. Resonant Memory establishes sound as central to post-war reconciliation and remembrance, expands cultural memory studies into the sonic realm, and examines its influence on political identities in seventeenth-century Europe and beyond.

Within the gilded Mass books of fifteenth-century Europe, a bawdy song about genitalia is the last thing one would expect to find. Yet L’ami Baudichon (“the friend Baudichon”), whose text leaves little to the imagination, shows up as the basis for an early mass setting by Josquin des Prez. The song’s presence in sacred polyphony has long puzzled scholars, since it resists the sacralizing impulses of much recent scholarship on the polyphonic mass, whereby “secular” elements are recast as sacred symbols. But Baudichon doesn’t confine himself to Josquin’s mass; he also turns up in combinative songs, theater pieces, poetry, and literature. This paper examines the song’s varied uses in early French theater. Here we find L'ami Baudichon functioning as a cultural touchstone for moral degradation, which playwrights could deploy for different effects—comedic, pathetic, or sinister.

Where music manuscripts show us how songs were composed, theatrical sources reveal how they were understood and deployed. They can help us understand the cultural negotiations by which a popular song could move between tavern, stage, and church. In most discussions of song masses, we are put in the position of having to argue for a connection between a song whose text is rather nonspecific and a sacralizing interpretation that is quite specific. With L’ami Baudichon, the song is explicit—in more ways than one—present, not referenced, with no interpretive bridge to cross. This paper suggests we need new theoretical frameworks for understanding how musical meaning operated in late-medieval culture—frameworks that acknowledge music's ability to sustain multiple, even contradictory, significances.

Scholars often tell a story about early-music performance ca. 1900 to ca. 1960 that emphasizes the impact of music-making in academic seminars. In these mostly informal contexts, students and professors alike acquainted themselves with unfamiliar repertoires. But a parallel—if less studied—tradition of public performances, many directed by these same scholars, also had a significant impact. These concerts offered a remarkably heterogenous mix of composers and genres; they took place not just in concert halls, but in churches, art museums, and resort hotels. And they show how interest in repertoires spread within regions, countries, and international scholarly networks. By systematically collecting and curating the surviving documentation of these concerts, we can facilitate a better understanding of how the early music performance tradition emerged.

Archival research in more than two dozen archives has allowed me to assemble a corpus of more than 400 concerts that took place 1915–60 in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. These concerts were far more numerous and widespread than our field has realized, above all at German-speaking universities. The 1920s, in particular, saw a burgeoning concert tradition that embraced medieval over Renaissance repertoire, secular over sacred music, and composers considered both well-known and obscure. This decade was a heyday of sorts, as ideological pressures in the 1930s and 1940s led to fewer concerts. And although the 1950s witnessed greater numbers of performances, the postwar performed repertoire actually narrowed toward what today are considered the most prominent figures. Taken together, these findings give us better texture for how an evolving performance tradition shaped the development of an early-music canon and, indeed, of our discipline as a whole.