Ron Alexander Memorial Lectures in Musicology: Jamie Reuland, Princeton University

Title: “'Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun': Mouthwatering Renaissance Duets"

Abstract: Even before plainchant first appeared in neumes, the ninth-century Musica enchiriadis treatise introduced a special notation to demonstrate how two voices singing at close range could be made to sound exquisitely “sweet.” In the ensuing centuries, two-voice textures continued to spark aesthetic interest. Duets could both enshrine stylistic norms and serve as sites for radical experimentation. Singers and composers sought to squeeze as much sweetness—and many other flavors—as possible out of two voices locked in song.

Despite all this, music that pits one voice against another has taken a historiographical back seat to more complex polyphonic textures. This paper puts duets back into the limelight. It begins with a tour of two-voice works across six centuries before homing in on some extraordinary cases by an underappreciated aficionado: Josquin des Prez. Working through live music examples sung by Stanford PhD students and a visiting artist, this paper explores the affordances of the most pared-down polyphony possible.

Jamie Reuland is Assistant Professor of Music at Princeton University. She is the author of Music and the Making of Medieval Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her work on the aesthetic and social history of premodern music in Europe and the Mediterranean has been supported by the ACLS, Medieval Academy of America, Fulbright Foundation in Greece, and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Articles on a wide array of topics appear in Modern Philology, Plainchant & Medieval Music, New Medieval Literatures, and the Journal of Musicology. She was last at Stanford as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities in 2015.

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