New York University

Alumnus, Department of French and Institute of French Studies

Thesis Title: Music, Language and Affective Lyricism

About

I study early-modern literature, performance and music history.  My dissertation, entitled “Music, Language and Affective Lyricism” and directed by Anne Deneys-Tunney and Suzanne Cusick, examines the presence and absence of the lyrical, expressive and melodic voice in 18th-century philosophical and literary texts.  During the Enlightenment, writers, philosophers and commentators debated over a crisis in French lyricism: namely, the inability of French language and prose to express vibrant emotions.  For moral philosophy and sentimental literature, the absence of an expressive voice limited a text’s ability to convey a full range of human emotions.  Furthermore, the lyrical voice could give presence to discourses on sensibilité (an individual’s receptiveness to emotion and physical sensation) and sympathy (the mobility of emotion from speaker to listener). 

In my study, I compare discourses on the absence of the voice’s emotional presence in literature and the search for its presence in affective lyricism, a touching, persuasive and emotionally vibrant imitation of the voice.  My approach differs from other scholarly perspectives because I explore how both literary figures and musical elements, such as melodic references, enter into this conversation.  While affective lyricism in Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues draws from his ideas on transparency and sensibility (melody as an externalized form of interior feelings), Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau elaborates a musical theory of paradox in which a musician de sang-froid touches his audience with melodic expressions of passion (musical references in the text).  Finally, in Jacques Cazotte’s 1772 edition of Le Diable amoureux, an ambiguously gendered voice of seduction, hijacking the moral mechanisms of sympathy, overwhelms the protagonist with a simulacrum of genuine emotion.  These versions of affective lyricism, precursors to the idealized singers of Romanticism, examine questions on the passionate expression of written language, the literary and musical imitation of emotion, and the transparent communication of feelings, a vexing question of moral philosophy.

My interdisciplinary focus on literature, performance and music began at Indiana University, where I studied French literature and music.  In addition to training in vocal performance (under the Wagnerian tenor, James King), I studied the theory and history of Western music from  Gregorian chant, to baroque operas, to Mozart's neoclassical operas to John Adams' minimalist operas.  Melding literature and music brings together my two passions.

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