Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Music

Advisor

Emily Wilbourne

Advisor

Philippe Canguilhem

Committee Members

Anne Stone

Jeanice Brooks

Isabelle His

Domna Stanton

Álvaro Torrente

Kate van Orden

Subject Categories

Musicology

Keywords

Air de cour, five-course guitar, secular song, Early Modern France, cultural mobility, alfabeto manuscripts

Abstract

The cultural traditions of European nations are too often treated as independent and essential entities, obscuring the transnational and interregional exchanges that have shaped modern cultures. In musicology, recent studies have emphasized the plurality and mobility of people, cultures, and music in Europe. Yet, French songs are still largely explained within the framework of the national, generally privileging written over oral traditions, printed over manuscript music, national over regional languages, and monolingual over plurilingual practices. Through the study of songs in Italian, Spanish, Occitan, and Turkish, this dissertation challenges such preconceptions.

This study shows that secular songs in foreign and regional languages circulated alongside those in French, representing difference while also demonstrating familiarity. The relation between printed courtly songbooks and manuscript sources reveals nuanced differences in the presence of songs in each language and leads to conclusions about their cultural associations in France, the different coexisting mechanisms of representation, their social and geographical circulation, and their access to print and notation. Through the examination of an understudied manuscript of guitar songs, linked to a woman from Avignon, the five-course guitar emerges as a sonic marker of otherness and as a vehicle for transnational repertoires. This dissertation thus sheds new light on the use of that instrument and of alfabeto notation in France and contributes to a more inclusive understanding of the practice of secular song in the early modern period.

The first chapters focus on the representation of foreigners and songs in languages other than French. Chapter 1, Introduction: A Ballet of Nations in Song, provides an introduction to the historical context and state of research through the study of the Ball de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Paris, 1626). In Chapter 2, Foreign Songs and French Voices, I argue that airs de cour represented images of courtly cosmopolitanism while disseminating repertoires for domestic practice. A song from the Avignon manuscript suggests that Turkish songs were practiced in these contexts, alongside the more numerous Italian and Spanish ones. In Chapter 3, Occitan Voices in Early Modern France, I argue that Occitan songs in air de cour books reflect courtly ideas about the hierarchy and cultural associations of the kingdom's languages, but also testify to the circulation of Occitan songs across linguistic boundaries. I further examine the Occitan voices of women and poets who sang in their local language through manuscript and printed sources from southern France.

The final two chapters focus on the use of the five-course guitar to accompany foreign and French songs. Chapter 4, The Othering Sound of the Strummed Guitar, examines the guitar's associations with foreign languages and cultures in guitar songbooks printed in the first half of the seventeenth century in Paris. Chapter 5, French Songs or an Instrument for Mobility, focuses on the appropriation of the guitar by French musicians to accompany French song alongside foreign repertoires. In the conclusions I discuss the mechanisms of representation of the foreign people and songs that emerged from this research, marked as different but becoming part of Early Modern French culture.

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