Within the gold-tinged choirbooks of fifteenth-century Europe, a
bawdy song about genitalia is perhaps the last thing one might
expect to find. Yet L’ami Baudichon (“the
friend Baudichon”), whose text leaves little to the imagination,
shows up as the basis for an early mass by Josquin des Prez. The
song’s presence in sacred polyphony has long puzzled
musicologists. Whatever the song is doing in Josquin’s mass, it
also appears in other contexts: combinative songs, theater
pieces, poetry, and literature. This paper examines the song’s
varied uses in early French theater, focusing on its appearances
in a morality play about blasphemy and a ribald farce.
This paper examines the song’s varied uses in early French
theater, focusing on its appearances in a morality play about
blasphemy and a ribald farce. In “Les
Blasphemateurs,” L’ami Baudichon appears
alongside other popular tunes in a scene of transgressive
revelry, while in “Le Farce des Enfants de Borgneux,” it
functions as a euphemistic reference to sexual activity. These
theatrical appearances provide valuable context for understanding
how popular songs functioned in late-medieval culture,
particularly during a period when they began to play an
increasingly important role in polyphonic compositions. Turning a
spotlight on the non-musical sources for these tunes offers new
perspectives on the relationship between popular song, theatrical
performance, and transgressive speech in late-medieval France.
The soundtrack to the film Dil Chahta
Hai (2001) was arguably the first hit soundtrack in
Bollywood created by a rock band. In this presentation, Prof.
Beaster-Jones illustrates how the collaborative approach for this
Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy soundtrack generated momentum for a new kind
of Indian film song.
He highlights the changing tastes of India’s urban youth
audiences in the twenty-first century and shows how Dil
Chahta Hai paved the way for the rock and EDM-oriented
compositions of Hindi-language cinema that came to dominate the
first decades of the 21st century. This influence, he argues,
makes Dil Chahta Hai among the most
influential soundtracks in Indian cinematic history.
Joseph Straus has argued that musicology and theory often focus
on so-called “normal” listeners. As a disabled woman who has
multiple sclerosis, I aim to subvert these ableist erasures. As
such, I offer an autoethnography of what I call my neuroqueer
experience of music: I am sexually attracted to (long-dead)
composers such as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák.
An educator with 14 years of experience, Afro-Cuban female
author Eva Silot is an interdisciplinary and
independent scholar, former diplomat and international negotiator
in the United Nations, representing Cuba and developing
countries. The focus of her presentation is her recently
published non-fiction academic book: Cuban
Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music
Scene, on Cuban music and transnationalism.
