Troubadours and Globalization:

Spreading the Love

Prof. Judith Peraino

Cornell University

The idea of “globalization” emerged from modern-day conditions of late capital and electronic networks, and asks us to think in terms of boundary-crossing production and consumption of cultural objects, such as music, and thus also to think of objects, subjects, and desire.  How does a cultural object, such as a love song, become an object of desire, or an object that structures desire?  How does that cultural object constitute the subject of desire?  And finally, how does the transmission of that cultural object across geographic, linguistic, and temporal boundaries serve to connect or alienate cultural groups? These questions are usefully applied the medieval repertory of the troubadour love song. This paper considers how the widely disseminated mid twelfth-century song Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai by Jaufre Rudel and its famous theme of amor de lonh (“love from afar” or “distant love”) served to structure both medieval and modern desire as a condition of geographic and cultural distance.

Professor Peraino is a Professor of Musicology at Cornell University, where she is also a faculty member of the Medieval Studies Program and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her work includes studies of medieval music, rock, and queer theory, having written articles on secular songs and motets, the rock artists PJ Harvey and Blondie, synthpop groups of the late 1970s and early 80s, and Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. She is the author of two books: Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (California, 2006), winner of the Philip Brett Award of the American Musicological Society; and Giving Voice to Love:  Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut (Oxford, 2011).

Please see bio page for more details on Professor Peraino: http://music.cornell.edu/people/faculty/?page=cudm/facultyCtrl&action=detail/id=27