Music Colloquium (03/20): Jesse Rodin

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Please join us on Friday, March 20th, at 4:00 PM EST for this week's installment in the CWRU Department of Music Colloquium Series. Jesse Rodin (Stanford) will be presenting a talk entitled “High Notes and Full Hearts.” This talk will take place on campus, in the Harkness classroom. We highly encourage attending colloquium in person to support the CWRU music community. 

For more about the series, please visit: https://case.edu/artsci/music/news-events/music-colloquium-series.

Yours in music,

Anna Somerville and Carlos Gámez

ABOUT THE TALK:

If you were a professional singer around 1480 you would have thought nothing of melodies spanning eleven, twelve, or even thirteen notes. Ranges this wide would have been rare when your teacher was a boy; in your old age they would have become rare once again. But if you earned your bread premiering new music by Du Fay, Okeghem, or Josquin, virtuosic vocal ranges would have been the norm. The reason, I argue in a recent book, is that expansive ranges helped produce a special kind of intensity that musicians of this period craved. With a wide range it becomes easier to withhold the highest note. Unleashing that note, especially when approaching the end of a section or when setting powerful words, can be explosive. A potent example is Josquin’s Vultum tuum, a multi-section motet from 1480s Milan that handles vocal ranges with elegance and drama. Across more than nineteen minutes the most

significant high note is reserved for the words “with a full heart.” In this moment—and in many others—Josquin seems to have wanted to channel the feeling produced by the words into physically charged sounds. That charge is hard to get at, in part because until recently it has not seemed possible to develop as much fluency with Renaissance polyphony as with later repertories. This experimental paper moves between historical evidence and things we do with that evidence today—like singing, listening, and making recordings. The central claim is that becoming intimate with pieces like Vultum tuum can help us connect viscerally to musicians from a long time ago.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Jesse Rodin is the Osgood Hooker Professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University. He directs the vocal ensemble Cut Circle (cutcircle.org) and the Josquin Research Project (josquin.stanford.edu) and co-directs Mapping the Musical Renaissance (renaissancemapping.org). His most recent book (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is titled The Art of Counterpoint from Du Fay to Josquin. In March, Cut Circle will release Josquin: II. Missa L’ami Baudichon; Milanese Motets, the second installment in a cycle of recordings

devoted to Josquin’s music. The album will appear with the Belgian label Musique en Wallonie.