Evan Angus MacCarthy

DOGE has terminated all four of the NEH grants for the American Musicological Society. Our executive director writes:

“As the chief operating officer for the American Musicological Society, a 91-year-old knowledge society committed to the study of music, history, and culture, I am resolved.” 1/2

Photograph of a building in Florence. A tall thin stone section rises up, from street level several stories. About the level of the second story, a yellow section sticks out from the outside of it, awkwardly wrapping around the outside of the stone part, supported by elegant sticky-outy triangular struts. The yellow section has several small circular windows, much too small for a human to climb through, barely large enough for a chubby cat.

Let’s talk about resistance after a conqueror takes power. Specifically let’s talk about this bendy yellow building, and what it shows us about the moment the Florentine Republic finally fell to its kleptocratic/proto-capitalist banking-fortune Medici conquerors 1/?

Detail of an apostle with reading glasses in Conrad von Soest’s Niederwildungen Altarpiece

Making the most of the remainder of Winter term.

Il Dit / Elle Dit Trobár · Album · 2024 · 26 songs

Spotify link: open.spotify.com/album/44fKyb...

He Said/She Said in French Courtly Love » Early Music America Medieval ensemble Trobár celebrates women in 14th and 15th c. song, centered on poet Christine de Pizan and her musical circles, including (male) composers who are now famous, obscure or anonymous. It...

New review of the fabulous new album by my colleague Allison Monroe’s ensemble Trobár!

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is such a powerful term/concept for so many things (environment, politics, media, work/life balance…)

"A drawing produced to show off his new apparatus depicts a man enclosed within a leather shell reinforced with iron bars. Vest, sleeves, and britches protect what seems to be a muscled physique. A bulbous hood and a plug seal the suit, the latter protruding from where we should imagine a human mouth. The manuscript page carefully describes this outfit and its function, using an alphabetic key to identify each piece of the diving suit. It tells us, among other things, that the curlicue-ing tubes and futuristic switches ensure a man can breathe even as the weighted device sinks him into the sea, up to a depth of twelve brazas (or roughly twenty meters). Breathing underwater, of course, would not be enough. Protuberances on the helmet, labeled “F,” represent glass lenses." -Aaron Hyman and Dana Leibsohn, “Lost and Found at Sea, or a Shipwreck’s Art History” West 86th, 28.1 (Spring-Summer 2021): 43-74.

Arnaldus Alexander Durand Baro de Mazabrat, Design for an underwater suit, 1720. Ink on paper; 41.5 × 28.2 cm, Archivo General de Indias, Seville

On December 6th (4:30pm), the UMass Kinney Center and the School of Earth & Sustainability are co-sponsoring a talk at the Kinney Center with Annette Kehnel, author of The Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability (2024) and Professor and Chair of Medieval History at University of Mannheim.

View of the dome of St Peter’s Basilica through keyhole of the gate of the priory of the knights of Malta

Getting things lined up for a productive week.

Learning Latin manually

Paradis Symposium Image description: The logo for the Paradis Symposium features a silhouette portrait of Paradis from 1786, superimposed on an 1805 map of Vienna. Design by Grid Girl Studio.

Excited to attend and chair a panel session at this symposium (Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture Before & After Braille), which starts today at Mt Holyoke College and online. Tune in!

Soundscapes of the Silenced | Erin Maglaque In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

“In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florence, one in five women lived behind the walls of an institution. The rule of the cloister: silence.” —Erin Maglaque

The book Medieval Women.

Look what arrived in the mail today! #medievalsky

Roland Jackson Award
Joseph W. Mason

“Trouver Et Partir: The Meaning of Structure in the Old French Jeu-Parti,” in Early Music History (2022) 40.

Otto Kinkeldey Award
Bettina Varwig

Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology
(University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award
Emily Wilbourne

Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Early Music Award
Emily Zazulia

Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing
(Oxford University Press, 2021).

Alfred Einstein Award
Jacob Olley

“Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court,”
Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023) 76:3.

2024 AMS Award Winners - American Musicological Society “Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court,”Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023) 76:3.

Hearty congrats to all the AMS award winners, including several scholars for articles and books in medieval and early modern topics.

An introduction to @universalstc.bsky.social: an open access database of early modern print culture. To find out more visit our website: www.ustc.ac.uk

Jumped into Rogier van der Weyden’s portrait of Jean Gros during last weekend’s #AMS2024 meeting

The third & final meeting of this fall’s Five College Renaissance Seminar this Thursday features historian of medicine Alisha Rankin (Tufts Univ.)! “The Witches’ Brew: Potions & Poisons in Renaissance Europe” Thu 11/21 4:30PM @ Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst