Knowledge Building in Early Modern English Music by Katie Bank

Author:Katie Bank [Bank, Katie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Historiography
ISBN: 9781000169676
Google: GVLzDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-08-16T01:38:59+00:00

2.5 Conclusion

Performance is a sensory activity that requires embodiment or a visceral experience that necessarily engages sense perception and the passions, both for historical subjects and us. Though this chapter covers a wide range of topics, they are all indispensable components of understanding this repertory as evidence of an early modern ecology of interior experience. A contemporary understanding of sense perception and the relationship between passion and action are necessary for revealing structures of experience in the phenomenological sense. It is the historical context crucial for understanding contemporary awareness. In musical performances that textually address sensation explicitly, the words surround the ‘unrepresentable’ moment of somatic experience, revealing meaning that is the product of texts in experience. Some historians ignore the sensory aspects of historical experience, including experiences of art and music, because of an errant belief that real historical analysis, usually involving texts, should not rely on ‘fuzzy’ interpretation. David Carr points out, however, that language is still a representation. Treatises, medical books, and household inventories are still representations. Carr asks, as generations of philosophers have: how does language represent anything? He reminds us that historical language represents ‘primarily people and actions and events, rather than things and their properties (the traditional paradigm for representational theories of language)’.188 Even a household inventory is often read by historians to understand the people, actions, and events behind its making. Carr continues, arguing the ‘primary linguistic form in which such things are represented is narrative, and narrative is…altogether different in form from the reality it purports to represent’.189 This historical context around early modern sensing can provide a more nuanced reading of musicalised texts that address the fundamentals of human consciousness, but a phenomenological lens can help us access past experience of music as a subjective experience rather than as a static object. This allows songs ostensibly about amorous topics to take on far more gravitas, demonstrating that there is much more at stake in these pieces than often assumed, even if the texts involve Beauty or the Mistress, Cupid, or other tropes of seemingly simple pastoral love.

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