Performance also plays a central role in the research of Kate van Orden, an assistant professor of music and a professional bassoonist whose specialty is the French Renaissance.
Van Orden is at work on a book about the French military aristocracy at the end of the Renaissance. Military history and music theory are rarely linked, but van Orden's intriguing work reveals a strong connection between the two while also considering questions about the relationship between the body and music. By studying music and dance from the period and re-creating historical performances, she sheds light on a cultural transformation that reshaped French society during the rise of absolutism in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
"Much of my research delves into the society and culture of Renaissance France as a way of better understanding what music meant to those who heard it then," she says. "But there is always a point at which history is silent, and this is where performance can articulate meanings that otherwise remain inaccessible."
One offshoot of her research was a production in spring 1999 that brought together Berkeley's music, dance, and theater arts departments for a re-creation of the grand Fetes at Fontainebleau staged in 1564 by Catherine de Medici. Supported by a grant from the Consortium for the Arts, the production involved dance students performing to the music of Berkeley's Collegium Musicum, a student ensemble that plays on period instruments. Van Orden used fragmentary historical descriptions of the event's music to reconstruct a score and co-direct the musicians, while UC Santa Cruz dance professor Mark Franko choreographed the ballet. A Boston-based professional Renaissance band joined the production and helped coach the student musicians.
"Performance becomes a new means of discovery, a type of research through practice that brings the music to life and reveals its material essence."
Kate van Orden
For students and the public, the performance provided an opportunity to learn about a chapter in French history when music and dance served a striking political purpose. For van Orden, as a historian and a musician, the performance was an opportunity to complement her intellectual understanding of a historical event with a physical understanding of it as well. She says the process of reconstructing the music, costumes, and ballet, and then seeing the dancers embody the music, gave her an insight into the historical event that simply that can't be gained by studying primary historical documents and history books alone. "Performance becomes a new means of discovery, a type of research through practice that brings the music to life and reveals its material essence," she says.
Van Orden currently is staging another aspect of her research -- one that involves horses as well as people. Equestrian ballet was a ritualized form of military display that was highly valued during the reign of Louis XIII in the early 17th century. This form of ballet -- which involved noblemen riding together and directing their steeds to execute precise turns, leaps, and other difficult maneuvers -- brought music to horsemanship, demonstrating both the ballet-like quality of dressage and the new collectivity required of light cavalry in battle.
Says van Orden, "I thought, this is so odd -- imagine people dancing with horses. Who would do it, and why was it important?" Her project, produced by Cal Performances and the Consortium for the Arts, will reconstruct an equestrian ballet choreographed for the marriage of Louis XIII in 1612. In it, riders will show how the fancy footwork, flashy costumes, and musical coordination of the French court dance was transferred to the world of horses and military pomp.
Equestrian
ballet
"Carrousel
du Roi" was
performed
for Louis XIII.
See reference page
Van Orden, who earned a Ph.D. in the history and theory of music, grew interested in studying Renaissance France while performing French baroque opera with Les Arts Florissants in Paris. She was intrigued to learn more about how the French arrived at the 17th-century grandeur of Louis the XIV and Versailles. Her studies revealed that the modes of the civilizing process in France were largely musical ones, and music theory underpinned political theory and philosophy.
Her forthcoming book from Cambridge University Press, for which van Orden received an American Association of University Women Post-Doctoral Fellowship and the President's Fellowship in the Humanities from UC, concentrates on the years 1550 to 1650. The rules of chivalry and the technology of battle changed during that century, and, consequently, the characteristics of nobility began to change too. Tentatively titled Music and Military Virtue in Early Modern France, her book spotlights the integral role of music in this cultural transformation.
"My approach, which turns musicology toward anthropology, takes music to be an active shaper and mediator rather than a passive reflector of culture," she explains. One of the services of her interdisciplinary research will be to recover a French history of Renaissance music in the face of musicology's Italian bias, she adds, as "the historiography of Renaissance music is completely dominated by the study of Italian repertories."
Van Orden's research and performance work together to illustrate how history inspires creative artists to produce art -- art that in turn helps people discover their own humanity. As she says, "Historical research produces performances that make us rethink the music we think we already know."