Music, emotion, and autobiographical memory: they're playing your song.

Very long-term memory for popular music was investigated. Older and younger adults listened to 20-sec excerpts of popular songs drawn from across the 20th century. The subjects gave emotionality and preference ratings and tried to name the title, artist, and year of popularity for each excerpt. They also performed a cued memory test for the lyrics. The older adults' emotionality ratings were highest for songs from their youth; they remembered more about these songs, as well. However, the stimuli failed to cue many autobiographical memories of specific events. Further analyses revealed that the older adults were less likely than the younger adults to retrieve multiple attributes of a song together (i.e., title and artist) and that there was a significant positive correlation between emotion and memory, especially for the older adults. These results have implications for research on long-term memory, as well as on the relationship between emotion and memory.

Contrary Voices: Heine, Holderlin, and Goethe in the music of Hanns Eisler

Contrary Voices examines composer Hanns Eisler’s settings of nineteenth-century poetry under changing political pressures from 1925 to 1962. The poets’ ideologically fraught reception histories, both under Nazism and in East Germany, led Eisler to intervene in this reception and voice dissent by radically fragmenting the texts. His musical settings both absorb and disturb the charisma of nineteenth-century sound materials, through formal parody, dissonance, and interruption. Eisler’s montage-like work foregrounds the difficult position of a modernist artist speaking both to and against political demands placed on art. Often the very charisma the composer seeks to expose for its power to sway the body politic exerts a force of its own. At the same time, his text-settings resist ideological rigidity in their polyphonic play. A dialogic approach to musical adaptation shows that, as Eisler seeks to resignify Heine’s problematic status in the Weimar Republic, Hölderlin’s appropriation under Nazism, and Goethe’s status as a nationalist symbol in the nascent German Democratic Republic, his music invests these poetic voices with surprising fragility and multivalence. It also destabilizes received gender tropes, in the masculine vulnerability of Eisler’s Heine choruses from 1925 and in the androgynous voices of his 1940s Hölderlin exile songs and later Goethe settings. Cross-reading the texts after hearing such musical treatment illuminates faultlines and complexities less obvious in text-only analysis. Ultimately Eisler’s music translates canonical material into a form as paradoxically faithful as it is violently fragmented.

Mount Carmel in the Commune: Promoting the Holy Land in Central Italy in the 13th and 14th Centuries

The Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.

My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?

I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.

Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables

In my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.

This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.