Joseph Mason

Abstract

“What is the cost of music?” ask Matt Brennan and Kyle Devine in a recent article. Music’s cost—that which must be paid or sacrificed for the production or consumption of music—can come in many forms (capital, material, environmental, ethical), but in thirteenth-century France, the primary cost of music was thought to be violent.

Trouvères, poet-composers active between 1160 and 1310, often describe their creation of love songs as a process in which their bodies are injured by violence. This paper reconstructs some of these aesthetic principles that lie behind trouvère love songs, arguing that a conception of music as a product of violence inflects the text and music of these songs in distinctive ways. While trouvères chose to conceive of songmaking in these terms in order to respond to the particular historical conditions in which they lived, their songs raise thorny ethical questions for the modern scholar.

Biography

Joseph Mason is a musicologist and music analyst specialising in song in thirteenth-century France. He has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and has held postdoctoral research positions at University College Dublin and New College, Oxford. Joseph has published a number of journal articles on French monophony and English polyphony and is the co-editor of a collection of essays on the manuscript Bern 389. In January 2025, Joseph will take up a teaching position at the University of Cambridge.